Thursday, May 09, 2024


It can be bad to REDUCE pollution!

There's no such thimg as a happy Greenie

It might sound like a conspiracy that China is controlling global warming, but a new study has revealed that this might inadvertently be the case.

Researchers at the Ocean University of China have found that the country has been creating 'heat blobs' over the northeast Pacific from 2010 through 2020.

The team noticed that temperatures had warmed up to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit from the Bering Strait and traveling 1,000 miles to the Gulf of Alaska which has caused fish to die off, toxic algae to bloom and whales to go missing.

However, the warming events were found to be from China's agenda to reduce aerosol emissions, which are pollutions that can have a cooling effect on the Earth because it acts like a mirror, reflecting the heat from the sun back into space.

Researchers have now warned that Chinese government that it should reconsider its ban on aerosol, saying a lack of them will continue to increase temperatures in the region.

The nation has experienced record-breaking heatwaves in the last decade, such as in 2015 when temperatures hit 125 degrees.

And in 2010 China saw up over 104 degrees, which may support the researchers findings.

In the latest study, the researchers noted that the heat waves' patterns seemed to begin after the Chinese government successfully reduced aerosol emissions such as sulfate from factories and powerplants in 2010.

The team created 12 computer climate models that were run with two conditions in place: the first was where East Asian emissions remained stable while the other reflected the drop over the last decade.

They found that models where the emissions hadn't dropped, didn't change the temperatures in other regions while those that reduced aerosol levels saw heat waves in the northeast areas of the Pacific.

The models revealed why cleaner air meant warmer temperatures - as less heat was reflected into space, the rising temperatures caused high-pressure systems which is associated with hotter, dryer temperatures during the summer and more mild weather during the winter.

In turn, high-pressure systems forming above the Earth's atmosphere caused low-pressure systems in the Pacific to become more intense.

When this happened, the Aleutian Low - which transports warm air from the Aleutian Islands into the northeastern Pacific - developed a larger range and weakened the winds that would usually cool the sea's surface, resulting in hotter conditions.

This has had disastrous impacts, not only on the sea temperature and marine life, but also has had a socioeconomic impact such as the 2013 to 2016 California drought that cost multibillion dollars in US agricultural losses and killed more than 100 million trees.

'These severe ecological and social consequences indicate the urgency of revealing the causes of these emerging climatic extremes,' the study said.

Although limiting aerosol emissions does contribute to global warming, increased levels leads to the premature death of eight million people annually worldwide, according to NASA.

The tiny aerosol particles, like sulfate or nitrate, are emitted during fossil fuel combustion and when they're inhaled, can cause asthma, respiratory infections, lung cancer and heart disease.

In the Ocean University of China study, the researchers said their newest findings highlight the need to consider what risks come from reducing aerosol emissions. and called on government bodies to reassess its impact on climate change.

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How China’s Climate Agenda Threatens US

China is intentionally advancing a climate agenda for its own gain, and America is allowing it to happen, according to a senior research fellow for international affairs at The Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center.

China has “taken advantage of the United States, because we’ve had this very driven climate agenda,” Heritage’s Erin Walsh says. (Heritage founded The Daily Signal in 2014.)

The development of solar energy, for example, began in America, and then the Chinese developed it further, and now China controls the “entire supply chain, so you can’t be involved unless you’re purchasing some goods from China to make your solar panels,” Walsh explained, adding that the same is true for wind turbines, and for batteries and electric vehicles. Right now, with respect to EV batteries, “they’ve got the dominant control of the supply chain.”

The more the U.S. and other nations move toward use of wind and solar energy, and electric vehicles, the further China’s economy benefits and the more America’s economy and national security are put at risk, according to Walsh.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/05/08/climate-agenda-puts-america-chinese-handcuffs-expert-says/#:~:text=The%20development%20of%20solar%20energy,is%20true%20for%20wind%20turbines%2C

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Right, "The Hill", Polls Do Show Declining Public Concern About Climate Change

The Hill posted an article discussing the fact that a recent survey indicates that the public’s concern about climate change is waning, especially among younger people, those we are constantly told are most concerned about and demanding governments take action to fight climate change. This poll’s results are confirmed by another recent independent survey which came to the same conclusion. Despite a daily barrage of mainstream media stories alternately proclaiming “we have just X number of years fight to radically reduce carbon dioxide emissions before it’s too late to save the planet,” or that we face a “climate crisis,” or that “climate change is an existential threat,” polls show the public is increasingly immune to the message.

Dozens of surveys conducted by a variety of noted polling organizations over the past two decades consistently demonstrate a few clear results: 1) a plurality or slight majority of the public (or registered voters, or people likely to vote—depending upon the polling organization’s criteria) are somewhat or very concerned about climate change; 2) when asked to rank climate change against other public policy issues of concern, climate change ranks last or near last among the issues of concern; 3) when asked how much those polled were willing to pay to fight climate change, or alternately the degree to which government should act to restrict or direct peoples’ choices to fight climate change, the answer is very little, to the former, or not much, to the latter.

Discussing the results of a recent survey conducted by the Monmouth University, The Hill writes:

Fewer Americans today see climate change as a “very serious” problem than they did three years ago, according to a new survey released Monday.

The Monmouth University poll, conducted on April 18-22 shows a 10-point decline in Americans who says climate change is a “very serious” problem, falling from 56 percent in September 2021 to 46 percent in April.

Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, attributed this trend to a decline in urgency among Americans.

“Most Americans continue to believe climate change is real. The difference in these latest poll results is a decline in a sense of urgency around this issue,” Murray said.

Perhaps surprising to many, the decline in concern among adults ages 18-34 was 17 points. In 2021 67 percent of that demographic said climate change was a “very serious” problem compared to just 50 percent in the most recent survey.

Interestingly, Monmouth’s survey found 27 percent of those surveyed did not believe climate change was happening or were unsure of it (an increase from 24 percent in 2021). And, almost as many survey participants believed human activities and natural changes in the environment were equally responsible for climate change (31 percent) as those who believed that human actions alone were responsible (34 percent).

The Monmouth poll is not really all that surprising to anyone who has closely followed surveys asking questions about climate change during the past two decades or longer.

On Earth Day, April 24, Breitbart reported on Gallup’s annual Earth Day poll, a survey it has undertaken since 2000. Its results were consistent with pervious Earth Day surveys. Finding the environment in general, and climate change, in particular, ranked very low on the list of the public’s issues of concern. Gallup’s 2024 poll found that despite decades of climate doomsaying fewer people worried a great deal about climate change in 2024 (42 percent) than were very worried about it in 2020, when the stated concern hit its high point (46 percent) in more than 20 years of surveys asking the question.

In Gallup’s survey a majority (55 percent), said they did not believe that climate change would pose a serious threat in their own lifetime.

Also, when ranked against other issues confronting the nation, as Gallup states: “Environmental Worries Lag Behind Economic and Social Issues,” which is also consistent with past surveys. And all of this is despite nearly two decades of climate alarm propagandizing in the mainstream media.

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Australia: A "fossil fuel" comes in from the cold

New gas projects will gain stronger federal support in a Labor pledge to deliver affordable gas to customers for decades to come, as it warns of shortages within four years unless the nation boosts supply.

The federal government will back the case for new gas fields and import terminals to secure the supplies despite calls to phase out the use of fossil fuels, setting up a clash with the Greens and environmental groups over the new plan.

The future gas strategy, to be released by Resources Minister Madeleine King on Thursday, says the new supplies are fundamental to the economic transition to net zero emissions and the industries in the government’s “made in Australia” agenda for next week’s federal budget.

An official report to support the strategy says Australia could fill the future shortfalls by opening new gas fields such as Scarborough, being developed by Woodside off the Western Australian coast, and Narrabri, being developed by Santos in northern NSW.

“Ensuring Australia continues to have adequate access to reasonably priced gas will be key to delivering an 82 per cent renewable energy grid by 2030, and to achieve our commitment to net zero emissions by 2050,” King said.

While Labor often rubbished the Coalition’s support for fossil fuels with its talk of a “gas-fired recovery” three years ago, the new plan names gas supply as crucial to the nation’s economic fortunes.

“New sources of gas supply are needed to meet demand during the economy-wide transition,” the strategy says.

Former prime minister Scott Morrison outlined a “gas-fired recovery” policy during the pandemic with a vow to open up new gas fields, including the Beetaloo Basin in the Northern Territory, but no new gas field has been developed in recent years.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese questioned the Coalition claims when he was opposition leader but broadly endorsed the use of gas, saying in November 2020: “The truth is that gas will play a role and should play a role in terms of firming up renewables and in other areas.”

Energy Minister Chris Bowen dismissed the Coalition gas plan as a “fraud” at the time.

Australia relies on gas for 27 per cent of its existing energy needs, as well as 14 per cent of its export income, but some Labor supporters as well as the Greens want the fossil fuel to be phased out by 2030.

The strategy mirrors the gas industry’s calls for new projects and endorses warnings from the energy market operator that new supplies are needed to avert supply shortfalls.

The government documents say NSW and Victoria will face shortages by 2028, along with other east coast states, while the shortage on the west coast will begin from 2030.

While the new plan does not force any change on state governments, it clashes with Victorian Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio because of her criticism of east coast gas producers, whom she has argued continue to export large volumes to international buyers.

“Gas companies in Queensland are putting their export profits ahead of domestic supplies. That has been the case now for a number of years,” D’Ambrosio said.

Victoria lifted its moratorium on conventional gas projects in 2021 but at the same time banned the practice of onshore fracking for gas.

The federal plan matches calls from NSW Premier Chris Minns and others in the Labor government for more domestic gas supplies, such as from the Narrabri field being developed by Santos.

The Future Gas Strategy will contain analysis of the future gas supply balance, which it is understood will reflect the Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO) current forecasts.

ExxonMobil and Woodside’s 50-year-old Gippsland Basin gas fields in Bass Strait have historically provided up to two-thirds of southern states’ gas demand, but are rapidly drying up. AEMO forecasts gas production in NSW and Victoria will drop from 363 petajoules in 2023 to 236 petajoules in 2028.

AEMO said in March that the entire east coast gas market would be in annual deficit by 2028 unless new supplies are tapped, forecasting an annual shortfall of around 50 petajoules until 2032. The supply gap is expected to increase to between 100 petajoules and 200 petajoules from 2033.

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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

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Wednesday, May 08, 2024


How your cooking could cause the same lung damage as pollution, study claims

This puts Greenie scares about pollution into perspective. If we want to eliminate air polluion we would have to eliminate cooking too. The fact of the matter is that cooking fires have long ago accustomed us to air pollution. We mostly just spit it up

Breakfasts featuring fried eggs, sausages and bacon aren't just bad for your heart. They could spell serious problems for your lungs too - especially if you're cooking them, a new study suggests.

Researchers have found that frying certain foods triggers the release of similar pollutants that flood the outdoor air in built-up cities, and are known to increase the risk of lung disease.

Previous studies involving chefs have shown exposure to cooking emissions is associated with chronic diseases in chefs.

But the new experiment, by experts at the University of British Columbia, is the first in which researchers revealed certain compounds can form in domestic kitchens.

The study analyzed the emissions and chemicals produced when cooking common meals using a frying pan - including pancakes, pan-fried brussel sprouts and vegetable stir fries.

To measure the amount of of pollutants produced by frying the meals, researchers set out to capture the smoke and emissions let off by cooking using a tool called an impinger, a small bottle mean to collect airborne chemicals.

After analyzing the emissions, scientists found the cooking produced carbon aerosols, small particles or liquid droplets in the air, called BrCOA.

The team then exposed these aerosols to overhead lighting in typical houses and natural sunlight.

They found all the meals released the same amount of carbon aerosols that then subsequently produced a harmful compound called singlet oxygen when exposed to light.

Singlet oxygen is a highly reactive compound that can cause lung damage and contribute to the development of cancer, diabetes and heart disease, previous studies have shown.

While all the meals produced singlet oxygen at around the same concentration, the highest amounts were detected when the fumes were exposed to sunlight - meaning kitchens with natural sunlight streaming in through windows could have the most compounds in the air.

Not only do these compounds form while cooking, but the scientists said they can linger in the air long after you've eaten, leading to the persistent degradation of your household air quality.

The study found the amount of singlet oxygen produced by cooking was present at similar levels to environmental pollution measured outdoors, but could be more dangerous indoors because it is a confined space with less ventilation.

While singlet oxygen compounds can be useful - sometimes used as a cancer therapy to cause cancer death - they have also been associated with damage to the body's cells.

Research has shown the chemical can also cause DNA and tissue damage, particularly of the skin and eyes and can cause swelling, blistering and scarring.

Because this is the first study of its kind, the scientists said more research is needed to fully understand cooking-related singlet oxygen and other cooking emissions.

Dr Nadine Borduas-Dedekind, UBC chemistry assistant professor and lead author of the study, said: 'Our next steps include determining just how this oxidant might affect humans and how much we’re breathing in when we cook. Could it play a role in some cooking-related diseases?'

In an effort to reduce the amount of this chemical, researchers recommend turning on kitchen venting fans, opening windows for fresh air and using an air filter in the kitchen.

Cooking with an oil with a high smoke point, such as avocado oil, can also help mitigate indoor pollution.

The study was published in the journal Environmental Science: Atmospheres.

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A whistleblower shares shocking details of corruption of peer review in climate science

I have been contacted by a whistleblower with a remarkable story of corruption of the academic peer-review process involving a paper published in 2022. The whistleblower has provided me with relevant emails, reviews and internal deliberations from which I recount this disturbing episode — which ends with an unwarranted and politically-motivated retraction of a paper that some climate scientists happened to disagree with.

The paper at the center of this story is not particularly significant, as it mainly reviews the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on trends in weather extremes. The paper does venture a bit too far (in my view) into commentary, but that is neither unique nor a basis for retracting a paper – if it were we’d have a lot of retractions!

To be clear, there is absolutely no allegation of research fraud or misconduct here, just simple disagreement. Instead of countering arguments and evidence via the peer reviewed literature, activist scientists teamed up with activist journalists to pressure a publisher – Springer Nature, perhaps the world’s most important scientific publisher – to retract a paper. Sadly, the pressure campaign worked.

The abuse of the peer review process documented here is remarkable and stands as a warning that climate science is as deeply politicized as ever with scientists willing to exert influence on the publication process both out in the open and behind the scenes.

I have contacted the publisher and the co-chief-editor of the journal with several questions (which you can find at the bottom), and a request for a reply by close-of-business today. It is now after 7PM in Europe, where both are based, and I have not received a response. My invitation for comment remains open and I will update this article should they respond.

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What the IPCC Actually Says About Extreme Weather. I promise, you'll be utterly shocked

ROGER PIELKE JR.

People are going absolutely nuts these days about extreme weather. Every event, any where is now readily associated with climate change and a portent of a climate out of control, apocalyptic even. I’ve long given up hope that the actual science of climate and extreme weather will be fairly reported or discussed in policy — nowadays, climate change is just too seductive and politically expedient.

But for those who want to know what research actually says on the relationship of extreme weather and climate change, that information is readily available. Today I’ll share the excellent work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summarizing what its most recent assessment says about various types of extreme weather and climate change.

When you read the below you will realize that the difference between what you see in the news (including statements from leading scientists) and what the IPCC has concluded could not be more different. One day PhD dissertations will be written about our current moment of apocalyptic panic.

Identifying the signal of human caused climate change according to the IPCC, refers to detecting and attributing a change in the statistics of a particular climate or weather variable.

The IPCC further defines the emergence of a signal of climate change :

In this Report emergence of a climate change signal or trend refers to when a change in climate (the ‘signal’) becomes larger than the amplitude of natural or internal variations (defining the ‘noise’).

The IPCC further defines a concept called time of emergence:

Time when a specific anthropogenic signal related to climate change is statistically detected to emerge from the background noise of natural climate variability in a reference period, for a specific region

The “time of emergence” is a key concept of the AR6 report and a focus of its Chapter 12. It is important to note that just because a signal has not been detected, that does not mean that changes are not happening. However, as I have often said, the practical significance of a signal that can’t be detected cannot be large.

Before proceeding — A sidenote, perhaps telling about the state of climate research:

We (Ryan Crompton, John McAneney and I) were among the first to introduce the concept of time of emergence into the academic literature in 2011. The IPCC instead references the concept to a 2012 paper that applied the same concepts and methods, but failed to cite our work. I am used to such things! But it is satisfying to know that our work helped to kick start a major part of the IPCC AR6, which devoted an entire chapter to the topic. Now you know also.

Back to extreme weather — let’s take a look what IPCC AR6 says about the time of emergence for various extreme events. Here are some direct quotes related to specific phenomena:

An increase in heat extremes has emerged or will emerge in the coming three decades in most land regions (high confidence)

There is low confidence in the emergence of heavy precipitation and pluvial and river flood frequency in observations, despite trends that have been found in a few regions

There is low confidence in the emergence of drought frequency in observations, for any type of drought, in all regions.

Observed mean surface wind speed trends are present in many areas, but the emergence of these trends from the interannual natural variability and their attribution to human-induced climate change remains of low confidence due to various factors such as changes in the type and exposure of recording instruments, and their relation to climate change is not established. . . The same limitation also holds for wind extremes (severe storms, tropical cyclones, sand and dust storms).

The IPCC helpfully provides a summary table for a range of extremes, indicating for various phenomena whether emergence has been achieved with medium or high confidence at three points in time:

A white entry in the table means that emergence has not yet been or is not in the future expected to be achieved. The blue and orange entries represent the emergence of respectively increasing and decreasing signals at various levels of confidence.

Take a moment and look at the table carefully. Look especially at all those white cells.

The IPCC has concluded that a signal of climate change has not yet emerged beyond natural variability for the following phenomena:

River floods

Heavy precipitation and pluvial floods

Landslides

Drought (all types)

Severe wind storms

Tropical cyclones

Sand and dust storms

Heavy snowfall and ice storms

Hail

Snow avalanche

Coastal flooding

Marine heat waves

Furthermore, the emergence of a climate change signal is not expected under the extreme RCP8.5 scenario by 2100 for any of these phenomena, except heavy precipitation and pluvial floods and that with only medium confidence. Since we know that RCP8.5 is extreme and implausible, that means that there would even less confidence in emergence under a more plausible upper bound, like RCP4.5

The IPCC concludes that, to date, the signal of climate change has emerged in extreme heat and cold spells. The IPCC states:

An increase in heat extremes has emerged or will emerge in the coming three decades in most land regions (high confidence) (Chapter 11; King et al., 2015; Seneviratne and Hauser, 2020), relative to the pre-industrial period, as found by testing significance of differences in distributions of yearly temperature maxima in simulated 20-year periods. In tropical regions, wherever observed changes can be established with statistical significance, and in most mid-latitude regions, there is high confidence that hot and cold extremes have emerged in the historical period, but only medium confidence elsewhere.

Clearly, with the exception perhaps of only extreme heat, the IPCC is badly out of step with today’s apocalyptic zeitgeist. Maybe that is why no one mentions what the IPCC actually says on extreme events. It may also help to explain why a recent paper that arrives at conclusions perfectly consistent with the IPCC is now being retracted with no claims of error or misconduct.

I’ve done research on climate change and extreme weather for almost 30 years (yowza!). I know the literature and have contributed quite a bit to it. My view is that the IPCC has accurately summarized that literature (if perhaps overlooking some key work, ahem).

I wonder if the IPCC is next in line to be attacked by champions of the apocalyptic zeitgeist. After all, how can science like this co-exist with an end-of-times panic? Something would seem to have to give, right?

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Australian Greens want a big new bureaucracy to supervise supermarkets

Guess who would wear the costs of it

Woolworths boss Brad Banducci won’t be pursued by the Greens-led Senate supermarket inquiry for contempt, and jail time of up to six months, after his fiery appearance last month but the inquiry has hit out at the powerful supermarket chains with recommendations to curtail their power, heighten regulatory oversight and possibly break them up.

In a lengthy 195-page report released on Tuesday, which carried 14 key recommendations aimed at lifting competition, limiting the power of Woolworths and Coles and beefing up regulation, the inquiry heavily criticised Mr Banducci for his performance, castigated Bunnings for not sending its CEO and ‘named and shamed’ multinational supermarket suppliers who declined to turn up at all.

The highly-anticipated report comes after the Albanese government earlier this year gave approval for the Greens-led inquiry to go ahead, handing Greens Senator Nick McKim a powerful pulpit as inquiry chairman to level accusations of price gouging and profiteering at Woolworths and Coles, and in one combative hearing threaten Mr Banducci with contempt charges and jail time.

The 14 key recommendations include recommending the federal government pursue a range of new rules and legislation to combat the power of the supermarket giants Woolworths and Coles, including divestiture powers, establishing a prices commission and making the food and grocery code of conduct compulsory.

Divestiture powers could allow a court to break up a large corporation, such as the biggest supermarket chains, if they were seen to be misusing their market power. The bosses of Woolworths and Coles warned in their public hearings that divestiture could cause unintended consequences such as job losses and a fall in business investment, while other witnesses before the inquiry argued in favour of these powers being introduced.

The committee also recommended that, as a matter of priority, the government establish a Commission on Prices and Competition to examine prices and price setting practices of industries across the economy, and review government and other restrictions on effective competition which are leading to high prices.

This commission would have the authority to, among other things, monitor and investigate supermarket prices and price setting practices, conduct market studies to review restrictions on competition in the supermarket sector, require supermarkets to publish historical pricing data that is transparent and accessible to both suppliers and consumers and access any data and information required to undertake its work, including supermarket pricing, mark-ups and profits data and price setting policies.

It has also called on the Competition and Consumer Act to be amended to prohibit the “charging of excess prices, otherwise known as price gouging”, merger laws to be strengthened, and the ACCC be given greater funding.

It has also recommended the current voluntary food and grocery code of conduct that covers the relationship between suppliers and Woolworths, Coles, Metcash and Aldi, be made mandatory.

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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

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Tuesday, May 07, 2024


Forbes Calls BS on the latest Climate Economics Doomsday Prediction

A new study claims that loss of productivity because of climate change could result in a 19% reduction in the world economy by 2049. Despite the number being significantly higher than previous studies, the authors claim their numbers are conservative and could be as high 29% of the global GDP. Climate activists were quick to latch onto the study, calling for more aggressive measures to prevent climate change and fund mitigation efforts.

The study, The economic commitment of climate change, was published in Nature on April 17 by researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, also known as PIK, a non-profit organization funded by the German government.



While I am not an economist, in my opinion the data seems flawed. According to a study published by NOAA in January 2024, the average temperature has risen 2° F since 1850. In that same period, the global GDP increased from $1.73 trillion to $134.08 trillion. If we accept the climate projection models used in the study, it dismisses the resiliency of human nature and our ability to overcome economic challenges.

The abstract of the study;

The economic commitment of climate change

Maximilian Kotz, Anders Levermann & Leonie Wenz

Abstract

Global projections of macroeconomic climate-change damages typically consider impacts from average annual and national temperatures over long time horizons1,2,3,4,5,6. Here we use recent empirical findings from more than 1,600 regions worldwide over the past 40 years to project sub-national damages from temperature and precipitation, including daily variability and extremes7,8. Using an empirical approach that provides a robust lower bound on the persistence of impacts on economic growth, we find that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices (relative to a baseline without climate impacts, likely range of 11–29% accounting for physical climate and empirical uncertainty). These damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to 2 °C by sixfold over this near-term time frame and thereafter diverge strongly dependent on emission choices. Committed damages arise predominantly through changes in average temperature, but accounting for further climatic components raises estimates by approximately 50% and leads to stronger regional heterogeneity. Committed losses are projected for all regions except those at very high latitudes, at which reductions in temperature variability bring benefits. The largest losses are committed at lower latitudes in regions with lower cumulative historical emissions and lower present-day income.

Spot on Jon McGowan – it’s near impossible to produce a scary projection without making some pretty questionable assumptions. From the study above;

… Following a well-developed literature2,3,19, these projections do not aim to provide a prediction of future economic growth. Instead, they are a projection of the exogenous impact of future climate conditions on the economy relative to the baselines specified by socio-economic projections, based on the plausibly causal relationships inferred by the empirical models and assuming ceteris paribus. Other exogenous factors relevant for the prediction of economic output are purposefully assumed constant. …

Holding as many variables as possible static, while changing only those variables you want to study, is a time honoured method of analysing complex systems.

But as the authors admit, their study is not realistic. My understanding of the study is they are attempting to abstract the impact say more extreme weather would have on the economy, if nobody attempted to mitigate these problems, say by building better drainage and water management systems to manage floods, and bigger reservoirs to maintain agricultural output during severe droughts.

As Forbes author Jon McGowan rightly points out, there are good reasons to doubt the real world applicability of the predictions of the study, even if we pretend their admittedly unrealistic assumptions are realistic.

Why would the next 0.5C of warming be so much worse than the previous 0.5C of warming?

There is no historical evidence which suggests the next 0.5C of warming, if it occurs, would be any worse than what we have already experienced. There is no evidence extreme weather is getting worse, despite the predictions of climate models which were used as the basis of the study quoted above.

In fact there are good reasons to believe additional warming might produce a better climate for humans.

Global warming is not evenly distributed across the world. Polar amplification is the observed strong tendency for global warming to be pushed away from the equator to where it is actually needed.

If global warming continues, by 2049 there is a very good chance there will be more viable agricultural land available for our use, not less. Canadian Geographic admitted in 2020 that global warming is opening millions of square kilometres of new agricultural land, and will continue to do so if the world continues to warm.

I’m personally pleased Jon McGowan and Forbes published this rare criticism of alarmist global warming tropes. Let’s hope more news outlets and authors find the courage in future to question the steady stream of increasingly exaggerated and implausible claims of how doomed we all are.

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Saving Climate From the Greens

“It’s like we were an idiot country,” the late Dwayne Andreas, longtime CEO of Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., once told me, referring to some systematically self-defeating policy out of Washington.

He raised a question of enduring interest. Why does government persist in demonstrably failed and foolish efforts? It took billions of dollars in subsidies from carmakers and federal taxpayers to get early adopters to buy electric vehicles, so it’s pretty clear car buyers aren’t that keen on EVs. They’ll put one in the garage if the price is right, but the right price is thousands less per vehicle than it costs to build them.

And remember why we sold ourselves this bill of goods: to reduce emissions. It was always nonsense. When Congress launched its first Obama-era climate subsidies, it funded a study by the Nobel-winning climate economist William Nordhaus, who concluded that alternative energy handouts are a “poor tool” for fighting emissions, with negligible effect even before accounting for the inevitable “international spillovers”—i.e., consumers globally using more fossil fuels because the U.S. spends insane billions to subsidize its consumers to use less.

A widely heralded paper by Princeton economists showed subsidizing green energy globally at best would have a “minuscule” effect on emissions.

Even Biden officials will say as much off the record. Yet look at the Washington Post’s recent contortions to let readers know the administration’s proclaimed U.S. “climate goals” are meaningless when the U.S. simultaneously exports large amounts of hydrocarbons and imports emissions-intensive manufactured goods. The Post could apparently publish these caveats only by attributing them to “big oil” lobbyists.

Or take the room where New York Times editors craft sentences to mislead readers. They say about Joe Biden’s EV policy: “Cars and other forms of transportation are, together, the largest single source of carbon emissions generated by the United States, pollution that is driving climate change and that helped to make 2023 the hottest year in recorded history.”

Notice how this conflates U.S. car emissions with total transportation emissions, then U.S. emissions with global emissions, to hide that the president’s policy would only reduce emissions by 0.2%, and then only if we ignore those pesky international spillovers.

Do no harm, the most cited advice of the Hippocratic Oath, is also a pungent observation on human nature. People want to be seen helping even when they aren’t. Much self-interested mischief is advanced under the guise of helping.

In search of relief, meet Chris Wright, CEO of the fracking services provider Liberty Energy, testifying Wednesday before the House Financial Services Committee.

He’s suing over an impertinent SEC rule on corporate climate disclosure, but his real goal, he tells me, is to seek progress against a “ridiculously naive” climate and energy debate, dominated by the cant phrases that prevail in the media.

“Clean energy,” as Americans increasingly understand, is a two-word phrase for the extremely dirty industrial business of delivering a consumer a car with no emissions at the tailpipe or electricity manufactured without the help of a fossil-fuel power plant.

“Energy transition” describes a nonexistent, mythic phenomenon found nowhere in the data. Wind, solar and biomass have always existed. All forms of energy consumption are going up, but oil, gas and coal still carry the load and no policy will alter this, especially as China embraces EVs to cut reliance on imported oil in favor of domestic coal.

“Decarbonization,” likewise, is a polysyllabic prettifier for sending gas-fired U.S. and German heavy industry to China to run on coal, with twice the emissions.

I’ve borrowed the term “sophisticated state failure” for the energy suicide of the West. Though not a fan, I told readers during the long election night of 2016: “Whatever you think of Donald Trump, his candidacy represents a chance to dismiss a very particular elite about whom it could be said, borrowing from Cromwell, ‘For any good you have been doing . . . in the name of God, go!’”

I was referring to the green-energy elite.

Mr. Wright’s company provides fracking to North American oil and gas producers in ways that reduce their total effect on the environment. His real passion, though, has been carbon-free nuclear ever since his undergraduate days at MIT. He endorses the estimates of the U.N. climate panel, which weighs dozens of computer models, none of which seem to get the climate exactly right. If so, the coming century will see 1 or 2 degrees Celsius more warming and 8 to 17 inches of sea-level rise.

If you believe no cost is too great to avoid this outcome, please stop exhaling. Otherwise, you’ve already accepted that some things are worse than CO2 emissions.

Welcome to humanity, points out Mr. Wright, which by its actions has shown that its adaptations won’t come at the expense of affordable energy that helps solve real problems for eight billion humans.

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Former Auto Exec Exposes ‘Colossal Mistake’ In America’s EV Push

According to Experian data, as of the third quarter of 2023, only one percent of all registered vehicles in the U.S. are electric.

Former Big Three automotive executive Bob Lutz explained why the EV push isn’t resonating with buyers or suppliers to Fox News Digital.

“The idea of EVs, gradually, adoption over time, with ever longer battery range, ever quicker recharge time, so that over the next couple of decades, EVs take a bigger and bigger slice of the pie, that’s fine. But trying to get it done overnight was a colossal mistake, and it just plain is not going to work,” Lutz said.

Keeping in mind that the EV debate has become a “politically charged” subject, Lutz argued that legitimate pros exist in terms of driving an electric car, but there seems to be more cons in today’s market.

“We’ve had 125 years to perfect the internal combustion engine, and we’ve had roughly 15 years so far on doing modern electric vehicles with modern batteries,” Lutz said. “Electric vehicles are fun, they drive well, they’re silent, they’re fast.”

EVs also have fewer moving parts, their brake systems are more durable and, overall, it’s intelligent technology, according to Lutz, but they’re expensive and unreliable when it comes to charging.

An energy report released last October by the Texas Public Policy Foundation concluded that EVs would cost tens of thousands of dollars more if not for generous taxpayer-funded incentives: the average model year 2021 EV would cost approximately $48,698 more to own over a 10-year period without the staggering $22 billion in taxpayer-funded handouts that the government provides to electric car manufacturers and owners.

Additionally, as of December, only eight EV chargers were reportedly being built with funds from President Biden’s infrastructure law that earmarked $7.5 billion for 500,000 chargers nationwide.

“Tesla and many other electric vehicles nowadays, as far as design, road behavior and so forth, there is nothing wrong with it. It’s just that the American public is stubborn, and they happen to like gasoline engines,” Lutz said. “It’s just a question of convenience and infrastructure.”

Just over one year ago, Toyota’s president and chairman was forced to resign after telling the Wall Street Journal that he questioned whether the push for the auto industry to phase out gas-powered vehicles was the right decision.

“Turns out he was right,” the former Big Three exec reacted. “So all we’re seeing is that everybody is pulling back on their EV programs. And both Jim Farley of Ford and I believe Mary Barra of General Motors have said: we have to admit, we were all consumed in this wave of EV euphoria, and we all thought it was going to happen much faster than it actually did.”

“But they’re flexible. They’re still making predominantly internal combustion engines. So, as long as production facilities are still there for internal combustion vehicles, which they manifestly are, they’ll still keep producing gasoline-powered Explorers and Equinox,” Lutz expanded, “despite the government’s best efforts to make these things go away as fast as possible, which is not going to happen.”

The former exec also made the distinction that a liberal, environmentally focused crowd is “pushing the heck out of” EVs, while conservatives typically “reject” EVs as another example of government control.

“A lot of it’s become like Second Amendment gun rights, you know, ‘Nobody is going to take my gasoline powered pickup truck away from me, and they’ll have to come and get it at the same time that they pry my shotgun out of my cold, dead hands,’” Lutz said.

“One of the reasons why EV sales are down is because center-right conservative America is beginning to see them as a political statement, that if you buy an EV, it kind of means that you’re siding with the Biden administration on their environmental and social policies,” he emphasized. “And many Americans don’t want to do that.”

Pointing to a “long-term positive trend,” the self-deemed “father” of the first extended range EV believes the solution includes segmented improvements when it comes to mileage and charging supply over the next 10 years.

He also advised current and future executives and CEOs to use their resources and look ahead three to four years to consumer demands, but admitted “nobody is very good at that.”

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What The Media Fails To Tell You About Coral Bleaching

Jennifer Marohasy

There was significant coral bleaching this last summer. It was remarkable at the Keppel Islands

But because scientists have been falsely calling it every year, this important fact is likely to be lost to our collective memory.

It is also a problem when my colleagues deny this bleaching.

If we deny when there is bleaching, and claim bleaching when there is none – it is impossible to know the cycles and their causes.

Last Sunday morning, at Secret Cove, I watched the turtle come out from under a stand of stark white coral – bleached coral – and swim towards me.

The turtle was not bothered by me and seemed oblivious to all the coral bleaching.

The creatures under-the-water last Sunday morning, they seem oblivious to the colour of the coral that was mostly stark white, some healthy chocolate brown (replete with symbiotic zooxanthellae/good microalgae), and some brown from infestations of macro algae smothering the corals.

To my eye, the fish and other creatures seemed randomly distributed, which is to say they could be found across the reef irrespective of the colour of the coral.

It was not at all how the BBC have described coral bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef – they have recently been using the terms ‘ghostly white’, ‘spooky white’, ‘like a graveyard’. These journalists are clueless (CLICK HERE).

Secret Cove a week ago was badly bleached – and it was teeming with life. But to know this, it is necessary to get under the water.

A big shout out to Jenn and the rest of the crew at Keppel Dive on Great Keppel Island (CLICK HERE). Thank you for the opportunity to dive so many coral reefs last weekend – thank you for your care and for finding the Epaulette shark at Secret Cove.

To know that many of the stark white corals are still alive it is necessary to observe them up close. For example, the brain coral (perhaps a Lobophyllia sp. or Caulastrea sp.) did look ‘ghostly white’ from a few metres away.

But up close – after I reset my camera to take a macro – you can see that the polyps are still very much intact, that the polyps have a carpet-like texture concealing separate corallites.

Secret Cove fringes Great Keppel Island, reportedly with some of the worst of the coral bleaching, considering the entire Great Barrier Reef this last summer.

The BBC also mentioned ocean acidification and high temperatures – unprecedented they claim. Again, they are just making stuff up.

I’ve noticed that the journalists and the scientists, from all sides of the political divides, increasingly just add to the established narratives rather than checking the data, or even visiting a coral reef.

This makes me an outlier – relevant only because you are reading me. (For sure the institutions and sometimes even my colleagues and even social media want me cancelled so be sure to subscribe at my website for weekly e-news: CLICK HERE)

It is the case that our oceans are not acidic, not at all. I wrote about this in a chapter for ‘Climate Change, The Facts’ back in 2017

As for the water temperatures, this last summer was hot, but not exceptionally so.

I write this, not with reference to the wholly contrived coloured maps they show you on the nightly news often for the whole Earth and always showing continuous increase (as though there is never winter), but rather with reference to more reliable location specific temperature data for the Keppel Islands.

For example, considering Australian Institute of Marine Science data for Square Rocks, and Bureau of Meteorology data for Rosslyn Bay, we can see that there is still a strong seasonal component to the temperature data and that this last summer temperatures were well within the expected seasonal cycle.

So, what caused the coral bleaching this last summer that has been so severe, particularly at the southern Great Barrier Reef, and particularly at the Keppel Islands?

The Moon has a particular influence on sea levels.

We see this not just in the daily and monthly cycles, but the Moon also causes the less well understood 18.6-year declination cycle.

The Moon takes a month to complete a revolution around the Earth. But it doesn’t follow the same path, moving above the Earth’s equator for two weeks and below the equator for two weeks of each month.

The distance above and below the equator changes with this 18.6 year cycle.

This is because as the Earth is tilted at 23.5 degrees relative to the Sun causing the seasons, the Moon is tilted at 5 degrees relative to the Earth, and every 18.6 years, the angle between the Moon’s orbit and Earth’s equator reaches a maximum that is the sum of Earth’s equatorial tilt (23°27′) and the Moon’s orbital inclination (5°09′) to the ecliptic.

This is called major lunar standstill, and I define it as occurring when the distance that the Moon travels south is more than 28 degrees south each month.

While we may intuitively expect larger sea tides as the Moon approaches its maximum declination considering this 18.6-year cycle, because the gravitational forcing of the Moon is less well aligned with the gravitational forcing of the Sun on the Earth at this time, we see on average lower sea tides at least in the data for the nearby Rosslyn Bay gauge for the last few months.

I suspect that the bleaching at the Keppel Islands this last summer can be blamed on the Moon; specifically that the lower tides caused by Maximum Lunar Declination combined with a short period of clear skies and no winds caused the water to stay continuously warm for a longer period than usual, in a way that was catastrophic.

That is my hypothesis.

The popular claim, the consensus claim consistent with anthropogenic global warming theory that the atmosphere replete with ‘greenhouse gases’ has been warming the ocean is not credible, at least not considering the location specific data for Square Rocks between North Keppel Island and Great Keppel Island.

The available Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) data shows that the water is consistently warmer than the air above it. As the water is consistently warmer than the air, it is not logical to suggest that the air is warming the water.

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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)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Monday, May 06, 2024


Offshore Wind Is Gearing up to Bulldoze the Ocean

The Biden Administration has recently produced a wave of plans and regulatory actions aimed at building a monstrous amount of destructive offshore wind. No environmental impact assessment is included.

Time scales range from tomorrow to 2050. Here is a quick look at some of it, starting with the Grand Plan.

“Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Offshore Wind” is the grandiose title of the Energy Department’s version of Biden’s vision. Their basic idea is that having successfully traversed the unexpected cost crisis, offshore wind is ready to take off.

They point out that even though costs quickly jumped an average of 65%, the boom market is unchanged. The coastal States are raring to go with huge offshore wind targets and laws. In short, it is a seller’s market. Cost is no object.

They note that State mandates and targets already exceed the Biden goal of 100,000 MW by 2050. But why stop there? They say that Net Zero requires an incredible 250,000 MW of offshore wind. At 15 MW a turbine, this is just under 17,000 monster towers.

The word “environmental” occurs frequently in this 62-page grand vision but it is always about environmental justice. The cumulatively destructive environmental impacts of lining our coast with towers and cables are ignored apparently not worth mentioning. Neither is cost.

Next comes transmission, where we have “AN ACTION PLAN FOR OFFSHORE WIND TRANSMISSION DEVELOPMENT IN THE U.S. ATLANTIC REGION“. While the Pathways plan covers the US, this one is just about the Atlantic because that is where the big action is now.

This 110-pager is from the Energy Department and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which is actually building the offshore wind monster.

The basic idea is simple. Instead of bringing the juice ashore individually from each giant wind facility, we will build a massive high-voltage grid in the ocean. This way, we can move the energy up and down the coast from wherever it is generated to where it is needed.

In the Plan, there are actually three backbone grids: northern, central, and southern, but this detail need not concern us. There is, of course, a huge network of feeder lines connecting the backbones to the legion of individual giant generation facilities.

Given the incredibly huge generation numbers in the Liftoff Plan, this is a very big grid indeed. It is a DC grid, so I guess the juice gets turned into AC onshore, where it then ties to the suitably beefed-up land grid. Beefing that up is another huge unknown cost.

There are many issues with this grand design, including legal and policy ones, and many of these are mentioned. How this ocean-going grid ties into State utility law is an interesting example.

Environmental impacts are only addressed as a research topic, not as a potential problem, except for floating wind, where some big problems are mentioned in passing. The feel-good idea of minimizing impact occurs frequently, but what those impacts might be is not said.

As is typical for BOEM, they talk about monitoring a good bit. Their approach to environmental impact is let’s build it and see what happens as though extinction of the North Atlantic Right Whale was reversible. The concept of cumulative impacts is not addressed.

Cost allocation is a major economic topic, but there is nothing whatever on what this underwater monstrosity might cost.

Returning to today, several things have happened. First, BOEM has announced a lot of new lease sales over the next five years (the Biden II years?). These run from Maine to Oregon, fixed and floating, with five scheduled for this year alone.

Some are in new places, while others are in already crowded areas like the New York Bight. As always, there is no cumulative environmental impact analysis. It’s like BOEM never heard of that, even though the law clearly calls for it when piling on the projects.

More ominously, there are new regulations governing the permitting of offshore wind projects. The developers love these new rules, which tells us they are not designed for environmental protection. This is from the BOEM press release:

“”The final modernization rule will streamline the permitting process and reduce regulatory barriers for developers. It will also lead to greater collaboration between federal, state, and local stakeholders, ensuring that offshore wind projects are developed in a sustainable and responsible manner,” said Anne Reynolds, the American Clean Power Association Vice President for Offshore Wind.”

The primary “regulatory barrier” is environmental impact analysis. The new rules require agencies to rush these, which means glossing over them with no time for serious analysis.

Today’s actions may seem small, but given the long-term Plans, they are anything but. It is all part of a huge rush to do something enormously expensive and environmentally destructive for which there is no need whatsoever.

This offshore bulldozer must be stopped before it is too late.

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The High Price of Climate Alarm

It is with no small amount of pleasure that I found a media outlet acknowledging President Joe Biden’s energy and climate policies have increased American’s energy costs. The Dallas Express, a local online alternative news outlet, published a story titled “Energy Prices 30% Higher Under Biden Admin.” Unlike so much of the mainstream media, The Dallas Express didn’t expend ink trying to explain how consumers really don’t realize that the economy and their lives are better despite the higher prices, or that the costs Biden and company have added to peoples’ power bills are justified as a means of fighting climate change. Rather, the Express took a Joe Friday, “just the facts” approach, explaining:

Energy prices in the United States are wreaking havoc on budget-sensitive households, making it harder for families to save money or get ahead financially.

Since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, Americans’ electricity bills have skyrocketed nearly 30%, or 13 times faster than in the previous seven years, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of the latest consumer price index data.

Despite the Federal Reserve holding interest rates steady since July 2023, inflation continues to pose a problem for policymakers and households.

“There is no improvement here, we’re moving in the wrong direction,” said Bankrate chief financial analyst Greg McBride in an interview with Fox Business. “The usual trouble spots persist—shelter, motor vehicle insurance, maintenance, repairs, and service costs. Add electricity to that list, up 0.9% in March and 5% over the past year.”

Part of the reason for the surge in energy prices is due to the push to replace fossil fuels and nuclear power plants with renewable subsidies and green-energy mandates.

Of course, The Heartland Institute has been on top of this story since Biden took office. We produced Energy at a Glance Documents in 2021 and 2022 detailing the Biden policies that have resulted in higher electricity, heating, and transportation fuel prices, and how much they went up. By our calculation, after less than 2 full years in office, Biden’s climate and energy policies hare increased average household energy costs by more than $2,300.

Interviewed for an Environment & Climate News story covering the lingering high prices energy prices in 2023, Gary Stone, executive vice president of engineering at Five States Energy, said:

The Biden administration has been a continually growing disaster for the domestic oil and gas industry. Using the ‘New Green Deal’ as a basis, they have halted or delayed drilling on federal lands, attempted to restrict drilling because of allegedly endangered species, cancelled pipelines, and restricted exports of crude and processed gas liquids.

While international oil politics, production, and pricing still control a significant portion of the market, there is no doubt the policies of the Biden regime have had a huge impact on prices.” Gas prices, for instance, were far lower under the Trump administration, crude oil prices were about $30 (per barrel) lower, and gasoline was around $2 per gallon less than now, all of which immediately rose under Biden.

Instead of encouraging domestic production as Trump did, the current regime is now implementing onerous methane-emission regulations and taxes that some sources estimate will result in the abandonment of as much as 30 percent of domestic wells and greatly increase the operating costs, and reduce the life, of the remaining producers. The Biden administration will serve the ‘green gods’ even if it bankrupts much of a major industry and greatly reduces the energy available to the country.

Of course those are just the direct energy costs to drivers, businesses, renters, and homeowners, not accounting for the ripple effect higher energy prices have on energy-intensive goods like food production and delivery, chemical production, and manufacturing.

Other rarely accounted for costs of Biden’s climate obsession—one not shared by the American public, according to recent polls—stem from government spending on Biden’s climate and energy policies. The costs of these programs are borne by taxpayers and future generations who will inherit the costs Biden’s energy policies are adding to the nation’s annual deficits and long-term debt.

How much are we talking about? Well, in early April 2024, the Biden administration granted outright more than $20 billion to unaccountable climate, finance, and community activist NGOs to promote green energy adoption across the country.

Author and energy analyst Robert Bryce has calculated that the subsidies and tax credits for wind and solar power alone have ballooned from an estimated $19.9 billion in 2015 to commitments of more than $425 billion by 2033, based on newly installed, approved, and anticipated wind and solar construction.

And, in December 2023, at a conference in Dubai, Vice President Kamala Harris bragged about the administration’s commitment to spend more than $1 trillion fighting climate change—less than the country spent on Social Security in 2023, but more than we spent on defense. This is likely an underestimate as past estimates of spending on these programs have repeatedly proven to be.

Government spending and regulations are a drag on the economy, basically a hidden tax, spending money on goods and services that consumers likely wouldn’t have freely chosen to spend their own money, or companies invested in, or banks financed, in a marketplace not directed by federal mandates or influenced by federal incentives: replacing market assessments of how to balance the concerns of climate change, energy security, and economic progress with spending decisions dictated by political overlords, their crony-capitalist allies, and climate scolds.

Any way you measure it, the price tag on Biden’s climate program on the American economy and its people is quite high and growing.

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BBC Uses Bad Science To Promote ‘Climate-Induced’ Extreme Weather

A recent BBC article, titled “How climate change worsens heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, and floods,” claims that climate change is linked to four types of extreme weather, specifically that it causes extreme rainfall, worse heatwaves, longer droughts, and more wildfires. [emphasis, links added]

Widely available data proves these claims are false.

The “evidence” given by the BBC is not evidence at all, as it eschews real-world measurements, [preferring] model outputs and predictions from a single climate activist organization.

The first section of the BBC’s report is dedicated to the idea that climate change causes more extreme rainfall.

The BBC presents a very simplistic vision of how the precipitation is related to average temperature, claiming that warmer air can hold more moisture, and therefore heavier rainfall. While the basic physics here is accurate, the atmosphere is more complex than that in reality.

For this section, they [didn’t rely on] available data, even from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shows no evidence of the increasing intensity of rainfall, but rather the BBC solely referenced counterfactual modeling produced by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group.

Climate Realism very recently explained why, contrary to the BBC’s insistence, attribution modeling is not evidence for climate change’s impact on flooding like that which was recently seen in Dubai.

In that same post, I pointed out that the IPCC does not admit to finding any evidence of climate change’s impact on heavy precipitation. (See figure below)

The next section in BBC’s report is no better. This time, the BBC writes “the distribution of daily temperatures shifts to warmer levels, making hotter days more likely and more intense.”

As evidence, they point to a recent heatwave in Mali and the Sahel region of Africa… and WWA’s analysis that concluded it could not have happened without “human-caused climate change.”

Again, WWA’s claims aren’t evidence. Many parts of the Sahel region frequently meet temperature maximums on average above 40°C – usually in April – which is what the recent heatwave brought.

There is no way to claim that such heat never happened before industrialization. This is pure speculation on the part of WWA and the BBC, lacking any facts or peer-reviewed research to back up their claim.

Once again, this exact claim was refuted in an earlier Climate Realism post, “Wrong, BBC and Reuters, No Evidence Proves West African Heatwave Is Unprecedented.”

Longer droughts, the BBC admits, are harder to link to climate change, but they attempt to do it anyway, asserting that recent short-term droughts in East Africa and the Amazon rainforests were caused by human-induced climate change.

The BBC once again relies only on the WWA’s say-so to support its claims, which, once again, are false.

Focusing on the Amazon rainforest, real-world data do not show that the Amazon is becoming more prone to drought because of climate change.

Myriad factors contribute to recent droughts, such as human causes like deforestation and increased agriculture putting strain on water supplies.

No research or data ties climate change to Amazonian droughts.

Meteorologist Anthony Watts points out that recent studies, including a paper from 2023, show that even worse droughts occurred in 1865 when the planet was cooler, and “several other years in the historical record were as bad or worse than the drought being experienced today.” (See figure below)

The final section again relies on WWA studies, this time promoting the idea that climate change is making the weather conditions needed for wildfires more likely, and claims that extreme wildfires are projected to become worse and more frequent in the future.

This is easy to refute, as data show that wildfire damage is becoming far less expansive.

NASA tracks the total acreage burned by wildfires since 2003. Their data show a steep downward trend in acreage burned—so, a decline in wildfires, not an increase. (See figure below)

Data from the European Space Agency display the same downward wildfire trend.

This is despite an increase in industry, deforestation, warming, and human encroachment on fire-prone areas, around the globe.

The BBC’s confidence in their assertions is utterly unfounded, and it is telling that they refuse to cite any historical data, instead relying exclusively on projections from WWA’s attribution models, which Climate Realism has refuted using historical data and present trends repeatedly here and here, for example, in addition to the articles cited above.

Reality paints a far friendlier picture of the climate and recent climate trends than does the BBC. Instead of attempting to frighten readers, the BBC ought to consider telling the truth.

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Wrong, Mainstream Media, Climate Change Isn’t Spreading Malaria to New Places

Editor’s Note: The media seems to have gotten their marching orders. Multiple news outlets, including The Guardian, The Daily Express, and Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, among others, published stories on the same day saying malaria and other mosquito borne diseases are on the rise in unusual locations due to climate change. We at Climate Realism have refuted similar claims multiple times in the past, here, here, and here, for instance. As detailed in Chapter Four of Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, the vast body of scientific literature refutes the recent mainstream media claims that climate change is likely to exacerbate the spread of mosquito borne diseases. Studies from Africa, to England and Wales, to North and South America, to Thailand and beyond refute any link between climate change and the spread of malaria, Dengue fever, West Nile virus, and other vector-borne diseases.

In this post guest analyst, Eric Worrall, uses classic literature, historical accounts, and scientific studies to show that malaria has historically been common in non-tropical areas, like Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States, until modern societies learned to suppress them with medical and pesticide interventions. If such diseases become make a comeback in the future, it will not be because the climate has changed, making it new areas suddenly more conducive to malaria bearing mosquitos, but rather because we are no longer using the interventions which defeated such diseases in these regions and countries in the recent past.

Guest Essay by Eric Worrall

Famous British playwright William Shakespeare wrote about endemic Malaria in Britain in the 1500s. Malaria was the scourge of Scandinavia and Russia right up until the 20th century. But this has not stopped greens falsely claiming Malaria is a disease of warm climates.

Mosquito-borne diseases spreading in Europe due to climate crisis, says expert

Illnesses such as dengue and malaria to reach unaffected parts of northern Europe, America, Asia and Australia, conference to hear

Helena Horton Environment reporter Thu 25 Apr 2024 14.00 AEST

Mosquito-borne diseases are spreading across the globe, and particularly in Europe, due to climate breakdown, an expert has said.

The insects spread illnesses such as malaria and dengue fever, the prevalences of which have hugely increased over the past 80 years as global heating has given them the warmer, more humid conditions they thrive in.

Prof Rachel Lowe who leads the global health resilience group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain, has warned that mosquito-borne disease outbreaks are set to spread across currently unaffected parts of northern Europe, Asia, North America and Australia over the next few decades.



“Global warming due to climate change means that the disease vectors that carry and spread malaria and dengue [fever] can find a home in more regions, with outbreaks occurring in areas where people are likely to be immunologically naive and public health systems unprepared,” Lowe said.

“The stark reality is that longer hot seasons will enlarge the seasonal window for the spread of mosquito-borne diseases and favour increasingly frequent outbreaks that are increasingly complex to deal with.”

Studying Shakespeare is, or was until recently, a staple of British education. So why do people swallow the mistruth that Malaria is a tropical disease? Why doesn’t everyone know about Shakespeare’s references to Malaria?

The reason is back in Shakespeare’s day, they called Malaria something else. Shakespeare’s 16th century word for fevers like Malaria and Dengue was “Ague“

Sixteen references in Shakespeare’s plays – Ague was an important factor in people’s lives in Britain in the 1500s.

Ague was a changer of battles, a metaphor for fear or a sign of divine punishment, a disease which caused a burning fever with shaking, pale skin (anaemia) and weight loss, a disease whose worst phases left people bedridden, a disease which was stronger during Spring, when mosquitoes become active: “the sun in March, This praise doth nourish agues“.

Ague was Malaria.

The point is Malaria infection was prevalent enough to be referenced sixteen times by Shakespeare, during the Little Ice Age, during the period frost fairs were held on the River Thames, which froze solid enough in winter for people to walk around on the ice. Malaria is not a tropical disease.

The American CDC also provides evidence that tropical weather is not the main driver of Malaria;

From Shakespeare to Defoe: Malaria in England in the Little Ice Age

Paul Reiter

Author affiliation: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, San Juan, Puerto Rico

Abstract

Present global temperatures are in a warming phase that began 200 to 300 years ago. Some climate models suggest that human activities may have exacerbated this phase by raising the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Discussions of the potential effects of the weather include predictions that malaria will emerge from the tropics and become established in Europe and North America. The complex ecology and transmission dynamics of the disease, as well as accounts of its early history, refute such predictions. Until the second half of the 20th century, malaria was endemic and widespread in many temperate regions, with major epidemics as far north as the Arctic Circle. From 1564 to the 1730s—the coldest period of the Little Ice Age—malaria was an important cause of illness and death in several parts of England. Transmission began to decline only in the 19th century, when the present warming trend was well under way. The history of the disease in England underscores the role of factors other than temperature in malaria transmission.

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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)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Sunday, May 05, 2024



Can we really avoid “forever chemicals”?

The prologed agonizing over PFAS chemicals is based on the claim that they are harmful to your health but the link that they give in "Salon" below in support of that claim says only that they "MAY BE" harmful to your health.
And the reason for that caution is that many studies have shown that PFAS are NOT harmful to humans in the concentrations likely to be encountered. The evils of PFAS have become as much of a religion as the evils of climate change. Proof not needed. Not even probability is needed



It’s no secret that many of our favorite foods contain an array of chemicals that can lead to serious health risks.

This month, Consumer Reports — the watchdog group that’s currently urging the Department of Agriculture to remove Lunchables from the National School Lunch Program — found that pesticide contamination was rampant in several produce items, both conventional and organic. Pesticides, the group said, “posed significant risks” in 20% of the foods they examined, including bell peppers, blueberries, green beans, potatoes, and strawberries. Green beans, in particular, contained residues of a pesticide that is prohibited from being used on the vegetable for over a decade. And imported produce, namely some from Mexico, was likely to carry especially high levels of pesticide residues.

In addition to pesticides, there’s been growing concerns about PFAS, short for per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances. Dubbed “forever chemicals,” PFAS are a group of synthetic chemical compounds that have been used in industry and consumer products since the 1940s because of their ability to resist grease, oil, water, and heat. Although the chemicals are useful in food packaging and cookware, they are harmful to human health and our environment. PFAS take at least a century to break down in the human body, and even longer in the environment. Prolonged exposure and consumption of PFAS also contributes to a higher risk of cancer, autoimmune disease, thyroid problems and other health issues.

Unfortunately, PFAS are widespread in our foods — specifically some produce items, packaged foods and seafood — and even our drinking water. Today, more than 97% of the national population has PFAS in their bodies, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). To make matters worse, human exposure to PFAS has become increasingly difficult to assess with the creation of new substances in recent years. PFAS are almost impossible to avoid, many experts have said. Further research into the chemicals — both new and existing — is also ongoing.

In 2020, CR tested 47 bottled waters, including 35 noncarbonated and 12 carbonated ones, for four heavy metals (arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury) along with 30 PFAS chemicals. Most of the noncarbonated beverages had detectable levels of PFAS, but only two brands — Tourmaline Spring and Deer Park — exceeded the 1 part per trillion health guideline set by the Environmental Working Group (EWG). Both brands later refuted the findings: Tourmaline Spring said PFAS levels in its bottle water are below the levels set by the International Bottled Water Association, while NestlĂ©, which owns Deer Park, claimed a recent test on its brand of water revealed “undetectable levels” of PFAS.

Many of the carbonated beverages CR tested contained measurable amounts of PFAS. Perrier Natural Sparkling Mineral Water, La Croix Natural Sparkling Water, Canada Dry Lemon Lime Sparkling Seltzer Water, Poland Spring Zesty Lime Sparkling Water, Bubly Blackberry Sparkling Water, Polar Natural Seltzer Water, and Topo Chico Natural Mineral Water all had PFAS levels higher than 1 part per trillion.

Outside of bottled waters, PFAS have also plagued sports drinks. Prime Hydration, the contentious energy drink brand founded by internet personalities Logan Paul and KSI, was named in a 2023 class action lawsuit claiming the brand’s drinks contain PFAS. The suit, filed in the Northern District of California, alleged that the amount of PFAS found within Prime Hydration during independent testing was “three times the (EPA's) recommended lifetime health advisory for drinking water.” It also accused the brand of fraudulently marketing its drinks as healthy.

A motion to dismiss hearing was heard on April 18. In it, Prime Hydration argued that the plaintiff failed to allege “cognizable injury” along with “facts showing a concrete (and) imminent threat of future harm.”

Paul responded to the lawsuit in a three-minute-long TikTok video posted Wednesday.

“First off, anyone can sue anyone at any time that does not make the lawsuit true,” he said. “And in this case, it is not... one person conducted a random study and has provided zero evidence to substantiate any of their claims.”

"This ain't a rinky-dink operation. We use the top bottle manufacturers in the United States. All your favorite beverage brands... use these companies. If the product is served in plastic, they make a bottle for them.”

Paul claimed that Prime “follows Title 21 for the code of regulations for (polyethylene terephthalate) and all other types of bottles.” According to the U.S. Code, Title 21 “made it unlawful to manufacture adulterated or misbranded foods or drugs in Territories or District of Columbia and provided [a] penalty for violations.” Many national beverage companies use polyethylene terephthalate (PET) because it is a recyclable, “clear, durable and versatile” plastic, according to the American Beverage Association.

Measures to limit PFAS pollution are slowly being issued as of recently. On April 10, the Biden-Harris Administration announced the first-ever national, legally enforceable drinking water standard that would protect communities from exposure to PFAS. That being said, the new regulations don’t apply to all public drinking water systems in the US and will take several years to go into full effect.

In the meantime, consumers can limit their intake of PFAS by testing their tap water with a home test kit obtained from a certified lab or through a local environmental agency, like EWG’s tap water database. It’s important to note that boiling or sanitizing water won’t rid it of “forever chemicals.” But using certain faucet filters and even a countertop filter and water pitcher filter certainly will.

As for how to reduce exposure of PFAS in food and home products, the PFAS-REACH (Research, Education, and Action for Community Health) project, funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, offered guidance on their official website. A few notable tips include looking for the ingredient polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) or other “fluoro” ingredients on product labels, avoiding nonstick cookware and boycotting takeout containers.

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Britain’s climate action plan unlawful, high court rules

The UK government’s climate action plan is unlawful, the high court has ruled, as there is not enough evidence that there are sufficient policies in place to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The energy secretary, Claire Coutinho, will now be expected to draw up a revised plan within 12 months. This must ensure that the UK achieves its legally binding carbon budgets and its pledge to cut emissions by more than two-thirds by 2030, both of which the government is off track to meet.

The environmental charities Friends of the Earth and ClientEarth took joint legal action with the Good Law Project against the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) over its decision to approve the carbon budget delivery plan (CBDP) in March 2023.

In a ruling on Friday, Mr Justice Sheldon upheld four of the five grounds of the groups’ legal challenge, stating that the decision by the former energy security and net zero secretary Grant Shapps was “simply not justified by the evidence”.

He said: “If, as I have found, the secretary of state did make his decision on the assumption that each of the proposals and policies would be delivered in full, then the secretary of state’s decision was taken on the basis of a mistaken understanding of the true factual position.”

The judge agreed with ClientEarth and Friends of the Earth that the secretary of state was given “incomplete” information about the likelihood that proposed policies would achieve their intended emissions cuts. This breached section 13 of the Climate Change Act, which requires the secretary of state to adopt plans and proposals that they consider will enable upcoming carbon budgets to be delivered.

Sheldon also agreed with the environment groups that the central assumption that all the department’s policies would achieve 100% of their intended emissions cuts was wrong. The judge said the secretary of state had acted irrationally, and on the basis of an incorrect understanding of the facts.

This comes after the Guardian revealed the government would be allowing oil and gas drilling under offshore wind turbines, a decision criticised by climate experts as “deeply irresponsible”.

The CBDP outlines how the UK will achieve targets set out in the sixth carbon budget, which runs until 2037, as part of wider efforts to reach net zero by 2050. Those emissions targets were set after a 2022 ruling that Britain had breached legislation designed to help reach the 2015 Paris agreement goal of containing temperatures within 1.5C (2.7F) of pre-industrial levels.

The Climate Change Committee’s assessment last year was that the government only had credible policies in place for less than 20% of the emissions cuts needed to meet the sixth carbon budget.

The lawyer for Friends of the Earth, Katie de Kauwe, said: “This is another embarrassing defeat for the government and its reckless and inadequate climate plans. We’ve all been badly let down by a government that’s failed, not once but twice, to deliver a climate plan that ensures both our legally binding national targets and our international commitment to cut emissions by more than two-thirds by 2030 are met.

“We urgently need a credible and lawful new action plan that puts our climate goals back on track and ensures we all benefit from a fair transition to a sustainable future. Meeting our domestic and international carbon reduction targets must be a top priority for whichever party wins the next general election.”

Ed Miliband, the shadow energy secretary, said: “This is a new low even for this clown show of a government that has totally failed on energy and climate for 14 years. Their plan has now been found unlawful twice – once might have been dismissed as carelessness, twice shows they are incapable of delivering for this country.

“The British people are paying the price for their failure in higher bills, exposed to the dictators like [Vladimir] Putin who control fossil fuel markets. Only Labour can tackle the climate crisis in a way that cuts bills for families, makes Britain energy independent, and tackles the climate crisis.”

Caroline Lucas, the Green party MP, said: “Once again the government’s climate plan has been ruled unlawful. When dealing with the climate emergency, simply ‘hoping for the best’ and putting your faith in unproven technologies and vague policies is not good enough – we need concrete plans and investments and there is no time to lose. The government must now go back to the drawing board and urgently pull together a credible plan to put the UK back on track to delivering our climate commitments.”

John Barrett, professor in energy and climate policy at the University of Leeds, said: “The UK government has failed to describe a credible pathway for the UK to achieve its legally binding climate commitments. This is despite overwhelming evidence from the Climate Change Committee and university researchers on the various options available to the government. Many of these options also deliver numerous co-benefits such as warmer homes, cheaper bills, more energy security, better air quality, more jobs and a healthier society. It is time for the UK government to take climate change seriously and tell us how they are going to achieve their own targets.”

A DESNZ spokesperson said: “The UK can be hugely proud of its record on climate change. Not only are we the first major economy to reach halfway to net zero, we have also set out more detail than any other G20 country on how we will reach our ambitious carbon budgets. The claims in this case were largely about process and the judgment contains no criticism of the detailed plans we have in place. We do not believe a court case about process represents the best way of driving progress towards our shared goal of reaching net zero.”

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Replacing coal with wind and solar requires massive storage

In a summary of a recent peer-reviewed paper, the principal author stated that an electric grid predominantly powered by intermittent renewables such as wind and solar would require storage approximately equal to 25% of annual generation to be reliable. Other studies have reported similar results.

US coal powerplants produced approximately 700,000 GWH of electricity in 2023. The Administration has announced a goal of eliminating coal generation by 2030. Achieving this goal would require installation of approximately 270 GW of wind and solar rating plate capacity generation, depending on the percentages of wind and solar generation.

Based on the Fekete paper, the US would also require a total of approximately 175,000 GWH of additional electricity storage as the result of the elimination of coal power plants. The primary battery storage system currently being installed for grid level storage is the Tesla Megapack, which stores 19.3 MWH deliverable at a rate of 4.9 MW over a 4-hour period. Utilizing Tesla Megapacks to support the intermittent wind and solar generation installed to replace US coal powerplants would require 9,067.357 units at a current installed cost of $8,128,870 per unit, for a total installed cost of $74 trillion.

Research suggests that battery life can be extended by operating the batteries between 20% and 80% of full charge. Grid scale batteries would be expected to operate below 20% of full charge very rarely, so the lower limit can essentially be ignored. However, limiting the batteries to a maximum charge of 80%, while maintaining necessary electricity storage would require increasing the installed battery capacity by 25%, at an installed cost of approximately $18 trillion, increasing the total battery system installed cost to approximately $92 trillion. (Note: These costs do not include the land required for installation or the cost of grid connection.)

The US currently has an electricity storage deficit of approximately 140,000 GWH. Fossil fueled generation currently provides support for the existing wind and solar generation in the absence of this storage and there is growing concern regarding grid capacity margins during peak demand periods. Therefore, as coal powerplants are decommissioned, it would be essential that the current storage deficit be eliminated as well as installing the additional storage required to support the intermittent generating capacity which would provide the generation previously provided by the coal powerplants. This would require the installation of approximately 18 million Tesla Megapacks (or equivalent). Currently, production capacity does not exist to meet this demand over the next 6 years.

Also, as coal power plants are decommissioned, there will be a growing need for long-duration storage to support the grid through seasonal variation in both wind and solar generation. The only current long-duration systems are pumped hydro facilities. However, it is unlikely that significant additional pumped hydro capacity will be installed in the US because of geographic limitations and public resistance.

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Game meat company to begin hunting deer in South Australian forests amid criticism of aerial culling

Sounds overdue to me

A game meat company will begin hunting deer in South Australian forests this month, which the owner says is more environmentally friendly and less cruel than the state government's preferred culling method.

Macro Meats Australia's contract with forestry companies to work towards eradicating deer in their plantations is also a rebuke to recreational hunters, who would prefer for some deer to remain so they can continue their enjoying sport.

The company is based in Adelaide and mostly focuses on exporting kangaroo meat.

Managing director Ray Borda has been critical of the state government's aerial deer culling program, which involves the use of shotguns to kill deer from helicopters and leaves the carcasses to rot on the ground.

Forestry companies want the deer eradicated because of the damage they to do trees.

Mr Borda said professionals shooting deer for meat was the best solution, because the meat could be sold for a profit rather than attracting scavengers or emitting methane when it rotted.

"Environmentally, and even animal welfare-wise, the professional industry is always looked upon as the best and cheapest way to handle these overabundant animals," Mr Borda said.

The hunters employed by Macro Meats will be in the South East next week to plan for the cull.

Professional deer hunters aim to shoot deer in the head to prevent damaging the meat in the animal's body.

Mr Borda, who is also the chair of the Australia Wild Game Industry Council, says this is better than aerial culling, when most deer die after being shot in the heart or lungs.

"The poor old deer — it's not their fault that there's too many of them," he said.

"So what we try to do is, we try to do it humanely, and then we're creating jobs."

Limestone Coast Landscape Board general manager Steve Bourne said aerial culling was an "effective and efficient means of removing large numbers of feral deer from the landscape in a humane way".

"Meat harvesting is a tool we have used — 2,100 feral deer have been processed for human consumption in the last three years," he said.

"In closed canopy pine forests, ground shooting can be a more effective means of removing feral deer."

The RSPCA has raised concerns that shooters targeting feral deer from helicopters using shotguns may not be able to tell whether the animals they shoot are dead or not.

But a Flinders University study found all the deer that researchers cut open after an aerial cull had been fatally shot in the lungs or heart.

A CSIRO study found aerial culling was extremely effective at controlling deer populations compared with ground shooting, with up to 94 animals killed per hour during aerial culling.

The SA government plans to eradicate all feral deer in the state by 2032, mostly through aerial culling, but also shooting on the ground.

It estimates there are about 40,000 feral deer in South Australia, mostly in the state's south-east, but also on the Fleurieu Peninsula and in the Adelaide Hills.

Deer compete with native wildlife and livestock for grass.

They damage trees and contribute to erosion and road crashes.

The government estimated farm productivity losses of $36 million last year, which would rise to $242m by 2031 if the deer population was not controlled.

Amateur hunters, many of whom travel to SA from Victoria, say they contribute to SA's economy.

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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)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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