Global cooling!

A terrifying video shows the moment an American Airlines plane skidded off a snowy runway at the O'Hare International Airport in Chicago as the Arctic blast grounds more than 800 flights in the Midwest.

None of the 38 passengers and three crew members aboard the Envoy Air flight from Greensboro, North Carolina, were hurt when the plane slid off the runway at about 7.45am Monday morning amid the quick-moving storm system that is expected to affect at least 60 million people across the US.

In the video, flight 4125 is seen sliding off the runway shortly after the plane landed. The passenger who recorded the video is heard in the background saying 'oh sh*t' once he realized the plane was heading off the runway.

'We're sliding! We're sliding!' another passenger yells in the background shortly before the plane's wing hit the ground, bringing the aircraft to a stop.

The city's aviation department says 803 flights in and out of the airport have been canceled since the incident.

Besides the flights canceled at O'Hare, snow and ice have forced airlines to cancel 93 flights at Chicago's Midway International Airport, putting the total cancellations at 896 between both airports.

The National Weather Service (NWS) expects as much as 6 inches of snow in Illinois and up to 10 inches in northwest Indiana and southwest Michigan.

The snow also caused some minor delays for Metra trains going in and out of Chicago on Monday.

A winter weather advisory has been issued for Chicago and surrounding areas, according to the NWS. 

SOURCE 





'Climate emergency' declaration takes heat for fictional 'world scientists'

There was something goofy about the petition signed by 11,258 “world scientists” from 153 countries declaring a “climate emergency.”

One “scientist” was named “Mouse, Micky” from the “Micky Mouse Institute for the Blind, Nambia.” Another was Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts. And then there was “Araminta Aardvark” from the fictional University of Neasden.

Among the “Alliance of World Scientists” members who were apparently real people, many identified themselves as teachers, students, administrators, statisticians, economists, technicians, therapists, doctors, psychologists — not climate scientists.

As it turns out, however, being recognized as a “world scientist” may be easier than you think.

The alliance is a project of the Oregon State University College of Forestry, which invited “all scientists” to add their names to the four-page statement, “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency,” by clicking on a green “sign the article” button on the college’s website.

Following a round of fact-checking in the press and on social media, the college removed 34 names, including “Micky,” “Araminta” and “Dumbledore,” bringing the total to 11,224 signatories on the Nov. 5 article published in the journal BioScience, part of the Oxford University Press.

“During our original signature screening process, we attempted to remove all signatures that appeared to be invalid,” said a post on the OSU website. “Although, a few invalid ones were missed. We are thoroughly reviewing the full list at the moment and will make further updates if required.”

That said, the less-than-scientific signature-gathering process and ensuing media mockery did no favors for the climate-crisis movement, nor the major media outlets that trumpeted the story.

“More than 11,000 scientists from around the world declare a ‘climate emergency,’” said the headline in the Washington Post.

Said the CNN article: “11,000 scientists warn of ‘untold suffering’ caused by climate change.”

“Climate crisis: 11,000 scientists warn of ‘untold suffering,’” said the [U.K.] Guardian, while ABC News reported, “11,000 scientists sign declaration of global climate emergency.”

Ezra Levant, a conservative commentator on Canada’s Rebel News, said the alliance is “not a thing. It’s a one-page homemade website set up by some guy in the forestry department at Oregon State University.”

He noted that one signer identified his speciality as “BS Detection and Analysis.”

“I’m sorry, but that’s a joke,” Mr. Levant said on his Thursday show. “But it sure was important for the propaganda to say there were 11,000 scientists signing this. I wonder, are there even 11,000 climate scientists in the world? Maybe, come to think of it, because what a great way to get government grants.”

No Michael Mann

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano noted that the alliance posted a similar declaration in 2017, and that both were spearheaded by OSU forestry professor William J. Ripple, but that the previous petition was signed by 15,000 “world scientists.”

“Here we go again: The same organization is attempting to recycle their non-scientific commentary about a ‘climate emergency’ with a heavy dose of grad students, social workers, psychologists, veterinarians, librarians, and of course, Disney’s famous mouse character,” said Mr. Morano in an email.

Cracked Breitbart’s James Delingpole: “Now they’re down to just 11,000. Presumably, this time, Professors Donald Duck, Minnie Mouse, Pluto, the Little Mermaid, the Seven Dwarfs and the 101 Dalmatians just weren’t available.”

Australian climate blogger JoNova pointed out that none of the world’s leading climate scientists, including Penn State’s Michael Mann and NASA’s Gavin Schmidt, signed the article.

“Strangely, the world’s about to die and yet none of the top climate scientists are willing to put their name on the list,” she said.

The biggest kahuna on the article may be Stanford biology professor Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 doomsday book, “The Population Bomb,” which may explain the petition’s focus on reducing world population to combat climate change. He was also listed as a “contributing reviewer.”

In his bestselling book, Mr. Ehrlich predicted that “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death” in the 1970s due to global overpopulation. He famously lost a 1980 bet with economist Julian Simon over whether commodity prices would rise or fall in the next decade, with Mr. Ehrlich predicting they would rise due to scarcity.

“How fitting if he is involved in the ‘climate emergency,’ since he was the inventor of the population emergency,” said Mr. Morano.

The Washington Times has reached out to Mr. Ehrlich, Mr. Ripple and Oregon State for comment.

The article declared that “the planet Earth is facing a climate emergency” and recommended eliminating fossil-fuel use; increasing forestation; eating more plant-based foods and less meat; lowering fertility rates, and curtailing economic growth.

“Our goals need to shift from GDP growth and the pursuit of affluence toward sustaining ecosystems and improving human well-being by prioritizing basic needs and reducing inequality,” said the alliance.

Mr. Morano described the piece as “a political activist ‘statement’ designed to lobby for ‘social and economic justice’ and ‘a sustainable and equitable future.’”

“Despite the obvious agenda and flaws of this declaration, the media promoted it as expected,” he added.

SOURCE 





When Wolves Infiltrate the Sheepfold: Discerning Climate Truth From Falsehood in Churches

In recent decades, environmental issues have emerged as a major source of concern for our society. Churches, except for a small percentage, have largely remained silent on how Christians should approach and even help overcome the environmental challenges.

As a result, Christians have remained susceptible to being deceived by unbiblical principles that demand subscription to radical environmental viewpoints, often antithetical to the biblical doctrines on our relationship with the creation.

These radical theories are often promoted as scientific theories. In reality, they are merely predictive guesses, not hard truth based on solid evidence. With no proactive discourses on such matters in the church, Christians tend to absorb the radical principles and make choices based on them.

Vegetarianism and veganism, for example, are the most common radical environmentalist principles that have infiltrated the church. They have roots in Eastern philosophy and cannot be justified as a morally superior dietary lifestyle.

Other, more radical, principles are often mixed with science to make them more appealing to the masses.

In the 20th century, population control was the most dominant radical environmental theory. Proponents argued that the world will run out of food and other essential resources by the end of the 20th century because of growing population.

But their theories failed. Twentieth-century population growth failed to lead to resource depletion. The world now produces a record number of food crops. Most resource prices are falling—signaling that they are more abundant now, not less. Life expectancy has increased dramatically throughout the world.

Today, a new radical principle is being injected into the church: catastrophic anthropogenic (man-made) global warming (CAGW). In simple terms, CAGW is the belief that greenhouse gas emissions from human activity have caused a dangerous increase in global average temperature (GAT).

However, this time, the radical environmentalists—learning from all the mistakes they made in the 20th century—have made their CAGW theory closely resemble science, making it hard to distinguish it from truth.

Yet CAGW is a radical proposal. Unlike climate change, which is real and continuous, CAGW largely relies on assumptions and forecasts about GAT that are far from the truth.

Real science, using paleoclimate data, shows that current changes in climate (predominantly warming) are neither unprecedented nor dangerous. The radical environmentalists want people to believe current climate changes are unprecedented and will worsen in the future.

Real climate science says warming is driven by many various factors, including changes in the earth's rotation and tilt toward the sun, cycles of energy and magnetic wind output from the sun, ocean circulations, cloud cover, changes in concentration of greenhouse gases (GHG) and various other natural factors. But the radicals want the masses to blindly believe that increased atmospheric GHG concentrations, driven by human activity, are the primary driving force behind the modern warming.

Real climate science has shown us that climate and weather are unpredictable. CAGW radicals want us to trust their faulty computer climate models as legitimate, dependable, accurate tools of climate prediction. Yet computer models failed constantly in the past two decades to predict the trend and magnitude of change in GAT.

Radical environmentalists use several strategies to silence those who try to critically review their distortion of climate science. One is to call anyone who disagrees with their theory a "denier."

As E. Calvin Beisner put it, "belief in 'climate change' (shorthand for dangerous man-made warming that must be mitigated even at the cost of trillions of dollars and potentially trapping billions in poverty) really is a leap of faith." But unlike the Christian faith, which is based on evidence, CAGW is based on imaginary forecasts about future climate states.

Surprisingly, the church has fallen for this crafty bait. The pope, the archbishop of Canterbury and many other Christian leaders are now ardent supporters of the climate alarmist movement. Even some Christian scientists have joined the chorus.

Not one but many wolves have infiltrated the sheepfold. It is high time that the shepherds equip themselves with sound doctrine on environmental stewardship, the counter perspectives and how to discern between lies and truth.

The church needs to do a great deal of study to understand the complex web of climate science, the radical players involved in the debate, and how it compares with the biblical command to steward the creation while wisely using natural resources to meet people's needs.

The scientists, economists, theologians and other scholars of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation think human-induced global warming is real. They also think empirical evidence indicates that it is relatively small and largely benign. They think efforts to reduce it by substituting wind, solar and other renewable energy sources for fossil fuels would do more harm than good both to humanity and to the entire biosphere. They provide scientific, economic and engineering reasons for this view in hundreds of articles and several major papers on their website.

SOURCE 





Prominent Geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack dissents – Laments ‘hubris’ of those who ‘believe that we can ‘control’ climate

Global Warming/Climate Change began as a scientific discussion.  It has evolved into a polarizing political argument (whenever a scientific understanding depends on a “consensus”, we know it has become political), and from there to a semi-religious campaign advanced by well-intended people who feel, deep in their hearts, that they are “saving the planet”. 

Many of those people have chosen to allow their good intentions to override their scientific objectivity. As soon as people who disagree about scientific conclusions start calling each other pejorative names, we know that the discussion has become primarily political, not scientific.

I know the work of [MIT’s Dr. Richard] Lindzen, [Climatologist Dr. Roy] Spencer, [Georgia Tech Climatologist Dr. Judith] Curry, [Climatologist Dr. John] Christy, [Princeton Physicist Dr. Will] Happer, etc.I share the skepticism that these people have expressed that anthropogenic CO2 emissions represent the primary driver of the climate change now under way.

We know that the climate “warmed”, with a few unexplained reversals, from ~18,000 years ago until ~1830 AD, as a consequence of factors that have controlled climate for all of Phanerozoic time.  It defies the imagination to suggest that those factors abruptly ceased to operate ~300 years ago just to accommodate our need to attribute contemporary climate change to human activity.

It beggars the imagination to assert that the natural factors that drove the warming trend from 18,000 years ago to ~300 years ago (with some unexplained temperature reversals) abruptly stopped operating at the end of the Little Ice Age to accommodate our political need to attribute climate variability to human industrial activity.

Climate models are instructive, but they lead to scenarios, not predictions. They can be manipulated to yield desired outputs.
Removing the groundwater contribution, not directly the consequence of climate change, yields a rate of global sea-level rise that is the slowest in the last 18,000 years.  In prior “interglacial” times, most recently to ~125,000 years ago, global sea level rose to levels higher than the present sea level, and no humans were burning fossil fuels.

We run an insidious risk:  When/if a) we learn that anthropogenic CO2 is not the primary driver of contemporary climate change; b) we drastically reduce anthropogenic output of CO2 and the climate does not respond as we have predicted; or c) we enter a period of unexplained cooling, as the mid-20th-century cooling episode, or the Little Ice Age, the credibility of climate scientists will be dashed, and with it the credibility of any scientist who tries to inform environmental policy via rigorous science.

More HERE 




Australia: Greens playing politics with fire, say Labor and Coalition

Senior Coalition and Labor MPs have launched a bitter attack on the Greens for suggesting climate change policies are responsible for the catastrophic bushfire threat confronting NSW and Queensland.

As firefighters braced for the arrival of high winds and low ­humidity that threaten some of the worst conditions seen since the Black Saturday bushfires a decade ago, Greens leader Richard Di ­Natale sparked fury from both major parties when he said the ­nation’s emissions policy had caused the fires that killed three people and injured 100.

Senior Nationals turned the ­attack back on the Greens, suggesting that environmental opposition to backburning, particularly in national parks, had exacerbated the bushfire threat.

NSW Deputy Premier John Barilaro criticised his state’s ­National Parks Service for contributing to the catastrophic threat facing the state by failing to carry out extensive backburning in the lead-up to bushfire season.

“We need to do more hazard ­reduction, (burning) in national parks to manage the fuel load,” Mr Barilaro told The Australian. “Everyone knows that this is a real issue and I’ve got the guts to say it.”

Senator Di Natale sparked the row on Monday when he said: “Every politician, lobbyist, pundit and journalist who has fought to block serious action on climate change bears responsibility for the increasing risk from a heating planet that is producing these deadly bushfires.”

Federal Labor agriculture spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon, who is facing fire threats in his NSW seat of Hunter, lashed the Greens for politicising the catastrophe.

Mr Fitzgibbon said it was ­“absolutely the wrong time to be looking for political opportunity and it’s also hypocritical given the Greens opposed the CPRS (the Rudd government’s carbon pollution reduction scheme)”.

“But if Scott Morrison wasn’t sitting back and allowing emissions to increase every year there would be less political tension in the necessary community conversation about the need to act and adapt to our changing weather patterns,” he added.

Deputy Prime Minister ­Michael McCormack criticised the Greens’ comments as the “disgraceful, disgusting” behaviour of “raving inner-city lunatics”.

The Nationals leader said Australia had experienced bushfires since “time began” and he found it “galling” that people linked the ­catastrophe with climate change. “What people need now is a little bit of sympathy, understanding and real assistance, they need help, they need shelter,” Mr McCormack said. “They don’t need the ravings of some pure, enlightened and woke capital-city greenies at this time when they’re trying to save their homes.”

However, Greens MP Adam Bandt said Mr McCormack was a “dangerous fool” who was putting lives at risk through the government’s inaction on climate change.

“Thoughts and prayers are not enough; we need science and ­action too,” Mr Bandt said. “They’ve done everything in their power to make these catastrophic fires more likely. When you cuddle coal in Canberra, the rest of the country burns.”

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd hit out at the Greens’ comments, pointing out it was the Greens who had blocked action on climate change when they ­opposed the CPRS in 2009.

“Seriously? If it weren’t for the Green party’s political opportunism in 2009-10, we would now be 10 years into an emissions trading scheme, a fully functioning carbon price, a long-term transition from coal and leading global action on climate,” Mr Rudd told The Australian.

“Instead, what did the Green party do? To try and score political points off my government, they hypocritically jumped into bed with the Liberals to defeat my legislation in the Senate. The rest is history.”

NSW Agriculture Minister Adam Marshall echoed Mr Barilaro’s sentiments, saying: “More needs to be done to clear fire trails, back burning operations and allow controlled stock grazing to keep fuel loads down. Better management would help enormously and lack of good quality local management has contributed.”

Mr Marshall told parliament three weeks ago that he had written to state Environment Minister Matt Kean “requesting a full and immediate review of fire management in the state’s national parks”.

“It is clear that landholders felt that there is a ‘lock it and leave it’ approach to management in ­national parks, which is not good enough,” Mr Marshall said at the time.

Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce said it was “infuriating” the Greens were attempting to score political points by saying the government’s “inaction” on climate change had contributed to fires that had killed three people.

Mr Joyce said climate change action in Australia would do nothing to reduce the bushfire risk ­unless there was also action taken by China, India and the US.

Australia produced 1.3 per cent of the planet’s emissions, compared with China’s 27.5 per cent and the 14.75 per cent that comes from the US.

Mr Joyce, a former deputy prime minister, said people were “once again talking about indigenous land management” because there were too many regulations around controlled burning ahead of bushfire season.

“We haven’t had the capacity to easily access (hazard) reduction burns because of all of the paperwork that is part of green policy,” Mr Joyce said.

Shine Energy chief executive Ash Dodd, an indigenous businessman trying to build a coal-fired power station in central Queensland, said traditional owners had undertaken hazard ­reduction to manage the fire risk “since time immemorial”.

“The responsibility of the build-up of surplus fuel must lay at the hands of state governments which do not allow seasonal burning based upon the traditions and customs of Australian traditional owners such as the Birri people,” Mr Dodd said.

Hazard-reduction burning has also been a contentious issue in Queensland.

A Queensland Audit Office ­report issued last year ­revealed the Queensland Fire and Emergency Services had missed key deadlines to improve the state’s bushfire readiness.

The report, itself a follow up to a highly critical audit of QFES in 2014, had “improved its visibility and oversight” of bushfire risk, ­including establishing the Office of Bushfire Mitigation and area fire management groups. However, the audit office said the authority had not fully implemented any of the original 2014 recommendations despite committing to do so by the following year.

SOURCE 

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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