Humans held responsible for twists and turns of climate change since 1900

The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (the Gulfstream to you) has clearly had a large role in explaining oscillations in our climate.  As such it is something of an alternative to CO2 as an influence. So that is pesky to Warmists.

The authors below, however, have done all sorts of revisions, estimates and modelling which have enabled them to claim that the AMO has in fact done nothing. All the changes are due to human deeds.  So a simple explanation has been swapped for a complex one

When you are a Warmist however you have to ignore a lot.  You even have to ignore the philosophy of science.  One of the basic axioms of science is what some people call Occam's razor:  That a simpler explanation is always to be preferred to a complex one. When we apply that axiom to the explanation put forward by the authors below we have to conclude that their explanation is wrong


While industry and agriculture belched greenhouse gases at an increasing pace through the 20th century, global temperature followed a jagged course, surging for 3 decades starting in 1915, leveling off from the 1950s to the late 1970s, and then resuming its climb. For decades, scientists have chalked up these early swings to the planet’s internal variability—in particular, a climatic pacemaker called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), which is characterized by long-term shifts in ocean temperatures. But researchers are increasingly questioning whether the AMO played the dominant role once thought. The oceanic pacemaker seems to be fluttering.

It is now possible to explain the record’s twists and turns almost entirely without the AMO, says Karsten Haustein, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and lead author of a new study published this month in the Journal of Climate. After correcting for the distinct effects of pollution hazes over land and ocean and for flaws in the temperature record, Haustein and his colleagues calculated that the interplay of greenhouse gases and atmospheric pollution almost singlehandedly shaped 20th century climate. “It’s very unlikely there’s this ocean leprechaun that produces cyclicity that we don’t know about,” Haustein says—which means it is also unlikely that a future cool swing in the AMO will blunt the ongoing human-driven warming.

Others aren’t convinced the “leprechaun” is entirely vanquished. “They are probably right in that [the AMO] is not as big a player globally as has sometimes been thought,” says Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. “But my guess is that they underestimate its role a bit.”

The AMO arose from observations that sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic seem to swing from unusually warm to cold and back over some 20 to 60 years; the ancient climate appears to have had similar swings. Researchers theorized that periodic shifts in the conveyor belt of Atlantic Ocean currents drive this variability. But why the conveyor would regularly speed and slow on its own was a mystery, and the evidence for grand regular oscillations has slowly been eroding, says Gabriele Hegerl, a statistical climatologist at the University of Edinburgh. “Those are harder to defend.”

The new skepticism kicked off with work led by Ben Booth, a climate scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, U.K.. In 2012, he reported in Nature that pollution hazes, or aerosols, began thickening the clouds over the Atlantic in the 1950s, which could have cooled the ocean with little help from an internal oscillation. In the past year, several independent models have yielded similar results. Meanwhile, most global climate models have been unable to reproduce AMO-like oscillations unless researchers include the influence of pollutants, such as soot and sulfates produced by burning fossil fuels, says Amy Clement, a climate scientist at the University of Miami in Florida.

Now, it seems plausible that such human influences, with help from aerosols spewed by volcanic eruptions, drove virtually all 20th century climate change. Haustein and his co-authors tweaked a relatively simple climate model to account for the fact that most pollution originates over land, which heats and cools faster than the ocean—and there’s much more land in the Northern Hemisphere. And they dialed back the cooling effect of volcanic eruptions—a reasonable move, says Booth, who is not affiliated with the study. “We’ve known models respond too strongly to volcanoes.”

The also adjusted the global temperature record to account for a change in how ocean temperatures are measured; during World War II, the British practice of measuring water samples in buckets gave way to systematically warmer U.S. readings of water passing through ships’ intake valves. Past efforts to compensate for that change fell short, Haustein and his team found, so they used data from weather stations on coastlines and islands to correct the record.

As input for the model, the team used greenhouse gas and aerosol records developed for the next U.N. climate report, along with records of historical volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, and El Niño warmings of the Pacific. Comparing the simulated climate with the adjusted temperature record, they found that multidecadal variability could explain only 7% of the record. Instead, soot from industry drove early 20th century warming as it drifted into the Arctic, darkening snow and absorbing sunlight. After World War II, light-reflecting sulfate haze from power plants increased, holding off potential warming from rising greenhouse gases. Then, pollution control arrived during the 1970s, allowing warming to speed ahead.

It’s a compelling portrait, but it could have been substantially different if the team had used other, equally justifiable assumptions about the climate impact of aerosols, Booth says. Trenberth thinks the team’s adjustments had the effect of fitting the model to an uncertain record. “There is considerable wiggle room in just what the actual record is,” he says.

Haustein disputes that the team tailored the model to explain the 20th century warming. “All we did was use available data in the most physically consistent way,” he says. The researchers ran the model from 1500 to 2015, and he says it matches paleoclimate records well, including Europe’s Little Ice Age.

If a grand ocean oscillation isn’t shaping climate, a future ocean cooling is unlikely to buy society time to address global warming. But the demise of the AMO also might make it easier to predict what is in store. “All we’re going to get in the future,” Haustein says, “is what we do.”

SOURCE





Why resources aren’t ‘natural’ and will never run out

Last week, the World Wildlife Fund proclaimed May 10 to be Europe’s “Overshoot Day,” the day that Europe consumed its portion of Earth’s resources for the year. The WWF, the United Nations, and universities continue to warn that modern society is rapidly depleting our natural resources. But instead, trends show that for all practical purposes, Earth’s resources will never run out.

The World Wildlife Fund proclaims August 1 this year as Earth Overshoot Day, where society will have used “more natural resources than the planet is able to produce in a 12-month period.” They estimate that Overshoot Day for the United States occurred already in March, warning that the US is using four times its share of sustainable global resources.

Overshoot Day is a continuation of the long-running ideology that humans are consuming too much of Earth’s resources. [I commented on that back in the '70s -- JR]
Environmentalist David Suzuki said, “We live in a world of finite resources. Although it may sometimes seem quite big, Earth is really very small―a tiny blue and green oasis of life in a cold universe.” Margaret Beckett, UK Environment Secretary pointed out in 2006, “It is a stark and arresting fact that, since the middle of the 20th century, humankind has consumed more natural resources than in all previous human history.”

Price trends are usually a good indicator of resource scarcity. The World Bank maintains a world commodity price database of 41 commodities from 1960 to present. Inflation-adjusted trends show that from 1960-2015, food prices have declined, agricultural raw material and industrial metal prices have been flat, and energy prices, dominatedWhy resources aren’t ‘natural’ and will never run out by the price of oil, have increased. Commodity prices fluctuate widely from decade to decade, but we don’t see a rising price trend indicating resource exhaustion.

The 1972 international best-selling book Limits to Growth predicted humanity would run out of aluminum by 2027, copper by 2020, gold by 2001, lead by 2036, mercury by 2013, silver by 2014, and zinc by 2022. But today, none of these metals is in historically short supply.

Global production of industrial metals soared from 1960-2014. Annual production levels were up: aluminum (996 percent), copper (417 percent), iron ore (531 percent), lead (343 percent), nickel (455 percent), tin (66 percent), and zinc (348 percent). At the same time, the World Bank industrial metal real price index of these seven metals was flat, down a little more thanWhy resources aren’t ‘natural’ and will never run out 1 one percent by 2015. World reserves of copper, iron ore, lead, and zinc stand near all-time highs. Prices are not rising as predicted by resource-depletion pessimists.

“Natural resources” is a misleading label. The term “natural resources” conveys the naive idea that food, energy, or materials can merely be plucked from a tree or gathered from a field or stream. Raw materials are natural, but resources are created by humans from raw materials.

Consider the miracle of copper refining. Rock containing copper is fragmented by explosions and then loaded onto huge trucks with 240-ton capacity. Each ton of rock contains only 13 pounds of copper. The copper ore then goes through a series of milling machines that grind the rock down to a fine powder. Next the powder goes through a flotation cell, where the copper floats to the top of a solution and is skimmed off, producing 28 percent copper concentrate. Three different furnaces come next, smelting the metal into 98 percent copper. Finally, electrolysis is used in a half-mile-long factory to produce ingots that are 99.99 percent copper. Advancing human technology continues to produce high-quality copper from ores of declining copper concentration.

But aren’t we running out of raw materials to make copper metal and other resources? Most people don’t realize the vast quantity of raw materials available on our planet. Canadian geologist David Brooks estimated that a single average cubic mile of Earth’s crust contains a billion tons of aluminum (from bauxite), over 500 million tons of iron, a million tons of zinc and 600,000 tons of copper.

There are 57 million such square miles of Earth’s land surface and almost triple that area under the surface of the oceans. Of course, only a tiny fraction of metals in Earth’s crust is economically recoverable with today’s technology. Nevertheless, Earth’s supply of raw materials is finite, but vast.

But aren’t we running out of hydrocarbon energy? In 1977, President Jimmy Carter told the nation, “World consumption of oil is still going up. If it were possible to keep it rising during the 1970s and 1980s …we could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.”

President Carter and his advisors were wrong. Petroleum engineers changed the world with the technological advances of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. United States daily oil production more than doubled from 5 million barrels in 2008 over 12 million barrels today. US natural gas production also doubled over the last decade.Why resources aren’t ‘natural’ and will never run out 2

From 1980-2017 world petroleum production increased more than 50 percent. But world crude oil reserves increased 150 percent, from 27 years of supply to 46 years of supply at higher production rates. The same doomsayers that continue to forecast resource depletion were certain we had reached peak oil a decade ago.

Today, humanity has the greatest abundance of resources in history. Human ingenuity determines resource availability, not the amount of fruit on a tree or the number of rocks on the ground. Driven by advancing human technology, for all practical purposes, Earth’s resources will never run out.

SOURCE





Presidential wannabe’s climate Christmas tree

Washington State Governor Jay Inslee wants to be President of the United States. If elected, he wants to increase spending by $9 trillion (that’s “t”) by 2030 to fight climate change.

Gov. Inslee’s not exactly a household name, and it shows. The second-term governor is among two dozen declared Democrats who are running for president and he does not register in this crowded field – meaning he’s polling nationally somewhere between zero and 0.8 percent. Even Andrew Yang, another obscurity running for the job, polls better.

Presumably in an effort to break out of the tenths-of-a-percent digits in polling, Gov. Inslee last week unveiled his $9 trillion “Evergreen Economy” plan to transform the country to achieve a promised “net-zero climate pollution before 2045.” This plan follows his initial proposal for “100% clean standards for electricity, new vehicles and new buildings” by 2030, and phasing out coal power by 2035.

According to the plan, there is no need to worry about any economic dislocation, such as the fossil fuel industry being put out of business and the millions of American households standing to lose their employment. Gov. Inslee promises “a comprehensive suite of 28 policy initiatives” that would “put Americans to work in every community” with 8 million new jobs in ten years. These jobs will be created in “clean manufacturing,” “climate-smart infrastructure” and scientific research that will pay “family supporting wages & benefits.”

Gov. Inslee’s plan prints out to 35 pages that outline his 28 initiatives. Within those pages are more bullet points than ornaments on the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center in New York City.

Let’s give Gov. Inslee some credit: while climate change has become dogma for every Democratic candidate running for president, his plan provides more information than the typical vapid media release of promises from politicians. Rather, his plan is a whole booklet of mostly vapid promises, with some program details like expanding and updating the Weatherization Assistance Program and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

There are two major problems with Gov. Inslee’s “Climate Mission.” First, $9 trillion in additional federal and private sector dollars has to come from somewhere, and there are not enough millionaires and billionaires to come close to paying for this, even if the government confiscated their wealth.

To paraphrase the late Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, a trillion here, a trillion there – pretty soon it adds up to real money. (Sen. Dirksen actually said “billion” back in the 1960s). With the current federal debt at $22 trillion and growing with existing spending and entitlements, it’s hard to know how much longer this spending-and-debt spree can be sustained. All but a handful of politicians from both parties no longer pretend to care about the national debt, so why should Jay Inslee? However, there is a hard reality to the mathematics of financing debt, which is not unlimited.

Gov. Inslee’s plan also would induce or mandate the private sector to spend money, but that is even more impractical since the private economy can’t print money like the federal government does. American industries also have to compete globally with energy producing countries that will continue to use plentiful, lower-cost fossil fuels.  Since Russia and the Middle East do not share Gov. Inslee’s climate change obsession, they will be more than happy to watch him or some other president pursue it.

There is an even bigger, more alarming problem with Gov. Inslee’s climate plan; that is, what if we spent $9 trillion for something completely unnecessary and impractical?

Throughout the Evergreen Plan, Gov. Inslee assumes its necessity and soundness. “We need a president guided by science,” he said, but he offers none in his plan to justify $9 trillion to attempt to turn the nation’s energy sector and infrastructure inside out. For all his stated commitment to “clean” energy, there also is no mention of nuclear, the cleanest energy in use throughout the world today.

Believing in man-made climate change apparently means never having to prove it. The debate is over, the science is settled, we are constantly told. Gov. Inslee all by himself has started a “Climate Movement” where he claims, “[w]e are the first generation to feel the sting of climate change, and we are the last generation that can do something about it. The science is clear – we have a short period of time to act.” But, nowhere does he reference actual science or explain why there is a “short time” remaining. Instead, we are supposed to believe a politician’s 35 pages of promises to painlessly transform and better our lives for another $9 trillion based on a truism.

An honest look at the science of the climate would throw a lot of cold water on a government takeover of the economy to solve something that may not need fixing – or can’t be fixed. Time and again claims by politicians, activists and government-funded scientists about climate change have been either proven wrong or been worthy of serious skepticism.

Examples that demolish climate myths continue to manifest, mostly recently including the now expanding glaciers in Iceland and Greenland, the real cause of wildfires in California, or how the “greenhouse effect” actually works to impact the earth. The list goes on.

The point is, before we commit to trillions of dollars to any endeavor, especially one proposed by an ambitious politician, a lot more debate and scrutiny is warranted

SOURCE





British police push to prosecute all 1,130 arrested in big Warmist  protests

Scotland Yard is pushing to prosecute all the 1,130 people arrested in the Extinction Rebellion (XR) protest as it called for tougher penalties to deter similar demonstrations.

The Metropolitan Police has set up a dedicated unit of 30 officers to investigate the public order offences allegedly committed by the arrested protesters who range in age from 19 to over 70.

"It is our anticipation that we are putting all of those [arrested] to the Crown Prosecution Service," said Laurence Taylor, deputy assistant commissioner.

If successful, it would be the biggest mass prosecution for civil disobedience for at least 37 years, surpassing the anti-nuclear protests at Upper Heyford in 1982

SOURCE






Australian election result should force Labor Party to rethink its climate change policies

The Coalition’s stunning re-election victory is obviously a triumph for Prime Minister Scott Morrison. His campaign strategy of making economic management and the Labor Party’s big-target, big-taxing, transformative agenda the key election issues was a spectacular success.

Labor did not win the seats it was expected to, and needed to, to form government, in Victoria, Western Sydney, across Queensland, or in Western Australia.

But the result also suggests that the politics of the nation are being shaped by a new social geography. This is demonstrated, ironically, by the fate of former prime minister Tony Abbott, who lost his seat at an election that arguably vindicated the political strategy he has long promoted for the Liberal Party regarding climate change.

It was Abbott who led the Coalition to a crushing victory over Labor in 2013 by promising to “axe the carbon tax”. But when Malcolm Turnbull lost the prime ministership in August 2018, many commentators blamed his fall on an Abbott-inspired coup by the “hard-right, climate change-denying” faction of the Liberal Party.

As in Wentworth (which the Liberals will struggle to regain) affluent former Liberal voters who live in harbourside parts of Warringah such as Manly and Mosman have turned against the man who they condemn for strangling Australia’s response to climate change.

But what the election result has comprehensively shown is that neither Warringah nor Wentworth is representative of vast swathes of the rest of the nation, especially on climate policy. Wealthy voters who can easily pay higher electricity prices can literally afford to treat climate change as a moral issue requiring action regardless of the cost, and to thereby treat the election as a referendum on the issue.

But these sentiments were clearly not shared across the wider electorate. The centre-piece of Labor’s transformative agenda – its 50 per cent renewable energy target and 45 per cent emission reduction polices – did not translate into the election-swinging advantage in the key seats that pundits anticipated.

In fact, these policies almost certainly proved a liability, given that Morrison’s focus on economic management heavily targeted Bill Shorten’s repeated failure to explain the cost of his energy policies – a point the Prime Minister effectively drove home during the leaders’ debates.

Moreover, Labor’s climate change stance was undoubtedly influential in regional Queensland, where the equivocal attitude Labor displayed to the Adani mine project turned off voters concerned about mining jobs and the long-term future of the coal industry. The overall closeness of the election result suggests that the nation remains divided over climate policy.

But having staked so much on this issue, Labor’s election loss can only be viewed as a repudiation of its “progressive” approach.

Since the recently departed Bob Hawke’s fourth and final election victory in 1990, the Labor Party has only won two federal elections in its own right: the 1993 GST election and the 2007 WorkChoices election.

In both cases, Labor’s victory heavily relied on the political mistakes of the Coalition over tax and industrial relations.

Otherwise, Labor’s near 30-year quest to find an election-winning agenda of its own that can form the basis of Hawke-style sustained electoral success has produced a meagre political harvest.

Unless Labor is prepared to rethink the political mistakes that led it to support climate policies that have greater appeal to well-off elites of Wentworth and Warringah than to the battlers of Penrith and Picton, its electoral prospects will remain bleak.

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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Greenie hate

An email to Marc Morano copied to many climate skeptics:

From: Tim Remple tim@remple.us

Date: Thu, May 23, 2019, 20:07

Subject: FUCK YOU! DROP DEAD MOTHERFUCKER!!

Whereas you appeared on public at the recent House Natural Resources Committee, and

Whereas you said things that indicate your guilty of Crimes Against Humanity and Ecocide,

You are hereby official and irrevocably CURSED:

May you live long enough to see the collapse of both the climate and the eco-system on Planet Earth,

May you live long enough that your children and grandchildren likewise see the end of ALL LIFE on Planet Earth,

May they, when they understand what they YOU have done,

Ask you, "How the FUCK could you have done this to us??!!??

And may they then kill you!

May you die by their hand!

Looking them in the eye as THEY end your miserable life!!!!!

Curses are the recourse of people who have no actual power so this should bother nobody. It does however show how deep is the personal inadequacy of the curser.  He desperately needs to  be seen as heroic when he is in fact a nobody.  He has tied his own self-esteem to the climate myth.  To doubt global warming is to insult him personally. A couple of centuries ago he would have been burning witches -- JR.

Joe Bastardi comments:

"Greg Whitestone and David Legates witnessed a PSU climate ethics professor  trembling he was so upset while accusing me of leading to the deaths of millions even as I pointed out graphics that showed climate deaths were plummeting. One chart after another was systematically denied as it showed the opposite.  They are committed zealots and will not listen to reason"

Tim and Ruth Remple are anti-fracking activists who live in Longmont Colorado. That would fit with the email. And a Tim Remple is a Senior Software Engineer at NetApp SolidFire in Longmont, Colorado. Likely the same guy.

There is further nuttiness from him in a comment here of July 6, 2016. He lives in a fantasy world.  He seems to think that the Nazis are  coming to get him





In Another Reversal, Apple Allows App Countering Climate Alarmism

Apple’s on-again, off-again relationship with an online smartphone application that challenges global warming alarmism is back on.

The app, Inconvenient Facts, is available again in Apple’s App Store, much to the delight of the geologist who inspired it.

“I thought that it was entirely political,” Gregory Wrightstone, author of the book “Inconvenient Facts: The Science That Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know,” said of Apple’s original ban of the app in March. “I still don’t know, but we are back up and available.”

The book by Wrightstone, who has more than three decades of experience as a geologist, serves as the source of information on the app.

As The Daily Signal previously reported on Apple’s decision to backpedal on offering the app, Wrightstone points out that the board of the California-based tech giant includes former Vice President Al Gore, a leading proponent of the view that mankind’s activities propel dangerous climate change.

Apple initially approved the Inconvenient Facts app for sale on its iPhones on Feb. 3, then reversed itself and pulled the app March 4.

“In their rejection, Apple blamed several factors,” Wrightstone said in an email to The Daily Signal. “One was lack of compelling content. Another was limited functionality and use of the iPhone features.”

“The limited functionality meant that it was an app that could be web-based,” he said. “So, we added the phone component so that you can take a picture using the app and your camera, and we added an I LOVE CO2 banner at the bottom of the photo. My app developer and partner thought that might do the trick.”

The Daily Signal sought comment from Apple’s media relations office by phone and email, but the company had not responded by publication time.

For more than two months, the app remained available to Android users through the Google Play Store, where it has been downloaded about 16,000 times.

Apple reinserted the Inconvenient Facts app into its App Store on May 17, making a total of 60 facts about the climate change debate from Wrightstone’s book available to Apple users as well as Android users.

Complete with data, charts, and videos, the facts challenge the premise of alarmist theories linking man-made carbon dioxide emissions to dangerous levels of global warming or climate change.

Gore’s campaign to convince the public that rising levels of carbon dioxide could trigger catastrophic global warming was the subject of the 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” and the 2017 follow-up “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.”

The Daily Signal also sought comment from Gore via Delaware-based Carthage Group LLC, with which he is associated, and from the Climate Reality Project, which he founded. Neither organization had responded by publication time.

Users of the app simply tap on it to activate the features, including these “inconvenient facts”:

—“First and foremost, CO2 is plant food.”

—“140-million-year trend of dangerously decreasing CO2.”

—“Recent inconvenient pause of 18 years in warming, despite rise in CO2.”

—“The current warming trend is neither unusual nor unprecedented.”

—“Cold kills far more people than heat every year.”

—“There are more polar bears now than we’ve had for 50 years.”

Information about Wrightstone’s book and the app may be found at inconvenientfacts.xyz and on YouTube and Facebook.

SOURCE






India’s Coal Output To Grow 4.3% A Year Over Next 10 Years

Fitch Solutions Tuesday said India’s thermal coal output is projected to grow at an average annual rate of 4.3 percent by 2028.

“In absolute volume terms, China and India will have the largest impact on the global coal market balance,” Fitch Solutions Macro Research said in a report.

It further said the surge in Chinese imports that occurred over 2015-2017 as a result of dramatic domestic production curbs was a temporary phenomenon.

“We forecast thermal coal production in China to stagnate at 0.5 percent growth per annum from 2019 onwards, but not decline, as new coal mines in Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces offset mine closures in the rest of the country,” it said.

It further estimates that production by state-owned Coal India (CIL) — which accounts for around 90 percent of domestic output — will underwhelm the government expectations.

“We forecast India’s thermal coal output to grow by an average annual rate of 4.3 percent over 2019-2028,” it said.

Along with weaker Chinese and Indian demand, South Korea and Japan will also see coal consumption slowing down in 2019 due to heightening environmental concerns, it added.

“We maintain our thermal coal price forecast for 2019 at [$85/ton] as our previous belief that prices will be pressured downwards in 2019 due to lower seaborne demand from China and India, while global production will remain buoyant, is playing out,” the report noted.

SOURCE






EU Top Court Throws Out Climate Lawsuit

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has rejected a case brought by 10 families against the European Union.

The families claimed that the bloc’s inaction on climate change was harming their homes and livelihoods, lawyers said on Wednesday.

Plaintiffs from the EU, Kenya, and Fiji had filed the case in May of last year, saying climate change had already seriously impacted their lives and damaged their ability to make a living.

The plaintiffs included a family from the German island of Langeoog, who said those living on small islands would be the first to lose their homes to rising sea levels.

There was also a family from the Italian Alps who said that a shorter winter was leading to fewer tourists coming to the region for winter sports, a Swedish reindeer herder, and a Portuguese forester who lost a large portion of his property to wildfires in 2017.

Lawyers for the “People’s Climate Case” have said they will appeal the decision by the ECJ that individuals cannot sue the European Union for its environmental policy.

The judges found that “every individual is likely to be affected one way or another by climate change,” but that this was no legal grounds to file a complaint against the EU.

SOURCE





James Cook University head in trouble over firing of Prof. Ridd

Ridd is an honest scientist who had the daring to call out fake Greenie science at the university.  So they hate him with a passion.  In an old, old strategy, they thought to protect the Greenie crooks by attacking the whistleblower

If the vice-chancellor of James Cook University thinks she can keep a low profile, she is mistaken. Sandra Harding’s management of the sacking of physics professor Peter Ridd is under the microscope for good reason. The buck stops at the top. And much is at stake, with JCU facing international reputational damage over the scandal, huge legal costs, cost-cutting pressures from falling student numbers and staff discontent.

“The bottom line is Sandra Harding should go,” says a former member of the university’s 15-member governing council. “It’s in the interest of everybody that she retires.” Speaking to The Weekend Australian this week, the former council member says if Harding doesn’t retire, she should be sacked.

Ridd, an esteemed physics professor respected by students and staff, was sacked by JCU using a bogus claim of uncollegial behaviour that was rejected by the Federal Circuit Court last month. He questioned the quality of science about coral bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef. JCU spent hundreds of thousands of dollars defending its right to sack Ridd, rather than encouraging a healthy debate about the claims he made.

So much for JCU being a bastion of academic freedom in the search of the truth. “Ridd is a decent man,” says the former council member who has had a long association with JCU, adding that Ridd did not want this fight. “He never set out to hurt anybody. But he did believe in what he was saying, he had evidence, and it’s proper to call out your colleagues if that is needed, to get to the truth. JCU took the nuclear option against Ridd, and that was crazy.”

Sacking Ridd was squarely a management issue for the VC, but the former council member says that JCU’s governing council should now be far more involved given the fallout from this debacle.

Still in close contact with JCU staff, including academics, the former council member says staff are upset and “whether or not they agree with Ridd is a separate matter. This court case probably cost the university a million bucks, which is money JCU cannot afford.”

The Weekend Australian has been told JCU is cutting about $20 million each year over its forward estimates due to financial pressures because the university is not meeting its own student enrolment targets. The former JCU council member confirms that is “one of the reasons why the staff across campus are very unhappy”.

“They know that there will be further redundancies coming. Those redundancies have already been chosen, but the staff haven’t been told who they are.”

According to the ex-member, the other reason the governing council should be more involved is that “the sacking of Ridd is being watched around the world. It is damaging JCU’s reputation in an area where JCU leads the world. In marine science, JCU is the top dog. To have that reputation damaged is extraordinarily worrying.”

The Weekend Australian also has been told JCU’s governing council has received briefings but otherwise has had little hands-on involvement in the Ridd matter. Given that council members have fiduciary duties similar to board members, some are asking why the governing council is not more involved with issues of reputational damage to JCU and the big bucks spent on court battles with Ridd.

The Weekend Australian sought an interview with Harding. She declined. A spokesman provided some answers by email to a list of questions, and a link to a statement by JCU provost Chris Cocklin after the Federal Circuit Court found against the university last month. The Weekend Australian also rang and left a message with JCU chancellor Bill Tweddell, who chairs the council. He did not return the call.

Though Harding has tried to keep her head down, the focus will remain on her. And it is not just her handling of the Ridd case that is causing consternation. “One of JCU’s current council members has been precluded from taking part in any council discussion involving Ridd because they reckon he has a conflict of interest because he knows one of the lawyers acting for Ridd,” says an insider.

“That’s not a conflict of interest,” he says, clearly frustrated by the erosion of council oversight, adding that “the council member didn’t want to rock the boat, so he has agreed not to attend meetings when the matter is discussed. She (Harding) might fight the battle, but she won’t win the war and there was never a need for the war in the first place. (JCU’s) campus is a very unhappy place right now.”

All this when Harding, in her 60s, might be planning one more career move. Her term as JCU boss expires at the end of 2021. She has been mentioned as a future Queensland governor. Some say she has her sights on one of Australia’s grander Group of Eight universities. But the controversy over her handling of Ridd won’t make either promotion easy.

“This is a significant bump in that road to a bigger and better position,” says one insider, who has been involved in the governance of JCU.

According to the former member of JCU’s governing council, Ridd has more support on campus than he realises, including from fellow academics. Something for Harding to keep in mind.

This month, Ridd told The Weekend Australian that none of his colleagues had defended him publicly. He suggested the need for “kamikaze academics”, academics who are older and established enough to resign in the noble cause of defending academic freedom. A few days later, JCU adjunct associate professor Sheilagh Cronin resigned from her unpaid position at the university. “After reading that, I thought ‘that’s me’,” she told The Weekend Australian this week.

Cronin wrote to Harding, resigning from her role at JCU and outlining her concerns over Ridd’s treatment: “I believe his treatment by yourself and your board is completely contrary to the philosophy of open discussion and debate that should be at the heart of every university. It saddens me that the reputation of JCU is being damaged by the injustice of Professor Ridd’s case.”

Cronin told The Weekend Australian she is also concerned about the scale of money spent on litigation against Ridd, and more still if JCU appeals.

“When the federal government gives us money, we are very closely scrutinised and so we should be. These are precious dollars that could be used elsewhere,” says Cronin, a doctor who has overseen a $23m budget to provide health services through the Western Queensland Primary Health Network. It is the same at JCU, she says, where the governing council has oversight duties.

“I’m not looking for a row with JCU, but I think there is an important principle of openness and transparency when you’re handling taxpayer dollars.”

Cronin is troubled by the lack of introspection at the highest levels of JCU: “They’re putting all the blame on him and they aren’t looking at themselves.”

Cronin has not received a response from Harding.

A few weeks ago, former JCU dean of science John Nicol wrote to each of JCU’s council members expressing his concern that “the university’s reputation as an honest broker in the field of marine science has been trashed”.

“I am writing to express my concern and disappointment at the worldwide unmitigated adverse publicity, which the university management has brought to bear on James Cook University’s fine reputation, through its inaction in ensuring the integrity of all of its research output and its un-conscienable (sic) treatment of Professor Peter Ridd who sought to encourage the university to restore such integrity.”

Nicol concluded his letter to council members as follows: “James Cook University now needs your direct intervention and support.” He has not received a response to his concerns from any council members.

The Weekend Australian asked Harding whether, given the dismal fallout from the Ridd saga, JCU intends to commit to the set of principles about academic freedom recommended by former High Court chief justice Robert French in his recent report to the Morrison government.

Harding had nothing to say. A spokesman referred back to the provost’s April statement, adding this: “JCU strongly supports the principle of academic freedom and notes that the French review found there was … no evidence, on the basis of recent events, which would answer the pejorative description of a ‘free speech crisis’ on campus.”

Pulling a single line from the lengthy French review has further disappointed Harding’s critics. “Harding is making a huge mistake in the way she’s managing this whole issue,” the former council member says of the university’s attempt to justify the Ridd debacle and fob off the French review.

French appealed to university vice-chancellors to embed a culture of academic freedom on their campuses: “A culture powerfully predisposed to the exercise of freedom of speech and academic freedom is ultimately more effective than the most tightly drawn rule. A culture not so disposed will undermine the most emphatic state of principles.”

French’s recommendation for a model code of academic freedom was released by the Morrison government barely two weeks before JCU’s attempt to sack Ridd was rejected by a court at first instance.

Harding might re-read the whole 300-page French review before deciding to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting the respected physics professor in another round of expensive and damaging litigation.

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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Illegal ozone-depleting gases traced to rogue factories in eastern China

The science behind the claim that CFCs cause the ozone hole has been drastically revised so it is no surprise that the hole is NOT shrinking.  It oscillates but it was at its biggest in 2015, many years after it was supposed to start shrinking.  So China is doing no harm

Industries in northeastern China have spewed large quantities of an ozone-depleting gas into the atmosphere in violation of an international treaty, global scientists say.

And it’s slowing down the rate of recovery for the hole in the crucial ozone layer.

The ozone layer is a region of Earth’s stratosphere that essentially act as a shield and absorbs most of the sun’s ultraviolet (UV) radiation.

So when scientists discovered in 1985 that there was a hole in it over Antarctica and Australia, it was very unsettling news.

After that, we all got together and banned the use of harmful gases that depleted Earth’s protective layer in the 1987 Montreal Protocol and ever since it has more-or-less been on a slow recovery ever since.

China is a signatory of the Montreal Protocol but it looks as if the country hasn’t been keeping up its end of the bargain.

Since 2013 annual emissions from northeastern China of a banned chemical called CFC-11 have increased by about 7000 tonnes, researchers reported overnight in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.

“This increase accounts for a substantial fraction (at least 40 to 60 per cent) of the global rise in CFC-11 emissions,” they wrote.

Before it was phased out CFC-11, or Chlorofluorocarbon-11, was widely used in the 1970s and 1980s as a refrigerant and to make foam insulation. The chemical is a major cause of ozone depletion.

Ever since the ban, the concentration of the chemical in the atmosphere has been steadily declining but last year startled scientists discovered that the pace of that slowdown dropped by half from 2013 to 2017. Because the chemical does not occur in nature, the change could only have been produced by new emissions.

Using high-frequency atmospheric observations from Gosan, South Korea, and Hateruma, Japan, together with global monitoring data and atmospheric chemical transport model simulations, researchers investigated the likely culprit and have pointed the finger at eastern China.

Reports last year from the Environmental Investigation Agency fingered Chinese foam factories in the coastal province of Shandong and the inland province of Hebei, which surrounds Beijing.

Suspicions were strengthened when authorities subsequently shut down some of these facilities without explanation.

Manufacturers have said they continued to use the banned product because of its better quality and cheaper price.

The New York Times reported that some factories were producing the gas in secret, while other manufacturers said the local governments turned a blind eye.

“It wasn’t entirely a surprise,” said Matthew Rigby, lead author of the study and Reader in Atmospheric Chemistry in the School of Chemistry at the University of Bristol.

Paul Fraser, an honorary fellow at Australia’s CSIRO Climate Science Centre and co-author of the paper said while eastern China accounted for about half of the rise in CFC-11, global scientists don’t have the technology in place to monitor large parts of the rest of the world.

Along with other scientists, he presented the data last year to Chinese authorities and is optimistic action will be taken to reduce the harm done by the emissions.

“They were concerned, it was clear I think ... that they were going to tackle this issue,” he told ABC radio this morning.

But as yet, he has not seen or heard any indication that China has begun cracking down on the rogue factories thought to be responsible.

Because scientists have noticed the chemical increase in the atmosphere early, “that gives us a really good chance to make sure they don’t do too much damage,” he said.

But pouring more CFC-11 into the air could also prevent ozone from returning to normal levels, scientists warn.

“If emissions do not decline, it will delay the recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole, possibly for decades,” Mr Fraser said.

Paul Krummel, and expert in atmospheric composition and chemistry at the Climate Science Centre at the CSIRO said research like this was important to keep countries honest.

“This study highlights the importance of undertaking long-term measurements of trace gases like CFC-11 to verify the efficacy of international protocols and treaties,” he said.

SOURCE 





'Authoritative propaganda': Skeptics blast U.N. warning of mass species extinction

A widely touted United Nations report predicting mass species extinction took a beating Wednesday at a House subcommittee hearing, with Republican-called witnesses blasting the claims as “highly exaggerated” and “authoritative propaganda.”

The executive summary released May 6 by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services concluded that “transformative change” was needed to save as many as 1 million species at risk of extinction.

“The evidence is unequivocal. Biodiversity, which is important in its own right and essential for human well-being, is being destroyed by human activities at a rate unprecedented in human history,” Robert Watson, former chairman of IPBES, told the Natural Resources subcommittee on water, oceans and wildlife.

Rep. Jared Huffman, the California Democrat who chairs the subcommittee, said Earth is “currently in what they call the sixth mass extinction, and species are disappearing 100 times faster than historic rates, mostly because of things that we are doing.”

Challenging that premise was Patrick Moore, a former Greenpeace leader, who argued that species extinction has declined in the past century thanks to international efforts. He insisted there was “zero evidence that any such event is occurring now or has even begun to occur.”

“As with the manufactured ‘climate crisis,’ they are using the specter of mass extinction as a fear tactic to scare the public into compliance,” Mr. Moore said in his prepared remarks. “The IPBES itself is an existential threat to sensible policy on biodiversity conservation.”

The result was a feisty hearing in which Mr. Huffman took aim at the credentials of the Republican witnesses and Republicans accused the subcommittee of holding a hearing based on a document that nobody had read.

The report was prepared by 145 authors over three years using 15,000 peer-reviewed publications and 15,000 comments, but the full document remains classified and has yet to be released. A summary was released two weeks ago at a plenary session in Paris.

“Right now, I feel like I’m part of a book club, and we’re going to give opinions on the book, except we’re all making it up because no one has actually read the book,” said Rep. Rob Bishop, Utah Republican. “If you’d actually waited until the report was released and people could look at it, maybe there would be a point at that point that this could be a legitimate hearing.”

The five factors driving the extinction threat are “land and sea use changes; exploitation of organisms; climate change; pollution; and invasive species,” Mr. Huffman said.

“All of these are things we can do something about, but we’re not on track to slow the extinction crisis,” Mr. Huffman said. “We need to do more.”

The “extinction crisis” claim met with skepticism from Rep. Tom McClintock, California Republican, who ticked off previous apocalyptic extinction predictions, including a 1970 warning by a Smithsonian official that 75% to 80% of all animals would be extinct by 1995.

He also challenged the report’s claim of an estimated 8 million animal and planet species, including insects, noting that the International Union for Conservation of Nature has cataloged only 1.8 million. About 800 are known to have gone extinct since 1500.

“You cannot call yourself a scientist if you pretend that there are 6.2 million species that have no names and have never been identified,” said Mr. Moore. “That is not science. That is fiction. Fairy tale stories. And that’s what we’re being told here.”

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano described the report as a politically driven document, “the latest U.N. appeal to give it more power, more scientific authority, more money and more regulatory control.”

“At best, the U.N. science panels represent nothing more than ‘authoritative bureaucracy,’ claiming they hype the problem and then come up with the solution that puts them in charge of ‘solving’ the issue in perpetuity,” Mr. Morano said in his prepared remarks. “A more accurate term for the U.N. than ‘authoritative science’ may be ‘authoritative propaganda.’”

Mr. Huffman fired back at the Republican witnesses by noting that Greenpeace has denied that Mr. Moore is a co-founder, despite a Greenpeace screenshot listing him as one of five founders, and referring to Mr. Morano as a troll.

“I don’t know what inspires someone to make a career out of trolling scientists or monetizing contrarian ideology on the YouTube and Ted Talk circuit, but it’s just a very different kind of conversation than the science-based conversation I think many of us would try to have,” Mr. Huffman said.

No House committee hearing this year would be complete without a climate change row. Republicans took aim at the Green New Deal, the Paris climate agreement and the 97% scientific “consensus,” while Democrats’ witnesses stressed the impact of global warming on species.

“As we’re already observing, climate change is radically changing our weather and moving species’ habitats,” said Defenders of Wildlife’s Jacob Malcom. “Climate change alone is a terrifying transformation of our planet. In combination with the other threats, the damage we have done and are doing is almost unimaginable.”

Mr. Moore argued that most animals that have gone extinct since 1500 were the victims of invasive species such as cats, rats and foxes brought by European colonialists.

“Today, it’s introduced species, especially on islands, where it’s a small area, and a rat can get on an island and eat all the bird’s eggs, and that’s the end of the bird,” Mr. Moore said. “That is the classical situation that has occurred lately.”

Rep. Raul M. Grijalva, the Arizona Democrat who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, lamented the Republicans’ approach to climate change. “There’s not so much climate denial going on in Congress anymore,” said Mr. Grijalva. “It’s climate avoidance — anything to avoid the topic and to avoid doing something serious about it.”

SOURCE 





Environmental indoctrination in our schools

Ever wonder why kids come home from school often sounding as if they had received woefully inadequate instruction in everything from English, history, and civics to mathematics, science, and other traditional fields of learning?

That’s because, in far too many K-12 classes across the country, these subjects have been pushed aside in favor of a curriculum specifically designed to set children on a path toward progressive indoctrination of their impressionable young minds. This is not a new development; it’s been gradually tightening its grip on our education system (public and private) ever since the poisonous progressive ideas of John Dewey and his acolytes started making their way into school curricula during the last century.

Over time, the discipline of history has given way to “social studies,” and the teaching of science has undergone a noticeable politicization.

In their 2017 book, “Deconstructing the Administrative State: The Fight for Liberty,” Emmett McGoarty, Jane Robbins, and Erin Tuttle discuss the battle of ideologies that has lasted over a century and continues today, pitting those who defend the American Experiment and its constitutional structure against those who seek to replace that structure with one that empowers them to implement their ideas with little or no popular input. All three scholars are affiliated with the Washington-based American Principals Project Foundation.

Curse of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)

By hijacking the traditional school curriculum and transforming it into an instrument of indoctrination, progressive educators can mold minds to their hearts’ content. The authors note that many students are subjected to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), written in 2011 under the direction of Achieve, Inc., the same organization that wrote the controversial Common Core national standards for English, arts, and mathematics.

After evaluating the NGSS, the Fordham Institute, an education policy think tank that actually supported Common Core, determined that the NGSS was “inferior” to standards in 20 other states. In physical science, it observed that “it would be impossible to derive a high school physics or chemistry course from the content included in the NGSS.”

Instead of introducing students to the world of scientific inquiry, NGSS seeks to inculcate progressive social values. It does so by striving to “engage” students during classroom instruction by brainwashing them and pressuring them to become active participants in rescuing the planet in accordance with environmentalist dogma.

The NGSS provide targeted goals for what students should know at the end of different grade levels. Quoting directly from the NGSS playbook, the authors cite the NGSS Global Climate Change standards for three grade levels:

By the End of Grade 5: If Earth’s global mean temperature continues to rise, the lives of humans and other organisms will be affected in many different ways.

By the End of Grade 8: Human activities such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels are major factors in in the current rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature (global warming). Reducing human vulnerability to whatever climate changes do occur depend (sic) on the understanding of climate science, engineering capabilities and other kinds of knowledge, such as understanding of human behavior and on applying that knowledge wisely in decisions and actions.

By the End of Grade 12: Global climate models are often used to understand the process of climate change because these changes are complex and can occur slowly over Earth’s history. Though the magnitudes of humans’ impacts are greater than they ever have been, so too are humans’ abilities to model predict and manage current and future impacts. Through computer simulations and other studies, important discoveries are still being made about how the ocean, the atmosphere and the biosphere interact and are modified in response to human activities, as well as to changes in human activities. The science and engineering will be essential to both to understanding the possible impacts of global climate change and to informing decisions about how to slow its rate and consequences – for humanity and well as for the rest of the planet.

The underlying assumptions of human-induced climate change are never challenged, nor are students, including those at higher levels, encouraged to consider alternative explanations for climate variability.

Education Establishment’s Relentless Campaign to Adopt NGSS Nationwide

By 2017, 18 states had adopted the NGSS since the standards were completed in 2011. “The remaining states face a relentless campaign from the education establishment to adopt the standards,” McGroarty, Robbins, and Tuttle point out. “For example, the National Association of School Boards of Education (NASBE) has pushed adoption of NGSS by state school boards, which generally exercise authority over state academic standards. Efforts to reject the NGSS face a barrage of ‘export’ reports by the NASBE to refute any objections raised.”

SOURCE 




UK says 100% renewables won’t work

A lot of countries (as well as many U.S. states and utilities) are announcing so-called zero-carbon plans, typically with a target year around 2050. These are often reported as calling for 100% renewable energy, which is wrong.

There is a difference between zero-carbon and 100% renewables, but this is often hidden and unclear. In the new UK plan it is still hidden, but once found it is very clear. Renewables provide just 57% of the energy, which is a lot less than 100%. Perhaps most surprising is that nuclear might provide as much as 38% of the energy!

By way of introduction, the plan comes from the government’s own Committee on Climate Change (CCC), in a report titled “Net-Zero: The UK’s contribution to stopping global warming.” The CCC is the UK’s top climate action planning group.

The surprising numbers occur in an obscure Technical Annex, titled “Integrating variable renewables into the UK electricity system.” As the title suggests, the UK CCC is well aware of the severe limitations that intermittency creates for renewables.

These limitations are succinctly summarized right up front, in the second paragraph of this 17 page Annex. Here is what the CCC says:

“Variable (or ‘intermittent’) renewables – which are weather dependent – are different to other forms of electricity generation, and increased deployment of them could require additional system services. For example, renewables cannot be guaranteed to generate during winter peak demand periods, and renewable output is generally correlated across different sites. Similarly, wind and solar generation can change substantially over periods of just a few hours, requiring non-renewable plants to be held in reserve to meet any sudden shortfall in supply.”

The CCC therefore proposed a mix of zero emission power generating technologies, as follows:

“Our Further Ambition scenario for the power sector sees low-carbon sources providing 100% of power generation in 2050, through a mixture of variable renewables (57%), firm low-carbon power like nuclear or plants fitted with carbon capture and storage (38%) and decarbonised gas such as hydrogen (5%).”

Renewables provide just 57%. A whopping 38% comes from some combination of nuclear and fossil fuel plants fitted with carbon capture and storage (CCS), or perhaps from some unknown new technology. Another 5% comes from decarbonised gas, making fossil fuel use at least 43%.

Of these alternatives, nuclear power is the only proven technology, so it is the only sure bet.

There has been a lot of research on CCS but it may never be feasible. Existing CCS technologies require a major fraction of the power plant’s energy output, making them very expensive. Plus all this extra needed energy would jack fossil fuel use way up.

There is also the huge unresolved environmental issue of safely sticking billions of tons of CO2 down into the ground. Perhaps worst of all, it would violate the Green goal of eliminating fossil fuel use, especially if the full 43% of UK power comes from that hated stuff.

Or they could burn wood and the Annex even suggests this, except they call it “bioenergy,” so maybe it includes Indonesian palm oil. What an environmental disaster that would be! If CCS can be made to work, why not burn readily available coal, oil and gas? In fact Big Oil & Gas are spending nearly a billion dollars on CCS research.

So this plan seems to give the greens a very nasty multiple choice, between nuclear power and continued fossil fuel use and destructive bioenergy. It is hard to say which they like least.

But the CCS zero-carbon is clear, accurate and honest, which is very rare in this policy zone. It should be a lesson for every country, as well as for every U.S. state and utility. 100% renewables will not work, so you have to find a very different way to get to zero carbon emissions. Also, let’s all try being honest about it for a change.

The CCC makes it very clear that zero-carbon will be very difficult. But then, zero-carbon is an insane goal, so it should be hard to get to.

SOURCE 






Australia: Leftist Queensland Premier backflips on Adani coal mine - after Labor's obstruction of the mine cost them the Federal election

The Queensland Labor Premier has demanded action over the Adani coalmine after Labor's federal election defeat.

Annastacia Palaszczuk criticised her own government's delays in approving Australia's biggest mine.

She said federal Labor's loss of core support in the Sunshine State has given her a 'wake-up call.'

Traditional Labor voters deserted their party at the ballot box after Bill Shorten vowed to change the nation and take 'real action' on climate change.

Before the federal election, Ms Palaszczuk promised there would be no political interference in the decision to approve the Adani mine.

But on Wednesday she stood before cameras in a hard hat in Mackay and demanded a meeting between Adani and her own government ministers.

'The community is fed up with the processes, I know I'm fed up with the processes, I know my local members are fed up with the processes,' Ms Palaszczuk said.

'We need some certainty, and we need some timeframes. Enough is enough… the federal election was definitely a wake-up call to everyone.'

Ms Palaszczuk said she understood there was frustration in the community about the lack of a decision on the mine. 'I think everyone's had a gutful of this, frankly,' she said.

The Adani coalmine will provide 1,500 jobs in regional Queensland but building work is on hold pending approval from the regulator, Queensland's Environment Department. 

A Queensland government representative will meet with Adani on Thursday to thrash out a timeline for the Carmichael mine approval process in an attempt to resolve delays that caused a voter backlash.

Ms Palaszczuk intervened to order her state co-ordinator-general to meet with Adani and the independent regulator to fix a timeline and deadline for a decision by Friday. 

Two outstanding environmental management plans, involving the site's Black-Throated Finch habitat and complex groundwater sources, have contributed to delays.

Adani Australia chief executive Lucas Dow said if approvals were not complete within two weeks then the meeting would prove to be just another government 'delaying tactic'.

CFMEU National President Tony Maher welcomed a clear timeline for the project which he said had significant community support on the grounds it would create local jobs.

He said he wanted Adani to confirm how many permanent full-time jobs the mine would generate.

Mackay Conservation Group coordinator Peter McCallum said Queensland's water and wildlife are not put at risk by the project.

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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Costly wind power menaces man and nature

The true costs of wind energy are too often (deliberately?) ignored or underestimated

Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris

Wind energy can never replace fossil fuels, despite claims of environmentalists and advocates of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal (GND). It’s not environment-friendly either. Indeed, wind power is hampered by many limitations, including:

* its intermittent and inefficient nature

* insufficient sites with adequate, reliable wind

* acreage required to erect turbines and harness wind

* excessive expenses, many of them rarely mentioned

* dangers to bird and bat populations

* dangers to human health from light flicker and low frequency throbbing noise (infrasound).

* costs, limitations, and health and environmental impacts of batteries and other back-up systems

Wind turbines are highly inefficient. Large industrial wind turbines (IWT) typically produce about 2.5 megawatts of power when wind speed is between about 8 and 25 miles per hour. However, most of the time it’s not, even at the best locations.

Today’s wind farms have a 30–40% average “capacity factor.” That means their average annual output is only 30–40% of “nameplate” capacity, or what they would produce if the wind were blowing 8–25 mph 24/7/365. As we erect more turbines, they must be placed in less optimal locations, and capacity numbers will drop, perhaps dramatically. And no one can predict when they will generate electricity.

When the wind isn’t blowing, the electricity grid cannot provide the energy we need to operate and maintain our standard of living. Today fossil fuels stand ready to step in when wind speeds decline. But under the GND, virtually all fossil fuels would be eliminated, making it impossible to keep the lights on without a major increase in nuclear power, which environmental activists hate even more than fossil fuels.

To generate significant wind energy, facilities must be located where there is steady wind most of the time. Such areas exist along the West Coast of the United States and a strip of the Midwest from the Dakotas to Texas. But 75% of the conterminous 48 states have only half the wind of these locations. Offshore areas have higher wind potential but are be at least three times more expensive to develop.

Perhaps the biggest drawback to relying on wind power is the immense amount of land required. IWTs must be placed far apart so they don’t interfere with each turbine’s “wind capture area.”

In his keynote address at the 2018 America First Energy Conference , Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry explained that generating enough electricity to power just the Houston metropolitan area would require almost 900 square miles of wind turbines. This is six-times more land than an equivalent solar farm of photovoltaic cells, assuming they operate at full efficiency 24/7/365; dozens of times the land required for an equivalent nuclear power plant; and 16 times the size of Washington, DC.

Wind is also much more expensive than existing conventional energy sources. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) claims that wind power can generate electricity for 8¢ per kilowatt-hour (kWh). However, this is based on poor assumptions and glossing over important realities.

It assumes average wind turbine lifetime is 30 years, the same as a conventional fossil fuel power plant. In reality, most turbines last only 15 years, and less offshore. It ignores the cost of backup power. It includes no cost for transmission lines from wind farms to distant cities. Most significantly, it omits subsidies.

A 2016 Utah State University study shows the following extra costs omitted or miscalculated by the EIA for wind power: 15-years not 30-year life expectancies (US 7¢ per kWh), backup power (at least 2.3¢ cents if the back-up is natural gas), transmission costs (2.7¢), government subsidies (23¢). All that means the real cost of wind power is a staggering 43¢ per kilowatt hour! That’s seven times the cost of natural gas-generated electricity! What family, factory, hospital, office, church or school can afford this?

GND promoters would like wind farms everywhere, but even the most supposedly environmentally friendly communities often do not want wind turbines in their own neighborhoods: they spoil the landscape and cause serious environmental impacts, such as killing many birds and bats each year.

In 2013, Loss, Will and Marra estimated that 140,000 to 328,000 birds are killed each year in the contiguous United States by wind turbines. The Audubon Society says that makes wind “the most threatening form of green energy.” Other sources say the death tolls are far higher.

Bat deaths are even worse and potentially more threatening to human health and welfare. Spain’s Save the Eagles International says industrial wind turbines “kill millions of bats & birds, worsening an environmental and epidemiological crisis.” The 2016 study “Multiple mortality events in bats: A global review” reports that since 2000 industrial wind turbines have overtaken all other causes of mass mortality for bats in North America and Europe.

A conservative estimate of bat mortality in the USA is that at least 4 million bats have been killed by wind turbines since 2012. Bats are our primary natural defense in keeping mosquito and crop-damaging insect populations in check. One bat can eat between 500 and 1,000 mosquitoes and other insects in just one hour, or about 6,000 per night.

Fish and wildlife specialists were stunned at the number of dead bats they found at industrial wind turbines in the eastern US. About half were due to barotrauma: a bat only has to come close to a spinning blade, and the pressure change bursts the blood vessels in its lungs.

Save the Eagles explains that killing millions of bats results in billions of extra mosquitoes. It is no coincidence that mosquito populations have increased up to tenfold over the last 50 years, according to long-term mosquito monitoring programs, which also note that increased urbanization and reduced use of insecticides were the main drivers of this change.

Finally, noise generated by wind turbines is akin to that of a helicopter, affecting quality of life and causing serious health problems for people living within a quarter-mile of a turbine. A 2013 Canadian paper reported, “People who live or work in close proximity to IWTs have experienced symptoms that include decreased quality of life, annoyance, stress, sleep disturbance, headache, anxiety, depression and cognitive dysfunction.” Other studies report the same problems.

A woman who was forced out of her Ontario, Canada home said “the problem is not just cyclical audible noise keeping people awake, but also low frequency infrasound, which can travel many kilometres.” The former operator of the Wind Victims Ontario website added, “Infrasound goes right through walls. It pummels your body.” Sherri Lange, CEO of North American Platform Against Wind, says she has “personally received hundreds of phone calls from distressed people who need to vacate their homes.”

Across the world, governments have received tens of thousands of complaints. They rarely even try to address the problems raised. “It is my experience from talking to doctors, researchers and other high-level professionals, that governments seem to be [under the influence of] the industry,” Lange says.

Less frequent but more serious are 192 deaths over the past decade, primarily from massive failures of turbine blades. The deaths have prompted Finland, Bavaria and Scotland to propose legislation that no wind farm be allowed within 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) of any housing.

Many Americans think wind energy is cheap, eco-friendly and wonderful. But that’s because few are ever exposed to the real human, animal, scenic and environmental costs. Green New Deal supporters are counting on people to remain in the dark about these serious problems, to turn their plans into law.

We all need to do more to get the truth out, and confront activists, legislators, regulators and journalists with tough questions and hard realities.

Via email





This Vet Imprisoned for Digging Ponds on His Land Died. Now His Widow Continues the Fight

The name of a Navy veteran may be cleared after he was convicted, fined, and imprisoned for digging ponds in a wooded area near his Montana home, to supply water in case of fire.

The Supreme Court has vacated a lower court ruling against Joe Robertson, who was sent to federal prison and ordered to pay $130,000 in restitution through deductions from his Social Security checks.

Any definitive legal victory for Robertson would be posthumous, since he died March 18 at age 80.

But his lawyers describe the Supreme Court’s action as a “big win” for Robertson’s widow, Carrie, who plans to carry on the fight.

President Barack Obama’s Justice Department had prosecuted Robertson for digging in “navigable waters” without a permit, in violation of the Clean Water Act.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling against Robertson in November 2017 and denied him a rehearing in July 2018.

The Navy veteran’s initial trial at the district court level resulted in a hung jury and a mistrial. He then was convicted after a second district court trial.

Robertson was 78 when he was sentenced in 2016; he completed his 18 months behind bars in late 2017. At the time of his death, he was supposed to be on parole for another 20 months.

In November, he had petitioned the Supreme Court to review his case.

Prior to his conviction, Robertson operated a business that supplied water trucks to Montana firefighters. Because he himself resided in a “fire-prone landscape,” he was concerned for his safety and that of his property, according to his petition to the Supreme Court.

In 2013 and 2014, Robertson had dug a series of ponds close to an unnamed channel near his home, to store water in case of fire. The foot-wide, foot-deep channel carried the equivalent of two to three garden hoses of water flow, his petition explains. 

Robertson argued that he didn’t violate the Clean Water Act because digging the ponds did not discharge any soil into “navigable waters,” since the water flow in the channel didn’t amount to that. The ponds are more than 40 miles away from “the nearest actual navigable water body,” the Jefferson River, the petition says.

On April 15, the Supreme Court vacated the 9th Circuit ruling in response to Robertson’s petition and said his widow, Carrie, could pursue his case and represent his estate. The high court also ordered the 9th Circuit to determine whether the estate may continue to contest the $130,000 in restitution.

Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit, public interest law firm specializing in property rights, represented Robertson in his legal dispute with federal officials.

Tony Francois, a senior attorney with the firm, told The Daily Signal in an email that if the 9th Circuit decides to leave the fine against Robertson’s estate in place in one form or another, the Supreme Court possibly could review long-standing concerns over how the government applies the Clean Water Act.

Robertson’s petition makes the point that some Supreme Court justices have expressed concern over the “vagueness” attached to the term “navigable waters,” and that the dispute over the veteran’s ponds in Montana “offers an ideal vehicle” to resolve uncertainty over the definition of navigable waters. The petition also suggests that the court could void the term.

“The Supreme Court vacated the 9th Circuit’s decision in Joe’s case because of his death,” Francois told The Daily Signal. “It is the usual practice when a criminal defendant dies before his appeal is final for the federal courts to vacate the conviction and dismiss the indictment, regardless of the merits. There is some disagreement among the lower courts how this applies to restitution orders, including amounts paid prior to death.”

Francois added:

Because of Joe’s death, the Supreme Court ordered the 9th Circuit to consider whether the case is moot. We think this means that the court of appeals will have to consider whether all of his restitution obligation should be abated.

If they decide that to be the case, including return of the amount he paid before he died, then that would likely fully resolve the case and it would likely be moot. Joe’s estate would have no further obligations and would get back what he has paid to date.

If the 9th Circuit decides that any of the restitution remains due, including allowing the government to keep the amount he already paid, then we would likely return to the Supreme Court to ask for a substantive review of his convictions. It seems likely that only in that case would the Supreme Court address the Clean Water Act issues.

Congress initially passed the Clean Water Act in 1948, but lawmakers greatly altered and expanded it into the current form with amendments in 1972.

The law “establishes the basic structure for regulating discharges of pollutants into the waters of the United States and regulating quality standards for surface waters,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s website.

Under the 1972 amendments, it is illegal to discharge any pollutant from a point source into navigable waters without a permit from the EPA. The Army Corps of Engineers oversees the permitting process and shares enforcement authority with the EPA.

In 2015, the Obama administration implemented its Clean Water Rule, widely known as the Waters of the United States rule or WOTUS rule, which expanded the ability of the EPA and the Corps to regulate bodies of water throughout the country.

The Trump administration has taken steps to withdraw the Obama administration’s rule and replace it with a new one that limits the regulatory reach of federal agencies.

The Daily Signal sought comment for this report from both the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers. Neither agency had responded as of publication time.

Daren Bakst, senior research fellow for agriculture policy at The Heritage Foundation, submitted comments last month to the EPA and the Corps expressing concern that “vague and subjective definitions” attached to the Clean Water Act affect how those agencies enforce the law.

Those imprecise definitions also create great uncertainty for average citizens who must comply with regulations, Bakst said.

Addressing the Trump administration’s proposed rule revising the definition of  “waters of the United States,” Bakst wrote:

In 2004, the General Accounting Office (GAO) highlighted the Corps’ inconsistent enforcement across districts and even asserted that definitions were intentionally left vague. If experts within the agencies are unable to agree if a water is a ‘waters of the United States,’ it is unreasonable to think that a lay person will be able to know that a water is a jurisdictional water.

In fact, if definitions are extremely vague and subjective, and enforcement is inconsistent, there is no way for anyone to know whether some waters are jurisdictional because the answers to those questions depend on the subjective whim of whatever government officials have decided to answer the questions …

Bakst told The Daily Signal in an email that the Robertson case “is a clear and horrifying example of how the vagueness problem with the definition of ‘waters of the United States’ is a major problem.”

“This vagueness problem is just one of the many reasons why the EPA and Corps need to develop a new definition of ‘waters of the United States,’” the Heritage research fellow said. “The definition should be clear and objective, and not allow the agencies to make subjective, after-the-fact determinations as to whether a specific water is regulated.”

Although the Robertson case is far from finished, the Pacific Legal Foundation in a blog describes the Supreme Court’s order moving the case back to the 9th Circuit as a “big win” for the veteran’s widow, Carrie.

“The high court’s decision came via summary disposition, which means it did not issue a written opinion,” the blog says. “But clearly the justices felt the 9th Circuit’s decision was erroneous, or they wouldn’t have granted Joe’s petition, or vacated the 9th Circuit’s decision, after his untimely death.”

SOURCE 





The Idea That There Are Only 100 Harvests Left Is Just A Fantasy

WHEN it comes to science reporting, there are some headlines that are so frequently repeated, so intuitively plausible, so closely aligned to our cultural beliefs, that they can seem like incontrovertible truths.

The general public, and indeed many scientists, may fervently believe that these claims reflect the overwhelming scientific consensus. However, sometimes when you dig a little beyond the surface, the evidence underpinning even the most ubiquitous headlines can seem surprisingly shaky.

Perhaps the best example of such an assertion is that of an impending agricultural Armageddon, caused by decades of irresponsible farming practices that have degraded soils across the planet (or so the press narrative goes).

A quick scan of the headlines reveals that despite the confidence with which these forecasts are proclaimed, the actual timescale to D-Day varies rather widely from story to story. While some report that we have 100 years until the end of our soil’s ability to support farming, citing a University of Sheffield study, others claim that this is a mere 60 years away, referencing a speech at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

Recently, the UK government’s environment secretary even stated that the UK is as little as 30 years away from an “eradication of soil fertility” because we “drench it in chemicals”. If this is indeed a likely end-game scenario, we should probably determine which of these estimates is most plausible as a matter of urgency: 30, 60 or 100 years. So let’s take a closer look at this claim.

Despite dozens of headlines quoting these predictions, surprisingly only one peer-reviewed paper from a scientific journal is ever cited as evidence to back them up. This 2014 study from the University of Sheffield compared the soil quality of a range of sites in the English city, including agricultural, garden and allotment soils.

Now, before we question whether the results of this single, small study can be extrapolated to represent all of England, let alone the whole UK or even the whole world, let us take a look at their findings: basically, some urban soils in Sheffield are higher in carbon and nitrogen than some nearby agricultural ones. OK, but where is the 100-year statistic? It turns out that nowhere in the study was there any calculation, prediction or even passing reference to the claim. None whatsoever. Perhaps not so much shaky evidence to support this assertion as much as non-existent.

“I asked leading soil scientists if they had ever come across such a prediction in published research. Not a single one had”

Maybe this is the result of a typo and the work is in another research paper? After an 8-hour trawl through the academic journals failed to pull up a single study that even attempted to make this calculation, I contacted six leading soil scientists across the world to ask if they had ever come across such a prediction in either the published literature or their work. Not a single one had.

In fact, the words they used to describe this claim were “bold”, “too Malthusian”, “hardly useful”, “almost insulting” and “I have used this in my soil science lectures to show the students to be wary of headlines!”. Ouch.

Does that mean there aren’t real threats to some agricultural soils around the world? Absolutely not. Indeed, all the scientists I spoke to went to great lengths to point these out, where they exist.

However, they also highlighted how incredibly complex the calculations needed to make such predictions would be, based on myriad factors, only some of which can be predicted with any reliability, with generalisations almost impossible. The boring reality is that while soils in some parts of the world might be in decline, others are not.

Furthermore, while agriculture may be one of the factors driving erosion and nutrient depletion, many modern farming practices such as no-till and synthetic fertiliser applications may actually be helping alleviate (rather than drive) this. In fact, according to many objective measures, modern, evidence-based farming techniques are more sustainable than those of an idealised past. Quite a different picture to that painted by the headlines.

Despite the thirst for simple truths in a complicated world, the researchers I contacted agreed that setting such a figure for an agricultural “end-point” would be nigh on impossible, which may explain why no published studies appear to have been able to do so. But this hasn’t stopped the newspapers. Welcome to 2019!

SOURCE 





Back To The Medieval Green World

Greens dream of a zero-emissions world without coal, oil, and natural gas.  They need to think about what they wish for.

First, there would be no mass production of steel without coke from coking coal to remove oxygen from iron ore.

People could cut trees in forests for charcoal to produce pig iron and crude steels, but forests would soon be exhausted.  Coal saved the forests from this fate.

We could produce gold and silver without using mineral hydro-carbons, and with ingenuity, we could probably produce unrefined copper, lead, and tin and alloys like brass and bronze.  But making large quantities of nuclear fuels, cement, aluminum, refined metals, plastics, petro-chemicals, and poly pipes would be impossible.

Making wind turbines and solar panels would also be impossible without fossil fuels.  A wind turbine needs lots of steel plus concrete, carbon fiber, and glass polymers as well as many other refined metals — copper, aluminum, rare earths, zinc, and molybdenum.  Solar panels and batteries need high-purity ingredients — silicon, lead, lithium, nickel, cadmium, zinc, silver, manganese, and graphite, all hard to make in backyard charcoal-fired furnaces.  Transporting, erecting, and maintaining wind and solar farms plus their roads and transmission lines need many pieces of diesel-powered machinery.

Every machine on Earth needs hydro-carbons for engine oil, gear oil, transmission oil, brake fluid, hydraulic oil, and grease.  We could of course use oils from seals, beeswax, and whales for lubrication.  The discovery of petroleum saved the whales from this fate.

Roads would be a challenge without oil-based bitumen.  The Romans made pretty good roads out of cobblestones (this would ease unemployment).  But hard labor would not sit well with aging Baby-Boomers or electronic-era Millennials.

Cars, motor launches, airplanes, iPhones, and CAT scans would be out.  Horses, oxen, sulkies, wooden rowing boats, sailing ships, herbal medicine, and semaphore would have a huge revival.  Some wood-burning steam tractors may still work and wood-gas generators may replace gasoline in some old cars.

This is the return to the “zero-emissions” world that Green extremists have planned for us.

But modern life cannot be supported by a pre-coal and pre-oil economy.  Without reliable electricity and diesel-powered farm machinery and transport trucks, cities are unsustainable.  In Green-topia, 90% of us people will need to go.

SOURCE 






Climate change: Cuttlefish of the Left extend tentacles on climate ‘truth’

Comment from Australia

Fortunately for all of us, the climate isn’t changing as rapidly as the politics and language around it. What started out as global warming was redefined by proponents as climate change, enabling them to pivot from having to explain record cold snaps to including them in the catch-all of change.

Now the political barometer is generating more language shifts. The alarmists, apparently, haven’t seen enough children crying at climate change protests so they want to up the ante. Left-wing newspaper The Guardian (along with The Guardian Australia online) is leading the crusade with a new dictate to staff — they should refer to the climate issue as an emergency, crisis or breakdown.

The paper’s official style guide has been amended saying the phrase “climate change is no longer considered to accurately reflect the seriousness of the ­situation”.

Wow. That is change you can almost believe in.

Up bobbed the phrase immediately in today’s Australian coverage. The Guardian Australia’s political editor Katharine Murphy covered the election fallout in full compliance. “This was an election in large part about the climate emergency, and the field evidence shows Australia in 2019 is deeply divided about the road ahead,” she wrote.

The Guardian is changing language in a brazen attempt to change politics. Later in the story, Murphy went on: “In his concession, Shorten noted that the ­divisions on the climate crisis were etched into Saturday night’s result.”

But a quick check of the transcript reveals a bit of an accuracy issue. Shorten never referred to a climate crisis. He spoke of “climate change” and “climate action” — guess he hadn’t got the memo.

It hardly needs saying this is the epitome of Orwellian. As ­George Orwell wrote in Politics and the Eng­lish Language: “If thought corrupts language then language can also corrupt thought.”

The Guardian doesn’t like the way you are thinking so it is adopting more emotive language to frighten you into its camp.

As Orwell wrote in his seminal essay: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were instinctively, to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”

And, just like that, you’ll now hear more words such as emergency, crisis and breakdown. Expect ABC reporters to broadcast them, too.

“The Guardian has updated its style guide to introduce terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world,” the paper said in a statement. “Instead of ‘climate change’, the preferred terms are ‘climate emergency, crisis or breakdown’ and ‘global heating’ is favoured over ‘global warming’, although the original terms are not banned. We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue. The phrase ‘climate change’, for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.”

Oh, The Guardian is also sceptical about the word sceptic. Apparently it’s not alarmist enough, either. The thought police have dictated that sceptics are now referred to as “climate science deniers” or “climate deniers” — terms that shamelessly echo the disgrace of Holocaust denial.

Even when they don’t have newsprint editions, the green Left is dealing in ink; like spurting cuttlefish, they want to muddy the waters and won’t be denied.

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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