International study finds no evidence in records of ‘climate emergency’
An international study of major weather and extreme events has found no evidence of a “climate emergency” in the record to date.
The study by Italian scientists provides a long-term analysis of heat, drought, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and ecosystem productivity and finds no clear positive trend of extreme events.
The authors do not say that no action should be taken on climate change but argue the issue should be placed in a bigger context.
“Fearing a climate emergency without this being supported by data, means altering the framework of priorities with negative effects that could prove deleterious to our ability to face the challenges of the future, squandering natural and human resources in an economically difficult context,” the report, published in European Physical Journal Plus, said.
The paper – “A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming” – found the most robust global changes in climate extremes are found in yearly values of heatwaves, but it said global trends in heatwave intensity were “not significant”.
Daily rainfall intensity and extreme precipitation frequency were stationary.
Tropical cyclones show a “substantial temporal invariance”, as do tornadoes.
The impact of warming on surface and wind speed remained unclear.
The team, led by Gianluca Alimonti from the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics and the University of Milan, extended the analysis to include natural disasters, floods, drought, ecosystem productivity and yields of the four main crops (maize, rice, soybean and wheat).
“None of these response indicators show a clear positive trend of extreme events,” the report said.
The authors said it was important to underline the difference between statistical evidence of excess of events, with given characteristic, and probabilistic calculation of anthropogenic attribution of extreme events. The statistical evidence is based on historical observations and tries to highlight differences between these and recent observations or possible trends as a function of time. “The anthropogenic versus natural attribution of the origin of a phenomenon is based on probabilistic models and makes reliance on simulations that hardly reproduce the macro and microphysical variables involved in it,” the researchers said.
“In conclusion, on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet.”
On floods, the report said: “Although evidence of an increase in total annual precipitation is observed on a global level, corresponding evidence for increases in flooding remains elusive and a long list of studies shows little or no evidence of increased flood magnitudes, with some studies finding more evidence of decreases than increases.”
The paper said there was “no evidence that the areas affected by the different types of drought are increasing”.
In conclusion, the findings do not mean we should do nothing about climate change. “We should work to minimise our impact on the planet and to minimise air and water pollution,” the authors said.
“Whether or not we manage to drastically curtail our carbon dioxide emissions in the coming decades, we need to reduce our vulnerability to extreme weather and climate events.
“How the climate of the twenty-first century will play out is a topic of deep uncertainty. We need to increase our resiliency to whatever the future climate will present us.”
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Rethinking the Greenhouse Effect
A former head of Australia’s National Climate Centre is arguing that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has adopted an overly simplistic approach to global warming and has ended up exaggerating the human contribution to recent climate change.
William Kininmonth argues that the warming of the planet is fastest in winter and in high latitudes near the poles. He argues that this is mostly due to increased heat transport from the tropical oceans.
However, the recent warming of the tropical oceans can’t be explained by the greenhouse effect due to carbon dioxide, because that effect is small in the humid tropical atmosphere. The most probable explanation is natural changes in ocean currents.
William Kininmonth says:
“The IPCC’s radiation balance approach is very simplistic, ignoring the fact that nowhere on the Earth’s surface is in radiation balance. Mainstream climate science may have led us all up a blind alley”.
GWPF invited the Royal Society and the Met Office to review this paper, and to submit a response to be published as an appendix to it. No reply was received.
About the author
William Kininmonth joined the Australian Bureau of Meteorology in 1960, and retired in 1998 as head of the National Climate Centre. He was a consultant to the World Meteorological Organization’s Commission for Climatology and participated in regional coordination and training programs. William Kininmonth is author of Climate Change: A Natural Hazard.
Contact
William Kininmonth
e: w.kininmonth@bigpond.com
m: +61 418 376 236
https://mailchi.mp/4b5e1017732a/press-release-rethinking-the-greenhouse-effect-191191?e=cc88839e92
**********************************************************What Happened When 1 Government Fell Under Influence of World’s Environmental Extremists
Starvation. Poverty. People struggling to buy medicine and fuel.
Disaster happened after one government fell under the influence of the world’s environmental extremists.
Many “experts” say pure nature is best. United Nations officials now tell politicians that the climate “crisis” demands countries make all sorts of sacrifices, like cutting nitrogen waste.
Much of that waste comes from synthetic fertilizer, so activists applauded when Sri Lanka’s government decided to become the first country to really take their advice. Sri Lanka banned all synthetic fertilizers.
Oops.
Suddenly, the same farms produced much less food. Food prices rose 80%.
One result: riots. As my new video shows, thousands swarmed the president’s mansion. Some had a cookout on his lawn.
The president resigned and fled the country.
It turns out that we need chemical fertilizers.
Environmental writer Michael Shellenberger says that if countries listened to today’s green activists, there would be mass starvation.
“We could only support 2 to 3 billion people on Earth if we just relied on natural fertilizers like manure,” Shellenberger says. “[But] there’s 8 billion people.”
“Why can’t we just make more organic manure?” I ask.
“It takes twice as much land to produce all the cows that you need to get the manure,” he explains. “Synthetic fertilizers are a friend to saving nature because they reduce how much land we need.”
Now the environmental purists make excuses for Sri Lanka.
Mother Jones said it’s “ridiculous to single out [the fertilizer ban] as the ‘underlying’ cause, as Shellenberger did.” Others say that Sri Lanka just needed time to adjust to organic farming.
“You might be able to become poorer over five or 10 years, rather than over six months,” replies Shellenberger. “But the result will be the same.”
I push back. “There were other causes of the problems: higher oil prices, COVID, other stuff happened.”
“But those same problems affected other countries where the economies did not collapse,” Shellenberger replies. “What made the difference in Sri Lanka was its fertilizer ban.”
We are right to worry about chemical fertilizer. Not only does the nitrous oxide emit a greenhouse gas, but when nitrogen runs off into waterways, it can kill fish.
“Absolutely. We should be concerned,” says Shellenberger. “But that’s best dealt with through a gradual process of farmers getting better at applying the fertilizer.”
Farmers are already doing that. Fertilizer is expensive, so farmers have an incentive not to waste it.
“We know you can significantly reduce pollution while producing the same amount of food,” Shellenberger points out. In the Netherlands, he says, “They reduced fertilizer pollution by 70%.”
But that still wasn’t enough for environmental zealots in the Dutch government. They want to force farmers to cut nitrogen emissions by another half, even though they admit that will force 11,000 farms to shut down.
This green extremism is “out of control,” says Shellenberger. “You would think that Sri Lanka would be a wake-up call. But we haven’t seen any slowdown.”
Fortunately, most countries don’t yet embrace the zealots’ most destructive ideas, like banning synthetic fertilizer or the Green New Deal’s demand for 100% renewable energy.
But many countries closed nuclear plants.
And President Joe Biden killed pipelines, stopped a long-planned sale of offshore oil rights, and imposed a moratorium on new oil and gas leases on public lands.
This is a war on affordable energy.
“We’re in the worst energy crisis in 50 years,” says Shellenberger. “Yet governments are trying to make energy more scarce and expensive. It’s totally insane. There’s no other word for it.”
The pursuit of a chemical-free world is insane. Modern technologies such as synthetic fertilizer make people’s lives better. They especially make poor people’s lives better. Banning them brings disaster.
The hardcore environmental left got its way in Sri Lanka. Let’s hope they don’t destroy more countries.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/09/07/going-hungry-under-green-policies/
****************************************************"Green" subsidies in Australia
Simply to list the subsidies available for green purchases (think here solar panels, small batteries, LED lighting, shower heads, home insulation, electric vehicles, etc,) would require the space of several columns. So let me pick out just a few examples. In Victoria, you can get $1,400 plus an interest free loan if you want to install solar panels on your roof. There is also a thousand dollars available for solar hot water. Even better, there is nearly $3,000 for a solar battery. If you want to upgrade your heating or cooling, there’s another grand available.
For those homes that generate excess electricity that is fed back to the grid, there are ‘feed-in tariffs’. Initially, the size of these tariffs was obscene. In Queensland, for instance, households were paid 44 cents per kilowatt hour and those who signed up early will enjoy this rate until 2028. More recently, feed-in tariffs have crashed and are generally well below 10 cents per KWh.
When it comes to buying an electric vehicle – they are now called zero emissions vehicles (ZEVs) to emphasise their worthiness – there’s an upfront grant of $3,000 in Victoria but the car has to be worth less than $69,000. No top-of-the-line Tesla for you. You may have to pay a small road user charge in the future but the overall amount in dollar terms will be small compared with the excise on petrol and diesel paid by less well-heeled motorists.
One of the first actions of our new federal treasurer, Jim, was to remove the fringe benefits tax from the purchase of electric vehicles. In this instance, the maximum value of the car is $85,000. Treasury calculates that the owners can save between 5 and 9 grand per year – not bad if you can afford the purchase price in the first place.
Getting back to Bloomberg’s Greener Living, one interesting fact contained in the document is that Norway, the nirvana of EV enthusiasts, taxes the living daylights out of petrol/diesel cars, thereby propelling the shift to EVs – sorry ZEVs. The average tax imposed on normal vehicles is $US15,000 – which is 22,500 big ones here.
It’s actually surprising that anyone at all in Norway, which by the way is the size of a handkerchief, would even contemplate buying an internal combustion engine vehicle with that sort of impost. The Sheriff would be extremely proud of the politicians who dreamt up this grand theft.
And don’t forget the absence of road tolls, free parking and the use of bus lanes that further entice the Norwegian public to do the ‘right thing’. You wonder whether it might be cheaper for the government to simply give EVs – OK, let’s just forget ZEVs – to every citizen with a driving licence.
But don’t think it’s just the Europeans who are into these reverse Robin Hood subsidies. The US government under great uncle Joe is really ramping them up. And this is on top of the raft of subsidies that exist at the state level, particularly in California.
Under the laughably titled Inflation Reduction Act, there are new point-of-sale tax credits for all electric vehicles although there are some price and income caps. It turns out that unless subsidies take the form of an immediate reduction in the sale price, they don’t work very well and the Biden administration has acted on this advice.
The IRA (funny that) also restored a 30 per cent tax credit for both home solar and home battery storage systems, extended out to 2034. There are also subsidies for heat pumps and electric induction stoves.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/09/robin-hood-robin-hood/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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