Another brain-dead food shortage scare

Greenies have been making false prophecies of food shortages for years now.  Even Hitler did it. And I have often rebutted them. In brief: The world's internationally-traded food problem has for a long time been glut;  Warming would open up new agricultural land in Canada and Russia; Warming should cause more evaporation from the oceans, thus giving MORE rainfall, not less.  A prediction of flood might make some sense but a prediction of water shortage makes no sense at all

Widespread water shortages caused by rising global temperatures could lead to food shortages and mass migration, an expert has warned.

The head of the World Meteorological Society, Michel Jarraud has warned that of all the threats posed by a warming climate, shrinking water supplies are the most serious.

It is predicted that by 2025, some 2.8 billion people will live in 'water scarce' areas - a huge rise from the 1.6 billion who do now.

Parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia will be worst affected, with pockets of Australia, the US and southern Europe also predicted to suffer.

Mr Jarraud told Carbon Brief that although it has been a few years since a spate of major food crises, 'all the ingredients are there for a food crisis to come back on a very large scale.'

More HERE





Three Global Warming Stories The Media Don't Want You To See

 Want to know the latest global warming news? Don't bother looking in U.S. media. They can't be bothered with stories that contradict the man-made climate change narrative. But the truth is out there.

Let's start with a new paper from NASA — a distinctly American organization — that was covered by the British Express.

The newspaper tells us that our space program has "found the Earth has cooled in areas of heavy industrialization where more trees have been lost and more fossil fuel burning takes place."

This is, of course, the opposite of what we've been told for decades.

The Express reports that the findings confirm that the aerosols from fossil-fuel combustion "actually cool the local environment, at least temporarily," as they reflect "solar radiation away from the planet."

A NASA official said solar radiation is similarly bounced away from Earth when "deforestation in northern latitudes" results in bare land that "increases reflected sunlight."

The Express further reports that the NASA paper's lead author said the findings show the "complexity" involved in estimating future global temperatures.

This is something we've been saying for years. While the mainstream American press can't get off its carbon-dioxide fixation, we've noted that far too many variables affect global climate to focus on a single influence.

The British Daily Mail also wrote about this NASA paper, which clearly has high news value.

But the U.S. press couldn't get out of bed to cover the story. As far as we can tell, the legacy media in this country ignored it entirely.

The same can be said about a study conducted by the Norwegian Polar Institute, which found "that there are probably more polar bears than the last time the bears were counted in this area in 2004, in spite of the fact that there have been many years with poor ice cover during this period." The American press doesn't want the public to know this because it throws into doubt the story it's been feeding us since the 1980s.

Remember, we have been told over and again that man-made global warming was a grave threat to polar bears, which are an endangered species.

Yet here's this study telling us that "scientists now estimate that there are around 975 polar bears in the Norwegian region, whereas they estimated a number of 685 in 2004," while another has found them to be in "excellent" condition, with some being "as fat as pigs."

Indeed, polar bears are making "a surprise comeback."

Finally, in an effort to deliver a public service that the mainstream media refuse to provide, we point out that the temperature data that supposedly show warming have been corrupted by poor positioning.

"The majority of weather stations used by (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) to detect climate change temperature signal have been compromised by encroachment of artificial surfaces like concrete, asphalt and heat sources like air conditioner exhausts," says Anthony Watts, a former meteorologist who is the lead author of a study of temperature station locations.

Watts believes his work "demonstrates conclusively that this issue affects temperature trends and that NOAA's methods are not correcting for this problem, resulting in an inflated temperature trend."

As a result of this systematic error, Watt believes the U.S. temperature record needs to be revised.

Nor is this problem limited to America.

Watts says there's also "evidence of this same sort of siting problem around the world at many other official weather stations, suggesting that the same upward bias on trend also manifests itself in the global temperature record."

All three of these are significant stories. But instead of doing its due journalistic diligence, the press would rather muse about the role climate change might be playing in the warm Christmas weather in the Eastern part of the country.

It's all part of the liberal narrative. Science that doesn't agree with the media's agenda is treated as if it's myth.

SOURCE



Will global warming slow the earth's rotation?

The latest scare about man-made global warming is that it is slowing the earth’s rotation. The reasoning is that ice melting at high latitudes results in the melt water moving to lower latitudes, which increases the moment of inertia and slows rotation.

Although this is theoretically correct, the amount would so tiny as to be immeasurable. However, the Harvard scientist who announced this, claimed to have found a measurable amount via satellite.

There are all kinds of problems with this. First of all, angular momentum is conserved, so when the ice reforms the rotation rate will increase. But again, the amount would be infinitesimally small, so the whole thing is simply lunch conversation at the physics lab. Okay, but what about the measured amount?

The earth’s axis wobbles on several periods of rotation and this probably would cause tiny, but measurable, change in rotational velocity, but again, angular momentum is conserved and the lost velocity will return when the axis straitens.

SOURCE





Judicial Watch sues government for records in global warming dispute

The conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch announced Tuesday that it is suing the Obama administration to obtain the same internal communications of federal scientists sought by a House committee in a dispute over global warming research.

The group said in a news release that it filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington on Dec. 2 against the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, seeking the agency’s “methodology for collecting and interpreting data used in climate models.”

The suit stems from an investigation by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, into a blockbuster June study by NOAA scientists that refuted the notion of a global warming “pause.” The research, published in the peer-reviewed journal Science, undercut a talking point for skeptics of the conclusion that the planet’s warming is man-made.

Smith has subpoenaed NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan for the internal communications of the scientists who did the study, as well as emails among other staff members. Last week Sullivan gave the committee about 100 emails written by non-scientists on her staff, but not of the scientists, which Smith has taken off the table for now.

Judicial Watch said it submitted its Freedom of Information Act request for the records in late October. After NOAA did not respond, the group sued. Among the data it is seeking are atmospheric satellite temperature readings. Smith has said that these readings are more reliable and show smaller rates of warming than the ocean and land data used in the study. Climate scientists, including those at NOAA, have said that it’s the satellite data that is unreliable.

Judicial Watch took credit for prodding NOAA to release the emails to the committee last week.  “We have little doubt that our lawsuit helped to pry these scandalous climate change report documents from the Obama administration,”  Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement.

NOAA has already provided all the data and methodology it says its scientists used in the study. Agency staff said they had been in communication with the science committee staff for several weeks before they handed over the emails.

SOURCE





‘Climatarian’: These People Think Their Diets Will Reverse Global Warming

You’ve heard of vegetarians, but have you heard of “climatarians”?

A climatrian is a new dieting fad among eco-conscious food snobs purporting to reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with raising, transporting and disposing of foods. They believe their dieting choices will help reverse global warming.

The New York Times even listed climatarians as one of the top new food words of 2015 along with “hangry,” “piecaken” and “zarf.” The Times defined a climatarian as a “diet whose primary goal is to reverse climate change.”

“This includes eating locally produced food (to reduce energy spent in transportation), choosing pork and poultry instead of beef and lamb (to limit gas emissions), and using every part of ingredients (apple cores, cheese rinds, etc.) to limit food waste,” The Times reported last week.

In environmentalist circles, climatarianism has caught on among those who think veganism isn’t hardcore enough (though being a climatarian is nowhere near mainstream).

Enviro blog EcoWatch praised the diet in a Tuesday article, claiming the “evidence supporting a climatarian diet is abundant.”

“Several reports within the past year, including one from the UK think tank Chatham House, have found that eating less meat and dairy is essential to curbing climate change,” according to EcoWatch. And a carbon-conscious diet is not only good for the planet, but is healthy for people, too.”

Increasingly, international groups and environmentalists have been pushing people to eat less meat, saying it’s not just unhealthy, but is also bad for the environment. Earlier this year, the United Nations released a report linking processed meats to cancer.

The U.N. has also encouraged substituting insects in people’s diets as a way to reduce consumption of beef and pork, which environmentalists commonly cite as big emitters of greenhouse gases.

Before you go ditching your hamburgers for roasted cockroaches, it’s not clear that being a “climatarian” is all that good for the environment. In fact, years of evidence from the “eat local” movement show the tenets of eco-friendly diets are often worse for the environment than eating a normal diet.

For example, “locavores” argue locally-grown food is better for the environment because it reduces the energy use from transportation — all that gasoline contributes to global warming, they say.

Numerous studies, however, have debunked the idea that locally-grown food is more environmentally friendly.

Efficiencies in agriculture are highly dependent on trade specialization, meaning certain regions will just be better at growing things at a lower cost than others. The locavore movement ignores this central tenet of economics, according to experts.

“Forsaking comparative advantage in agriculture by localizing means it will take more inputs to grow a given quantity of food, including more land and more chemicals—all of which come at a cost of carbon emissions,” agricultural economist Steve Sexton wrote in 2011 for the blog Freakonomics.

“In order to maintain current output levels for 40 major field crops and vegetables, a locavore-like production system would require an additional 60 million acres of cropland, 2.7 million tons more fertilizer, and 50 million pounds more chemicals,” Sexton wrote. “The land-use changes and increases in demand for carbon-intensive inputs would have profound impacts on the carbon footprint of our food, destroy habitat and worsen environmental pollution.”

SOURCE  





Australia: Isn't the sunny optimism below wonderful?

Unmentioned is that this is an old idea and that there are already a lot of these plants around to assess how successful they are.  Huge projects of the sort are already in operation in both California (See here and here) and Spain (See here).  And guess what?  They do produce some power but have big problems and need big subsidies from government to stay in operation

After hours of steady rain, there is not a ray of sunshine in sight and the mud is thick on the ground at the $20 million Jemalong pilot solar thermal plant near Forbes in central west New South Wales.

But in a way, the fact it is overcast helps to explain the importance of this technology, which enables both capture and storage of energy from the sun, according to James Fisher, chief technology officer of Vast Solar.

The engineer, who formerly worked in the fossil fuel industry and said he never thought renewables could compete with coal, now has a much sunnier outlook on the subject.
Technology behind solar thermal power plant

The Australian company has developed what it hopes will be a low-cost, high-efficiency Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) generation technology.

The Jemalong pilot plant will be ready for commissioning in mid-January and is designed to prove the technology works.

Five modules of 700 mirrors — or heliostats — will concentrate the sun's energy onto a receiver mounted on a 27-metre high tower.

Sodium will then be pumped through the receiver where it will be heated up to 565 degrees Celsius and stored in a tank.

When power is needed, the hot sodium will be put through a steam generator, similar to a big kettle, which will boil the water, generating steam and driving the turbine in the same way a coal-fired plant operates.

Mr Fisher said traditional solar or photovoltaic power production converted the sun's energy directly into electricity which then had to be stored in expensive batteries.

He said the difference with CSP was that it captured the sun's energy in heat which was cheaper and easier to store.

"So the big advantage with solar thermal is the storage. Our storage costs around $25 a kilowatt an hour, compared to lithium ion batteries which cost about $300 a kilowatt hour," Mr Fisher said.

He said the system meant power production could happen whenever it was needed and until now, that role of maintaining a steady electricity grid had mainly been provided by coal power.

"We can run 24 hours a day and providing base load is really the key to solar thermal," he said.

Mr Fisher said if the 1.1 megawatt Jemalong pilot proved the technology was viable for 30 years, billion dollar commercial plants would be built.

"This sort of technology will put massive amounts of money into regional Australia if it takes off," he said.

Vast Solar has revealed plans for a 30 megawatt commercial plant — at a yet to be determined location — and Mr Fisher said the company had progressed well in attracting investment.

"But a problem is it's big money to develop it. These plants you can only build in large scale, so a tiny plant will be $100 million and a good-sized plant will be $500 million," Mr Fisher said.

The commissioning process at the Jemalong pilot will take four to six months and experts ranging from representatives of power utilities to academics from the Australian National University will be involved.

The project is also being closely watched by the Australian Government's Renewable Energy Agency, Arena, which has committed $5 million.

Mr Fisher said commercial solar thermal plants could be producing power at seven cents per kilowatt hour, which was cheaper than the most up-to-date coal-fired plants.

"I think we'll look back in 50 years and think, 'wow, what were we doing building coal mines to power a plant that has to run 24-hours a day when the sunshine's free?'"

He said solar thermal technology had a bright future. "Hopefully it will be Vast Solar that cracks it but someone will do it, there's no question in my mind," he said.

SOURCE

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

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

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Opec faces a mortal threat from electric cars (!)

I don't believe it but the Business Editor of the Telegraph has drawn together below a great range of optimistic prophecies which claim that electric cars will become the normal car in the near future.  But prophecies are a dime a dozen in economics and are mostly wrong.  The key of course is a big leap in battery capacity but that is only a promise so far.

The author below could easily have  quoted problems which puncture his balloon but he prefers to talk only of do-gooder prophecies.  Just off the top of my head:

Take the problem of winter. Nobody these days would drive an unheated car during a snowy winter. Yet heating drains batteries at a great rate.  Driving with the heater on can easily halve the distance you can drive.   To overcome that would require a miracle in battery development.

And then there is the SUV.  Where would a Texan be these days without his big SUV?   But SUVs are heavy and most owners of them like them that way.  And electric cars are usually the opposite of that.  They are tiny little bubble cars.  They have to be.  They are tiny so that the batteries don't have to push much weight. A battery-powered SUV is possible but you won't be able to drive it far.

The failure of a very well-thought-out and well-executed electric car experiment in Israel is also instructive. As a small densely populated place with a moderate climate, Israel should have been ideal for electric cars but the whole thing was a flop.

So I can't see electric cars selling in the Northern United States because of the winter problem and I can't see them selling in Texas and other places where SUVs are immensely popular.  That doesn't leave much of a market, does it?

The greatest marketing flop of all times was Ford's Edsel. And the Edsel was only a minor change.  Ford sunk $250 million into Edsel development for nothing.  And that was in the late '50s when a dollar was worth a dollar.  The funds being poured into electric cars are far greater than that but are equally no greater guarantee of success


OPEC’s World Oil Outlook released today is a remarkable document, the apologia of a pre-modern vested interest that refuses to see the writing on the wall.

The underlying message is that the COP21 deal is of no relevance to the oil industry. Pledges by world leaders to drastically alter the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions before 2040 - let alone to reach total "decarbonisation" by 2070 - are simply ignored.

Global demand for crude oil will rise by 18m barrels a day (b/d) to 110m by 2040. The cartel has shaved its long-term forecast slightly by 1m b/d, but this is in part due to weaker economic growth.

One is tempted to compare this myopia to the reflexive certainties of the 16th Century papacy, even as Erasmus published in Praise of Folly, and Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg’s Castle Church.

The 407-page report swats aside electric vehicles with impatience. The fleet of cars in the world will rise from 1bn to 2.1bn over the next 25 years – topping 400m in China – and 94pc will still run on petrol and diesel.

“Without a technology breakthrough, battery electric vehicles are not expected to gain significant market share in the foreseeable future,” it said. Electric cars cost too much. Their range is too short. The batteries are defective in hot or cold conditions.

OPEC says battery costs may fall by 30-50pc over the next quarter century but doubts that this will be enough to make much difference, due to "consumer resistance".

This is a brave call given that Apple and Google have thrown their vast resources into the race for plug-in vehicles, and Tesla's Model 3s will be on the market by 2017 for around $35,000.

Ford has just announced that it will invest $4.5bn in electric and hybrid cars, with 13 models for sale by 2020. Volkswagen is to unveil its "completely new concept car" next month, promising a new era of "affordable long-distance electromobility."

The OPEC report is equally dismissive of Toyota's decision to bet its future on hydrogen fuel cars, starting with the Mirai as a loss-leader. One should have thought that a decision by the world's biggest car company to end all production of petrol and diesel cars by 2050 might be a wake-up call.

Goldman Sachs expects 'grid-connected vehicles' to capture 22pc of the global market within a decade, with sales of 25m a year, and by then - it says - the auto giants will think twice before investing any more money in the internal combustion engine. Once critical mass is reached, it is not hard to imagine a wholesale shift to electrification in the 2030s.

Goldman is betting that battery costs will fall by 60pc over the next five years, driven by economies of scale as much as by technology. The driving range will increase by 70pc.

This is another world from OPEC's forecast. Even this may well be overtaken soon by further leaps in science. A team of Cambridge chemists says it has cracked the technology of a lithium-air battery with 90pc efficiency, able to power a car from London to Edinburgh on a single charge. It promises to cut costs by four-fifths, and could be on the road within a decade.

There is now a global race to win the battery prize. The US Department of Energy is funding a project by the universities of Michigan, Stanford, and Chicago, in concert with the Argonne and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories. The Japan Science and Technology Agency has its own project in Osaka. South Korea and China are mobilising their research centres.

A regulatory squeeze is quickly changing the rules of global energy.The Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics counts 800 policies and laws aimed at curbing emissions worldwide.

Goldman Sachs says the model to watch is Norway, where electric vehicles already command 16.3pc of the market. The switch has been driven by tax exemptions, priority use of traffic lanes, and a forest of charging stations. [And acceptance of tiny cars]

California is following suit. It has a mandatory 22pc target for 'grid-connected' vehicles within ten years. New cars in China will have to meet emission standards of 5 litres per 100km by 2020, even stricter than in Europe.

Beijing's pilot scheme to promote electric cars has fallen short - chiefly because there are not yet enough charging sites - but this will change soon with drastic rationing of permits for petrol cars. If you want a car as the authorities grapple with 'airpocalypse', it may have to be electric.

China's Geely Automobile aims to generate 90pc of its sales from electric vehicles by 2020. Bill Russo from Gao Feng Advisory in Shanghai says China is about to "leapfrog" the rest of the world and become the epicentre of the electrification drive.

OPEC does not deny that the Paris accords change the energy landscape, but they view this as a problem strictly for the coal industry. There will be a partial switch from coal to gas, with a little nuclear thrown in, along with a risible contribution from wind and solar.

Their own charts seems to show that coal, gas, and oil will together emit a further 1,200 gigatonnes of carbon by 2040. This would blow through the maximum carbon budget deemed allowable by scientists if we are to stop temperatures rising by more than 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2100 - let alone to achieve the 1.5 degree 'ambition' agreed by world leaders in Paris.

Saudi Arabia's belief that it can carry on with business as usual into the mid 21st Century is what informs the current OPEC strategy of flooding the crude market to eliminate rivals.

The report admits that this is proving to be a costly undertaking. Tight oil and shale in North America has not buckled - as presumed in last year's forecast - and OPEC now expects it to keep rising slightly in 2016 to 4.5m b/d, and again to 4.7m in 2017.

In the meantime, OPEC revenues have crashed from $1.2 trillion in 2012 to nearer $400bn at today's Brent price of $36.75, with fiscal and regime pain to match.

This policy has eroded global spare capacity to a wafer-thin 1.5m b/d, leaving the world vulnerable to a future shock. It implies a far more volatile market in which prices gyrate wildly, eroding confidence in oil as a reliable source of energy.

The more that this Saudi policy succeeds, the quicker the world will adopt policies to break reliance on its only product. As internal critics in Riyadh keep grumbling, the strategy is suicide.

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are lucky. They have been warned in advance that OPEC faces slow-run off. The cartel has 25 years to prepare for a new order that will require far less oil.

If they have any planning sense, they will manage the market to ensure crude prices of $70 to $80. They will eke out their revenues long enough to control spending and train their people for a post-petrol economy, rather than clinging to 20th Century illusions.

Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the former Saudi oil minister, warned in an interview with the Telegraph fifteen years ago that this moment of reckoning was coming and he specifically cited fuel-cell technologies.

"Thirty years from now there will be a huge amount of oil - and no buyers. Oil will be left in the ground. The Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones."

They did not listen to him then, and they are not listening now.

SOURCE

Revisiting John Cook's 97% climate consensus study. How bad was it?

My conclusions at the end of this post may surprise you

Jose Duarte is one of the few genuine scientists in social psychology.  I am in a position to know that.  Over a period of 20 years beginning in 1970 I encountered countless pieces of published social psychological research that were so flawed that they proved nothing. And that's not just my opinion.  I put my thoughts into writing and on many occasions, journal editors saw that I had a point and published my critiques.

And it is notable that they did so.  Journal editors HATE publishing critiques.  It exposes their own review processes as inadequate.  So I had to be making a very strong scientific case in what I wrote.  So the fact that more than half of my critiques did get into the journals is actually rather amazing.

What I found was that any thin excuse to come to a Leftist conclusion will get published.  Nothing else much seemed to matter as long as there was a veneer of scientific method to it.  It was actually common for authors to come to conclusions which were contradicted by their own data!  Their urgent priority was to prop up their fallacious Leftist wordview.  That trumped everything else.  More on that here.

So I gave it 20 years of doing social psychological research but in the end concluded that I was pissing into the wind.  Truth and the facts were just not of interest to most of my colleagues and my pointing the facts out was CERTAINLY not of interest.  The Leftist talent at denial -- ignoring uncomfortable facts -- was in full force when it came to my writings.

So over two decades ago I gave up doing survey research and concentrated on family and business interests instead, with results that please me.  I still occasionally read the literature, however and I am pleased that there is a small band of real scientists trying to make social psychology more scientific.  Duarte is one, as are Jonathan Haidt, Lee Jussim and that old hand, Philip Tetlock.

Those four obviously know one-another.  They were co-authors of a paper 18 months ago that pointed out what I have just said about ideological bias in psychology.  The paper is:

Duarte, J. L., Crawford, J. T., Stern, C., Haidt, J., Jussim, L., & Tetlock, P. E. "Political diversity will improve social psychological science". Behavioral and Brain Sciences / Volume 38 / January 2015, e130.

It appeared earlier this year but a preprint was available from around July, 2014.  There is a Readers Digest form of the paper here

Why am I noting this on a blog devoted to tracking environmentalism?  Because the situation in climate science is incomparably worse than in psychology.  The global warming enthusiasts make the psychologists look rigorous. And Jose Duarte has noticed that. Below are some of his astounded comments on the subject.  He is looking particularly at the risible "97% consensus" studies that have come out, particularly the study by John Cook, a psychologist from the University of Queensland in Australia.

If some third world political leader gets 97% of the vote, we know immediately that the vote was rigged and laugh at the naivety of the leader in thinking anyone would believe that figure.  Yet Warmists do exactly the same.  They are too fanatical to see how absurd they are. Their need to believe has overcome their reason and sense of caution.  Their claims are not even good propaganda.

But over to Duarte.  He details just how bad the Warmist studies are:


"Ignore climate consensus studies based on random people rating journal article abstracts. Ignore them completely – that's your safest bet right now. Most of these studies use political activists as the raters, activists who desired a specific outcome for the studies (to report the highest consensus figure possible), and who sometimes collaborated with each other in their rating decisions. All of this makes these studies completely invalid and untrustworthy (and by customary scientific standards, completely unpublishable.) I had no idea this was happening. This is a scam and a crisis. It needs to stop, and those papers need to be retracted immediately, especially Cook, et al (2013), given that we now have evidence of explicit bias and corruption on the part of the raters. (It's crazy that people think the consensus needs to be artificially inflated to absurd heights – do they think 84% or 90% isn't good enough?)

In social science, it's common to use trained human raters to subjectively rate or score some variable — it can be children's behavior on a playground, interviews of all kinds, and often written material, like participants' accounts of a past emotional experience. And we have a number of analytical and statistical tools that go with such rating studies. But we would never use human raters who have an obvious bias with respect to the subject of their ratings, who desire a specific outcome for the study, and who would be able to deliver that outcome via their ratings. That's completely nuts. It's so egregious that I don't think it even occurs to us as something to look out for. It never happens. At least I've never heard of it happening. There would be no point in running such a study, since it would be dismissed out of hand and lead to serious questions about your ethics.

But it's happening in climate science. Sort of. These junk studies are being published in climate science journals, which are probably not well-equipped to evaluate what are ultimately social science studies (in method). And I assume the journals weren't aware that these studies used political activists as raters.

Examples of the unbelievable bias and transparent motives of the raters' in Cook, et al (2013) below. These are excerpts from an online forum where the raters collaborated with each other in their ratings:

"BTW, this was the only time I "cheated" by looking at the whole paper. I was mystified by the ambiguity of the abstract, with the author wanting his skeptical cake and eating it too. I thought, "that smells like Lindzen" and had to peek."

"Man, I think you guys are being way too conservative. Papers that talk about other GHGs causing warming are saying that human GHG emissions cause global warming.  How is that not an implicit endorsement?  If CFC emissions cause warming because they're GHGs, then CO2 emissions cause global warming for the same reason.  That's an implicit endorsement."

Jesus. This is a joke. A sad, ridiculous, confusing joke. And it's exactly what you'd expect from raters who are political activists on the subject they're rating. Who in their right minds would use political climate activists as raters for a serious report on the consensus? This is so nuts that I still have a hard time believing it actually happened, that the famous 97% paper was just a bunch of activists rating abstracts. I've called on the journal – Environmental Research Letters – to retract this paper. I'm deeply, deeply confused how this happened. If this is what we're doing, we should just call it a day and go home – we can't trust journals and science organizations on this topic if they're going to pull stunts like this.

I don't care who you are – even if you're a staunch liberal, deeply concerned about the environment and the effects of future warming, this isn't something you should tolerate. If we're going to have a civilization, if we're going to have science, some things need to be non-political, some basic rules need to apply to everyone. I hope we can all agree that we can't seriously estimate the AGW consensus by having political activists rate climate paper abstracts. It doesn't matter whether the activists come from the Heritage Foundation or the Sierra Club – people with a vested interest in the outcome simply can't be raters.

We don't need random people to interpret climate science for us, to infer the meaning of abstracts, to tell us what scientists think. That's an awful method – extremely vulnerable to bias, noise, incompetence, and poor execution. The abstracts for many papers won't even have the information such studies are looking for, and are simply not written at the level of abstraction of "this study provides support for human-caused warming", or "this study rejects human-caused warming". Most climate science papers are written at a more granular and technical level, are appropriately scientifically modest, and are not meant to be political chess pieces.

There's a much better method for finding out what scientists think — ask them. Direct surveys of scientists is a much more valid method than having ragtag teams of unqualified political activists divine the meanings of thousands of abstracts. I don't mean ask about them their abstracts, as Cook, et al did – that inserts an unnecessary layer and potential selection bias. I mean ask them directly what they think about the principal questions. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, survey studies tend to report smaller consensus figures than the abstract rating studies (I'll have more on that later, see the Bray and von Storch series for now) The consensus will be strong regardless, so it's especially confusing why people feel the need to rig it.

(For subjective ratings of abstracts to be a valid and useful method, it would need to be a carefully selected pool of raters, without ideological agendas, implementing a very specific and innovative method, under strict procedures of independence. I can imagine deep philosophy of science questions that might be anwerable by such methods, things like the usage of certain kinds of words, the way hypotheses are framed and results reported, etc. – but much of that could be done by computers. The studies that have been published are nothing like this, and have no hope of being valid.)

NOTE: The Cook, et al data was leaked or hacked a few months ago – I'm confused by what's going on here. Cook wouldn't release some of his data, and ultimately a bunch of data was hacked or scraped off a server, and it included the raters' online discussion forum. Climate science features far too many stories of people refusing to release their data, and mysteriously hacked data. The person who posted this data, Brandon Shollenberger, is a complete unknown. It's amazing that if it weren't for him, we wouldn't know how rigged the study truly was. There's much more to report – the issues raised by the leaked dataset extend far beyond the quotes above.

The University of Queensland has apparently threatened to sue Schollenberger, on some sort of "intellectual property" grounds. Australia is one of my favorite countries, but we need to stand up for him. To the best of my knowledge, he hasn't done anything wrong – he hasn't posted any sort of sensitive information or anything that would violate our core principles of scientific ethics. The identities of the raters were not confidential to begin with, so there was no new disclosure there. He's exposed the cartoonish bias and corruption of the rating process that underlied this "study", and in so doing, he's served the interests of scientific ethics, not violated them".


Much more from Duarte HERE.  See also here for another searching critique of the Cook et al. paper.  The extraordinary actions of the University of Queensland in defence of Cook are detailed here.

The original Cook paper is here.  Cook is in fact usually misquoted by Warmists.  People allege that Cook showed that 97% OF ALL climate scientists support global warming.  Cook did not say that at all.  He said:  "Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming". And he adds that two thirds of the papers took no position on global warming (which was wise of them). So even in Cook's own words he showed that a MINORITY of papers supported global warming.  The 97% was not of all scientists nor even of climate scientists.  It was 97% of a minority of climate scientists.  Below again is that amusing video of a poor bewildered black man using like a crutch Cook's misquoted findings.  The habitual misquoting just shows how desperate Warmists are.



So although Cook's research methods were rubbish and a disgrace to psychology, I am inclined to think that he is more sinned against than sinning.  I would be quite happy to quote his figures in any debate with a Warmist.  The only difference would be that I would quote what he ACTUALLY said rather than what Warmists say he said!  LOL

Denier (Morano) admits: Humans cause "Global Warming"... With Windmills

One of Marc Morano's correspondents wrote as follows:

"The kinetic energy of wind, equivalent to ~10 billion barrels of oil, has in the past blown our ~6,000,000 billion tons of air at a speed of ~15 mph continuously around the Earth, bringing us rain and cooling.

But now, humans have built and are building more windmills that are reducing this natural cooling process. Present level of reduction is ~10%. There is no mechanism in nature that replenishes wind energy removed by humans."

Tear down all windmills!

Via email





California Governor Hails ‘Coercive Power of Government’

A genuine Fascist

California Gov. Jerry Brown raised some eyebrows while attending the U.N. Climate Summit in Paris this month, proclaiming that the “coercive power of the central state” is needed to promote good public policy, specifically when it comes to a cleaner environment.

Taking part in an onstage presentation with billionaire and climate activist Tom Steyer, Brown said government regulations force companies to adopt clean technologies.

After Steyer mentioned business frameworks, Brown said, “Tom, you used the phrase ‘policy.’ Good policy. But I want to unpack that term a little bit. Inside the policy, you need a law. You need a rule. You need the coercive power of government to say, ‘Do this.’ Now, you have to be wise and don’t say something stupid or order something stupid, but the fact is, the regulations supported by the laws drive innovation.”

The Sacramento Bee reported that Brown later urged a small crowd to “never underestimate the coercive power of the central state in the service of good.”

“You can be sure California is going to keep innovating, keep regulating,” the 77-year-old Democrat said. “And, shall I say, keep taxing.”

The Brown administration has been aggressive in instituting stricter environmental laws and regulations in California.

In October, the four-term governor signed legislation calling on California to generate half of its electricity from sources such as solar and wind by 2030. At the same time, the law mandates that homes, offices, and factories double their energy efficiency.

Such moves have prompted opposition from the energy industry, saying they will raise utility bills and gasoline prices, and Brown’s comments in Paris drew a swift reaction from critics, who seized on the “coercion” remark.

“Gov. Brown’s statement is a frank admission that politicians and government in the U.S. are out of control,” said Dan Kish, senior vice president at the Institute for Energy Research, a public policy organization that calls for free-market solutions on energy policy.

“The governor bragged about the ‘coercive powers of government’ and how his state would keep regulating and taxing. The United States was formed to put citizens in charge of their lives by putting a fence around government power and control,” Kish said in an email to Watchdog.org.

“Gov. Brown has shown he thinks people should be inside the fence, with government, and their crony business partners, using its coercive and taxing powers to make them do what the politicians say, and it’s illustrative he is doing it at the Climate Summit in Paris. This is how freedom is lost and tyranny and coercion prevail.”

Brown led a California delegation in Paris that includes Steyer; Senate President Pro Tem Kevin De León, D-Los Angeles; and other state legislators.

Brown made the remarks in a discussion about reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“This is an art and a science,” Brown said. “You have to push business further than they want to go, but within their capacity to reach it.”

Clean power companies have long been criticized for their reliance on federal and state subsidies and tax credits, with the bankruptcy of California-based solar company Solyndra used as a prime example. The U.S. Department of Energy awarded Solyndra $536 million in loan guarantees prior to the company’s collapse in 2011.

Green energy advocates have defended the subsidies, arguing that fossil fuel industries have long received tax credits and that government help is often a necessity to launch companies that require large start-up costs.

“Just as with any other major economic transition—the Industrial Revolution, the Marshall Plan, the fall of Communism—there is a role for government policy, finance and investment in speeding the adoption of the new, while easing the phaseout of the old,” Kate Gordon, vice chair at the Paulson Institute, said in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year.

At a news conference in Paris, K.R. Sridhar, CEO of the fuel cell technology company Bloom Energy, said it would be wrong to single out renewable companies, saying that taxpayers pay for highway and road maintenance that benefits gasoline-powered cars.

Clean technology, the Bee quoted Sridhar, only needs a “helping hand,” not a permanent subsidy. “For us,” Sridhar said, “it’s a feeding bottle and not an addiction bottle.”

SOURCE





Meet the House science chairman who’s trying to put global warming research on ice

The article below was apparently intended as a hit piece but I think it celebrates a doughty devotee of truth

When Republican House leaders appointed Texas Republican Lamar S. Smith to lead the House science committee after a headline-grabbing run as chairman of the Judiciary panel, it looked like the veteran lawmaker could head into obscurity.

He had previously championed an end to automatic citizenship for children born in the United States and riled up advocates for freedom of expression on the Internet. Yet Smith’s new role in 2013 as the House’s science boss seemed less influential, leading a committee viewed as a backwater and first stop for freshman lawmakers.

But he quickly remade the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology into a bulldog as ferocious as any in a Congress riven by partisanship. As the Obama administration escalated its fight against climate change with new environmental regulations, the lawyer from San Antonio, Tex. became a key player among the holdouts.

As lawyers and lobbyists were devising legal strategies to try to dismantle the president’s climate-change agenda, Smith became the lawmaker bent on debunking the science behind it.

Now finishing his third year as chairman, the Yale-educated lawmaker who has represented Texas Hill Country and parts of Austin and San Antonio since 1987 has used new subpoena powers to an unprecedented degree.

He’s called on the administration to account for air-pollution regulations he says are not backed up by science. He’s tried to slash NASA’s budget for earth sciences. He’s subjected grant reviews at the National Science Foundation to extra scrutiny. One of Congress’s most prominent global warming skeptics, Smith, 68, has railed against environmentalists and the media for buying into the “climate-change religion.”

In the fall he took on his biggest target yet, accusing federal scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of colluding to doctor data in a pivotal global warming study that refuted the long-held notion that the planet’s warming had “paused.”

“He’s taken the science committee to a new level,” said Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), a freshman who leads the committee’s oversight panel. “We’re challenging the status quo… You’re talking about very significant regulations imposed by this administration. We’re asking, ‘Is the science behind them valid?'”

His detractors accuse Smith of taking oversight to a new level of bullying by questioning the motives of federal scientists and threatening their freedom. Critics say he’s out of step with mainstream scientific thinking on climate change, which concludes that man-made pollution is behind the planet’s warming.

His confrontation with NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan started over the summer, soon after a team of scientists on her staff published their findings on the global warming pause in the peer-reviewed journal Science.

Smith accused the scientists of altering historical global temperature data and rushing to publish their research to advance Obama’s “extreme climate agenda.” The chairman subpoenaed the scientists and other NOAA staff and demanded that they turn over internal emails related to their research.

Sullivan balked for weeks, finally releasing about 100 emails from non-scientists last week that NOAA officials say contain none of the evidence Smith is seeking. Meanwhile, prominent societies representing thousands of scientists have rallied around her, warning the congressman in a letter in November that his efforts are “establishing a practice of inquests.”

“He is bringing more prominence to the committee by challenging the integrity of scientists,” said Rush Holt, a physicist and New Jersey Democrat who served with Smith in the House from 1999 until this year.

“It’s an interesting way to raise the profile of a science committee,” said Holt, now chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “In fact it seems to be Smith who is substituting politics for evidence and not the scientists.”

Smith, through his staff, declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this article or to answer questions by email.

He and his allies reject criticism that he is politicizing science as head of a committee that oversees space exploration, research and development and has jurisdiction over agencies from NOAA to the National Institute of Standards and Technology. They say it’s the government that’s doing just that in the service of excessive federal regulation of the environment, with mandates that threaten the economy and crucial industries like gas, oil and coal.

“His constituents see a man that’s fighting for the energy community here in Texas, which is a large part of the employment base,” said Charles McConnell, who served two years in the Obama administration as assistant secretary for the Energy Department, responsible for fossil fuels. Now at Rice University, McConnell has criticized new Environmental Protection Agency air quality regulations as “rampant environmentalism.”

“I don’t believe Smith is against regulation,” said McConnell, who has testified before the committee. “He’s interested in scientifically based regulation.”

As the climate change summit got underway in Paris in November, the science committee held a hearing whose title revealed precisely where Smith stands: “Pitfalls of Unilateral Negotiations at the Paris Climate Change Conference.”

Two of the three witnesses the Republicans called to testify were not scientists, but policy experts representing conservative think tanks, a common practice at hearings. Other witnesses have affiliations with the energy industry, Democrats complain.

Earlier this year, Smith issued a subpoena to compel the Environmental Protection Agency to produce text messages and phone records for Administrator Gina McCarthy as it investigated proposed limits on ozone it said would amount to the most costly federal regulation in history.

He has also demanded EPA cor­res­pond­ence with out­side groups on a range of en­vir­on­ment­al rules and reg­u­lat­ions, to show that they collaborated with the administration, for example in curtailing power-plant emissions.

Supporters say the chairman’s roots in Texas —a state that has objected strenuously to EPA rules slashing ozone levels and pollution from coal-fired power plants —form the core of his skepticism.

“Scrutiny of global warming started here,” said Michael Nasi, an Austin air-quality lawyer who represents many of the state’s electric power producers. “It’s incumbent on any federal lawmaker to be asking, are we looking at controls that will really have legitimate health benefits?” Texas regulators, for example, have questioned whether EPA’s emissions crackdown would really improve public health.

On the foundational question of whether human behavior is behind the earth’s rising temperatures, Smith has been called a truth seeker, a climate skeptic and a climate denier. He is fond of saying that “good science” should rule the day, while his detractors say it’s Smith who has lost sight of good science.

Just before he was installed as committee chairman, Smith said in a statement in response to questions from reporters that he believes climate change “is due to a combination of factors, including natural cycles, sun spots, and human activity.”

“But scientists still don’t know for certain how much each of these factors contributes to the overall climate change that the Earth is experiencing.”

SOURCE





Don’t believe the eco-hype: For all the optimism about wind and solar, renewables are nowhere near viable

After COP21, the Paris conference on climate change, it’s time to puncture green euphoria about renewable energy

Among greens, technological innovation is the new black. After all, dissing the plebs for their ignorant and greedy, carbon-guzzling behaviour hasn’t proved very popular. Similarly, protesting coal-fired power stations in Asia has cut little ice. So now environmentalists have conveniently discovered that technological innovation in wind and solar power will rapidly supply much of the world’s electricity.

Since 2008, the US has wanted wind power to account for a fifth of its electricity generated by 2030, up from 4.5 per cent today. Likewise, presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton envisages America as the ‘clean-energy superpower’, one where renewables generate ‘at least a third’ of electricity as early as 2027. Now the Paris Agreement upholds what it calls ‘universal access to sustainable energy in developing countries, in particular in Africa, through the enhanced deployment of renewable energy’. Indeed, at the Paris talks, US secretary of state John Kerry proclaimed ‘clean’ energy to be ‘cheaper against today’s alternatives’.

Is any of this credible? No. We are in no shape to make renewable electricity supplant the conventional sort within the next 15 years.

The dishonesty of green tech

During COP21, the US, much of Europe, China, India and several other major nations launched Mission Innovation, aimed at doubling research and development (R&D) into renewables by 2020. Significantly, Bill Gates and 28 other billionaire investors joined the mission. For Gates, this intrepid group of ‘patient’ capitalists has a philanthropic goal: the investors’ aim is ‘as much to accelerate innovation as it is to turn a profit’. Gates hopes that, over at least a decade, photovoltaic panels might morph into ‘solar paint’; rechargeable electrolyte in batteries, or ‘flow batteries’, might beat the lithium-ion sort; and sunshine might help make hydrogen and hydrocarbons in a process he calls ‘solar-chemical’.

While Gates believes that renewables need big improvements in clout and cost, Kerry imagines they’re already profitable – even without the subsidies they bask in. As he told COP21, renewables today are ‘one of the greatest economic opportunities the world has ever known’, and investors can now ‘do well and do good at the same time’. To complete the euphoria at the Paris talks, solar power in developing countries enjoyed special support. Thus, on top of Mission Innovation, a second key initiative emerged alongside COP21. Launched by India and France, the International Solar Alliance brings together around 120 tropical nations to attract $1,000 billion of investment in solar by 2030. The aim: to cheapen existing solar technologies, but also develop new ones ‘tailored to the specific needs of members of the Alliance’.

What dishonesty surrounds green tech! Today, ‘tailoring’ solar to the reputed needs of developing countries won’t build them the kind of electricity capacity that can continuously power ‘factories, skyscrapers, and other large consumers of energy’, as Gates rightly observes is necessary. Drawn up by international elites and the United Nations, the official programme for developing countries in solar is paltry by comparison. It plans to give the rural poor ‘access’ to electricity that’s ‘decentralised whenever possible and based on clean energy’.

As ever, climate negotiations form a diplomatic charade that only reveals the West’s grimy conception of how the developing world should develop – with just enough low-tech, low-output green electricity-lite to power a village hut, no more.

The idea that solar panels have now reached ‘grid parity’, or price equivalence with fossil fuel-powered electricity, is another charade. According to the US Energy Information Administration, the efficiency of solar (12 per cent) and wind (26 per cent) remains way below the efficiency notched up by conventional power plants, such as gas (42.9 per cent).

Yes, solar efficiencies have improved, but it has taken decades – and strides have mostly been made in laboratories, not under the more arduous conditions of everyday use. The economies of scale and subsidies enjoyed by Chinese manufacturers of solar panels have bankrupted their rivals and lowered prices. Yet with improvements in efficiency so slow, panels will go on occupying a lot of land, or roof space, for years and years. That will keep their installed costs buoyant, as well as counteract the falling costs of installation, maintenance and financing that US solar-services firms have recently achieved.

As Gates’ proposal for solar paint suggests, buildings and especially homes, not expansive ‘farms’ of panels, remain the principal units of account for solar power. Yet how can household panels, still less those mounted atop blocks of flats, provide enough reliable energy to power fleets of computer servers and trains, still less the processes involving heat that are at the core of making steel and cement? Solar can never be an easily concentrated, continuous source of baseload power in the way that fossil-fuel-fired and nuclear-power stations can be. Every spurious exaggeration of solar power’s capabilities in developing countries consigns them to stunted development – to intermittent, weak electricity.

Perhaps better battery storage of energy – including flow batteries – offers hope. Yet here, too, illusions are enormous. Storage will add to the costs of wind and solar. Moreover, even the breakthrough lithium-air battery, just announced by Dr Clare Grey at Cambridge University, will require at least a decade to be commercialised.

Why we need R&D

One of the chief dangers emerging from COP21 is that the misconception that renewables are saving the planet, along the lines of Germany’s disastrous, nuclear-free ‘energy transformation’, will now be taken as given.

Now, of course, no silver bullet will solve the issues of energy supply; so, for all their depressing intermittency, wind and solar power deserve, in principle, the kind of large and long-term R&D budgets that fossil fuels and nuclear power ought to enjoy. But, in fact, R&D expenditures by the West on renewables are, like those on fossil fuels and nuclear, utterly negligible. In 2014, Europe spent just $1.52 billion on R&D for renewables, while the US and Canada spent $1.08 billion. As for R&D in fossil fuels, Europe spent a mere $0.57 billion; the US and Canada, just $0.8 billion.

Yes, on a good day wind turbines can now generate a lot of a country’s electricity; yes, the price of solar electricity is now going down; and yes, innovation always needs to think about the longterm. But in the case of renewables, reliably generating a quarter of the world’s electricity at prices that compare well with fossil fuels and nuclear will have to wait until 2040 or later, not 2030. Even then, renewables will still need a lot of fossil-fuel backup to ensure continuous electricity generation.

Governments, and now philanthropically minded capitalists, may stress the ‘creative’ side of the creative destruction of the fossil-fuel and nuclear industries. Yet the preference for renewables has up to now meant subsidising yesterday’s technologies more than spending on tomorrow’s R&D. So, despite all the self-loathing of the fossil-fuel and nuclear industries, and despite the relative lack of profitability of nuclear, renewables will not wreak destruction on them for a long time to come.

There is simply not enough investment being made in new industries to eradicate the old. Capitalism is barely interested in general investment and innovation – let alone investment in energy, where the installed base and sunk costs of fossil-fuel infrastructure will only be overcome over decades.

John Kerry can claim that ‘over the next 15 years, $17 trillion is expected to be invested in energy, and the vast majority of that is going to be in clean energy, thank heavens’. But such a flow of investment into renewables is about as likely as the widely ridiculed ‘flows’ of renewables promised to developing countries by developed ones.

The numbers say it all. Kerry promises trillions of investment, when, in fact, the amount of credit extended by the West to help companies sell wind and, to a much lesser extent, solar power to the richer developing economies (‘middle-income countries’) was just $1.6 billion in 2013-14. And North America and Europe’s R&D budgets for renewables, are, as we have seen, even less than that.

So, don’t buy the hype: for a quarter century or more, renewables won’t make much of a difference to the world’s electricity supply.

SOURCE





How the Post-Soviet Left Latched Onto Climate For its Crusade on Capitalism

By CONRAD BLACK

The opening of the Paris conference on climate change will be the occasion for the customary lamentations about the imminent demise of life on Earth if we do not pull up our socks as a species and reduce carbon emission levels, and thus avoid the toasting of the world. The adduced scientific evidence does not justify any such state of alarm.

Every sane and informed person in the world is concerned about pollution and demands vigilance about any clear trends of climate change and any convincing evidence that human behavior influences the climate. Because the Copenhagen climate Conference of 2009 had promised agreement on imposition of dramatic measures to reduce fossil fuel use and resulting carbon emissions, thus avoiding apprehended rises in world temperature, and broke up in acrimonious farce and recrimination, the Paris conference has been more carefully and less ambitiously prepared.

At Copenhagen, the demand arose from developing countries that the economically advanced countries had permanently impaired the under-developed countries and that the $100 billion compensation fund that President Obama had promised to raise for the less-advanced countries was completely inadequate, mere reparations instead of a serious response to a moral debt that could only be quantified in trillions of dollars. (Mr. Obama had no takers, including his own Congress, when his Democrats controlled it, for one cent of such payments.)

Mr. Obama was unable even to get an interview with the Chinese prime minister, a historic first in lack of access for a U.S. president, as the Chinese, by far the greatest carbon emitter and polluter of all countries, cheekily set themselves at the head of the G-77 countries who with cupped hands and in stentorian voice, demanded immense monetary compensation for the sins of the carbon emitters, also led by themselves.

The world’s temperature has risen approximately one half of a centigrade degree, or almost one Fahrenheit degree, in 35 years. There has been minimal global warming for 18 years, though carbon emissions in the world have steadily increased throughout that period. It is indisputable that the world has been warmer several times in its history than it is now, so whatever impact man may have on it, the world’s temperature is evidently subject to fluctuations for other reasons.

There is also legitimate disagreement about the consequences of such warming as might occur. Recent research at the University of Sussex, widely recognized for its expertise in this field, indicates that warming up to 3.5 centigrade degrees from where we are now would have no appreciable impact on anything, except a positive impact where increased volumes of carbon dioxide increase arable area and make crops more drought-resistant.

Also there has been a good deal of reciprocally corroborating research in different countries by recognized experts that uniformly demonstrates that the world’s temperature is much less sensitive than had long been feared to increased carbon use. Antarctic polar ice is thickening and world water levels are not rising. Apocalyptic statements of imminent consequences of not reducing carbon use have been fairly thoroughly debunked.

Not only is the evidence of the effects of increased carbon use unclear, but the economic consequences of discouragement of carbon use are very clear and very harmful to the most vulnerable countries. China and India, the two most populous countries and the first and third carbon emitters, are eagerly pursuing economic growth, which is the only method for pulling the many hundreds of millions of desperately poor people in those countries upwards out of poverty, and they are not going to change policy to accommodate the militant ecologists of the West.

They don’t attach the slightest credence to the alarmist comments of the more strident ecologists, other than as an excuse for demanding monetary compensation for how the economically leading countries have disadvantaged them. The International Energy Agency estimates that the underdeveloped countries as a group, will emit 70 per cent of the carbon output of the world in the next 15 years, and will be responsible for all of the increase in carbon use over that time.

President Obama has called the Paris conference a “historic turning point,” but it isn’t, and claimed (in February) that climate change was a greater problem than terrorism. He and John Kerry (secretary of state), have several times called it the world’s greatest problem. This is bunk. The pope stated that we are “at the edge of suicide.” If so, it is not for climatic reasons. (The Holy See has placated the greens, but emphasized that “The Church cannot take the place of scientists and politicians.”)

Many in those groups are more impetuous in their assertions. And everyone seriously involved with the Paris conference knows that it is not really going to accomplish much. As Lord Ridley pointed out in the Wall Street Journal on November 28, the NGO spokespeople attending at Paris will scream like banshees of imminent disaster, for fear of having their budgets cut, despite contrary evidence and although it is now clear that decarbonization is much more harmful to the world than increased carbon emissions.

Alternate sources of energy, such as wind and solar, are hideously more expensive and much less productive, a luxury no country can really afford, and certainly not the poorer countries. But the conference will be hamstrung. Countries will volunteer their own individual targets for reduction of carbon emissions, called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, or INDC’s.

The INDC of China only predicts that such emissions will meet their peak by 2030, while, for all his militancy, President Obama’s U.S. INDC will be a reduction of between 26% and 28% in ten years, yet the outline of hoped-for gains, which the Congress will not endorse, and for years Obama will only see as a private citizen, only calls for half the volume reduction of emissions necessary to meet his pledge. The American INDC is a scam.

Even the Obama administration is demanding an involuntary international verification mechanism (much more rigorous than what it settled for in the rather more urgent matter of Iranian nuclear military development), and the elimination of the so-called “firewall” of separate arrangements for the developed and under-developed (or developing) countries. The developing countries, led by China and India, refuse, unless they are solemnly promised a $100 billion a year climate fund, as Obama imprudently pledged at Copenhagen.

This remains completely out of the question and furnished the justification in advance for the developing countries to fall short of their INDC targets, which will provide the cover for the developed countries to do the same. Everyone will solemnly announce ambitious INDCs, but there will be no verification, ample excuse for non-compliance for everyone and this charade will continue to the next portentous and verbose conference.

What seems to have happened is that the international far left, having been decisively routed with the collapse of the Soviet Union and of international communism, has attached itself to the environmental movement, usurped the leading positions in it from the bird-watching, butterfly-collecting, and conservation organizations, and is carrying on its anti-capitalist and anarchist crusade behind the cover of eco-Armageddonism.

While this has been rather skillfully executed, many office-holders and aspirants, including Mr. Obama, have used dire environmental scenarios to distract their electorates from their own policy failures, much as Arab powers have long diluted anger at despotic misgovernment by harping on the red herring of Israel.

SOURCE





Global warming: deluge first, wisdom later

Some breathtaking wisdom from Uganda below.  It probably makes sense to Greenies

The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference was recently held in Paris, France.

Also known as COP21 alias CMP 11, it was attended by 196 state parties and led to the Paris Agreement aimed at reducing the rate of climate change (global temperatures). The agreement talks of reducing global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, self-review every five years and promises of financial transfers from rich to poor countries.

Despite self-congratulation by states and the UN, the agreement is not legally binding; the 13 days in Paris with per diem have now been added to the 23 years wasted since the UN started crying foul about the global climate crisis.

From the first such conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the root cause of the crisis – a socio-economic model that treats life not as harmonious relationships between humans and with all other creation but as unlimited private appropriation and aimless consumption – is deliberately dodged.

Lessening use of fossil fuels or emissions of greenhouse gases per se is not enough to rescue planet Earth and human beings from the impending catastrophe. It requires reduction of per capita energy exploitation and general destabilization of the various natural systems and cycles.

The fashionable concepts ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ are even a misnomer; the situation is outrageous natural destabilization. Humankind has destabilized the natural foundation that helped it build civilization – in quest for super profits and dominion – and any simplistic sentimentalism will solve nothing.

The solution would require a big change in our worldview and lifestyle, more so abandoning the ones promoted by the UN under grand projects like Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals, and certain religious beliefs and practices that divide humankind rather than unite it.

Like with earlier agreements on climate, the states (read politicians) will renege on their promises and even forge statistics. No wonder many scientists and social activists feel betrayed already.

In the absence of a legitimate global authority that can whip each country or social grouping, trusting politicians who come to power through national elections after wild materialistic promises and protecting their domestic (economic and military) policies is a daydream.

Politicians and their economic advisers will never care about the common good for nature and other humans. The agreement doesn’t show any pathway to achieving even the shady goal, as if mere signing of aspiration leads to compliance.

The United Nations, as a club of states, cannot alone manage the problem of climate change. The minimum effort would involve participation of religious organisations, corporate institutions (directly rather than acting through politicians) and civil/social movements so as to bring to table all relevant issues.

There must be serious opposition to social monotonization (by promoting diversity in ideas, beliefs, ideals, and lifestyle), anthropocentrism, (the belief that only humankind is created in the image of God, that the world purposely exists to be dominated by and serve humankind) and the delusion of linearism (belief that we are ever on a continuity to higher progress), among others.

Otherwise, it is going to remain the same business as usual until three extra-human interventions take place: cumulative mass destruction as a form of natural self-purification and throwing off an unbearable burden; or a great sudden deluge, something like the biblical flood or collapse of the tower of Babel. Second will be the multiplication of new breeds of surprise leaders and individuals, the likes of Pope Francis, President John Mafuguli, former president Jose Mujica and whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Third, will be a spiritual revival around a global prophetic movement without a spatially-localized nucleus and not requiring paternalistic evangelization waves.

However, in the meantime, let the wise and concerned embark on social (activist/solidarity) movements working across all strata and nations to boost those already suffering the effects of nature destabilization, and expose and sabotage various criminals and ignoramuses responsible for the brewing catastrophe.

SOURCE

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

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Will global warming kill off our pine trees?

The modelling crap below claims it will but is most implausible. Pine trees are very widely distributed -- from the near-Arctic to the tropics. As I look down at the floor of the room where I am writing this, I see polished floorboards made of slash-pine, once super-abundant but now mostly cut out, in sub-tropical Queensland where I live. That such a versatile and hardly genus could be disturbed by a few degrees of climate change is absurd. The distribution of species might alter a little but that's it.

They have been around for at least 300 million years so they have survived huge climate changes in the past -- so it is unlikely that any piddly Warmist scenario will bother them. And note that some species -- such as the Bristlecone pine -- are amazingly hardy and survive in very unpromising situations to this day.

I like this humble sentence below however: "Our ability to accurately simulate drought-induced forest impacts remains highly uncertain"


UPDATE:  Here's some info from the FAO on how pines fail to thrive  in warm climates:

Tropical pine species play an especially important role in modern plantation forestry. Several species, mostly originating from the American or Asian tropics and subtropics are now widely cultivated.  Pines enjoy such great popularity because:

the large number of species allow choice for widely varying environmental conditions;

many thrive on a wide range of sites;

many flourish in dry, nutrient-poor soils or degraded sites;

the volume production of some species can be high to very high, even under unfavourable site conditions;

being robust pioneer species, pines are well suited for reforestation and for simple silviculture (monocultures and clear-felling);

wood qualities that are otherwise in limited supplies in the tropics - of uniform coniferous wood valued for production of lumber, chemical pulp, paper, particleboard, etc

Tragic, isn't it? [/sarcasm]


Multi-scale predictions of massive conifer mortality due to chronic temperature rise

N. G. McDowell net al

Abstract

Global temperature rise and extremes accompanying drought threaten forests1, 2 and their associated climatic feedbacks3, 4. Our ability to accurately simulate drought-induced forest impacts remains highly uncertain5, 6 in part owing to our failure to integrate physiological measurements, regional-scale models, and dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs). Here we show consistent predictions of widespread mortality of needleleaf evergreen trees (NET) within Southwest USA by 2100 using state-of-the-art models evaluated against empirical data sets. Experimentally, dominant Southwest USA NET species died when they fell below predawn water potential (Ψpd) thresholds (April–August mean) beyond which photosynthesis, hydraulic and stomatal conductance, and carbohydrate availability approached zero. The evaluated regional models accurately predicted NET Ψpd, and 91% of predictions (10 out of 11) exceeded mortality thresholds within the twenty-first century due to temperature rise. The independent DGVMs predicted ≥50% loss of Northern Hemisphere NET by 2100, consistent with the NET findings for Southwest USA. Notably, the global models underestimated future mortality within Southwest USA, highlighting that predictions of future mortality within global models may be underestimates. Taken together, the validated regional predictions and the global simulations predict widespread conifer loss in coming decades under projected global warming.

Nature Climate Change (2015) doi:10.1038/nclimate2873






Obama Vetoes Bill To Dismantle EPA Global Warming Rules

President Barack Obama has vetoed legislation to repeal Environmental Protection Agency regulations on power plants that are a key part of the administration’s global warming agenda.

Obama announced Sunday morning he would not be considering bills to repeal the EPA’s power plant rules, meaning the bills are subject to a “pocket veto.”

“The Clean Power Plan is a tremendously important step in the fight against global climate change,” Obama said in a statement. “[T]he resolution would overturn the Clean Power Plan, which is critical to protecting against climate change and ensuring the health and well-being of our nation, I cannot support it.”

Obama’s veto stops the last chance a Republican-controlled Congress has this year of derailing EPA rules to limit carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. Congress passed bills in November that would have repealed these regulations under the Congressional Review Act.

“The president’s veto of legislation that would have halted his EPA’s regulatory overreach ignores reality in favor of politics, and leaves the legal system as the best remaining course for those of us who are seeking to protect consumers and businesses, at least during the remainder of this administration,” Karen Harbert, who heads up energy policy at the Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement.

The Chamber has joined dozens of business and union groups challenging the EPA’s power plant rules. Twenty-seven states have also sued the EPA, arguing its CO2 regulations violate the Clean Air Act and infringe on state powers to set their own energy policy.

“The EPA’s carbon regulations will irreversibly harm America’s power sector and raise the costs for every business and every American that uses electricity,” Harbert said. “These rules will negatively impact every industry and damage the economy without any significant reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions. We look forward to our day in court.”

Obama’s veto will likely be welcomed by environmentalists, who along with the administration, argue EPA rules are necessary to prove to the world the U.S. is taking global warming seriously. Obama and his allies say the U.S. needs to commit to emissions cuts if it wants other major countries, like China, to also fight warming.

Obama got his wish earlier this month when nearly 200 countries approved a United Nations treaty to cut global emissions levels, but the agreement is not legally binding — an international strategy used by the White House to keep any agreement from having to go before a Republican-controlled Senate.

Republican lawmakers have vowed to derail Obama’s global warming agenda, but the recent $1.1 trillion budget bill did little to keep the EPA from regulating CO2 emissions or keep the president from funding the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund.

The budget bill does, however, impose a little more oversight over EPA and holds the agency’s budget to $8.1 billion — that’s lower than the agency’s 2010 funding levels.

SOURCE





Scientist: Global Warming Won’t Be Dangerous

Global warming won’t raise global temperatures enough to be dangerous, according to an analysis of satellite data released over the weekend by University of Alabama scientists.

The analysis of satellite data stretches back 37 years and estimates that the temperature increase will be only 1.15° Celsius over the century. Keeping global warming below 2° Celsius by 2100 is the widely accepted goal promoted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Nations COP 21 Paris summit. Such a low rate of temperature increase would prevent what global warming alarmists say are the most hazardous impacts of global warming.

The average temperature of Earth’s atmosphere has warmed just over four tenths of a degree Celsius (almost three fourths of a degree Fahrenheit) during the past 37 years, with the greatest warming over the Arctic Ocean and Australia,” Dr. John Christy, director of the University of Alabama’s Earth System Science Center who preformed the analysis, told the global warming blog Watts Up With That. “That would put the average global temperature change over 100 years well under the 2.0 C (3.6 degrees F) goal set recently at the climate change summit in Paris.”

Christy is best known for being the first person to successfully develop a satellite temperature record.

SOURCE






Global Warming Is Now A ‘Women’s Issue’ Due To ‘Ecofeminism’

More evidence that most feminism is just a subset of Leftism, with the best interests of women  just a front

Environmentalists are increasingly claiming that global warming is a “women’s issue” and that the world needs “eco-feminism” as a path forward.

“We know that the world’s poor feel the effects of climate change most acutely, but it turns out there is an even more vulnerable subset to that population: women” reads the article The Sierra Club tweeted Monday.

The author worries about a “agricultural resource gap for women farmers” and that global warming could increase the risk of sexual assault. The author even notes that “women are too often portrayed only as victims of climate change who must learn to adapt, rather than potential leaders and decision-makers.”

SOURCE






The socialist connection again

Bernie Sanders: ‘I'm Running Because We Need to Address the Planetary Crisis of Climate Change’

In his opening statement at the third Democratic presidential debate hosted by ABC News at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire on Saturday night, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said he is running because America needs to address “the planetary crisis” caused by climate change.

Sanders also said he is running because “our economy is rigged” and the campaign finance system is one where “billionaires are spending hundreds of millionaires of dollars to buy candidates," and because he wants a new foreign policy "that destroys ISIS, but...does not get us involved in perpetual warfare in the quagmire of the Middle East."

Here is Sen. Sanders' opening statement:

I am running for president of the United States because it is too late for establishment politics and establishment economics.

I'm running for president because our economy is rigged, because working people are working longer hours for lower wages and almost all of new wealth and income being created is going to the top one percent. I'm running for president because I'm going to create an economy that works for working families not just billionaires.
I'm running for president because we have a campaign finance system which is corrupt, where billionaires are spending hundreds of millionaires of dollars to buy candidates who will represent their interests rather than the middle class and working families.

I'm running because we need to address the planetary crisis of climate change and take on the fossil fuel industry and transform our energy system away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy.

I'm running for president because I want a new foreign policy--one that takes on Isis, one that destroys ISIS, but one that does not get us involved in perpetual warfare in the quagmire of the Middle East but rather works around a major coalition of wealthy and powerful nations supporting Muslim troops on the ground. That's the kind of coalition we need--and that's the kind of coalition I will put together.

SOURCE





Groundwater depletion adding to global sea-level rise

Increasing amounts of water are being depleted from the world’s aquifers, and scientists have estimated that a large portion of the water ends up flowing into the oceans.

So much groundwater is being pumped from wells that researchers say it is contributing significantly to global sea-level rise.

Hydrologists Yoshihide Wada and Marc Bierkens have calculated estimates of the amounts of groundwater depleted annually since 1900, and their findings are striking. When plotted on a chart, their figures show depletion occurring at an accelerating pace – which in turn is pushing the levels of the oceans higher.

The quickening rate of global depletion adds an alarming dimension to scientists' findings, based on satellite measurements, which reveal widespread declines in aquifers around the world. And as that water flows off the continents, it is adding to the problem of rising seas as glaciers and ice sheets melt due to global warming.

“If we want to understand current sea-level rise, which we need to understand to better predict future sea-level rise, we have to take account of this groundwater contribution,” said Bierkens, a professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands who is also affiliated with the institute Deltares.

Wada, a research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, said the world’s demand for water has grown significantly in the past 15 years as the global population has swelled. More water is being used to produce food, and much of that water is being pumped from aquifers.

Climate has also played a role in places like California, where drought has led farmers to pump groundwater more heavily to make up for the lack of surface water.

As water is pumped from wells, some of it is taken up by crops or piped to cities. Some evaporates and ends up in the clouds. In places, some of the water soaks back into the ground and replenishes aquifers. But scientists have calculated that much of the groundwater winds up in rivers and ultimately in the oceans.

Bierkens and Wada have estimated that in 1960, the amounts of groundwater depleted each year contributed between 0.09 and 0.27 millimeters to sea-level rise. By 1990, that had grown to 0.25-0.54 millimeters per year. And in 2014, they estimated groundwater depletion was causing between 0.41 millimeters and 0.89 millimeters of sea-level rise each year.

Researcher have produced varying estimates, with groundwater depletion accounting for between 10 percent and 30 percent of annual sea-level rise in recent years. Bierkens and Wada came down in the middle at roughly 20 percent in a 2012 research paper.

That makes groundwater a small yet significant chunk of the projected rise in the world's oceans, which threatens to swamp many low-lying islands and inundate coastal cities in places from the United States to China to Brazil.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has projected using a range of scenarios that the seas could rise by between 1 foot and slightly more than 3 feet by 2100. Other researchers have warned that the oceans could rise faster.

Because groundwater pumping isn't well monitored or measured in most places, scientific estimates of depletion are calculated based on limited available data. That includes recorded declines in groundwater levels when that information is available. In many places, though, measurements of changes in water levels aren't publicly shared or are only partially released, complicating the work of researchers.

In a 2011 study, Leonard Konikow of the U.S. Geological Survey calculated that groundwater depletion accounted for about 6 percent of sea-level rise during the 20th century. But he estimated that share grew to 13 percent between 2000 and 2008.

Konikow said even though the rate of sea-level rise has increased, the rate at which the world’s aquifers are being depleted "has increased proportionately more.”

Special Report – Pumped Dry: The Global Crisis of Vanishing Groundwater

Wada said more studies of this groundwater contribution will be vital in planning mitigation measures to adapt to rising seas.

The trends also point to a need to increase the efficiency of irrigation and take other steps to lessen overpumping, Bierkens said.

Groundwater has been called a "hidden resource" because in many areas people have long been largely oblivious as aquifers have receded. But Bierkens said that doesn't lessen the urgency of doing something about the world's growing depletion problem.

“Per person on this Earth, we should try to decrease water demand,” Bierkens said Thursday in an interview by Skype from San Francisco, where he and Wada were attending a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Bierkens likened overpumping to living on borrowed money.

“You’re basically depleting your savings to feed yourself, and that is actually not a good idea,” Bierkens said. “Everybody who runs a household knows that this is not sustainable in the end.”

In a 2014 article in the journal Nature Geoscience, Wada and other scientists analyzed several strategies for lessening “water stress” around the world in the coming decades. The strategies ranged from moving toward more efficient irrigation systems and improving crop yields to increasing the amounts of water stored in reservoirs and building more desalination plants.

They concluded that with a variety of strategies, it would be possible to hold steady the number of people living in water-stressed areas – now about one-third of the world’s population – or even reduce that number.

SOURCE

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