The New York Times Is Right, Finally; Climate Change Is Not Threatening Island Nations
The New York Times (NYT) recently posted an article, titled “A Surprising Climate Find,” which explains how island nations like the Maldives and Tuvalu are not, in fact, in danger of sinking under the seas due to climate change. This is true; a fact Climate Realism has repeatedly discussed. Atolls in particular are known to grow with rising water levels, this has been known for years if not decades.
The NYT climate reporter, Raymond Zhong, explains that as “the planet warms and the oceans rise, atoll nations like the Maldives, the Marshall Islands and Tuvalu have seemed doomed to vanish, like the mythical Atlantis, into watery oblivion.”
This is an exceptionally common claim from the climate alarmist media, and some of the nations themselves that are benefitting from massive aid packages and “reparations” from wealthier countries; money not be used to help their people relocate from the “sinking” islands, but rather to build infrastructure and boost tourism. In fact, the NYT promoted this falsehood as late as April 2024, with a story, titled, “Why Time Is Running Out Across the Maldives’ Lovely Little Islands.“
In his most recent piece Zhong writes:
“Of late, though, scientists have begun telling a surprising new story about these islands. By comparing mid-20th century aerial photos with recent satellite images, they’ve been able to see how the islands have evolved over time. What they found is startling: Even though sea levels have risen, many islands haven’t shrunk. Most, in fact, have been stable. Some have even grown.”
It is true that the islands are not sinking, but Zhong is wrong when he says this fact has only been discovered “of late.” His own article references a study published in 2018, which found 89 percent of islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans increased in area or were stable, and only 11 percent showed any sign of contracting. So just three months after the NYT published an article claiming the Maldives were disappearing beneath the waves, the paper is now reversing itself based on research that existed six years before the April article was published. Since, Climate Realism has covered the claim many times, including with regard to Tuvaluan “refugees,” looking at tropical storms, and examining other island refugee claims, one wonders whether the NYT’s fact checkers were asleep on the job when the paper published its false story in April.
The facts about atolls growth and demise are not newly discovered. Scientists have known for decades, if not more than a hundred years, that atoll islands uniquely change with changing sea levels. Charles Darwin was the first to propose that reefs were many thousands of feet thick, and grow upwards towards the light. He was partially correct, though reality is more complicated than his theory.
In 2010, as discussed in the Climate Realism post “No, Rising Seas Are Not Swallowing Island Nations,” studies found that Tuvalu and Kiribati were growing, as well as Micronesia, and some had grown dramatically. Likewise in 2015, the same group of researchers reported that 40 percent of islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans were stable, and another 40 percent had grown.
Zhong correctly says that ocean currents and waves can cause erosion, but also “bring fresh sand ashore from the surrounding coral reefs, where the remains of corals, algae, crustaceans and other organisms are constantly being crushed into new sediment.”
Climate at a Glance: Islands and Sea Level Rise, also confirms the fact that in Tuvalu in particular –often a poster child for islands supposedly threatened by sea level rise—“eight of Tuvalu’s nine large coral atolls have grown in size during recent decades, and 75 percent of Tuvalu’s 101 smaller reef islands have increased as well.”
The only “surprising” discovery in this story is that the climate desk for the New York Times was allegedly not aware of these facts before now. This information is not new. It could be, of course, that the NYT neglected to report the truth about island nations’ status previously simply because it did not conform to the alarming climate narrative they have been trying to push, but as the data has gotten too strong to ignore, they were forced to admit the truth with regard to growing islands in the face of rising seas.
****************************************************
Mining the Planet for Renewable Energy
By Paul Driessen
This election year, several critical issues dominate voter concerns. Illegal immigration across unsecured borders by migrants, criminals, sex traffickers and terrorists. Anti-police policies, reduced prosecution of criminals and rising crime. Unprecedented prices for food, clothing, housing and other necessities.
Parental roles in education and sex changes for children. Threats to our republic and democracy from unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats who use their powers to persecute, prosecute, silence and even imprison opponents, and control our lives.
Also crucial: control over energy – the lifeblood of our civilization, jobs, health and prosperity.
Will America shut down coal, gas and nuclear electricity generation before it has sufficient reliable replacements? Will we have electricity when we need it, or only when it’s available, especially after we’re forced to convert gasoline cars and gas stoves, furnaces and water heaters to electric models?
What will families pay for that electricity and everything we eat, drink, build and use? Where will we get plastics, paints, pharmaceuticals, and thousands of other products made from oil and gas they want to lock in the ground? What will happen to our jobs, health, living standards – and personal choices about where we live, what we eat, what car we can drive and how far, whether we can fly places for vacation?
We’re told a great energy and economic transformation is underway – and is essential to prevent a “climate crisis.” In reality, the crisis exists in computer models, headlines and politicized science, but not in actual temperature and weather records.
In reality, there is no energy transformation. In 2023, wind and solar power generated 2.7% of the world’s primary energy; 81.5% came from fossil fuels. Between 1965 and 2023, North America and Europe cut their fossil fuel consumption almost in half; but over the same period, the rest of the world consumed seven times more than those two regions reduced their use. Emissions went up even more, because China, India and other developing countries require minimal pollution controls on power plants and vehicles.
In reality, a transition to an all-electric economy with no fossil fuels means millions of acres of America’s wild, scenic and agricultural lands would be covered with wind turbines, solar panels, transmission lines, and warehouses filled with batteries that can spontaneously erupt in flames.
In reality, we don’t know whether there are enough accessible metal and mineral deposits on Planet Earth to extract all the raw materials required to manufacture the turbines, panels, batteries, transmission lines, electric vehicles, transformers and other equipment the energy transformation would require – just for the United States, much less for the entire world.
We don’t know how many billions of tons of rock would have to be mined, processed and disposed of; how many millions of acres would be impacted; how many millions of tons of toxic air and water pollution would be emitted; what human rights would be violated to get those metals and minerals.
One of the most basic and vital metals for the energy transformation is copper. Average worldwide ore concentrations (0.04%) mean miners would have to remove some 40,000,000 tons of overlying rock and extract, crush and process nearly 25,000,000 tons of ore to get 110,000 tons of copper – enough for just the first 30,000 megawatts of President Biden’s offshore wind plan.
Worse, mining is essentially banned in the United States – and the Biden Administration has vetoed world-class mines that could have met US needs for copper (and other metals) for decades to come. And the problem isn’t just President Biden or the Biden Administration. It’s governors like Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer, and countless activists and mostly Democrat politicians who support these policies.
Recent studies question whether mining companies can even produce enough copper just for the electric vehicles people are told they must buy – much less for wind and solar power; to say nothing of a full US (or global) energy transformation. Again, that’s just the copper.
A 2022 International Energy Agency report examines the need for essential metals and minerals in energy transitions. Onshore wind installations, the report says, require nine times more materials than combined-cycle gas generating plants, to produce the same amount of electricity. Offshore wind installations require fourteen times more. (These IEA numbers do not include materials for transmission lines or backup power for windless-sunless periods.)
The IEA says its projections are “highly dependent” on how quickly and stringently the world actually tries to reach zero greenhouse gas emissions in power generation and all energy uses; on which wind, solar, battery and other technologies dominate; and on whether countries also try to utilize low-carbon (natural gas) or no-carbon (batteries) equipment in mining, materials processing, manufacturing and transporting wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, vehicles and other technologies.
However, the IEA calculates, demand for aluminum, copper, cobalt, graphite, iron, nickel, lithium, rare earths, concrete and other “green” energy materials is expected to skyrocket by 5, 20, 40, 50 or more times current global requirements by 2040.
The Agency says numerous “challenges” to actually acquiring those materials include actually finding producible deposits, plus land use, water scarcity and pollution, air pollution, toxic mining waste management, corruption and bribery, worker and nearby resident health and safety, and child labor.
Meeting these challenges, the IEA says, will require “systematic approaches,” the “development of institutions and the rule of law,” “inclusive legal frameworks,” “responsible” and “robust” pollution and waste management frameworks, “sustainable practices,” “international coordination,” “capacity building and knowledge sharing,” greater “transparency” and, ultimately, “international minerals governance.”
These actions will all help foster “sustainable and responsible supply chains that contribute to a low-carbon economy” worldwide, the IEA assures us.
But will these wishful terms survive collisions with the real world? Developing nations view coal, oil and gas as their key to jobs, modernity and prosperity. China, Russia and their allies perceive the West’s fixation on climate change and green energy as opportunities to control US and EU supply chains, geo-political options and military-economic capabilities.
The biggest wind energy project in the USA will soon blanket 1,600 square miles (1.25 times Delaware) of New Mexico, to generate 3,500 MW about 30% of the year. The Palo Verde nuclear plant in Arizona generates 4,200 MW from 6 square miles almost 24/7/365.
A Bloomberg research team says the world will need at least $200 trillion to stop global warming by 2050. Others estimate $275 trillion!
How can we head this economy-and-environment-killing craziness off at the pass?
Wise decisions at the ballot box are essential, of course. But state and local governments should enact laws requiring that utilities explain how they will generate wind and solar replacement power on windless winter nights, before they shut down a single coal, gas or nuclear power plant – or get approval for a single wind or solar project. (Those are just a few of the actions they can take.)
They should also demand full details on where raw materials will come from, and at what dollar, human rights and environmental costs – to state and local communities … and our planet.
America’s jobs, health, living standards, and right to choose our homes, cars and food depend on it.
https://heartland.org/opinion/mining-the-planet-for-renewable-energy/
*************************************************Yet Another Waste Of Time Climate Conference
The implausible president of COP29, Mukhtar Babayev of Azerbaijan, was at the recently-concluded UN’s Bonn Climate Change Conference in June to try to galvanize the COP29 corpse, and claimed to have “a two-pillared plan to ‘enhance ambition and enable action’.”
To which again we say been there, done that.
Twenty-eight times and counting, in fact… if you’re only counting the main gatherings not the endless intermediate ones.
Given the grandiose rhetoric ambition hardly needs enhancing since everybody has it, in amounts that make it a drug on the market.
The real question is why action needs “enabling” since nothing’s obstructing it, other than nobody wanting to impose disastrous costs on their own people to no purpose.
Nations are able to act. They just aren’t motivated to, and an agenda full of high-falutin’ ambition won’t change that situation.
The Edge (Singapore) explains in vain that lead Azerbaijani climate negotiator Yalchin Rafiyev:
“says the COP29 Presidency also aims to broker a ‘fair and ambitious new climate finance goal, finalise Article 6, strengthen global financial institutions and ensure the private sector commits to climate action’.”
Ensure? That we’d like to see. Well no, we wouldn’t. And we aren’t going to, no matter what was said at the Bonn Show.
Which in fact was yes we failed again let’s um uh well see that is, as Climate Home News lamented in a closeout piece that makes you wonder whether covering the story was worth it:
“Apart from smiles and flowers in an emotional farewell for a longtime UNFCCC staffer, the mood at the closing session of the Bonn climate talks on Thursday night was sombre.
Frustration and finger-pointing dominated interventions by delegates representing both developed and developing nations, as they lamented the collapse of key talks on the Mitigation Work Programme – the main channel for curbing planet-heating emissions.
‘We have failed to show the world that we are responding with the purpose and urgency required to limit warming to 1.5 degrees,’ said Samoan negotiator Anne Rasmussen, speaking for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS).
Disappointment also ran high over minimal progress towards a new post-2025 finance goal due at November’s COP29 summit in Baku, with rich countries refusing to put numbers on the table.
And there were grumblings about the narrow scope and opaque process of work on integrating climate science into the UN talks in Bonn. All of that left UN climate chief Simon Stiell with little option but to give countries a stiff talking-to as he beseeched them not to ‘leave the hardest work to the eleventh hour’ before COP29.
‘Business-as-usual is a recipe for failure, on climate finance, and on many other fronts, in humanity’s climate fight,’ he warned them.”
Um that was business as usual. And the 11th hour. But they can fix the weather, honest. And will in Baku. This time for sure.
https://principia-scientific.com/yet-another-waste-of-time-climate-conference/
******************************************‘Green lawfare’ is now the weapon of choice for Australia's activist class
The anti-industry industry has come a long way from its humble origins in the late 1970s, when Bob Brown went to his local St Vincent de Paul and bought himself a suit. The transition from a gaggle of amateur nature lovers to a professional organisation with salaried staff was a giant evolutionary leap for the environmental movement.
It was the precursor to blocking the Franklin Dam and the first tentative steps into politics and the law. Today, green activism in Australia is a quarter-billion-dollar business that employs hundreds of people. Research published this week by the Menzies Research Centre shows the combined revenue of the top 25 green advocacy groups was $275m last year. The revenue has more than doubled from $113m in 2015. The number of staff on their books has increased from 374 to 880.
Ironically, the report finds that the green activist industry is growing faster than the primary industries and resource sectors it targets. Its goal is not to create wealth but to destroy it. It forms part of the NGO-corporate-industrial complex that has discovered how to profit from the war on carbon, aided and abetted by the government through subsidies and regulation.
The environmental juggernaut of today bears little comparison with the green movement that began in Tasmania almost half a century ago. Its focus has changed from conservation to the ideology of climate change. The movement has become remote and insensitive to the natural environment and developed a narrow-minded obsession with carbon emissions from coal and gas combustion.
The big environmental groups are wholly committed to renewable energy and dogmatically opposed to nuclear power. To the extent that we’re able to trace the source of their funding, much of it flows from investors in the renewables sector whose portfolios would be instantly devalued by the entry of nuclear power.
Activist organisations have become so dependent on green corporatism that they are willing to ignore the destruction of broad acres of natural vegetation for the construction of wind turbines, industrial solar plants, energy storage infrastructure and associated transmission lines.
Climate warriors are more likely to be found in the courts these days rather than tied to the front of a bulldozer in the tropical forests of the Upper Burdekin in far north Queensland. Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek’s approval of the Upper Burdekin/Gawara Baya wind development last month came despite a damning report that warned of “unavoidable significant impacts” on the endangered Sharman’s rock wallaby, the koala, the greater glider, the red goshawk and the masked owl.
Nowadays, lawyers perform much of the heavy lifting for climate activism. The MRC’s research found that Australia is the second-largest forum for environmental lawfare after the US. There are more climate lawsuits per capita in Australia than anywhere else in the world, thanks to a rich array of resource sector targets and an obliging legal system.
The bar for launching court actions in Australia is low for those with funds. Every dollar spent by legal activists is a drain on the profits of businesses forced to defend themselves against adventurous and vexatious claims. The biggest cost to the resource sector is not legal fees, punishing as they are. It is the mounting cost of interest on borrowed money that sits idle while the legal process drags on.
The MRC calculates that in past two years $17.48bn in industrial output has been frozen by legal action. Whether investors will see a return on their capital is at the mercy of the courts. The damage is compounded by the damage to the broader economy.
The MRC calculates 29,784 Australian jobs are at risk in cases before the courts. The loss of taxes and mining royalties will make it harder to fund roads, schools and hospitals and support our health and education systems.
The fiscal impact alone would prompt a clear-thinking government to step in and clean up this mess. The Albanese government, however, is anything but hard-headed about anything related to the environment. It refuses to countenance any reform that might give the Greens party an edge in quinoa-chomping enclaves such as the seat of Grayndler, the fate of which is of more than passing interest to our PM.
It gets worse. In an act of fiscal self-harm, the government is subsidising legal activism that eats into the profits it likes to milk. The 2022 budget included $10m in funding for the Environmental Defenders Office and Environmental Justice Australia, the two bodies responsible for most environmental lawfare in Australia.
In 2015, the EDO had 14 staff and a $3m budget. By 2023, it had grown to a team of 105 staff and a budget of $13.3m. It measures success with a perverse set of metrics. Its 2022 annual report boasts of providing 11,587 legal hours and spending 134 days in court.
In January, the EDO’s tactics were heavily criticised by Federal Court Justice Natalie Charlesworth, who reversed an order preventing Santos from building a pipeline allowing the $5.8bn development of the offshore Barossa gas field. She rejected assertions by three Tiwi Islanders that the pipeline posed a risk to intangible underwater heritage, including Crocodile Man song lines and an area of significance for the rainbow serpent Ampiji, and was not “broadly representative” of the beliefs of Tiwi people who would be affected by the pipeline.
Charlesworth found the EDO had engaged in dishonest “coaching” tactics and the misrepresentation of local Indigenous knowledge. Charlesworth dismissed evidence from the EDO’s expert witness about potential impacts on underwater archaeological sites, finding there was a “negligible chance” of a significant impact on tangible cultural heritage. Charlesworth found a cultural mapping exercise undertaken by an expert witness for the applicants and “the related opinions expressed about it are so lacking in integrity that no weight can be placed on them”.
“I am satisfied that this aspect of the case does indeed involve ‘confection’ or ‘construction’, at least in part, and that it cannot be an adapted account of the kind discussed by the anthropologists,” the judgment states.
Yet despite the loss of the case, the activists are winning. The global demand for liquid natural gas has never been higher, and is forecast to continue to rise until the 2040s. Yet oil and gas exploration activities in Australia have been falling significantly over the past two decades. The number of new offshore wells has fallen from over 50 in 2010 wells to just three in 2023. When your aim is to frustrate and delay, there is no such thing as a wasted day in court.
***************************************
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)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
*****************************************
Jim Hansen and his twin
No comments:
Post a Comment