That wicked air pollution again

The article below is a riot of statistics but one thing it sedulously avoids is any mention of effect sizes. The effect size in other studies of this topic is usually negligible so that may tell you why.


None of the previous studies of this topic are exactly comparable but some of them have been pretty powerful. For instance, a 2018 study included the entire Medicare population from January 1, 2000, to December 31, 2012. And their finding that only one in a million people die from particulate air pollution is pretty decisive. If you bother about that tiny risk, you should never get out of bed.

In the present study, even a probability statistic or two would have been of some help, though the large sample size would show just about any effect as statistically significant.  The text of the article does imply that effect size statistics can be found in the supplementary material but when I clicked on the heading of the relevant table there nothing happened.  Very suspicious.

There are however some indications that the effects were very weak. The authors' reliance on inter-quartile ranges is characteristic of what you do when there is no overall significance in the data. And take the sentence below:

"PM2.5 exposure was associated with excess burden of death due to cardiovascular disease (56070.1 deaths [95% uncertainty interval {UI}, 51940.2-60318.3 deaths])"

As far as I can work out the number of deaths was just about in the middle of the uncertainty interval, again suggesting that nothing much was going on. One hopes that the authors provide some real and accessible statistics about effect size soon.

The big hole in studies of this topic is failure to take account of income.  Poor people commonly have much worse health and unless income is controlled for you may be simply seeing the effects of poverty, not what you think you are seeing.

To their credit, the authors did use an expansive demographic statistic to provide some sort of control on their results.  But their procedure there was rather brain-dead -- or perhaps the procedure of someone who doesn't really want to deal with demographics.  They created an Area Deprivation Index (ADI), which ranks geographic locations by socioeconomic status disadvantage and is composed of education, employment, housing quality, and poverty measures.

One wonder exactly what "poverty measures" were.  Nothing as simple as individual income, it would seem.  And that was it:  No attempt to control for individual poverty.

So even if the ADI index was well done, that is not the end of the story. Using the characteristics of an area as a proxy for individual characteristics is quite desperate.  Any one area will include a considerable demographic range.  A poor person living in a rich are will be characterized as rich -- which is madness.

So once again the study founders on the rock of a failure to control for income.  The illnesses observed might have been effects of poverty, not air pollution.  For a variety of reasons, poor people are more exposed to air pollution, something this study does concede

And at risk of killing a dead horse, the pollution measures were also area statistics rather than individual statistics.  That assumes that everyone living in the same area breathes in the same amount of pollution.  I hope I don't have to give reasons why that may not be so

But air pollution SHOULD be bad for you, someone will say.  It probably is -- at some level. But is the level normally encountered in American cities bad for you?  That is what no-one so far has been able to establish reliably.

Given our evolutionary history of sitting around campfires for perhaps a million years, one would expect that evolution would have given us a substantial tolerance of inhaled air pollution.  That is probably what is actually revealed in studies like the present one

Burden of Cause-Specific Mortality Associated With PM2.5 Air Pollution in the United States

Benjamin Bowe et al.

Abstract

Importance:  Ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5) air pollution is associated with increased risk of several causes of death. However, epidemiologic evidence suggests that current knowledge does not comprehensively capture all causes of death associated with PM2.5 exposure.

Objective:  To systematically identify causes of death associated with PM2.5 pollution and estimate the burden of death for each cause in the United States.

Design, Setting, and Participants:  In a cohort study of US veterans followed up between 2006 and 2016, ensemble modeling was used to identify and characterize morphology of the association between PM2.5 and causes of death. Burden of death associated with PM2.5 exposure in the contiguous United States and for each state was then estimated by application of estimated risk functions to county-level PM2.5 estimates from the US Environmental Protection Agency and cause-specific death rate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Main Outcomes and Measures:  Nonlinear exposure-response functions of the association between PM2.5 and causes of death and burden of death associated with PM2.5.

Exposures:  Annual mean PM2.5 levels.

Results:  A cohort of 4 522 160 US veterans (4 243 462 [93.8%] male; median [interquartile range] age, 64.1 [55.7-75.5] years; 3 702 942 [82.0%] white, 667 550 [14.8%] black, and 145 593 [3.2%] other race) was followed up for a median (interquartile range) of 10.0 (6.8-10.2) years. In the contiguous United States, PM2.5 exposure was associated with excess burden of death due to cardiovascular disease (56 070.1 deaths [95% uncertainty interval {UI}, 51 940.2-60 318.3 deaths]), cerebrovascular disease (40 466.1 deaths [95% UI, 21 770.1-46 487.9 deaths]), chronic kidney disease (7175.2 deaths [95% UI, 5910.2-8371.9 deaths]), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (645.7 deaths [95% UI, 300.2-2490.9 deaths]), dementia (19 851.5 deaths [95% UI, 14 420.6-31 621.4 deaths]), type 2 diabetes (501.3 deaths [95% UI, 447.5-561.1 deaths]), hypertension (30 696.9 deaths [95% UI, 27 518.1-33 881.9 deaths]), lung cancer (17 545.3 deaths [95% UI, 15 055.3-20 464.5 deaths]), and pneumonia (8854.9 deaths [95% UI, 7696.2-10 710.6 deaths]). Burden exhibited substantial geographic variation. Estimated burden of death due to nonaccidental causes was 197 905.1 deaths (95% UI, 183 463.3-213 644.9 deaths); mean age-standardized death rates (per 100 000) due to nonaccidental causes were higher among black individuals (55.2 [95% UI, 50.5-60.6]) than nonblack individuals (51.0 [95% UI, 46.4-56.1]) and higher among those living in counties with high (65.3 [95% UI, 56.2-75.4]) vs low (46.1 [95% UI, 42.3-50.4]) socioeconomic deprivation; 99.0% of the burden of death due to nonaccidental causes was associated with PM2.5 levels below standards set by the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Conclusions and Relevance:  In this study, 9 causes of death were associated with PM2.5 exposure. The burden of death associated with PM2.5 was disproportionally borne by black individuals and socioeconomically disadvantaged communities. Effort toward cleaner air might reduce the burden of PM2.5-associated deaths.

JAMA Netw Open. 2019;2(11):e1915834. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.15834






Greta Thunberg and her handlers run from questions in Edmonton







Baltimore’s Answer to High Homicide Rates and Low School Performance? Ban Plastic Bags

What do you do when your community faces crushing poverty, failing schools, and disturbing homicide rates?

In Baltimore, the answer is: Ban plastic bags, of course. Yes, Charm City is saving the world, one plastic bag at a time.

The Baltimore City Council passed a citywide ban on retailers’ use of plastic bags at checkout on a 13-to-1 vote Monday. If that weren’t enough, the city will now put a 5-cent charge on paper bags.

The legislation now awaits signature by Mayor Bernard Young. If he signs it, it wouldn’t take effect until late next year.

Councilwoman Danielle McCray was the sole vote against the measure. Though she supported the ban on plastic bags, McCray opposed the new 5-cent tax on paper bags.

“I know that pennies add up,” she said on Baltimore’s WJZ-TV Channel 13. “I know that dollars add up, and my vote will be a consistent ‘no’ when it comes to unnecessary taxes on my constituents.”

The problem is, bag bans are not just annoying and inconvenient, they also add up to little more than virtue-signaling of being “environmentally conscious.”

There’s even evidence that they end up being worse for the environment.

A study by University of Sydney economist Rebecca Taylor in Australia found that banning plastic bags certainly caused customers to use fewer plastic shopping bags.

However, people began to use other kinds of plastic bags to make up for the lost supply.

Many customers actually reuse plastic bags for lining wastebaskets, among many other secondary uses. The study found that in areas that had plastic bag bans, there was a surge in the use of the thicker 4-gallon bags, which use more plastic.

The laws also create a huge uptick in the use of paper bags, which—according to some research—are actually worse for the environment than plastic bags.

The bottom line is, the bag bans have marginal or dubious value.

It’s notable that while Baltimore wages war on bags, the city has very real—and far worse—problems.

When one considers all of those problems, and then we see that the priority of Baltimore’s political leadership is getting rid of bags and tearing down Confederate statues, it’s no wonder the city is trapped in a cycle of despair.

As I wrote in August, when President Donald Trump harshly criticized the city in a tweet, Baltimore is dealing with a number of genuine crises.

Violent crime has spun out of control in recent years.

There were 342 homicides in Baltimore in 2017, the highest homicide count in the nation. The city recently hit 300 homicides, the fifth year in a row that has happened, with more than a month remaining in 2019.

In fact, the number of homicides is climbing in Baltimore while it’s falling around the rest of the country.

If that’s not bad enough, the city has an astounding amount of poverty to go along with crushingly high taxes.

Baltimore isn’t offering much hope for future generations, either. It has some of the lowest-performing public schools in the country, despite the fact that the city annually spends about $16,000 per student.

“In fourth- and eighth-grade reading, only 13 percent of city students are considered proficient or advanced,” according to The Baltimore Sun. “In fourth-grade math, 14 percent were proficient, and in eighth-grade math, 11 percent met the mark, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally mandated test from the U.S. Department of Education.”

To top it all off, the city is contending with a heaping helping of corruption. The past three Baltimore mayors have resigned in disgrace.

Former Mayor Catherine Pugh, who at one time was billed as a “reformer,” resigned in May and has been charged with “conspiracy to commit wire fraud, seven counts of wire fraud, conspiracy to defraud the United States and two counts of tax evasion,” Fox News reported.

Pugh was originally caught in a scheme allegedly involving kickbacks for selling her children’s books to hospitals, in which she was able to pocket hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Rather than addressing these serious problems, Baltimore’s politicians opt for empty virtue-signaling. The residents of Baltimore are the ones left holding the bag, literally and figuratively.

SOURCE




New York's Burgeoning Electricity Crisis

Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo's regime is causing major headaches for New Yorkers. 

What happens when the irresistible force meets the immovable object? When both are personified by Democrat New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, one gets an eco-radical whose “carbon neutral” policies may end up leaving thousands of business owners, residents, and builders in Brooklyn, Queens, and on Long Island without reliable energy service.

“Cuomo is a proud opponent of fossil fuels,” the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board explains. “But now that the consequences of his policies are harming people in the real world — those who can’t afford to escape to Florida — the Governor is blaming others.”

Because the governor has blocked shale fracking upstate, as well as several pipelines that would deliver natural gas from Pennsylvania, upstate New Yorkers are paying some of the highest electric bills in the country — as in 40% more for electricity than the people of Pennsylvania, and 15% more than those in in New Jersey. Moreover, 25% of them still use heating oil, which costs about $1,000 more per year than natural gas — and emits 40% more CO2, the “greenhouse gas” that is the bane of those who believe mankind is the ultimate culprit on a planet headed for extinction, unless we kowtow to the will of our internationalist overlords.

Overlords whose own commitment to eco-purity is overshadowed by a deeper commitment to mansions, limousines, private jets.

Last March, as a result of the aforementioned pipeline constraint championed by the governor, New York utility Con Edison halted natural-gas connections north of New York City. Last May, another power provider, the British-owned National Grid, announced a moratorium on new gas hook-ups following a decision by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation to nix a proposed pipeline known as the Northeast Supply Enhancement project.

National Grid insisted its gas capacity is maxed out, and without construction of the pipeline, it couldn’t guarantee uninterrupted service to existing customers. By contrast, Cuomo, other elected officials, and eco-advocates insist the utility company is holding its customers hostage to its demands for approval of the pipeline, and that the company never seriously investigated alternative methods of delivering energy.

Last month, Cuomo played both ends against the middle in an effort to escape the consequences of his policies. Earlier in the month, his administration ordered National Grid to provide electricity to 1,157 customers who had been denied service because of the moratorium on new hookups. The Public Service Commission (PSC), which licenses and oversees public utility companies, warned National Grid that a failure to do so would precipitate “millions of dollars in penalties.”

National Grid pledged to deliver the gas, but once again explained the obvious problem of meeting demand when supply is artificially constrained. “We stand by our analysis and there are very real gas supply constraints in the northeast,” stated said National Grid spokeswoman Karen Young in an email.

A little less than two weeks later, in the midst of further attacks on National Grid, Cuomo directed his animus at the PSC, despite the reality that the PSC is, as Politico put it, “a quasi-independent commission he effectively controls.” The governor wrote a letter to PSC Chairman John Rhodes in which he admitted that National Grid’s assertion of supply issues “was not a startling insight.” He excoriated Rhodes and his agency’s failure “to adequately anticipate, respond, or prevent this harm which was your regulatory duty.”

Cuomo persisted. “I also want to know when and how we eliminate an abusive utility from the state to protect consumers,” he added. “To that end, I want the specific explanation of potential grounds for revocation of National Grid’s license and its liability for the damage that has already been incurred and future damages which will be incurred over the following 12 to 18 months as development is delayed for additional projects is needed.”

On Nov. 12, Cuomo sent a letter to National Grid, giving the utility 14 days notice “of my intention to revoke National Grid’s certificate to operate its downstate gas franchise.” He also ordered the utility to explore “short-term options” he alleged the utility “either deliberately, negligently or incompetently refused to secure” to increase supply. They included transporting natural gas by tanker or truck, the proposal of other infrastructure, and the installation of additional unloading facilities, which he considered viable alternatives, courtesy of a company that he finds “grossly negligent” or one that “deliberately defrauded” the people of New York.

Yet as the Journal notes, several inconvenient realities intrude. “Building barges would require environmental permitting and is opposed by green groups in any case. National Grid already plans to deliver compressed natural gas by truck during the winter, but what if a snow storm closes roads?” The Journal’s editorial board further notes the irony of Cuomo’s pipeline veto below New York Harbor that “could reduce annual CO2 emissions by the equivalent of 500,000 cars on the road,” as opposed to his embargo, which “is raising state emissions.”

“National Grid is in receipt of the letter from Governor Cuomo and will review and respond accordingly within the timeframe outlined in the letter,” a company spokeswoman said in a statement. “We continue to work with all parties on these critical natural gas supply issues on behalf of all our customers in downstate New York.”

In the meantime, Cuomo boasted about his leverage: “This would be one of the most lucrative franchises in the country.”

Perhaps, but one might think if the governor makes good on his promise to end National Grid’s franchise, getting another utility willing to be browbeaten by the governor, hamstrung by the PSC, and very likely sued by a number of the state’s eco-warriors for any attempt to provide power that doesn’t comport with the state’s agenda to be “carbon neutral” by 2050, might prove problematic.

It is worth remembering that New York also sued energy giant Exxon for alleged securities fraud related to global warming. “Additionally, more than a dozen ‘public nuisance’ lawsuits seek to hold energy companies responsible for billions of taxpayer dollars spent on acclimating to a warming world, or picking up the pieces following unprecedented hurricanes, floods and wildfires,” the Los Angeles Times reports. “Rhode Island filed such a complaint last year, while a dozen city governments from California, Washington, Colorado, Maryland and New York have also sued.”

What they haven’t done? They haven’t given up using fossil fuels. Gas stations are still open, homes are still being heated and cooled, and the numerous products — many of which are critical to maintaining a modern society — are still being sold.

In other words, eco-talk is cheap. Moreover, what is happening in New York is a great harbinger in miniature of the devastating real-world consequences that the Democrat Party’s Green New Deal would engender.

Everyone wants a clean planet. But magic solutions, whereby reliance on fossil fuels can simply be mandated away by eco-warriors — many of whom will buy “carbon offsets” in a self-serving effort to preserve their own greenhouse gas-spewing lifestyles — and their overwhelming hypocrisy — aren’t part of the equation.

SOURCE



The politicians are responsible for Australia's big fires, says the NYT

The NYT has noticed Australia's bushfires.  Bushfires suit their agenda a lot better than the punishing cold that is gripping most of America at the moment. On the U.S. data they would have to be talking about global cooling!

As was to be expected from the NYT, the fires are said to be all due to global warming.  Global warming explains everything, it seems.  

It would be good if we DID have warming at the moment.  Ocean warming would evaporate off more water vapor, which comes back down as rain, which would tend to put the fires out.  A warmer world would be a wetter world, much less conducive to fires.  Bring on that elusive warming!

Excerpt only below

As was to be expected from the NYT, the fires are said to be all due to global warming.  Global warming explains everything, it seems.

It would be good if we DID have warming at the moment.  Ocean warming would evaporate off more water vapor, which comes back down as rain, which would tend to put the fires out.  A warmer world would be a wetter world, much less conducive to fires.  Bring on that elusive warming!

Excerpt only below


When a mass shooting shattered Australia in 1996, the country banned automatic weapons. In its first years of independence, it enacted a living-wage law. Stable retirement savings, national health care, affordable college education — Australia solved all these issues decades ago.

But climate change is Australia’s labyrinth without an exit, where its pragmatism disappears.

The wildfires that continued raging on Wednesday along the country’s eastern coast have revealed that the politics of climate in Australia resist even the severe pressure that comes from natural disaster.

Instead of common-sense debate, there are culture war insults. The deputy prime minister calls people who care about climate change “raving inner-city lunatics.” Another top official suggests that supporting the Greens party can be fatal. And while the government is working to meet the immediate need — fighting fires, delivering assistance — citizens are left asking why more wasn’t done earlier as they demand solutions.

“We still don’t have an energy policy, we don’t have effective climate policy — it’s really very depressing,” said Susan Harris Rimmer, an associate professor at Griffith Law School. [LAW school?]

But in Australia, where coal is king and water is scarce, the country’s citizens have spent the week simmering with fear, shame and alarm. As a 500-mile stretch from Sydney to Byron Bay continued to face catastrophic fire conditions, with 80 separate blazes burning and at least four deaths reported, Australians have watched, awe-struck, as life-changing destruction has been met with political sniping.

Michael McCormack, the No. 2 official in the conservative government, kicked it off on Monday, telling listeners of the country’s most popular morning radio programs that fire victims needed assistance, not “the ravings of some pure, enlightened and woke capital city greenies.”

Barnaby Joyce, the government’s special envoy for drought assistance, followed up by suggesting that two people killed by fires near a town called Glen Innes over the weekend might have contributed to their own deaths if they supported the Greens.

The victims’ neighbors called his comments “absolutely disgraceful.”

But a Greens party senator responded with his own outrage: He said the major parties were “no better than arsonists,” an insult carrying special weight for the world’s most arid inhabited continent....

Just a few days before the fires, for example, Prime Minister Scott Morrison told a mining group that new laws were needed to crack down on climate activists and progressives who “want to tell you where to live, what job you can have, what you can say and what you can think.”

What’s galling for many scientists is that the public wants the federal government to do more; polls consistently show that Australians see climate change as a major threat requiring aggressive intervention.

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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Ronald Bailey has gone over to the Dark side

Bailey was once a climate skeptic but claims that in 2005  new data made him into a Warmist. I commented on that "conversion" at the time. He has however upped his game since then and we see the result below. His big failing this time can be found in the rubric (red bit) below.  He is precisely wrong in what he says there.  The Climategate emails show that the major players in Warmism are outright crooks. They arbitrarily alter data sources and do their best to ensure that any articles that don't suit them never get published. How surprising that the word "climategate" does not occur once in Bailey's long and diligent aricle.

So it is difficult to ascertain the truth when the chief sources of information about the climate are untrustworthy.  This is particularly so if we realize something that Bailey himself admits:  The data is full of estimates. The climate data is woefully incomplete and all sorts of dodges have to be resorted to to fill in those gaps, with some of the estimates (terrestrial-based measures of arctic temperatures, for instance) being truly heroic.  At almost every point there is room to move estimates in the direction desired. So all the findings that Bailey relies on may or may not be true.  We cannot know. But it is the warmist claim is that we DO know

But that is not a deliberate retreat into nescience. We can still make our own observations and develop our own theories.  And that is what climate skeptics have done. And they have found much that does not support the conventional theories and findings.  Bailey attempts to debunk one by one the dissident theories and findings but he does so by relying on findings from people within the consensus.  And we know that data to be assumption-laden.  So Bailey's large project ends up with circular reasoning:  Warmism is true if you accept what warmists say.  Or putting it another way, you cannot lift yourself up by your own bootstraps.  Once crookedness has been established, it is difficult to find the truth

But vast government activity worldwide is based on Warmist claims being truth.  To use another metaphor, that is a castle built on sand.

The replication crisis

I must stress that I am not putting total reliance on the climategate revelations.  What I am stressing is the constant need for guessing when dealing with incomplete data.  And confirmation bias is well known  even without the climategate revelations. There is now a substantial literature in medical and psychological research showing that unreplicable findings will regularly be accepted until someone comes along and blows the whistle -- by attempting a close replication of the original finding.  A disastrous 60% of findings do not replicate -- indicating that most of what we thought we knew in those disciplines was frankly wrong.

So what about climate findings?  Do they replicate?  We cannot know. Climate researchers have traditionally kept all details of their data and its analyses close to their chest. They defy the basic philosophy of science dictum that your data and analyses must be available for all to check. So that basically tells you all you need to know about the research concerned. The authors know that their results will not replicate when examined by outsiders so make such examinations impossible.

And that suspicion hardens into certainty when we look at Michael Mann's influential hockeystick claim. Mann denied access to his data but inadvertently left some of it on a server where sophisticated computer users could find it.  And when Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre did a reanalyis of that data using Mann's program they found that ANY data fed into Mann's program would produce Mann's result.  Mann's findings were a total fraud.  Mann guards his data jealousy to this day.  He was even prepared to lose his lawsuit against Tim Ball rather than reveal it.  And Mann is one of those whom Bailey assumes to be "acting in good faith".

Sadly, global warming is the greatest hoax in human history, perpetrated by grant-hungry scientists with few scruples.  The future of the climate CANNOT be known or predicted but it is the contention of the Warmists that it can be.

The satellite data

I will be mentioning the satellite record of global temperatures shortly  so before I do that I need to spend a little time looking at Bailey's attempt to discredit the satellite data.

He says, rightly, that even the satellite data requires adjustments for various things and points to discrepancies in what the various versions of what the satellite data shows. In the best Leftist practice however he tells only half the story. Let me mention something he leaves out.  The two major versions of the satellite record have long been the UAH record maintained by skeptics and the RSS version by the conventional Carl Mears.

And the two produced such similar results that the RSS figures were often used by skeptics as discrediting warmism.  Even the RSS data from Carl Mears showed little warming.

As Mears himself admits, he was mightily irritated by people accusing his temperature record of supporting the climate skeptics.  He was in fact expressing irritation with that for quite some years.  He declared several times that he still supports Warmism despite what his own data show.

So in 2016 he finally devised a solution to his embarrassment.  He "adjusted" his data.  He said his old data had errors in it and he has now corrected the errors, to show some warming  -- a warming of 18 hundredths of one degree over nearly 20 years, no less!  One hundredth of a degree per annum! (If there had been errors in it, one wonders why he rode with the "erroneous" data for so long but let that be by the by).

And the explanation he gives for his adjustments is reasonable in principle, but, as always, the devil is in the details.  And the details do contain devilry, as Roy Spencer has pointed out.  Carl's adjustments were so bad in fact that the paper in which he described them was rejected as unpublishable by a major climate journal, eventually being accepted by a meteorological one.  However you look at it, however, one hundredth of a degree per annum is negligible warming. Both major versions of the satellite data continued to show no significant warming

The skeptical response

Most of the prominent climate skeptics have looked at Bailey's article and are mocking of it.  I thought I might close by reproducing a emailed comment on it from Don Easterbrook:

"The latest evidence shows that the likelihood of an apocalyptic climate change are about as close to zero as you can get. The NASA and NOAA portrayals of 'hottest  year ever' are totally fraudulent. NOAA temperatures in the US have cooled slightly over the past 20 years  and global satellite temperatures show no warming (see below).





We are now entering a Grand Solar Minimum, guaranteeing that temperatures will plunge, not warm catastrophically. The chances of cataclysmic warming are not worth worrying about!

Excerpts from Bailey

Researchers use complicated computer climate models to analyze all these data to make projections about what might happen to the climate in the future. My reporting strategy has been to take seriously what I believe to be the principal objections made by researchers who argue on scientific grounds that panic is unwarranted. I also assume that everyone is acting in good faith. What follows is based on what I hope is a fair reading of the recent scientific literature on climate change and communications with various well-known climate change researchers.

Ice Age Climate Change

To decide how worried we should be, we need to go back much further than 1992. Starting about 2.6 million years ago the Earth began experiencing ice ages lasting between 80,000 and 120,000 years. The world's most recent glacial period began about 110,000 years ago.

Most researchers believe that variations in Earth's orbital path around the Sun is the pacemaker of the great ice ages. Ice ages end when wobbles in Earth's orbit increase the sunlight heating the vast continental glaciers that form in the northern hemisphere. These orbital shifts initiate a feedback loop in which the warming oceans release of large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere which in turn further boosts global temperatures. Higher temperatures increase atmospheric water vapor which further boosts warming that melts more ice and snow cover. Less snow and ice enables the growth of darker vegetation which absorbs more heat and so forth.

At the height of the last glacial maximum 19,000 years ago atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide stood at only about 180 parts per million. The level of atmospheric carbon dioxide increased to around 280 parts per million by the late 18th century. This chain of feedbacks eventually produced a rise in global average surface temperature of about 4 degrees Celsius. That's the difference between the last ice age in which glaciers covered about one-third of the Earth's total land area and today when only 10 percent of the land area is icebound.

As a result of human activities, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen to about 415 parts per million now. The annual rate of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide during the past 60 years is about 100 times faster than the rate of increase that occurred at the end of the last ice age. How much this increase is responsible for having warmed the planet over the last century, along with how much more warming will result if carbon dioxide concentrations continue to rise, is the central issue in climate change science.

Just Add Carbon Dioxide

Of course, the sun powers the Earth's climate. About 30 percent of solar energy is directly reflected back into space by bright clouds, atmospheric particles, and sea ice and snow. The remaining 70 percent is absorbed. The air and surface re-emit this energy largely as infrared rays that are invisible to us but we feel as heat.

The nitrogen and oxygen molecules that make up 99 percent of the atmosphere are transparent to both incoming sunlight and outgoing infrared rays. However, water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone are opaque to many wavelengths of infrared energy. These greenhouse gas molecules block some escaping heat and re-emit it downward toward the surface. So instead of the Earth's average temperature being 18 degrees Celsius below zero, it is 15 degrees Celsius above freezing. This extra heating is the natural greenhouse effect.

NASA climate researcher Andrew Lacis and his colleagues contend that carbon dioxide is the key to greenhouse warming on Earth. Why? Because at current temperatures carbon dioxide and other trace greenhouse gases such as ozone, nitrous oxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons do not condense out of the atmosphere. Overall, these noncondensing greenhouse gases account for about 25 percent of the Earth's greenhouse effect. They sustain temperatures that initiate water vapor and cloud feedbacks that generate the remaining 75 percent of the current greenhouse effect. Lacis and his colleagues suggest that if all atmospheric carbon dioxide were somehow removed most of the water vapor would freeze out and the Earth would plunge into an icebound state.

Princeton physicist and lately resigned Trump administration National Security Council member William Happer has long questioned the magnitude of carbon dioxide's effect with respect to warming the atmosphere. In fact, Happer is the co-founder and former president of the nonprofit CO2 Coalition established in 2015 for the "purpose of educating thought leaders, policy makers, and the public about the important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy."His 2014 article, "Why Has Global Warming Paused?" in the International Journal of Modern Physics A, Happer argued that climate scientists had gotten crucial spectroscopic details of how atmospheric carbon dioxide absorbs infrared energy badly wrong. As a result, he asserts, a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would likely warm the planet by only about 1.4 degrees Celsius. If the effect of carbon dioxide on temperatures was indeed constrained to that comparatively low value man-made global warming would probably not constitute a significant problem for humanity and the biosphere.

In 2016, NASA Langley Research Center atmospheric scientist Martin Mlynczak and his colleagues analyzed Happer's claims in a Geophysical Research Letters article and found, "Overall, the spectroscopic uncertainty in present-day carbon dioxide radiative forcing is less than one percent, indicating a robust foundation in our understanding of how rising carbon dioxide warms the climate system." In other words, the details of how carbon dioxide absorbs and re-emits heat are accurately known and unfortunately imply that future temperatures will be considerably higher than Happer calculated them to be.

 Another related claim sometimes made is the effect of carbon dioxide on the climate is saturated, that is, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is already absorbing re-emitting about as much heat as it can. Consequently, increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere won't much increase the average temperature of the globe. But is this so?

This claim is based on the fact in the current climate era that, as Princeton University climatologist Syukuro Manabe in a 2019 review article "Role of greenhouse gas in climate change," notes, "surface temperature increases by approximately 1.3 degrees C in response to the doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration not only from 150 ppm [parts per million] to 300 ppm but also from 300 ppm to 600 ppm." To get a further increase of 1.3 degrees Celsius would require doubling atmospheric CO2 concentration to 1200 ppm. A metaphorical way of thinking about this issue is to visualize that the atmosphere consists of layers and as each layer fills up with enough carbon dioxide to absorb all the heat that it can, the extra heat radiates to the next layer that then absorbs it and re-emits it, and so forth. Consequently, the effect of CO2 on temperatures does decline but it does not saturate at levels relevant to future climate change.

Again, an increase of 1.3 degrees Celsius due to doubling carbon dioxide doesn't seem too alarming. "It is much smaller than 2.3 degrees C that we got in the presence of water vapour feedback," notes Manabe. Researchers find under current climate conditions that "water vapour exerts strong a positive feedback effect that magnifies the surface temperature change by a factor of ∼1.8." A warmer atmosphere evaporates and holds more water vapor which again is the chief greenhouse gas. Just as predicted, water vapor in the atmosphere is increasing as average global temperatures rise. Citing satellite data, a 2018 article in Earth and Space Science reported, "The record clearly shows that the amount of vapor in the atmosphere has been increasing at a rate of about 1.5% per decade over the last 30 years as the planet warms."

Evidence Tampering?

Researchers have devised various records to track changes in global average temperatures. These include surface records incorporating thermometer readings on land and at sea; remote sensing of atmospheric trends using satellites, and climate reanalyses to calculate temperature trends for two meters above the surface.

All temperature records must be adjusted since all have experienced changes that affect the accuracy of their raw data. For example, surface temperature records are affected by changes in thermometers, locations of weather stations, time of day shifts in measurements, urban heat island effects, shipboard versus buoy sampling and so forth. Satellite data must be adjusted for changes in sensors and sensor calibration, sensor deterioration over time, and make corrections for orbital drift and decay. Climate reanalysis combines weather computer models with vast compilations of historical weather data derived from surface thermometers, weather balloons, aircraft, ships, buoys, and satellites. The goal of assimilating and analyzing these data is to create past weather patterns in order to detect changes in climate over time. Since climate reanalyses incorporate data from a wide variety of sources they must be adjusted when biases are identified in those data.

Some skeptics allege that the official climate research groups that compile surface temperature records adjust the data to make global warming trends seem greater than they are. A recent example is the June 2019 claim by geologist Tony Heller, who runs the contrarian website Real Climate Science, that he had identified "yet another round of spectacular data tampering by NASA and NOAA. Cooling the past and warming the present." Heller focused particularly on the adjustments made to NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) global land surface temperature trends.

One general method used by climate scientists of adjust temperature records, explains Berkeley Earth climate data scientist Zeke Hausfather (now at Breakthrough Institute) is statistical homogenization. Researchers compare each weather station to all of its nearby neighbors and look for changes that are local to one station, but not found at any others in the area. A sharp sustained jump to either lower or higher temperatures at a particular station generally indicates a change such as a shift in location or a switch in instrumentation. The records of such out-of-line stations are then adjusted to bring it back in line with its neighboring stations.

In general, temperatures increase more rapidly over land compared to the oceans because of the oceans' greater capacity to absorb heat and ability to get rid of extra heat through evaporation. Heller is right that raw land station adjustments by NOAA/NASA have increased overall land warming by about 16 percent between 1880 and 2016. On the other hand, NOAA/NASA adjustments of raw sea temperature data to take account of the shift from measuring ocean temperatures using buckets and intakes aboard ships to a widely deployed network of automatic buoys reduced the amount of warming in past. The adjustments result in about 36 percent less warming since 1880 than in the raw temperature data. When taken together the NOAA/NASA adjustments to land and ocean data actually reduce, rather than increase, the trend of warming experienced globally over the past century. Adjustments that overall reduce the amount of warming seen in the past suggest that climatologists are not fiddling with temperature data in order to create or exaggerate global warming.

More HERE





Group To Air Thanksgiving-Themed Ad Knocking Green New Deal

A right-leaning group is continuing its months-long attack on the Green New Deal by releasing an ad warning about the climate policy proposal as Democrats prepare to take the debate stage on Wednesday night.

The ad depicts a family who refuses to drive to their grandmother’s house, citing the Green New Deal’s impact on gas prices. “Desperate times call for desperate measures,” the mother in the ad says before the family rides off on scooters.

Titled “Scooters,” the ad will be the latest installment in a $250,000 campaign by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).

It will air on MSNBC during the lead-up to the Democratic primary debate on Wednesday. The ad will air in the Washington, D.C., market and will appear on other cable news stations over the following week.

Each of the three Democratic frontrunners — former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. — have all endorsed the GND’s basic framework.

The costs of their plans range from $1.7 trillion over 10 years to $16 trillion over 15 years.

“Since Washington politicians are asking the American people to support energy rationing that will lead to higher costs and a complete restructuring of our economy, CEI is asking families to imagine what life would be like under the Green New Deal,” CEI President and CEO Kent Lassman said in a statement provided to Fox News.

“The Green New Deal would cost families tens of thousands of dollars in higher energy, housing and logistics costs and everyone should think about how those higher costs would affect their daily lives.”

The group debuted its ad campaign during October’s Democratic debate, claiming low gas prices and easy transportation would be disrupted by the Green New Deal.

In a dramatic tone shift, the ad showcased what it called the “other option” — alarmism, intrusive government intervention, and skyrocketing energy prices.

CEI has come under fire for taking donations from groups associated with the Koch brothers, two figures progressives have attacked for opposing climate change efforts.

CEI describes itself on its website as a “non-profit public policy organization dedicated to advancing the principles of limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty. CEI’s mission is to promote both freedom and fairness by making good policy good politics.”

Since the plan’s release, conservative groups have warned that the policy — notably sponsored by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., — would be a nightmare.

For example, CEI released a study in July that estimated the plan would cost the average household in swing states an average of $70,000 in the first year of the policy’s rollout.

SOURCE




Despite all the Greenie heartburn and protesting, world coal use is surging

A series of reports this week makes clear that, led by China, global coal use is surging, not in decline. India, Africa and much of Asia are getting ready to follow.

For years environment groups have said China was giving permits to new coal-fired power stations that would not be built. But that confidence has been dispelled in a Global Energy Monitor report, which shows that reductions in coal use in the developed world are being offset many times over by increases in China alone.

Global Energy Monitor, originally called CoalSwarm, started life as a bunch of activists and journalists wanting to put pressure on coal-plant developments in the US. It now tracks China, which it says has the power to make or break the Paris climate goals.

China has been given until 2030 to peak its emissions under the Paris Agreement but on the latest figures that is looking like a pipe dream.

Something radical urgently is needed to reshape the coal-burning trajectory of China and India for there to be any hope of even getting close to achieving the least ambitious targets of the Paris Agreement.

At a nuclear energy conference at the White House this week, US Energy Secretary Rick Perry offered a view from space. “If we look at a satellite image of the globe,” he said, “we see vast tracts of land that are shrouded in darkness. More than a billion people are completely without electricity; they are trapped in energy poverty.”

Perry said the pursuit of a “renewables only” approach to climate change and sustainable development would “lock them into that state maybe forever”.

In discussion with MIT Technology Review early this year, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said further technological evolution was essential. “If we freeze technology today you will live in a 4C warmer world in the future, guaranteed,” Gates said.

The big discussion playing out around the world gives context to the debate in domestic politics where the Greens have sought to link Australia’s bushfires directly to a lack of domestic action on climate change.

Scott Morrison says the suggestion that individual actions of Australia, accounting for 1.3 per cent of the world’s emissions, are impacting directly on specific fire events, here or anywhere else in the world, is not scientifically credible.

One response is that Australia must lead by example.

But the big picture is that China appears to have stopped reading the climate change script. According to Global Energy Monitor, for the first time since China’s coal-building boom began in the 1980s the coal fleet outside China shrank.

From January last year to June this year, countries outside China decreased their total coal power capacity by 8.1 gigawatts through steady retirements and an ongoing decline in the commissioning of new coal plants. But across the same period China increased its coal fleet by 42.9GW, and as a result the global coal fleet overall grew by 34.9GW.

In short, the increase in China’s coal-fired capacity across the 18-month period was equal to about eight times Australia’s total electricity capacity of 51GW.

“As more countries turn away from coal and retire their plants, China’s continued pursuit of coal is increasingly out of step with the rest of the world, and is now effectively driving the ongoing expansion of the global coal fleet,” the report says.

Today, 147.7GW of coal-fired plants are under active construction or under suspension in China and likely to be revived. This is an amount nearly equal to the existing coal-fired power capacity of the EU (150GW).

Some of China’s new coal-fired power development is to replace existing more polluting plants. However, the Global Energy Monitor report says given the amount of capacity under development, China’s central government looks ready to increase its 1100GW coal-fired power cap, as set by its 13th Five-Year Plan to 2020.

Coal and power industry groups are proposing the central government increase total coal-fired power capacity by 20 per cent to 40 per cent to between 1200GW and 1400GW as part of China’s 2035 infrastructure plan. That plan is expected to be released next year.

“The continued growth of China’s coal fleet and consideration of plans to significantly raise the nation’s coal power cap show that while the country is often hailed as a clean energy leader, the momentum of coal power expansion has yet to be halted,” the report says.

According to the report, an increase in China’s coal-fired power capacity is not compatible with the Paris climate agreement to hold warming well below 2C, and “almost certainly forecloses the possibility of China achieving greater emission reductions under the Paris Agreement — currently pegged at peaking carbon dioxide emissions by 2030”.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found keeping warming well below 2C requires a 58 per cent to 70 per cent reduction in global coal-fired power generation by 2030 below current levels, ramping up to between 85 per cent and 90 per cent by 2035. Global Energy Monitor says China needs to have phased out most of its coal-fired power capacity by 2035 to meet the IPCC scenario.

If China continues to increase total coal-fired power capacity through 2035, its coal-fired power generation alone will be more than three times as large as the global limit determined by the IPCC to keep warming well below 2C.

Global Energy Monitor concludes that China’s continued expansion of its coal fleet is not inevitable but the path that China’s central government chooses could make or break the Paris Agreement’s goals.

There is no doubt that enormous investment will continue in renewable energy sources including solar and wind with an increasing emphasis on storage. China has been held up as an exemplar in renewable energy.

But it is becoming increasingly clear globally that something is still needed for the world to replace the heavy lifting of coal.

SOURCE 




Let’s not pollute minds with carbon fears

IAN PLIMER

As soon as the words carbon footprint, emissions, pollution, and decarbonisation, climate emergency, extreme weather, unprecedented and extinction are used, I know I am being conned by ignorant activ­ists, populist scaremonger­ing, vote-chasing politicians and rent seekers.

Pollution by plastics, sulphur and nitrogen gases, particulates and chemicals occurs in developing countries. That’s real pollution. The major pollution in advanced economies is the polluting of minds about the role of carbon dioxide. There are no carbon emissions. If there were, we could not see because most carbon is black. Such terms are deliberately misleading, as are many claims.

But then again, we should be used to this after the hysteria about the Great Barrier Reef bleaching that has really been occurring for hundreds of years, fraudulent changing of past weather records, the ignoring of data that shows Pacific islands and the Maldives are growing rather than being inundated, and unsubstantiated claims polar ice is melting. By ignoring history and geology, any claim of unusual weather can be made sensational.

We’ve had reefs on planet Earth for 3500 million years. They came and went many times. The big killer of reefs was because sea level dropped and water temperature decreased. In the past, reefs thrived when water was warmer and there was an elevated carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere. Reef material is calcium carbonate, which contains 44 per cent carbon dioxide. Reefs need carbon dioxide; it’s their basic food.

We are not living in a period of catastrophic climate change. The past tells us it’s business as usual.

It has never been shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming.

Climate models have been around 30 years. They have all failed. Balloon and satellite measurements show a disconnect from climate model predictions. If they have failed across the past 30 years when we can compare models with measurements, there is little chance that the climate projections across the next 50 years will be more successful. Modellers assume carbon dioxide drives climate change. It does not. The role of the sun and clouds was not considered important by modellers. They are the major drivers for the climate on our planet.

We emit a trace atmospheric gas called carbon dioxide at a time in planetary history of low atmospheric carbon dioxide. The geological history of the planet shows major planetary climate changes have never been driven by a trace gas. Just because we are alive today does not mean we change major planetary systems that operated for billions of years. Earth’s climate dances to rhythms every day, every season and on far larger lunar, ocean, solar, orbital, galactic and tectonic cycles. Climate change is normal and continual. When cycles overlap, climate change can be rapid and large. Sporadic events such as supernovas and volcanic eruptions can also change climate.

The main greenhouse gas is water vapour. It is the only gas in air that can evaporate, humidify and condense into clouds that precipitate rain, hail and snow. These processes involve a transfer of energy, and water vapour makes the atmosphere behave like a giant airconditioner. Carbon dioxide is a non-condensable atmospheric gas like nitrogen and oxygen. Water vapour in air varies depending on temperature and location from five times the atmospheric carbon dioxide content in deserts to more than 100 times in the tropics. Water is 12 times more effective than carbon dioxide with respect to all incoming and outgoing radiation.

Earth is unevenly heated. Our spinning oblate globe is influenced by two fluids of different composition and behaviour moving chaotically against each other over the irregular solid surface of the planet. Oceans hold most of the planet’s surface heat, not the atmosphere. Processes that occur during sunlight do not occur at night due to the prime driver of our planet’s surface temperature: the sun.

Carbon dioxide is plant food. It is neither a pollutant nor a toxin. Without carbon dioxide, all life on Earth would die. Plants convert carbon dioxide, water and sunlight during photosynthesis into sugars, cellulose, fruit, vegetables and grains, which animal life uses as food. Marine organisms also take up and use carbon dioxide. Plants need almost three times today’s carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere to thrive. For decades horticulturalists have pumped carbon dioxide into glasshouses to increase yields. The fossil record shows that a thriving and diversification of plant and animal life occurs every time the atmosphere had a very high carbon dioxide content. In the past, warming has never been a threat to life on Earth. Why should it be now? When there is a low atmospheric carbon dioxide content, especially during very cold times, life struggles.

For the past 500 million years, the atmospheric carbon dioxide content has been decreasing and if we halved today’s atmospheric carbon dioxide content, all life would die. This carbon dioxide has been removed into the oceans and is sequestered into coral, shells, limey sediments and muds and on the land into coals, muds, soils and vegetation.

Air contains 0.04 per cent carbon dioxide. We add carbon compounds to our bodies from food and drinks and exhale carbon dioxide. The human breath contains at least 4 per cent carbon dioxide. Our bodies contain carbon compounds. If we were so passionately concerned about our carbon footprint, then the best thing to do is to expire.

In our lifetime, there has been no correlation between carbon dioxide emissions and temperature. On a larger scale, the ice caps show that after a natural orbitally driven warming, atmospheric carbon dioxide content increases 800 years later. Rather than atmos­pheric carbon dioxide driving temperature, it is the opposite. Geology shows us again there is no correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature. Each of the six major past ice ages began when the atmospheric carbon dioxide content was far higher than at present. The thought that a slight increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide will lead to unstoppable global warming is demonstrably wrong.

In the past decade China has increased its carbon dioxide emissions by 53 per cent, 12 times Australia’s total carbon dioxide output of 1.3 per cent of the global total. The grasslands, forests, farms and continental shelves of Australia absorb far more carbon dioxide than Australians emit. The attack on emissions of the gas of life is an irrational attack on industry, our modern way of life, freedoms and prosperity. It has nothing to do with the environment.

SOURCE 




Australia: Farmers ‘subsidising drivers of electric cars’

Farmers who drive long distances, and pay hefty petrol excise, are subsidising inner-city electric car drivers who pay none, prompting a peak infrastructure body to call for a “road user charge” on electric vehicles to share the tax burden more fairly.

Rapid forecast growth in electric vehicle sales will sap federal government fuel tax revenue but give state governments an ­opportunity to secure a growing source of revenue, according to a report by Infrastructure Partnerships Australia. “Applying a simple distance-based charge to electric vehicles will ensure every motorist makes a fair and sustainable contribution to the use of the roads and will help secure a vital stream of transport funding for generations to come,” said IPA head Adrian Dwyer.

The report, released on Thursday, says: “Electric vehicle motorists pay nothing at the pump, and only contribute to the road network through state-based road access charges such as registration and licence fees.

“All motorists should pay their fair share. Without reform fewer road users, especially in regional areas who drive vast distances, will increasingly subsidise electric vehicle motorists.”

Fuel excise collected per kilometre driven has steadily fallen from more than 7c in the late 1990s to just over 4c in 2017 as consumers switch to more ­efficient cars and electric vehicles, which are expected to grow from 0.3 per cent of new car sales in 2018 to 8 per cent by 2025.

“While a shift to electric vehicles could be great for the environment, we still need to make sure we can fund transport services to help people spend less time in their cars,” Mr Dwyer said.

The IPA said a 4 cent per kilometre road user charge, broadly equivalent with what most other motorists pay, wouldn’t discourage take-up of electric vehicles, which are expected to increase in cost effectiveness against petrol-powered cars as battery technology improves and charging stations become more prevalent.

It was imperative to act soon, though, given electric vehicles made up only 0.076 per cent of the light vehicle fleet, before a new tax became politically untenable. “While the revenue raised is unlikely to be substantial in the short term, it could raise rapidly as uptake grows — into the hundreds of millions each year for a large state and the billions by 2030,” the report says.

The NSW government’s review of federal financial relations, released last month, canvassed alternative state revenue sources to replace “highly inefficient” property stamp duty, shrinking coverage of the GST, including road user chrging.

The Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics predicts the electric vehicle share to hit 27 per cent in 2030 and 50 per cent by 2035.

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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Living near a park could add years to your life! City dwellers whose homes are close to green spaces are less likely to die young 'because they have cleaner air and exercise more' (?)

Not this old chestnut again. There are normally one or two studies every year that claim to prove a relationship between pollution (or lack of it) and health and I regularly review them. See here. Without fail, the studies are full of holes.  They do not show what they purport to show.  They omit major methodological precautions that would have protected them from false conclusions and as a result leave their reported effects attributable to other things than pollution.

Living near a park is desirable so mainly the rich can afford it.  And the rich have better health anyway. Some of these studies claim to control for demographics but usually rely on a proxy such as education, e.g. here.  I have never seen actual income data for each person gathered


Living near a park may slash your risk of an early death, according to the biggest ever review of the evidence.

An international team of researchers analysed nine existing studies involving eight million city-dwellers around the world.

Results showed adults who lived near green spaces were significantly less likely to die young from any cause, including heart disease, cancer and dementia.

Urban parks help improve the air quality, filtering out toxic pollutants that kill scores of people every year.

Researchers say they also offer no-cost spaces for people to exercise, which helps drive down obesity rates.

These benefits are also good for mental health and stress levels, said the Barcelona Institute for Global Health-led academic team.

They have now called for more shrubs, plants and trees to be planted in urban areas on the back of the findings.

People who can walk to a park are less likely to be fat
Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), found that children in the state who grew up within a third of a mile of a park were at a lower risk of becoming obese by age 18 and were less at-risk for chronic health problems later in life.

After a review of studies on California parks and human health, they concluded parks may offer a free, untapped resource for millions of Californians and city dwellers on the whole.

One of these studies surveyed 80,000 California households about their mental health, stress and financial circumstances.

They found that regardless of how poor or wealthy those families were, the ones that lived close to a park or green space were less distressed.

Their analysis also suggested teens that live near parks may take advantage of them for exercise.

One of the studies found that nearly 30 per cent more teenagers spent an hour or more doing some form of physical activity five days a week when they lived near parks and green spaces.

The study authors surmise that that meant less screen time for the teenagers living near parks, too, which may offer mental health benefits for them.

The studies that were reviewed included people from seven different countries – the US, Canada, Spain, Italy, Australia, Switzerland and China.

The researchers used satellite images to measure the distance between participants' homes and green spaces and cross-referenced it with their health records.

The studies tracked the participants for several years. Results were published in the journal The Lancet Planetary Health.

They found that for every two per cent increase in greenness within 500 metres of their home, there was four per cent lower chance of an early death.

Lead author David Rojas, researcher at the Barcelona Institute and Colorado State University, said: 'This is the largest and most comprehensive synthesis to date on green space and premature mortality.

'The results support interventions and policies to increase green spaces as a strategy to improve public health.'

The research team - which involved experts from the World Health Organization - are currently applying the results to estimate the number of premature deaths that could be prevented in cities around the world.

Mark Nieuwenhuijsen, director of the Urban Planning, Environment and Health Initiative at the Barcelona institute said: 'Urban greening programmes are not only key to promoting public health, but they also increase biodiversity and mitigate the impacts of climate change, making our cities more sustainable and livable.'

SOURCE





Extinction Rebellion co-founder Roger Hallam said the Holocaust wasn't unique and was 'holding Germany back'

He's not the first Green antisemite.  Hitler was one too

Hallam, 53, sparked outrage in Germany by referring to the Holocaust as 'just another f***ery in human history'.

He compared the murder of six million Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis to other historical massacres and claimed that memory of the Shoah - or Holocaust - was holding Germany back.

The former organic farmer was quickly condemned by Extinction Rebellion groups in Germany, as well as the German government after his comments to a newspaper in the country.

And the British branch of the organisation also distanced itself from him, denouncing his claims.

In an English-language interview he told Die Zeit: 'The extremity of a trauma...can create a paralysis in actually learning the lessons from it.

'The fact of the matter is, millions of people have been killed in vicious circumstances on a regular basis throughout history.'

He cited the Belgian colonialists who 'went to the Congo in the late 19th century and decimated it'.

Some Twitter users called for Extinction Rebellion to expel their co-founder Toger Hallam over his remarks about the Holocaust to a German newspaper.

Henrique Laitenberger wrote: 'This is Extinction Rebellion's final litmus test - Roger Hallam is not just any activist, he co-founded the movement and was central to the development of its strategy, despite his extremist politics. Will @XRebellionUK expel Hallam? Or do they tolerate his heinous views?'

In a statement sent to MailOnline, Extinction Rebellion UK said: 'Extinction Rebellion UK unreservedly denounces today’s comments from our co-founder, Roger Hallam, in the German newspaper Die Zeit, made in a personal capacity in relation to the recent launch of his book.

'Jewish people and many others are deeply wounded by the comments today. Internal conversations have begun with the XR Conflict team about how to manage the conflict process that will address this issue.

'We stand by restorative outcomes as preferable, although in some cases exclusion is necessary.

'Our 6th Principle states: ''We welcome everyone and every part of everyone working actively to create safer and more accessible spaces''. Our movement must be safe for Jews as well as all other minorities, marginalised peoples, and religious groups.

Hallam claimed his comments had been taken out of context and compared the impact of the Holocaust with the looming climate disaster, but did not apologise for the offence caused.

SOURCE





Climate ‘Science’ Riddled With Dishonesty, Incompetence

As climate historian Tony Heller makes clear

The absolute worst case of professional incompetence and dishonesty is in the area of climate science. Tony Heller has exposed some of the egregious dishonesty of mainstream environmentalists in a video he’s titled “My Gift To Climate Alarmists.”



Environmentalists and their political allies attribute the recent increase in deadly forest fires to global warming. However, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, forest fires reached their peak in the 1930s and have declined by 80% since then.

Environmentalists hide the earlier data and make their case for the effects of global warming by showing the public and policymakers data from 1980 that shows an increase in forest fires.

Climate scientists claim that rising sea levels are caused by man-made global warming. Historical data from the tide gauge in Lower Manhattan shows that sea levels have been rising from about the time when Abraham Lincoln was president to now.

Heller says that sea levels have been rising for about 20,000 years. He points out that anthropologists believe that when the sea level was very low people were able to walk from Siberia to North America.

Hot weather is often claimed to be a result of man-made climate change. Heller presents data showing the number of days in Waverly, Ohio, above 90 degrees. In 1895, there were 73 days above 90 degrees. In 1936, there were 82 days above 90 degrees. Since the 1930s, there has been a downward trend in the number of days above 90 degrees.

If climatologists hide data from earlier years and started at 1955, they show an increase in the number of above 90-degree days from eight or nine to 30 or 40. Thus, to deceive us into thinking the climate is getting hotter, environmentalists have selected a starting date that fits their agenda.

You might ask: “Who is Tony Heller? Does he work for big oil?” It turns out that he is a scientist and claims to be a lifelong environmentalist. From what I can tell, he has no vested interests. In that respect, he is different from those who lead the environmental movement, who often either work for or are funded by governments.

Once in a while environmentalists reveal their true agenda. Ottmar Edenhofer, lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fourth summary report released in 2007, speaking in 2010 advised: “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”

United Nations climate chief Christiana Figueres said that the true aim of the U.N.’s 2014 Paris climate conference was “to change the (capitalist) economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”

Christine Stewart, Canada’s former minister of the environment, said: “No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits. … Climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.”

Tim Wirth, former U.S. undersecretary of state for global affairs and the person most responsible for setting up the Kyoto Protocol, said: “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”

Not all scientists are dishonest and not all news reporters are leftists with an agenda. But one wonders at the deafening silence where there’s clear, unambiguous evidence.

For example, if ocean levels have been rising for some 20,000 years, why do scientists allow environmentalists to get away with the claim that it’s a result of man-made global warming? Why aren’t there any reporters to highlight leftist statements such as those by Edenhofer, Stewart, and others who want to ride global warming as a means to defeat capitalism and usher in socialism and communism?

I would prefer to think that the silence of so many scientists represents their fears as opposed to their going along with the environmental extremist agenda.

SOURCE





Climate change and human population growth are putting 7,000 plant species in Africa at risk of extinction, a study claims

Just another prophecy, no more likely to be true than all the others

A third of tropical plants in Africa are headed for extinction, a study has revealed.

Researchers determined that out of more than 22,000 vascular plant species, nearly 7,000 have now been classified as 'likely or potentially' threatened.

The report points at the losses of biodiversity, rapid human population growth and changes in land use and the effects of climate change as reasons to why these plants are disappearing.

Following an even deeper analysis, the team determined the regions most at risk were Ethiopia, the center of Tanzania, the southern Democratic Republic of Congo and the forests of West Africa.

A team of international researchers assessed the 'Red List', which is 'the most authoritative list of threatened species', developed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

The researchers assessed a total of 22,036 vascular plant species in tropical Africa and found that 32 percent are on their way to disappearing.

'Our study thus provides further evidence that the flora of tropical Africa will be highly vulnerable in the future,' reads the study published in Science Advances.

'This situation will no doubt be magnified by the effects of climate change, which is one of the most important assumptions influencing extinction risk.'

Although multiple countries are losing fauna, the team found Ethiopia has the highest number of disappearing species.

The country's highlands are in the top 10 most threatened with 50 percent of its tropical plants were deemed 'likely or potentially' threatened.

The new study uses a novel methodology based on key components of the IUCN Red List's assessment process to discern the potential conservation status of tropical flora at the continental scale.

The team used a the newly constructed database called RAINBIO, which consists of over 600,000 geo-referenced occurrence records of more than 20,000 vascular plant species in tropical Africa.

'Tropical Africa is a highly suitable model for undertaking such a study as it is faced with significant and mounting threats resulting from a wide range of activities, including logging, fuelwood collection, and deforestation for agriculture and mining,' reads the study.

After applying their PACA approach to the RAINBIO database, the researchers were able to categorize each species into five preliminary conservation status levels: likely threatened, potentially threatened, likely rare, potentially rare, and likely not threatened.

Study co-author Bonaventure Sonké noted that 'These results were possible because the partners involved agreed to share their data,' adding: 'This is a strong signal to encourage researchers to share their data, in order to obtain results on a larger scale.'

SOURCE





Leaked emails show ABC journalists conspiring on Global Warming

The ABC is Australia's major public broadcaster

Leaked emails have shown ABC journalists and producers conspiring together behind closed doors to push an ideological line on Global warming.

The first leaked email was sent on Sunday to journalists at the taxpayer funded public broadcaster by Melbourne executive producer Barbara Heggen. Heggen wrote that she was inquiring after “interest in an ABC-staff climate crisis advisory group”. The purpose of this new group was to “gather together the brains trust of the ABC staffers to develop ways to report on and inform Australians about the climate crisis using a solutions journalism approach”  and “to report back to ABC management our ideas and strategies for responding to the climate crisis both internally and externally”.

For those unaware, Ms Heggen is the woman responsible for such sterling journalism as this article discussing the possibility of fleeing to Tasmania to escape climate change and this radio segment talking about whether or not Australians should stop having children to save the planet.

The “Solutions journalism approach” she advocates is a theory of journalism developed in the late 90s which suggested that journalists shouldn’t simply report the facts but should suggest “solutions” to social problems. How this fits in with the obligations of the ABC charter is of course an interesting question.

Barbara’s friends and colleagues were excited at the prospect of what would effectively be an internal lobby group inside the ABC pushing for even more extreme alarmism and bias than currently. The ABC’s national rural reporter, Dominique Schwartz replied: “I’m keen. I have just been looking into how other media organisations are dealing with coverage of climate change.”

Investigative reporter Stephen Long agreed: “Also keen to discuss this. You should be aware also that [Editorial Policies] is having a look at this issue.” To get an insight into Stephen’s view on the matter one only needs to peruse the over two dozen articles he’s written slamming the proposed Adani coal mine, plus his other articles spruiking the benefits of renewables and downplaying the threat of blackouts caused by them.

ABC PM Presenter Linda Mottram also agreed: “We must report established science, the evidence, and not myth.” Presumably when Ms Mottram is speaking of reporting “evidence” instead of “myth” she’s referring to stories such as the one from earlier this month where the ABC breathlessly announced that 11,000 scientists were “declaring a climate emergency. The ABC of course neglected to mention during this “evidence” based reporting that many of the signatures were obviously false and that one of the signatories was a Professor “Mickey Mouse”.

I guess if they want to improve their “evidence” based reporting they can always give Tim Flannery another bag full of money to film yet another series. Maybe this time he can expand on his belief in a Gaia-like earth spirit.

The ABC receives over a billion dollars a year of taxpayer funds. If its journalists weren’t publicly funded then these leaked emails showing them conspiring to slant coverage behind closed doors would be annoying; but as an organisation funded by involuntary contributions of taxpayers it’s enraging.

The ABC will never reform unless it is under the threat of complete defunding. The time to start threatening that defunding is now.

SOURCE 

‘Inside’ the ABC’s climate group

Alas, the latest ABC staff-initiated brainchild is no more. As revealed on Monday through emails obtained by The Australian, senior journalists at Aunty had discussed establishing an “ABC-Staff climate crisis advisory group” to “report back to ABC management our ideas and strategies for responding to the climate crisis both internally and externally”.

ABC producer and presenter Barbara Heggen had made the proposal, suggesting a “solutions journalism approach”. ABC Melbourne journalist Karen Percy described it as “a fabulous idea,” national rural and regional correspondent Dominique Schwartz said she was “keen”. Senior journalist Linda Mottram said it was a “great idea”, also speaking of the “need (for) constant reminders that we must report established science, the evidence, and not myth”. Incidentally, Mottram’s ABC bio notes “Most recently she has taken a strong interest in editorial training at the ABC”.

The Institute of Public Affairs director of policy Gideon Rozner summed it up best. “Because if there’s a gap in ABC coverage, it’s climate change,” he quipped. As noted by The Australian’s media editor, Leo Shanahan, ABC policies require that “editorial decisions are not improperly influenced by political, sectional, commercial or personal interests”.

Yesterday ABC chairwoman Ita Buttrose put the kybosh on these journalists come crisis activists, stating “it was one of those ideas that is not going to happen.”

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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Climate Change to Have Harsh Effect on Children

You can count on the NYT to keep this arrant nonsense alive. Winter is the time of dying.  Warmth is on balance good for you

The health effects of climate change will be unevenly distributed and children will be among those especially harmed, according to a new report from the medical journal The Lancet.

The report compared human health consequences under two scenarios: one in which the world meets the commitments laid out in the Paris Agreement and reins in emissions so that increases in global temperatures remain “well below 2 degrees Celsius” by the end of the century, and one in which it does not.

The report, published Wednesday, found that failing to limit emissions would lead to health problems caused by infectious diseases, worsening air pollution, rising temperatures and malnutrition.

“With every degree of warming, a child born today faces a future where their health and wellbeing will be increasingly impacted by the realities and dangers of a warmer world,” said Dr.

Renee N. Salas, a clinical instructor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School and lead author of the United States policy brief that accompanied the report.

“Climate change, and the air pollution from fossil fuels that are driving it, threatens the child’s health starting in the mother’s womb and only accumulates from there,” she said.

Children are especially vulnerable partly because of their physiology.

“Their hearts beat faster than adults’ and their breathing rates are higher than adults,’” said Dr.

Mona Sarfaty, the director of the program on climate and health at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, who was not involved in the report.

As a result, children absorb more air pollution given their body size than an adult would in the same situation.

But unless nations halt emissions, air pollution, which, according to the report, killed seven million people worldwide in 2016 alone, will quite likely increase.

The burning of fossil fuels such as coal and gas also releases a type of fine air pollution called PM 2.5 that can damage the heart and lungs when inhaled. Exposure to PM 2.5 air pollution is correlated with health problems such as low birth weight and chronic respiratory diseases like asthma.

Research published in The New England Journal of Medicine after the passage of policies designed to improve air quality “shows that the children who grew up when the air was better quality literally had more functioning lung tissue,” Dr. Sarfaty said.

In addition to the emissions associated with burning fossil fuels, the report said future generations would be exposed to a growing source of fine-particulate pollution: wildfires.

As temperatures rise, wildfires are becoming more frequent in part because hotter temperatures dry out vegetation, making it easier to ignite. The smoke, like the smoke that comes from burning fossil fuels, has negative health effects.

According to the report, since the middle of this decade there has been a 77 percent increase in the number of people exposed to wildfire smoke worldwide. Much of that growth has been in India and China. The 2018 California wildfire season, though, when the Camp Fire became the state’s deadliest and most destructive blaze in terms of acres burned, and this year’s wildfire season make it clear that increasing wildfires are also happening in the United States.

Across the Western United States, the rise of giant wildfires has worsened air pollution enough to erode some of the airquality gains from the Clean Air Act.

“You have young kids escaping fires that are going to be, in effect, challenged for life,” said Gina Mc- Carthy, a former administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency. “There are mental health issues happening as a result of these climate events and fires and floods that children have never had to face, certainly not to the frequency and intensity that they have to face now.” The report said that there were many links between climate change and mental health, including the loss of property and the loss of livelihoods but stopped short of quantifying the impact.

Part of the exposure risk that children face is simply that they spend more time outside than adults. Coupled with their differing physiology, it makes them more susceptible to fine particulate pollution. These same factors also mean they are more likely to suffer from the effects of extreme heat associated with climate change; eight of the 10 hottest years on record have happened this decade.

The European heat waves in 2003 lead to the deaths of 70,000 people. “We know that climate change had its fingerprints there and that’s concerning,” said Dr.

Nick Watts, the report’s executive editor, adding that subsequent heat waves have “resulted in tens of thousands of deaths.” While many of those people were elderly, young people suffered, too.

As heat waves become more severe, parents and coaches “may not realize that the children are more exposed and therefore more vulnerable,” Dr. Sarfaty said.

A 2017 report that she helped prepare found that, in the United States, heat related illnesses were the leading cause of death and disability in young athletes.

This is the third time The Lancet has weighed in on the health impacts of climate change, but the first with a focus on children.

“It was our contention, both negatively, that the health costs were huge and underestimated.

But also, more positively, that by putting health first in our response to climate, there were dividends for both the public and for the economy in terms of cleaner and safer cities and healthier diets,” Dr. Richard Horton, editor in chief of The Lancet, said.

To that end, the report does contain glimmers of hope. Carbon intensity, or how much energy can be produced for each unit of greenhouse gas released, has increased.

And more cities are filing climate assessments detailing solutions that can be put into place.

But these actions are happening against a backdrop of greenhouse gas emissions that continue to rise.

SOURCE 





UK: Climate change: Firms failing to tackle crisis will be delisted from stock exchange, Labour Party says

Companies that fail to act on the climate change they cause will be axed from the stock exchange, under radical Labour plans.

John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, pledged his government would ensure firms are “pulling their weight” to tackle the “existential threat” to the planet.

And he warned: “For those companies not taking adequate steps under Labour they will be delisted from the London Stock Exchange.”

Vowing to “rewrite the rules” of the economy to benefit workers, Mr McDonnell also insisted curbing the climate crisis would be “Labour’s overriding priority” if it wins the general election.

The Corporate Governance Code would be beefed up to “set out a minimum standard for listing related to evidencing the action being taken to tackle climate change”.

“If we are meet the climate change target to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, we need to ensure that companies are pulling their weight alongside government,” he told an event in London.

And, claiming some support from the corporate world, he added: “Business bodies are calling for companies to improve climate related financial reporting and for all companies to bring forward decarbonisation plans.”

Earlier, the Green Party lashed out at Labour for dropping plans to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2030, as a shadow cabinet minister revealed on Monday.

It said the decision proved only the Greens are willing to wage “a war” on climate change, with a £100bn pledge to end emissions by that date.

SOURCE 





Climate Extremism In The Age Of Disinformation

ROY W. SPENCER

Do the global warming wars ever change anyone’s mind?

I suppose there are a few people whose minds have been changed. As I recall, Judith Curry has said Climategate (now “celebrating” its 10-year anniversary) was her wake-up call that institutionalized climate science might not be all it claims to be.

She is now a well-informed and unabashed skeptic of the modern tendency to blame every bad weather event on humans.

While I’m sure there are other examples, the unfortunate truth is that fewer and fewer people actually care about the truth.

The journalist who broke the Climategate story, James Delingpole, yesterday posted an article entitled The Bastards Have Got Away with It!, James concludes with,

Climategate was the event when, just for a moment, it seemed we’d got the climate scamsters bang to rights, that the world’s biggest scientific (and economic) con trick had been exposed and that the Climate Industrial Complex would be dismantled before it could do any more damage to our freedom and our prosperity.

But the truth, it would seem, is no match for big money, dirty politics and madness-of-crowds groupthink. We’ve lost this one, I think, my friends. And the fact that all those involved in this scam will one day burn in Hell is something, I’m afraid, which gives me all too little consolation.

You see, it does not really matter whether a few bad actors (even if they are leaders of the climate movement) conspired to hide data and methods, and strong-arm scientific journal editors into not publishing papers that might stand in the way of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) mission to pin climate change on humans, inflate its seriousness, and lay the groundwork for worldwide governmental efforts to reduce humanity’s access to affordable energy.

The folks were simply trying to Save the Earth™, and we all know that the ends justify the means, right? So what if they cheated? Boys will be boys, you know. The science is sound, and besides, 97% of all scientists agree that…something.

The Roots of Polarization

One would think that the practice of science would be objective. I once believed this, too.

As a fresh post-doc at the University of Wisconsin, when I discovered something new in satellite data, I was surprised to encounter NASA employees who tried to keep my work from being published because they feared it would interfere with a new satellite mission they were working toward.

I eventually got it published as a cover article in the prestigious journal, Nature.

But the subject I was dealing with did not have the profound financial, political, policy, and even religious import that climate change would end up having.

Furthermore, 35 years ago things were different than today. People were less tribal. There is an old saying that one should not discuss politics or religion in polite company, but it turns out that social media is far from polite company.

From a practical standpoint, what we do (or don’t do) about human-caused climate change supports either (1) a statist, top-down governmental control over human affairs that involves a more socialist political framework, or (2) an unconstrained individual-freedom framework where capitalism reigns supreme.

So, one could easily be a believer (or non-believer) in the ‘climate emergency’ based upon their political leanings.

While I know a few socialists who are skeptical of human-caused climate change being a serious issue, this is the exception rather than the rule.

The same is true of capitalists who think that we must transition away from fossil fuels to wind and solar energy (unless they stand to make money off the transition through subsidies, in which case they are financially rather than ideologically driven).

Or, on a spiritual level, a human who desires to worship something must ultimately choose between the Creation or the Creator. There is no third option.

I find that most Earth scientists are nature worshipers (showing various levels of fervor) and consider the Earth to be fragile.

In contrast, those who believe the Earth was created for the purpose of serving humanity tend to view nature as being resilient and less sensitive to lasting damage.

Both of these views have equally religious underpinnings since “fragile” and “resilient” are emotive and qualitative, rather than scientific, terms.

So, I would argue it really does not matter that much to most alarmists or skeptics what the evidence shows.

As long as 8 billion people on the planet have some non-zero effect on climate — no matter how small or unmeasurable — the alarmist can still claim that ‘we shouldn’t be interfering with the climate system’.

As a counterexample, the skeptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg actually believes the alarmist science from the IPCC, but claims that economics tells us it’s better to live in and adapt to a warmer world until we have more cost-effective substitutes for fossil fuels.

For this stance regarding policy, he is labeled a global warming denier despite fully believing in human-caused climate change.

The Role of the Disinformation Superhighway

Baylor Professor Alan Jacobs has an interesting essay entitled On Lost Causes regarding the tendency for people to believe anything they see on the internet if it supports their biases.

He mentions a recent novel in which a high-tech billionaire, fed up with the disinformation he sees on the Web, concocts an elaborate online story that Moab, Utah, has been obliterated by a nuclear explosion.

He has CGI video, actors, witnesses, and an elaborate (but fake) social media presence to support the story.

The plan is to then show the world how easily they were duped so that people would become less credulous when digesting information.

But instead, people cling to their belief. Even after many years, the ‘Moab truthers’ claim that anyone who disputes that Moab was destroyed is a troll or paid shill. People could actually travel to Moab to see for themselves, but virtually no one does.

SOURCE 





N. Hemisphere In Hypothermic Shock! Record Cold, ‘Historic Snowstorms’

Winter hasn’t even officially arrived, but already large areas of the northern hemisphere are seeing “historic snowfalls,” frigid temperatures, and even avalanche alarms.

The Northern Hemisphere has certainly caught a major cold, one certainly not caused by the human CO2 virus.

Instead of fever, parts of the northern hemisphere are in hypothermia!

Alarmists, media desperate

Though global warming scientists will never admit it, they are really surprised and stunned.

All that is left for them is to make up some cockamamie warming-causes-cold explanations and hope there are enough severely stupid among the media and masses to believe it.

“United States — Rewrite the Record Books”

Beginning in North America, “sub-zero temperatures are now blasting” millions of Americans following “the three historic snowstorms which buried parts of the U.S. last month,” reports weather site electroverse.net here.

Electroverse writes that “lows throughout the week will be more like January temperatures” with readings below zero for many U.S. states and “temps down into the teens are even forecast as far south as Texas.”

Yesterday, 97 records were toppled.

“It’s a big deal,” Electroverse writes in its headline. They also add:

“No, record cold & snow IS NOT made ‘more likely in a warming world.’ In fact, the IPCC’s line—until not that long ago—was that ‘milder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms.’”

Solar activity suspected

It’s not the sort of thing we are supposed to be expecting from a “warming planet”.  Some climate experts blame natural factors, like solar activity, for the cold, and that these warnings have long been known since the sun has entered a new period of calm.

Freeze watches and warnings also extend as far south as Florida. And it’s only early November. And don’t expect to see many FFF activists show up at rallies protesting hot weather any time soon.

Polar Bear Science site here also reports that the Hudson Bay in Canada has started freezing up earlier than normal three years in a row!

Europe starting to get clobbered by snow, 2m in the Alps

Meanwhile cold has also spread across Europe, though not quite as brutal as what we’ve been seeing across North America.

In central Europe, the Austrian online Heute here reports that “huge amounts of snow” are on the way for the Alps.

German site Wetteronline.de reports here of “new, severe snowfalls in the Alps” with “up to two meters of fresh snow are possible in places up to the weekend” in Switzerland, Austria, and Northern Italy. “This is good news for winter sports enthusiasts – but the danger of avalanches is increasing.”

Biggest November snowstorm in 40 years

Even global warming child activist Greta Thunberg’s Sweden is getting hard hit by extreme cold and snow. Electroverse reports the Nordic country is suffering “its biggest November snowstorm in 40 years.”

On November 10th, Mika tweeted that temps in northern Sweden fell 10 -34.5°C.

Most snow in 60 years

The German Ruhrkultur site reports how also Finland just saw “the coldest autumn temperature and the highest snow depth in at least 60 years” and that “the temperature in Enontekiö, a municipality in Finnish Lapland, dropped to 28.2°C on Tuesday 5 November.”

Deepening cold across Siberia as well

“On November 11 in Yakutia, the daily temperature never rose above −30°C (-22F),” reports the SOTT site here. “Some parts of Siberia were even colder: In Evenkia and the northern regions of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, the temperature dropped to −41 … −44°C.”

SOTT comments (sarcastically): “I wonder how much ice will melt at −44°C (-47F).

With all the early winter weather, it’s ridiculous to claim the globe is burning up. So it’s no wonder the alarmists have taken their climate ambulance to the far side of the globe, NSW Australia, and kept their narrow focus on brush fires.

SOURCE 





Venice Flood Due To Climate Change – Only It Wasn’t

On November 13th, the BBC website carried an article about the flooding in Venice, quoting the Mayor Luigi Brugnaro. He said “Now the government must listen. These are the effects of climate change… the costs will be high.”

This latest flood in Venice reached 1.87 metres according to the tide monitoring centre. Only once since official records began in 1923 has the tide been higher, reaching 1.94 metres in 1966. The BBC article said ‘Photographs showed people wading through the streets as Venice was hit by a storm’.

Hit by a storm. Hang on, the mayor said it was because of climate change. Storms are natural events, so which is it?

A storm coinciding with a high tide is what it is, and they are surprised it caused a flood? In a city sinking into the ground? A city that has flooded multiple times before?

The BBC article also said it was a result of the highest tide in 50 years. Tides are a natural event, they happen every day, caused by the Moon not the climate. Unless we are now to start blaming the Moon for climate change? It’s also interesting to note that in February 2018 & 2017, after weeks of no rainfall, the canals in Venice almost ran dry. Did the BBC article mention that? No of course not.

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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