The crook Cook again

John Cook is a bald-faced liar and I would be delighted if he sues me for saying so.  He trots out below the old 97% myth when his own research showed that two thirds (66.4%) of climate scientists TOOK NO POSITION on global warming, which is what any skeptic would do in the present climate of censuring and censoring dissent.  The only 97% consensus was among the one third who DID take a position.

Check it for yourself. The abstract of his paper says:  "We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW". Anybody who can read can see what a crook Cook is  -- just from his own writings

Cook does however make an interesting admission below.  He says that discussing the climate facts is unlikely to persuade people of global warming, which is right.  There are NO scientific facts which unambiguously support global warming.  It's only a focus on that bogus 97% that might win people over

I live only about 15 minutes drive away from where John Cook works so I challenged him to meet me and discuss global warming in person.  He agreed.  But when I asked if he minded me recording our conversation, I heard no more from him. He knows that his claims cannot stand the light of uncensored publicity


Communicating climate change is hard. Debunking climate myths is even harder.

Take it from me, I’ve spent the last decade researching climate communication and the psychology of misinformation. So let me express my expert opinion on a Jimmy Kimmel comedy segment on climate change.

It’s one of the better pieces of climate communication I’ve encountered.

Not everyone agrees. Scientist/filmmaker Randy Olsen has criticised Kimmel for giving free attention to climate denialist Marc Morano. Olsen does have a point. Morano scores a win by getting mainstream TV attention. But there’s a bigger picture here. The main winner on the night is public perception of scientific consensus.

The average person has no idea just how strong the scientific agreement on climate change is. Multiple studies have found 97% agreement among climate scientists that humans are causing global warming. In contrast, only 12% of Americans are aware that the consensus is over 90%.

Why the huge gap between public perception of consensus and the 97% reality? Part of the answer goes back nearly two decades. In the late 1990s, a Republican pollster Frank Luntz wrote a now infamous memo, advising Republicans to maintain doubt about the level of scientific agreement on climate change. Luntz’s market research had identified that what people thought about expert opinion affected other views on climate change.

It turns out Luntz was ahead of his time in identifying the psychological importance of perceived consensus. Scientific studies from 2011, 2013 and 2015 have identified perceived consensus as a “gateway belief”, influencing a range of attitudes about climate change including support for climate policy.

As a result, social scientists have urged climate scientists to set the record straight on scientific consensus. As far as climate communication messages go, this one is relatively straightforward. You don’t need to explain the mechanism of the greenhouse effect or the nuances of the carbon cycle (although those are good to explain if you get the opportunity). To effectively communicate the reality of climate change, you just need to mention that 97% of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming.

So Kimmel nails it. His approach is entirely consistent with the advice of communication experts. My guess is this is probably due to his instincts as a professional comedian rather than a thorough familiarity with the psychological literature on consensus messaging.

Either way, along with President Obama, John Oliver, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron and Bernie Sanders, Kimmel has provided another valuable contribution to closing the consensus gap.

SOURCE  





The world's children are already suffering from Climate Change

This crap hardly needs a reply but here goes:  COLD days are a much bigger killer than hot ones so a warmer world should be healthier for young and old.  Some harm can be done by heat but that is more than balanced out by the effects of cold

People urging more aggressive action on climate change often use children in their rhetoric: “we need to leave a better planet for our children,” “we owe it to the next generation to act,” etc. Earlier this year, two dozen children went so far as to sue the U.S. government for failing to act. “This is an intergenerational issue,” said James Hansen, a former NASA scientist supporting the lawsuit. “Our actions will affect our grandchildren and their children.”

The latest issue of the journal The Future of Children, a joint publication of Brookings and Princeton University, goes beyond the usual rhetoric and provides a detailed analysis of the impact of climate change on children’s wellbeing.

Extreme heat is associated with a rise in infant deaths, physical birth defects, delayed brain development, and nervous system problems, suggest Joshua Graff Zivin and Jeffrey Shrader in their contribution to the new volume. Excess heat can also reduce human capital development by damaging learning.

The direct effects of heat are just one way climate change can have an impact on children. Contributors to the volume examine a range of risks, including:

"the effect of extreme weather on political conflict and violence
greater pollution leading to increased asthma rates

the effects of more powerful and more frequent natural disasters on children’s nutrition and physical health

greater pollution—specifically fine particulates—affecting academic test scores

The priority for public policy should be to slow temperature rises by curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

SOURCE  




Some big effects of NATURAL climate change

You won’t find it in history textbooks, but the Roman Empire’s rise to dominance in Egypt and the Middle East may have been influenced by a series of volcanic eruptions that reduced rainfall.

These eruptions could have contributed to the sabotage and destruction of the Ptolemaic Kingdom on the Nile, paving the way for the rise of Cleopatra and the Roman Empire – and, ultimately, the modern Western world.

The Ptolemaic Kingdom ruled Egypt and North Africa in the final three centuries BC, known as the Hellenistic period. Now, teamwork between volcanologists and historians has revealed a close match in timing between volcanic eruptions and domestic unrest, revolts and uprisings that led to the kingdom’s downfall.

“So far, Hellenistic history has never had any climate component,” says Joseph Manning, a historian at Yale University. Bringing in the impact of climate shocks on the unfolding of history is important, he says.

“There were revolts and social unrest from 245 BC onwards, down to the mid-first century BC,” Manning told the meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna, Austria, last week. “One involved the entire river valley along the Nile for 20 years.”

At the heart of the unrest were starvation and famine in the Ptolemaic Kingdom, where grain harvests were critically dependent on annual flooding of fertile plains by the East African monsoon.

Rain drops

Fallout from major eruptions that affected global climate would have cut the annual rains in the highlands of Ethiopia that drained into the Blue Nile and ultimately irrigated the kingdom’s crops.

“Aerosols from volcanoes reduce evaporation and cool the temperature, leading to fewer clouds,” says Francis Ludlow of Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, and the team’s climate historian.

Volcanic fallout is known from more recent times to interfere with an equatorial belt of air called the Intertropical Convergence Zone that seasonally shifts up and down around the world, bringing monsoon rains either north or south depending on the time of year.

“You must have rain in the Ethiopian highlands to irrigate the Nile valley, so if monsoon rains are disrupted, the usual floods would have been lost,” says Ludlow.

Matching times

Ludlow, Manning and their colleagues have now found almost exact matches between the timing of uprisings in the kingdom and new eruptions they identified. The latter were deduced from spikes in sulphate contamination in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica, while dating of the uprisings came from historical accounts.

The researchers found that eight out of nine documented revolts against the Ptolemaic rulers began within two years of eruption dates.

Further historical investigations showed that the revolts severely disrupted attempts by Ptolemaic armies to seize new territory in Mesopotamia through at least nine major wars with their main rivals, the Seleucid Empire that straddled parts of the Middle East and Central Asia, between 274 and 96 BC.

Manning has now tied previously unexplained retreats from battle by the Ptolemaic rulers to the need to deal with insurrections on home territory. Unable to retain new territory on the battlefield, the kingdom eventually shrank,  giving way to rivals.

The misery caused by eruptions was also linked to significant decrees issued by Ptolemaic rulers. For instance, the priests’ decree of Canopus in 238 BC reports moves by Egypt to import grain in huge amounts from overseas, underscoring the severity of the domestic famine.

“Now, we can see it’s all lining up,” says Manning. “The last four centuries BC were very active volcanically and as a result saw this incredible instability, which ultimately paved the way for the kingdom to fall and for the rise of the Roman Empire.

Modern origins

In the grand scheme of things, Manning says, the weakening of the Ptolemaic Kingdom led to the forces of Cleopatra and Antony being defeated by Octavian’s Roman army. And without Rome as we know it, Europe would have looked very different, too.

“This is the beginning of the modern world, around the second century BC,” he says, and had the Ptolemaic kingdom not fallen, the world could have looked very different.

“I find it to be a very intriguing study,” says Matthew Toohey, of the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany. He cites more recent eruptions, particularly those of Laki, Iceland, in 1783 and Novarupta, Alaska, in 1912, that we know affected the levels of the Nile river.

“There is an emerging understanding of the physical mechanisms behind changes in the monsoons and tropical rainfall after such eruptions,” says Toohey. “It’s not hard to imagine that eruptions of the more distant past had similar effects on the Nile.”

The authors have presented “fascinating” correlations between well-dated records of climate change, Nile-flood reduction and societal unrest, says Brian Dermody, who studies the impact of climate on the Roman Empire at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “The coincidence in dating indicates that there is likely a link between these environmental changes and societal unrest within the Ptolemaic Kingdom.”

However, he says that Nile floods were highly variable throughout history – so it would be interesting to explore why some societies, such as those of the Ptolemaic period, seemingly had lower resilience to fluctuations in Nile floods than those at other times.

SOURCE  



Climate fraud in Canada

“Eco-freaks” wrong about Fort Mac wildfires. Here’s what DID cause them

Fort McMurray is devastated by wildfires, tens of thousands of people have been evacuated and have lost their homes and possessions but that didn’t stop people from blaming climate change for the catastrophe.

The eco-crazies were out in full force on social media, rejoicing as the town went up in flames -- even Elizabeth May stopped just short of blaming Alberta for bringing the catastrophe on. And who could forget the tweet from former NDP candidate Tom Moffat, who called the fires “karmic” and used the hash tag “Feel the Bern” to mock the town.

I know this is going to come as a shock but wildfires like the Miramichi fire that happened in New Brunswick and the Peshtigo fire in 1871 have occurred throughout history.

Scientists that specialize in climate say global average temperatures have risen only one degree and that if human activity is the culprit in rising temperatures, it would have only been significant starting from 1960. A degree in temperature increase is not “catastrophic” and the argument that climate change causes wildfires is flawed simply based on the fact that there have been more catastrophic events throughout time.

So, what did cause the fires?

It all started with El Nino, the appearance of unusually warm water off of Peru and Ecuador that causes complex changes in climate. It meant winter ended a month earlier in Alberta, causing higher than average temperatures. This in turn caused dry conditions that have provided ample fuel in the form of tinder dry forest fires.

A report released in 2012 also found that our forests are aging and much drier than 50 years ago. For Fort McMurray, it was one of those times where the elements for a wildfire were present – dry fuel, low humidity and high winds.

El Nino and aging forests aren’t a result of climate change, or human activity, so when are the politicians and eco-freaks going to stop misleading people and just have some compassion for the people of Fort McMurray?

SOURCE  




Al Gore: Solving ‘Climate Crisis’ Will ‘Save the Future of Civilization’

A man with VISION!

Former Vice President Al Gore said on Thursday that solving what he called the “climate crisis” would not only help the U.S. and global economy but could save civilization itself.

Speaking at the Climate Action 2016 summit in Washington, D.C., Gore said the “Number One threat to the global economy is the climate crisis,” which also threatens the U.S. economy, and that turning that around requires investment in the right kind of infrastructure here and abroad.

In the United States, Gore called for “physical stimulus in a coordinated way aimed at infrastructure that the country needs, which means de-carbonization, renewable energy, batteries, energy storage, sustainable forestry, sustainable agriculture.”

“This is the opportunity to save the economy and a side benefit would be to save the future of civilization,” Gore said.

Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, also spoke at the event and called climate change an “urgent issue.”

She said leaders should look to communities that are tackling climate change, such as New Orleans, which is losing “a football field” of land on an hourly basis.

“So often we find the best solutions, the truly breakthrough – kind of groundbreaking innovations – are already at work in some communities somewhere in the world,” Rodin said.

“For example, the city of New Orleans is working to restore their bayous, their wetlands triangle, which are very vulnerable by rebuilding critical areas of the coast that are subject to coastal erosion and reducing economic activity, as well as the well-being of their population,” Rodin said.

“This is an urgent issue,” she said. “Think about this.”

SOURCE  





Al Gore's Inconvenient Reality

May 24 will mark 10 years since Al Gore’s climate horror flick “An Inconvenient Truth” made its debut. The fact we’re able to write about it now is good news, because obviously the world, contrary to the film’s prognostications, hasn’t imploded (not in regards to the climate, anyway). But scientists and wannabe political superstars rarely grade their own work. Thankfully, third-party investigators do, and reporter Michael Bastasch re-watched the film to vet the claims Gore made in his farcical Nobel Prize-winning project. A decade later, here’s the reality:

“Kilimanjaro Still Has Snow”
“Gore Left Out The 15-Year ‘Hiatus’ In Warming”
“The Weather Hasn’t Gotten Worse”
“The North Pole Still Has Ice”
“A ‘Day After Tomorrow’-Style Ice Age Is Still A Day Away”

You can rummage the thorough details here. Complimenting Bastasch’s work, Steven Hayward adds, “Gore made much of Greenland’s ice sheet melting so rapidly you’d think the continent was a grilled cheese sandwich in a pizza oven. Science magazine reports this week that the interior of Greenland’s enormous ice mass appears to be … completely stable.” On Wednesday, a headline posted by the University of Illinois read, “Study finds ice isn’t being lost from Greenland’s interior.” This is Al Gore’s genuine inconvenient reality.

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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New analyses reveal that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would have only a tiny effect on temperature

Will Coal save Japan and the World?

Kyoji Kimoto

Abstract

The central dogma is critically evaluated in the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory of the IPCC, claiming the Planck response is 1.2K when CO2 is doubled. The first basis of it is one dimensional model studies with the fixed lapse rate assumption of 6.5K/km. It is failed from the lack of the parameter sensitivity analysis of the lapse rate for CO2 doubling. The second basis is the Planck response calculation by Cess in 1976 having a mathematical error. Therefore, the AGW theory is collapsed along with the canonical climate sensitivity of 3 K utilizing the radiative forcing of 3.7W/m2 for CO2 doubling. The surface climate sensitivity is 0.14–0.17K in this study with the surface radiative forcing of l.lW/m2. Since the CO2 issue is removed, coal will be the energy for the future of many nations in terms of the amount of resource and production cost.

SOURCE  




Global warming is pushing high altitude clouds towards the poles, Nasa study finds

The article below is a combination of fact and theory.  The factual finding is that high altitude clouds have moved polewards over the last 30 years -- something that would help explain why Arctic temperatures are so erratic and often out of step with the rest of the world.  But WHY the clouds have moved poleward nobody knows.  They speculate, predictably,  that it is due to global warming -- but since we have had so little warming for most of the period concerned, that is just a statement of faith.  Models don't tell you anything about the world.  All they tell you about is the assumptions of the modeller.  I like the model below a  lot better



And I don't even know her name


A new Nasa analysis of 30-years of satellite data has revealed high altitude clouds shifting toward the poles are being moved by the expansion of the tropics.

The changes could dramatically affect the planet's climate, expert warn.

Where clouds are absent, darker surfaces like the ocean or vegetated land absorb heat, but where clouds occur their white tops reflect incoming sunlight away, which can cause a cooling effect on Earth's surface.

Understanding the underlying causes of cloud migration will allow researchers to better predict how they may affect Earth's climate in the future, the researchers say.

They say the changes are driven by the tropics effectively becoming larger as the planet warms.

George Tselioudis, a climate scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University in New York City, was interested in which air currents were shifting clouds at high altitude - between about three and a half and six miles high - toward the poles.

The previous suggested reason was that climate change was shifting storms and the powerful air currents known as the jet streams - including the one that traverses the United States - toward the poles, which in turn were driving the movement of the clouds.

Researchers analysed the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project data set, which combines cloud data from operational weather satellites, including those run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to provide a 30-year record of detailed cloud observations.

They combined the cloud data with a computer re-creation of Earth's air currents for the same period driven by multiple surface observations and satellite data sets.

What they discovered was that the poleward shift of the clouds, which occurs in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, connected more strongly with the expansion of the tropics, defined by the general circulation Hadley cell, than with the movement of the jets.

'What we find, and other people have found it as well, is that the sinking branch of the Hadley cell, as the climate warms, tends to be moving poleward,' said Tselioudis.

'It's like you're making the tropical region bigger.'

That expansion causes the tropical air currents to blow into the high altitude clouds, pushing them toward the poles, he said.

The results were published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

Scientists are working to understand exactly why the tropics are expanding, which they believe is related to a warming climate.

The poleward shift of high altitude clouds affects how much sunlight reaches Earth's surface because when they move, they reveal what's below.

'It's like pulling a curtain,' said Tselioudis. And what tends to be revealed depends on location - which in turn affects whether the surface below warms or not.

'Sometimes when that curtain is pulled, as in the case over the North Atlantic ocean in the winter months, this reduces the overall cloud cover' in the lower mid-latitudes, the temperate regions outside of the tropics, Tselioudis said.

The high altitude clouds clear to reveal dark ocean below - which absorbs incoming sunlight and causes a warming effect.

However, in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, the high altitude clouds usually clear out of the way to reveal lower altitude clouds below - which continue to reflect sunlight from their white tops, causing little effect on the solar radiation reaching the surface.

That information is a new insight that will likely be used by the climate modeling community, including the scientists who contribute modeling expertise to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said Lazaros Oreopoulos, a cloud and radiation budget researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who was not involved in the study.

SOURCE  





We don’t need billion$ to prevent Zika

Controlling mosquitoes and preventing diseases requires smarter policies, not more billions

Paul Driessen and Robert Novak

The Zika virus is increasingly linked to serious neurological complications for pregnant women and microcephaly in newborns: smaller than normal heads and brains. It also affects areas of fetal brains that control basic muscular, motor, speech and other functions, leading to severe debilities that require expensive care throughout a person’s life.

The disease is becoming a crisis in Brazil, site of this year’s Summer Olympic Games. But cases continue to be reported in the United States, primarily among women who have traveled abroad, and Zika is reaching serious levels in Puerto Rico, other US territories, and many parts of Central and South America.

Stopping its spread is an urgent public health matter. President Obama has asked Congress for $1.9 billion in new funding, to find better diagnostic tests to detect Zika, develop a vaccine against the virus, and control the mosquitoes that are the primary vector for the vicious virus.

Not surprisingly, the request has spawned new budget battles in Washington. The White House and congressional Democrats want to spend new money, while Republicans insist there is already plenty of money in the budget, plenty wasted that could be better allocated, and plenty being spent on climate change and other programs that have a far lower priority than this public health menace.

Other observers say Zika is being used as another opportunity for government agencies to expand their budgets, personnel and empires. Certain agencies, they note, are blaming “mosquitoes” in general and even climate change, or promoting high-tech “solutions” that may never work and will take years to develop, test and employ on national or global scales.

Meanwhile, much can be done right now, to reduce mosquito populations and slash the incidence and spread of this disease, for far less than $2 billion. It requires smarter policies, more focused efforts.

Zika is not spread by generic “mosquitoes.” Its primary carrier is a very particular blood-sucker with unusual habits and habitats. Aedes aegypti is known as the yellow fever mosquito, because it is the principal avenue for spreading that nasty disease, which causes fevers, chills, nausea, muscle pains, and liver and kidney damage. A vaccine exists, but yellow fever still kills up to 30,000 people annually.

Ae. aegypti also spread dengue fever, another painful, debilitating disease that can recur for years; there is no vaccine, and it sickens nearly 100 million people a year, killing some 25,000. The flying killers also infect people with chikungunya, which often causes severe fever, headaches, muscle and joint pain, rashes and other non-lethal problems.

These mosquitoes were nearly eradicated, especially in Brazil, during the 1960s. Unfortunately, control bred complacency, and Ae. aegypti is again a dangerous scourge in Brazil, other South and Central American countries, Puerto Rico, Caribbean islands, Africa and Asia.

Their potential range includes the southeastern United States and southern Europe, they are actually found in some of these southern US states and Hawaii, and some do carry Zika and other diseases. All these diseases can infect blood supplies, making transfusions risky and necessitating that blood be imported from safe locales that may not have sufficient supplies themselves.

Summer Olympics fans and athletes could get infected and carry these diseases from Brazil back to their home countries. Thousands of other travelers could also spread all these diseases. The prospect has health officials worried. However,  Ae. aegypti’s habits offer opportunities for controlling them.

They live close to houses, rarely fly more than 80 feet from where they hatch, bite during the day, and hatch from eggs laid in tires, cans, jars, flower pots, vases, bromeliads, holes in trees, and almost any other containers that hold water, indoors and outdoors, in backyards and junkyards.

That means national and international health ministries, neighborhoods and individual families can undertake simple, low-cost actions that will bring rapid, significant returns with limited time, money and resources – by eliminating mosquitoes and keeping them away from people. They should start now.

1) Educate politicians, local leaders, teachers, neighborhood organizations and citizens about the dangers posed by mosquitoes and the diseases they carry – and about what they can do to help. Launch and coordinate home and neighborhood programs, and stress why they must continue well into the future.

2) Destroy Aedes aegypti reproduction habitats. Remove trash, especially containers. Punch holes in tires and cans, so they cannot collect water. Fill in other standing water areas with dirt. Augment these actions with larvacides and insecticides.

Used properly, today’s larvae and adult mosquito killing chemicals are safe – especially compared to the misery, death and long-term care that Ae. aegypti and other mosquitoes spread. Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health and other studies have determined that the most commonly used larvicides (BTI and Temephos, aka Abate) are safe for humans and mammals, even in drinking water.

3) Prevent mosquito bites, to break the disease transmission cycle. This is especially important for people attending the Olympics or vacationing where problems exist. You don’t want to take diseases home.

Use personal insect repellants, preferably those containing DEET, even while indoors, and keep skin covered with clothing. To keep mosquitoes out of homes, make sure doors and windows have screens. For homes without screens, spatial repellents like DDT can be sprayed on walls and doorways.

4) Employ cell phone GPS systems to locate and monitor mosquito populations, and significant biting and disease outbreaks. Every citizen can help with this. Tie these efforts into local or national databases – and into monitoring and surveillance programs that can dispatch rapid response teams.

5) Test people for antibodies, especially pregnant women, to determine whether they have Zika or other mosquito-transmitted diseases. The RT-PCR test can find Zika proteins and genetic material in people, and in the brains and placentas of infants and miscarried fetuses. It can also rule out dengue, yellow and chikungunya fever viruses. Developing better, more rapid detection tests will be money well spent.

This multi-pronged approach is true “integrated vector and disease control.” It will bring rapid returns.

Nonetheless, at least two high-tech, non-chemical “solutions” have been proposed. They involve releasing male mosquitoes that have been sterilized by radiation, so they cannot mate successfully – or genetically modified so their progeny die before reaching maturity.

At least one experimental GMO effort has been field-tested, somewhat successfully, with gradual but noticeable reductions in mosquito populations in test areas. Since male mosquitoes don’t bite, releasing them into urban areas should pose few health risks. The concepts have researchers, technocrats and bureaucrats salivating over potential budgets and personnel increases.

However, field tests are just that: tests. The experimental programs must still survive long US Food and Drug Administration and Agriculture Department approval processes, budgetary constraints, anti-biotechnology and anti-radiation activism, and similar delays at the international level.

Neither approach can help in the near term, across the sprawling Rio de Janeiro Olympics venues, urban areas and shantytowns – or across millions of square miles in Latin America, Africa, Asia and beyond.

We cannot afford to deemphasize or shortchange the less sexy, but proven, highly effective, truly integrated vector and disease control programs described above. These strategies can and must be employed now, to eliminate Aedes aegypti mosquitoes and the horrible diseases they spread.

They will save lives now – in time for the Olympics, before these bugs and diseases claim more victims.

Via email





Dr. Fauci: Brazil Eliminated Zika-Carrying Mosquitoes Historically--Using DDT

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), said on Tuesday that Brazil was able to eliminate the Zika-virus-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquito when, in the 1950s and 1960s, it made "a very aggressive attempt" to do so that included "very heavy use of DDT."

He cautioned that the means used to eradicate the mosquito then "might not be acceptable now."

“Now, years ago in the fifties and the sixties,” Fauci said, “Brazil itself made a very aggressive attempt to eliminate the Aedes aegypti mosquito. They did it successfully but they did it in a way that would be almost non-feasible today—very heavy use of DDT, very aggressive use going into homes, essentially, spraying in homes, cleaning up areas, things that I think the general public would not be amenable to accepting.

“So, it can be done," Fauci said. "But historically it was done in a way that might not be acceptable now."

Currently, the mosquito-borne Zika virus is spreading in South America and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) warn that the mosquitoes which carry Zika will populate much of the United States this summer.

At Tuesday’s news conference, Dr. Fauci said, “The mosquito that is the predominant mosquito that spreads Zika is called Aedes aegypti. Aedes aegypti is a very difficult mosquito to control and eliminate.”

“It will require a very aggressive, concerted effort,” Fauci cautioned of attempts to eliminate the mosquitoes. “Their ability to exist and stay in places that are difficult to eliminate; mosquitoes, for example, they like to stay indoors as well as outdoors, which make the spraying, the outdoor spraying, ineffective for those mosquitoes.”

“What one would have to do is raise public awareness,” he said, “have cooperation at the community level to get people as best as they possibly can where they can to eliminate and diminish standing water of any type, as well as to push and to try to utilize environmentally friendly larvicides and insecticides.”

“Having said all of that,” he continued,  “it’s still going to be very, very difficult to do.”

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released maps of the estimated range of the Aedes aegypti in the United States last month, as well as the Aedes albopictus, another mosquito that is capable of transmitting Zika. The CDC verified to CNSNews.com that the map of potential exposure includes all but 10 states in the United States.

Fauci emphasized that while Aedes albopictus has a greater estimated range in the United States than the aegypti mosquito, “overwhelmingly the dominant mosquito that spreads it is Aedes aegypti and there’s a number of reasons for that.”

“Aedes aegypti is a much different mosquito: it bites in the day, at night, it goes indoors, outdoors, it’s very difficult to eliminate, only likes to bite humans,” he explained. “The albopictus and other mosquitoes they get distracted, they bite animals, they bite a variety of other species. So when you have Zika and you have Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, the chances are overwhelming that Aedes aegypti is going to be the major factor.”

Fauci also stressed that the real concern over the Zika virus “is the association of Zika infection in a pregnant woman with congenital abnormalities, predominantly microcephaly in a variable percentage of babies born of Zika infected mothers.”

Fauci cited a small cohort study from Brazil that found that 29 percent of Zika-infected mothers had abnormalities in sonograms of their unborn children. Fauci also cited a study that found that 1 percent of Zika-infected mothers had children with birth defects.

Fauci said another cohort study, “The Zika in Pregnancy Study,” is underway and will enroll thousands of pregnant women in South America, predominantly Brazil.

“When we get the data from that study we’ll be able to answer the question of precisely what that percentage (of Zika-infected women with birth defects) is,” he said, “but today in May of 2016 we don’t know the answer.”

SOURCE  





Another failure of a scientific consensus

A new study has challenged the scientific consensus that replacing saturated fats with polyunsaturated vegetable oils rich in linoleic acid (omega-6) reduces the risk of death from coronary heart disease.

Every five years, the federal government publishes nutritional guidelines that “reflect the current body of nutrition science” and “serve as the foundation for vital nutrition policies and programs across the United States.”

The 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines’ recommendation to “limit intake of calories from saturated fats to less than 10 percent per day is a target based on evidence that replacing saturated fats with unsaturated fats is associated with reduced risk of cardiovascular disease.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), “diets high in saturated fats, trans fat, and cholesterol have been linked to heart disease and related conditions, such as atherosclerosis.”

But the study, which was published April 12 in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), found that “replacement of saturated fat in the diet with linoleic acid effectively lowers serum cholesterol, but does not support the hypothesis that this translates to a lower risk of death from coronary heart disease or all causes.”

“As expected, the diet enriched with linoleic acid lowered cholesterol levels, but this did not translate to improved survival,” according to a BMJ press release. “In fact, participants who had greater reduction in blood cholesterol had higher, rather than lower, risk of death.”

The study was conducted by a team of researchers from the U.S. and Australia led by Christopher Ramsden, a medical investigator at the National Institutes of Health, who reexamined raw data and unpublished autopsy reports from the federally funded Minnesota Coronary Experiment (MCE).

The MCE was “a randomized controlled trial conducted in 1968-73” of 9,423 individuals between the ages of 20 and 97 who were living in six state mental hospitals and a nursing home in Minnesota.

Study participants who were assigned to the control diet for more than a year had a high intake of saturated fats from milk, cheese and beef.

However, the diet of the “intervention group” replaced about 50 percent of the saturated fat in the control diet with a 280 percent increase in polyunsaturated vegetable fat, mostly in the form of corn oil and corn oil margarine.

“Though the MCE intervention effectively lowered serum cholesterol in all pre-specified subgroups, there was no clinical benefit in any group. Paradoxically, MCE participants who had greater reduction in serum cholesterol had a higher rather than a lower risk of death,” the study found.

“In addition, the MCE intervention group did not have less atherosclerosis or fewer infarcts at autopsy.”

Autopsy results showed that “41% (31/76) of participants in the intervention group had at least one myocardial infarct, whereas only 22% (16/73) of participants in the control group did,” according to the research team.

“There was a robust association between decreasing serum cholesterol and increased risk of death, and this association did not differ between the intervention and control group,” the study noted.

“This finding that greater lowering of serum cholesterol was associated with a higher rather than a lower risk of death in the MCE does not provide support for the traditional diet-heart hypothesis,” the researchers concluded.

SOURCE  





Inspector General Thinks Obama's Coal Program a Waste

The Department of Energy inspector general leveled criticism against a program to capture emissions from coal plants that has wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and has yet to materialize. For the administration, however, the stakes are higher than simply running another failed program. The Texas Clean Energy Project was needed if coal plants around the country were going to comply with the Obama administration’s tough, tough rules on the industry. Without the program that is attempting to commercialize trapping emissions leaving coal plants and disposing of them underground, Obama’s regulations mandating the practice of carbon capture and sequestration would become illegal. Even though the project was started in 2010, it has not caught the eye of private investors. Furthermore, it’s still in development, with the project to go live in 2019. “The Project’s inability to obtain required commercial debt and equity financing and the adverse effect of changing energy markets on the demand for coal-based power plants raise serious doubts about the continuing viability of the Project,” the IG’s report read.

Existence of the program just proves the lengths to which the Obama administration will go to institute climate change regulation. It decreed regulation so strict there was no commercial solution coal companies could turn to. So it started a program, supposedly, to provide some farce of a free-market solution. And everyone wonders at the fact coal companies are going out of business. Remember: Hillary Clinton said she’d put coal miners and their companies out of business, only continuing what this administration has started.

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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More Freudian projection from the Warmists

There is no group in this wide world more immune to persuasion by the facts than the Green/Left.  They HAVE to be unaffected by the facts because their beliefs are so counterfactual.  Could anything be more absurd as statements of fact than classic Leftist slogans such as: "All men are equal", "Man is naturally good" or "All men are brothers"?  Yet the article below claims that it is conservatives and climate skreptics who tend to be immune to the facts.  Freud would understand.  Seeing your own faults in others is a common defence mechanism.

And Warmists NEED to believe that there is something wrong in the heads of their opponents.  Realizing that something which they see as obsessively important is seen as unimportant by most people creates cognitive dissonance in their heads.  How can so many be so wrong?  How can so many not see these obvious truths?  Are Warmists the only sane ones?  So to relieve that dissonance they have to dimiss any possiblity that their opponents might be right and instead find some defect in their opponents

The title of the original article is "Scientists are figuring out the keys to convincing people about global warming".  It was written by dedicated climate deceiver Dana Nuccitelli and appeared in the Leftist "Guardian".  Just an excerpt below from a whole heap of garbage

Can facts convince people about global warming?

Social scientist Dan Kahan has argued that ideological and cultural identity can be so strong that scientific evidence, facts, and information can’t break through it. Kahan thinks that on certain issues like climate change, ideological biases make many conservatives immune to facts.

In fact, conservatives with higher education and general scientific knowledge are often more wrong about climate change, in what’s been coined the “smart idiot” effect. This has led Kahan to conclude that on climate change, facts and knowledge can’t sway people. However, other research has found that climate-specific knowledge does correlate with acceptance of climate science.

In the new study led by Jing Shi, the authors surveyed a total of 2,495 people in Canada, China, Germany, Switzerland, the UK, and the US. They asked questions to evaluate the participants’ specific knowledge about the physical characteristics of climate change and understanding of its causes and consequences.

Critically, they found that knowledge about the causes of climate change was correlated with higher concern about climate change in all countries, and knowledge about the consequences was linked to higher concern in most countries.

"respondents from Germany and Switzerland had significantly higher scores on knowledge about physical aspects of climate change than participants from Canada and the US. Chinese respondents knew significantly more about the causes of climate change than the respondents from the other countries. German and Swiss respondents were most knowledgeable about the consequences of climate change. In contrast, participants from the US had the lowest level of knowledge about climate change among the six countries we surveyed, independent of the type of knowledge"

In short, as illustrated in the Yale/George Mason poll numbers, people who realize that humans are causing global warming are more likely to be concerned about the problem.

In Shi’s survey, the Chinese respondents had the most knowledge about the causes of global warming, with the German and Swiss participants most accurately answering the questions about its consequences. These nationalities also expressed the greatest concern about climate change. Americans showed the least climate knowledge and the least concern.

The keys to convincing people on climate change

Social scientists have identified several key pieces of knowledge that might convince people – even conservatives – about the need to tackle global warming.

Shi’s team showed that when people realize humans are causing global warming, they’re more likely to be concerned about the problem.

Social scientists at UC Berkeley have shown that when people understand how the greenhouse effect works, they’re more likely to accept human-caused global warming, across the political spectrum.

Research by teams led by Lewandowsky has shown that when people are aware of the 90–100% expert consensus on human-caused global warming, they’re more likely to accept that reality, and to support climate policies. Meanwhile, only 16% of Americans, including just 4% of Republicans, realize the expert consensus is so high.

This social science research shows that teaching people about the expert consensus and how the greenhouse effect works can increase their likelihood of accepting the reality human-caused global warming and potentially increase their support of policies to solve the problem.

It may be the case that ideology acts as a mental block preventing conservative Republicans from accepting facts like the 90–100% expert consensus on human-caused global warming. However, while there’s certainly a group who are unreachable due to ideologically-based science denial, they are a relatively small and dwindling segment of the population. For the vast majority of people who underestimate the expert consensus and don’t understand the mechanics of the greenhouse effect, this knowledge can make a difference.

As this research shows, if climate communicators can successfully inform people about how the greenhouse effect works and that humans are responsible for global warming, more will come to support climate policies, and it will become even more of a winning political issue.

SOURCE





Book review: “The Fable of a Stable Climate”.  Review by  By Dr. Hans Labohm (Edited/condensed by P. Gosselin)

Gerrit van der Lingen has recently published a fascinating book, “The Fable of a Stable Climate, the writings and debates of a climate realist”.

Most of the public information about the climate comes from scientists who studied the weather and weather processes and who consider temperature data of 150 years already a long period. For geologist and paleoclimatologist van der Lingen this is only a heartbeat in the geological history, which forms the only correct context for judging the present climate developments.

Ideology vs pure science

While studying climate change in the past van der Lingen realised that the present belief in man-made catastrophic global warming caused by CO2 emissions is not supported by the science and that it seems the debate is one between ideology and pure science.

The first chapter of his book an overview giving a clear overview of the climate debate, with all its high and low points. It draws attention to important participants, protagonists as well as antagonists. What really surprises Gerrit van der Lingen is how it is possible that intelligent people have been taken in by the AGW hypothesis and seem to have lost all sense of reality as a consequence.

British science delegation misbehaviour

One salient detail in the book pertains to the Russian position in relation to the Kyoto Protocol. The Russians had a few questions on which they never received an answer. In 2004, they decided to organise a climate conference in Moscow, independently of the UN IPCC climate panel, and with the co-operation of a number of climate sceptics. At the end of this conference, Andrei Illarionov, then economic advisor of president Putin, presented his impressions.

Yuri Antonovich and I have mentioned the fact that this is the first seminar of its kind that we have managed to arrange and it was accidental. Over almost a year we have repeatedly asked our foreign partners who advocate the Kyoto Protocol and who insist that Russia should ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and we have invited them to meet and discuss these issues, present arguments and counter-arguments and discuss them jointly. But we have not received any reply for a year. These people persistently refused to take part in any discussion.

Nine months ago, at an international climate change conference in Moscow, ten questions concerning the essence of the Kyoto Protocol and its underlying theory were submitted to the IPCC. We were told that the reply would be given within several days. Nine months have passed since then but there has been no reply, even though we have repeated our inquiries on these and the growing number of other related questions.

Instead of getting replies to our questions, we kept on hearing that replies did not matter. What was important is that whether or not Russia trusts Britain, the European Union and the countries that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol and that have been exerting unprecedented pressure on Russia to ratify it. This is why it was so important for us to arrange a real meeting and a real discussion of real problems with the participation of foreign scientists who have different views in order not to stew in one’s own juice, as Yuri Antonovich put it, but to hear the arguments not only of our Russian scientists but also the arguments and counter-arguments from scientists in other countries.

We did get such an opportunity and over the past two days we heard more than 20 reports, we held detailed discussions, and now we can say that a considerable number of the questions we formulated and raised have been somewhat clarified, just as some other questions have.”

Andrei Illarionov continued describing in detail the misbehaviour of the British delegation under the leadership of Sir David King, then the most important advisor of the British government, who did his utmost to sabotage the meeting, among others by requiring that climate sceptics not be allowed to present their presentations, and by stalking out of the meeting.

Ideology, not science

Illarionov compared the AGW with an ideology:

The next point brings us directly to the Kyoto Protocol, or more specifically, to the ideological and philosophical basis on which it is built. That ideological base can be juxtaposed and compared … with man-hating totalitarian ideology with which we had the bad fortune to deal during the 20th century, such as National Socialism, Marxism, Eugenics, Lysenkoism and so on. All methods of distorting information existing in the world have been committed to prove the alleged validity of these theories. Misinformation, falsification, fabrication, mythology, propaganda. Because what is offered cannot be qualified in any other way than myth, nonsense and absurdity.”

The Moscow climate conference leaves no doubt that the Russian Academy of Sciences cannot be considered as supporters of the AGW dogma – a thesis that is part of the standard repertoire of the disinformation by climate alarmists.

“Rubbish in – gospel out”

The book also looks at all important themes of the climate debate are discussed in short, clear analyses, and all allegations of the climate alarmists are tested against measurements and observations, and are refuted. In the end all warming hysteria is not based on science, but only on non-validated computer models. As is often said: Rubbish in – gospel out.

At the end of the book, Gerrit van der Lingen sighs:

When future historians will be studying the present global mass hysteria about alleged catastrophic man-made global warming (MMGW), they will most likely shake their heads in total disbelief. They may well compare it with other such historic irrational hysterias, like the tulipomania in Holland in the 17th century. […]

The belief that human emissions of carbon dioxide cause, or will cause catastrophic global warming is a […] totalitarian belief. It does not allow ‘critical discussion’. Those scientists who try are vilified. Over the years I collected the following abuses: ‘climate change deniers’, ‘cashamplified flat-earth pseudo scientists’, ‘the carbon cartel’, ‘villains’, ‘cranks’, ‘refuseniks lobby’, ‘polluters’, ‘a powerful and devious enemy’, ‘profligates’. The list is endless. […]

By saying that the science of climate change is ‘settled’ and not open to further discussion, clearly shows that the belief in man-made global warming is not based on proper science, but is a neo-Marxist, intolerant ideology. It is anti-science, anti-capitalist, anti-democracy, anti-growth, anti-humanity, anti-progress.”

All in all, “The Fable of a Stable Climate” shows a wide and solid knowledge of the subject. Moreover Gerrit van der Lingen has the talent to very clearly explain the complicated problems, which make his writings very accessible for a broad public. In other words: his book reads like a riveting novel.

The book has 418 pages and many illustrations and graphs, as well as extensive reference lists, and is available in both paperback and Kindle, can be ordered at www.book2look.com.

SOURCE





Sorry, Environmentalists: Buffalo Were Saved From Extinction by Capitalism

The North American bison, widely known as the buffalo, will now likely be recognized as America’s “national mammal”—on par with the bald eagle. (The bill is heading to the president’s desk.)

It is a fine tribute to a creature etched into American lore. While praises are already being made to the efforts of conservationists and modern environmentalists to save North America’s largest land mammal, the reality is that the species was saved by capitalism.

After describing how bison populations “dwindled from tens of millions to the brink of extinction,” a Huffington Post contributor wrote that the animal must be “acknowledged as the first success story of the modern conservation movement.”

Conservationists did play a role in saving the buffalo from extinction, but it was in large part the power of the free market that allowed the once-decimated species to thrive after nearly being wiped out.

Any description of the Great Plains in the 19th century usually involves vast herds of the giant, imposing bison dotting the landscape. The great frontier historian, Francis Parkman, included numerous, vivid descriptions of buffalo herds and hunts in his books.

Parkman wrote in “The Oregon Trail,”

"The face of the country was dotted far and wide with countless hundreds of buffalo. They trooped along in files and columns, bulls, cows, and calves … They scrambled away over the hills to the right and left; and far off, the blue pale swells in the extreme distance were dotted with innumerable specks"

Native American tribes of the Great Plains relied on the American bison for food when early American pioneers encountered them in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Plains Indians had unique hunting methods that were efficient, yet wasteful.

Anyone who has spent time in Wyoming, Montana, or any one of the Plains states is likely to have encountered giant, seemingly random craters. These are the remains of what were called “buffalo jumps,” and were the primary way many tribes cultivated the animal for food.

Frontier explorer Meriwether Lewis, of the famed Lewis and Clark expedition, described one of these jumps in an 1805 journal entry:

"Today we passed on the Stard. side the remains of a vast many mangled carcases of Buffalow which had been driven over a precipice of 120 feet by the Indians and perished; the water appeared to have washed away a part of this immence pile of slaughter and still their remained the fragments of at least a hundred carcases they created a most horrid stench. in this manner the Indians of the Missouri distroy vast herds of buffaloe at a stroke.

It was a ruthless affair, but it got the job done. Squandering enormous quantities of meat was simply not a problem for the nomadic people of the plains. There seemed to be endless amounts of the beasts.

The dwindling of the American bison began long before settlers arrived, but a swelling population of new migrants finally put the species at risk. And the intentional extermination of the herds to drive out the Plains Native Americans left the buffalo on the brink of annihilation. At one point, there were only 300 of them left in the wild.

Saved by a Free Society and Market Economics

Though the social and economic dynamics of the 19th century came close to wiping out the American bison, the species survived and began a recovery in the 20th century. The wild-roaming bison had been hunted mercilessly to the brink of destruction, but widespread private ownership allowed them to flourish.

Historian Larry Schweikart wrote about a study by Andrew C. Isenberg, now a professor at Temple University, which busted the myth that it was government intervention that saved the bison. From a small herd clinging to survival in Yellowstone National Park, the bison began their resurgence. Isenberg’s conclusion “upsets the entire apple cart of prior assumptions,” according to Schweikart:

This remnant herd and other scattered survivors might eventually have perished as well had it not been for the efforts of a handful of Americans and Canadians. These advocates of preservation were primarily Western ranchers who speculated that ownership of the few remaining bison could be profitable and elite Easterners possessed of a nostalgic urge to recreate . . . the frontier.

Preservation societies that aimed to maintain an authentic Western landscape, and travelling shows like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, were instrumental in keeping the tiny bison population alive. They did a much better job of protecting these valuable assets than the public national parks.

But even more than as a tourist attraction, the bison became prized for the same reason Plains Native Americans and settlers hunted them to begin with: they’re delicious.

Isenberg’s study showed that the number of bison swelled in the 20th century mostly because they were “preserved not for their iconic significance in the interest of biological diversity but simply raised to be slaughtered for their meat.”

Ranchers like Charles Goodnight, who provided the herd reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park in 1902, found ways to raise and profit from the bison. This led to a thriving national industry and ensures the bison will survive into the 21st century. Today there are around 500,000 buffalo in the United States, and about 90 percent are in private hands. And for that miracle resurrection, the world has capitalism, not Congress, to thank.

SOURCE  





Tale of Two Tribes: 'Climate Refugees' vs. EPA Victims

The left has concocted a lucrative category of politically correct victims: "climate refugees." It's the new Green racket.

U.S. taxpayers will now be forking over untold billions to ease the pain allegedly inflicted on "carbon's casualties" by industrial activity. By contrast, those who have suffered as a direct result of government incompetence by federal environmental bureaucrats continue to get the shaft.

Consider the plight of two tribes: the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw in Louisiana and the Navajo Nation in New Mexico.

The New York Times splashed a viral story on its pages this week spotlighting the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's $48 million grant to Native-Americans who live in the flood-ravaged coastal community of Isle de Jean Charles. About 60 residents, the majority of whom belong to the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe, will be resettled to drier land.

That's a whopping $800,000 per "climate refugee!"

Never mind that the Times' propagandists themselves admit that erosion on the island began in 1955 as a result of land-use and land-management factors that had nothing to do with climate change.

"Channels cut by loggers and oil companies eroded much of the island," the paper reported, "and decades of flood control efforts have kept once free-flowing rivers from replenishing the wetlands' sediments."

Never mind that there are conflicting scientific analyses on the extent to which man-made greenhouses gases have caused sea levels to rise; whether the rate is accelerating; and how much, if any, reducing carbon emissions would actually mitigate purportedly rising sea levels.

Never mind that enviro-alarmists have conveniently changed their tune from blaming global warming for causing sea level rises to blaming global warming for causing sea level drops.

Oh, and never mind that many of the inhabitants of Isle de Jean Charles — whose forefathers originally moved there to escape forced government relocation under the 1830 Indian Removal Act — don't even want to leave and have fought resettlement efforts for decades.

Obama's social engineers are already plotting how to replicate the climate change relocation program. "We see this as setting a precedent for the rest of the country, the rest of the world," declared HUD official Marion McFadden, who is running the program.

Even worse, the United Nations is looking to preemptively "address extreme weather displacement" by targeting refugees even before any apocalyptic event has caused them to seek refuge.

Can you spell "manufacturing a crisis"?

While these meddling liberals conspire to displace one tribe in the name of saving the planet, another tribe is still begging for help after Obama's destructive EPA poisoned their waters.

It's been almost eight months since an Environmental Protection Agency contractor recklessly knocked a hole at the long-abandoned Gold King Mine in Colorado's San Juan Mountains. You should know that Washington has long schemed to declare it a Superfund site, which would increase its power, budget and access over the region.

A federally sponsored wrecking crew poking around in the mine last August triggered a 3 million-ton flood of bright orange gunk into the Animas River. EPA's blithering idiots delayed notifying local residents for 24 hours and downplayed the toxic spill's effects.

Downstream, the muck seeped into the San Juan River in New Mexico, where the Navajo Nation lives and farms. The impact on drinking water and livelihoods has been catastrophic. But the Obama administration refused the tribe's request for disaster relief from FEMA last fall and yanked emergency water tanks the EPA had supplied for Navajo livestock.

Navajo Nation chief Russell Begaye blasted the White House at the time for shirking its responsibilities.

"U.S. EPA caused this entire disaster, they have harmed the people, the water and the land. ... For years, we have consistently been at the receiving end of toxic spills and contamination with no adequate relief as the United States Government and Private Companies became wealthy off of the natural resources of the Navajo Nation."

Our eco-savior on the Potomac's response to the victims of his man-caused, government-engineered disaster: Never mind.

SOURCE





We are having an impact: the government has already begun removing links to its ‘Glacier Park glaciers disappearing’ sites

Roger Roots, J.D., Ph.D.

In the fall of 2015 I offered a bet of $5,000 if the glaciers at Glacier National Park disappear by 2030 (as predicted in all GNP signage, pamphlets, films and publications). See here. As of yet, no one has taken me up on my bet.

The Park’s glaciers were melting rapidly throughout the 1990s, as the catastrophic-manmade-global-warming-by-CO2 movement was riding high. Bills were introduced in Congress for “cap and trade” programs, carbon taxes and other reforms.

The National Park Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey published websites showing photos of the Park’s glaciers taken in prior decades next to more recent photos of the same glaciers. This ‘repeat photography’ showed massive decreases in the size of the GNP glaciers.

(I have often pointed out that the government’s photos from prior decades tended to not specify calendar dates. Because glaciers tend to build up in winter and then melt all summer long, the specificity of calendar dates is quite important.)

On January 8 of this year, I posted a prediction that the government would soon alter its GNP-glaciers-gone-by-2030 claims. See here. I asked, “What is the government going to do as 2030 approaches and it becomes clear that their preposterous claims are untrue?”

“I have no doubt,” I wrote then, “that the government will begin modifying these claims by 2025, if not sooner.” I began saving screenshots of government websites which make the claim that manmade-global-warming will melt the GNP glaciers by 2030.

It turns out I didn’t need to wait very long at all. Today, on May 4, 2016, I started looking for the government’s ‘repeat photography’ sites.

IT APPEARS THEY HAVE DISAPPEARED.

Today when you google “repeat photography” and “Glacier National Park,” you are redirected to general-info USGS sites with pictures of hikers in the mountains.

Fortunately, I have screenshots of the prior government projections.

SOURCE





Asbestos-laden building materials slipping into Australia as result of weak regulation, report finds

The whole asbestos scare is conventionally correct but is utter nonsense.  There has NEVER been any proof of harm from asbestos in building and other products.  The only people harmed by asbestos were those involved in mining, fabricating and installing it.  There has never been any harm to the general public from products in their environment that incorporate asbestos.  I spent a significant part of my childhood living in a house lined with unpainted asbestos sheeting ("Fibro"), as did countless other Australians.  It was once a very fashionable building material.  And none of us came to any harm from it.  Asbestos is one of the many things that are harmful only if you are exposed to large amounts of it


Glaring weaknesses in regulations and border protection issues are allowing building products contaminated with potentially deadly asbestos into Australia, a Senate committee has warned.

In an interim report tabled late on Wednesday, the committee raised particular concern about "the ability of Australia's enforcement agencies to effectively police borders so that [contaminated products] are detected and prevented from entering Australia".

"At the moment, this area of enforcement appears to require substantial strengthening and should be a high priority for government," it read.

"The importation of banned materials, such as asbestos, raises very serious concerns about the capacity of Australian authorities to deal with this issue, particularly in light of our open and dynamic trade environment."

The report notes only two importers have been fined over asbestos-laced building material since tougher penalties were imposed in February 2014.

It said fines of up to $170,000 could be imposed, but only $64,000 in fines, penalties and costs had been issued since 2009.

The committee said the role of foreign governments in stopping contaminated products from leaving their shores should also be considered.

It has requested the inquiry be extended for a fourth time, to September 30, 2016, "due to the seriousness of the problem and the disjointed regulation of the use of building products, both manufactured in Australia and overseas".

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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Global warming is turning the oceans ACIDIC and dissolving parts of the Florida Keys reef, new study finds

This is a total pack of lies.  And not even clever ones.  The ocean is still alkaline, though perhaps a bit less so.  And, anyway, a warmer ocean would outgas CO2 and the carbonic acid that it forms, so a warmer ocean would be LESS acidic, not more acidic.  Do these guys know any physics at all?

Seawater, which is increasingly acidic due to global warming, is eating away the limestone framework for the coral reef of the upper Florida Keys, according to a new study.

Projections, based largely on laboratory studies, led scientists to predict that ocean pH would not fall low enough to cause reefs to start dissolving until 2050-2060.

However, a new study has found the process has already begun.

In the natural scheme of things in the spring and summer months, environmental conditions in the ocean, such as water temperature, light and seagrass growth, are favorable for the growth of coral limestone.

While, during the fall and winter, low light and temperature conditions along with the annual decomposition of seagrass, result in a slowing, or small-scale loss of reef growth.

However, as atmospheric CO2 is absorbed by seawater, ocean pH declines.

The result is that the natural summer growth cycle of coral is no longer large enough to offset the effects of dissolution from ocean acidification.

This is one of the first times scientists have documented long-term effects of ocean acidification on the foundation of the reefs, said study author Chris Langdon, a biological oceanographer at the University of Miami.

'This is what I would call a leading indicator; it's telling us about something happening early on before it's a crisis,' Langdon said.

'By the time you observe the corals actually crumbling, disappearing, things have pretty much gone to hell by that point.'

The northern part of the Florida Keys reef has lost about 12 pounds per square yard (6.5 kilograms per square meter) of limestone over the past six years, according to the study published in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles.

Over the length of the reef, that's more than 6 million tons.

The water eats away at the nooks and crannies of the limestone foundation, making them more porous and weaker, Langdon said.

So far the effect is subtle, not noticeable to the eye, and can only be detected by intricate chemical tests.

But as ocean acidification increases, scientists expect more reefs to dissolve and become flatter, and that fish will leave, Langdon said.

Also, increasing acidity eats away at the shells of the shellfish, making them easier prey for other fish and harder for humans to harvest.

Acidification occurs when oceans absorb more carbon dioxide from the air, altering seawater chemistry.

Scientists expected limestone to dissolve, but not until the second half of this century. It's about 40 years early, Langdon said.

'This is another one of those cases where we're finding that we're underestimate the level of damage caused by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,' said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reef watch coordinator Mark Eakin, who wasn't part of the research.

But NOAA's Derek Manzello, a scientist in the ocean acidification program who studied the same area earlier, said it is difficult to blame the foundation loss just on ocean acidification, because long-term coral bleaching and death will also cause the limestone to dissolve.

There's a natural cycle of limestone production on reefs.

Limestone generally grows faster in the summer as the water become less acidic and ocean life absorbs carbon from the ocean.

But in the winter and fall, life dies off, carbon is released and the water becomes more acidic naturally, slowing or stopping limestone growth. But 'to actually see a negative was a big surprise,' Langdon said.

Extra, man-made carbon dioxide is being absorbed by the water and adding to its acidity.

And it's worse in the northern parts of the Keys, because the colder the water, the more carbon dioxide dissolves into it, Langdon said.

Reefs provide $2.8 billion a year to the Florida economy, mostly from tourists who come to dive and fish but also from commercial fishing, Langdon said.

SOURCE  





Real World energy and climate

“The sky is falling” scare stories have no place in public interest science or policy

John Coleman

Earth Day 2016 brought extensive consternation about how our Earth will soon become uninhabitable, as mankind’s activities of civilization trigger unstoppable global warming and climate change. President Obama used the occasion to sign the Paris climate treaty and further obligate the United States to slash its fossil fuel use, carbon dioxide emissions and economic growth.

I love this little blue planet and do all I can to preserve it for my children and grandchildren.

If I thought for even a second that the civilized activities of mankind are producing a threat to our planet, I would spend the rest of my life correcting the problems. However, after devoting a decade to carefully studying mankind’s impact on our climate, I am firmly convinced that the entire global warming/climate change campaign is based on a failed scientific theory.

In short, there is no dangerous manmade climate change problem.

“Who cares about your scientific study,” many people respond. “This is about loving a native environment.  This is about escaping from the horrors of so called civilization.”

That response is understandable because for fifteen years the Greenpeace-Sierra Club crowd has been constantly decrying the “ugliness” of civilization: cars, planes, trains, trucks, factories, power plants and all the rest. It seems they think things were better in pre-industrial times, or perhaps the world of Tarzan or modern-day central Africa.

There certainly has been a steady barrage of “research” that finds everything going drastically wrong with Planet Earth because of our civilized life. The media join in, of course, proclaiming “the sky is falling,”  and Al Gore’s book, movie and “climate crisis tipping point” mantra stirred the media into an even bigger tizzy. Now almost the entire Democrat Party has climbed aboard.

As a result, billions of dollars in annual government funding keep the alarmist climate research and environmental campaigns marching on. Tens of billions more subsidize wind, solar and biofuel energy that is supposedly more “sustainable” and “climate friendly.”

Today, a high percentage of Americans accept climate change as a valid problem, even though the vast majority rate it at the bottom of their top ten or twenty concerns. Many accept news reports that tell us the United Nations through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC) has “settled” the science in the last fifteen years.

In fact, President Obama and others say the matter is so proven that 97% of scientists agree on climate change. But this oft-quoted phrase has been totally debunked as fabricated or bait-and-switch. A group of scientists is asked, “Do you agree that Earth has warmed in recent years and Earth’s climate is changing?”

Probably every honest, competent scientist would answer “Yes.” But then the “survey” team changes the question to have them say, “Yes, humans are causing dangerous climate change.” Since 100% agreement would look suspicious, they back off a little and make it a “97% consensus.”

This leaves a somewhat David and Goliath situation for those of us climate experts who agree that Earth’s climate is changing, has always changed, and humans have some effects today – but do not believe that mankind’s emissions of plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide have replaced the powerful natural forces that have always driven climate change, or that any current or future changes must necessarily be dangerous or cataclysmic. We are frequently insulted and dismissed as Deniers.

Our side is not as small as the media may have you think. Many notable scientists totally reject claims of a manmade climate crisis. Over 31,000 have signed a statement that rejects the manmade global warming scare and says we see “no convincing evidence” that humans are causing dangerous climate change.  They and other experts have widely discredited the IPCC and other assertions about the climate.

There is even a Non-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). It has published several impressive 4,000-page books of scientific papers that totally dismantle IPCC claims. The NIPCC’s Climate Change Reconsidered and other books are also published on-line.

Even the late, great author/physician/scientist Michael Crichton (of Jurassic Park fame) debunked global warming and wrote about it in his novel State of Fear.

Our fossil fuel, nuclear and hydroelectric powered civilization has made billions of lives much healthier, longer and more pleasant than in previous times. Heating and air conditioning, power for lights and computers and smart phones, and modern hospitals and schools are just a few of the blessings that bring incalculable value to our lives.  What we enjoy today is the result of hundreds of generations of hard working men and women, each one moving us forward by inches or miles.

In my 80s now, I think about the world into which I was born. Radio was just beginning. Phones were few and far between and very primitive, requiring hand cranks and operators. Cars and trucks were slow and produced awful soot, smoke, carbon monoxide and other pollutants. Factories, power plants and home furnaces fueled by dirty unprocessed coal with un-scrubbed smoke billowing from their chimneys, left us all in smoggy, unhealthy air.

Doctors had few medicines to offer, and only primitive x-ray devices to peer inside us. Jet airplanes, computers, televisions, rockets, satellites and so much more had not yet been invented. Most people died in their late 40s or 50s. In this one man’s lifetime, civilization has made amazing progress.

Now think about what life on Earth will be like when you are my age.  I predict the fossil fuel-powered society will have been replaced by systems only a few geniuses are even thinking about today. A long list of now fatal diseases will have been conquered, and people will live healthy life into their late nineties.

I predict our cars and planes will not need drivers or pilots, and space flight will become common. Robots will do much of the work, so people can enjoy their lives much, much more.

And I predict that anyone who looks back on the threat of climate change/global warming and all the threats to life on Earth will have a hearty laugh, as mankind will have progressed beyond accepting any such silliness.

Life is good. Enjoy it. And stop worrying about climate hobgoblins.

Via email: Weather Channel founder John Coleman is the original meteorologist on ABC’s Good Morning America. He has been studying weather and climate for over 60 years





Clinton Faux-Apologizes for Threatening Coal Jobs

Hillary Clinton has a knack for lying to the faces of the people who have been hurt by her policies. She did it with the families of the men killed in Benghazi, and she lied to a man laid off because he worked in the coal industry, an industry the Left considers not only expendable but condemnable. On Monday, the former coal miner accosted Clinton at a West Virginia campaign stop, asking Clinton about her comments in March when she warned, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” The man wanted to know: How could she say something like that and then tell voters in places like West Virginia that she’s their friend?

“What I said was [taken] totally out of context from what I meant,” Clinton backpedaled. “It was a misstatement, because what I was saying is that the way things are going now, we will continue to lose jobs.” But moments after she told the audience in March that coal jobs would be destroyed, she continued, “Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels.” So her threat was neither out of context nor a misstatement.

Clinton did apologize to the coal miner — for the way conservatives interpreted her comments. “I do feel a little bit sad and sorry that I gave folks the reason or the excuse to be so upset with me,” Clinton said, “because that is not what I intended at all.”

The day before this confrontation, Clinton told the attendees at an NAACP dinner in Detroit, “We cannot let Barack Obama’s legacy fall into Donald Trump’s hands. We can’t let all the hard work and progress we have achieved over the last seven and a half years be torn away.”

What is that legacy? In 2009, Obama promised the price of electricity “would necessarily skyrocket” thanks to his policies of pursuing “green” energy at the expense of fossil fuels. What followed next was the systematic destruction of the coal industry through regulation. Why do we want four more years of that? Why give Clinton the chance to make good on Obama’s promise to hamstring the energy sector of our nation?

SOURCE  





A Real Bet for the Tough Guy in a Bow Tie

Joe Bastardi

BREAKING NEWS: Bill Nye issued a bet more than six years after my initial challenge to him in 2010 (which he would have lost) and four months into 2016 after reviewing the impact of El Niño on global temperatures. News flash, Bill: Midway through last year I said 2016 global temperatures would rise thanks to El Niño. I can forecast this because I don’t believe CO2 is a major player in determining global temperatures. I believe the sun, ocean cycles and stochastic events play a much more significant role.

Just so Bill and the rest of his brainwashed audience understand, I fully support our nation’s transition to clean and sustainable energy while using all sources of energy at our disposal now until a feasible economic transition can be accomplished. If you were really serious about it, we would be using more nuclear energy anyway.

However, I also believe the policies that Bill and the rest of the global warming political activists are pushing are detrimental to our economy and, in turn, our national security. How much money have we shipped to the Middle East because we did not use our own domestic fossil fuel resources? If not for the recent fossil fuel energy boom in the U.S., foreign countries would be making billions of dollars more at the expense of the U.S. consumer. I would argue that our failure to move more quickly and utilize our domestic fossil fuel resources has had catastrophic effects on our economy and national security.

Unlike Bill, I am a rational man, and I understand that while we must transition to clean energy we must do so in a way that is smart and economically viable.

Furthermore, we all know that Bill is not a forecaster. And since I am, I have a bet for the “science guy.” I believe 2017 will be colder than 2016. The bet is this: For 2017, every increment of .05 degrees Celsius (plus or minus compared to 2016) will be worth $10,000. If 2017 is 0.1 degrees Celsius warmer than 2016, I will pay you $20,000. If 2017 is 0.1 degrees Celsius colder, you owe me $20,000.

We do it with Dr. Roy Spencer’s satellite measurements.

The satellite data cannot be manipulated as we have seen in a culture among AGW scientists. (Remember “Climategate”?)

Furthermore, since you say global warming is proven science, how about we take all the money allocated for AGW research and use it to improve veterans health benefits. We wouldn’t be allocating all that research money to study whether the earth is flat/round, would we? Or we could stop that AGW gravy train and use the money allocated to professors around the world for improving fusion output. Make sense?

One more thing. I challenge Bill to lead by example and for one year use no fossil fuels, including products that use fossil fuels to be made. He can be like the DirecTV commercial in which a settler is settling in a world void of fossil fuels.

See you Dec. 31, 2017, Bill. One of us will pay up.

SOURCE  





Kimmel Airs 'F-Bomb' Clip to Mock Climate Skeptic Film He Didn't Even See

When critics trash a film, they’ve usually actually seen it – but, not ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel. So, the filmmaker of movie debunking climate hysteria is challenging Kimmel to attend a private screening.

The “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” host used seven minutes of his Monday show to mock a climate skeptic’s film he obviously hadn’t seen – since he repeats the very alarmist talking points the film debunks.

Kimmel bashed “Climate Hustle,” a climate skeptic film that aired in 400 theaters nationwide Monday, by making misleading, unsupportable, and inaccurate claims, and personally attacking Gov. Sarah Palin for supporting the film.

He then aired a two-minute climate change advocacy “message” featuring scientists dropping the “F-Bomb” to insult anyone skeptical of man-made climate change.

Kimmel’s rant against “Climate Hustle” displays a complete ignorance of the content of the film – and deploys the same shopworn deceitful and mean-spirited tactics the film exposes and addresses.

In “Climate Hustle”:

Former U.N. Climatologist Roger Pielke, Sr. explains how, since alarmists can’t debate the facts, they attack the messenger (as Kimmel personally insults Palin and the scientists drop the F-Bomb on skeptics),

The “97% scientific consensus” claim Kimmel cites is revealed to be the product of slanted methodology – one of which didn’t even poll 97 scientists,

Kimmel’s “hottest years ever” claim is dismantled and debunked,
The Big Money driving climate influence is shown to be on the activist side – in terms of grants, research funding, alarmist advocacy, etc. – not, as Kimmel claims, coming from corporate “polluters,” and

Renowned dissenting scientists (including a Nobel Laureate and a moon-mission astronaut) share data and analysis debunking climate hysteria – not the ignorant, average slobs Kimmel accuses his dissenting viewers of being.

In response to Kimmel’s uninformed, agenda-driven rant on national television, “Climate Hustle” producer, writer and host Marc Morano is challenging Kimmel to view the film.

Morano tells MRCTV:

“It is obvious Mr. Kimmel has not seen 'Climate Hustle' or he would have known better than to recite the same propaganda litany of climate 'facts' which the movie deals with head-on. Using a video of cursing scientists warning of a tired litany of doom, using terms like 'apocalyptic'; 'catastrophic'; and 'extremely dire' was bland and predictable and the very reason that ‘Climate Hustle’ was made.

"Apparently, Kimmel thinks failure to believe in man-made global warming fears is akin to not believing in gravity or yogurt. Odd.

“Mr. Kimmel, I challenge you to watch 'Climate Hustle' and issue an apology for your climate pabulum that you spewed to viewers. 'Climate Hustle' was made to counter the very boilerplate rants that you, Mr. Kimmel, engaged in. The public needs to view 'Climate Hustle' if, for no other reason, than to hear Mr. Kimmel's climate talking points dismantled.

“Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.”
“If Jimmy Kimmel is actually interested in the facts, he’ll step up and watch the film, instead of continuing to recite inaccurate, fear-mongering clichés on blind faith,” Morano added.

SOURCE  






Electric cars good for Australian miners

Due to the unprecedented interest in electric cars and renewable batteries, lithium miners are developing new projects across the state.

In the middle of iron ore country is one of the greatest discoveries of the sought-after resource, with Pilbara Minerals' Pilgangoora mine set to go into construction later this year.

It is one of 20 companies working to get lithium mining projects up and running in Western Australia.

"We are in essence going to be the world's number one lithium producer," Ken Brinsden, CEO of Pilbara Minerals, told 9NEWS.

The mine has promised hundreds of new jobs for unemployed FIFO workers.

"(There is) excitement in the mining industry.  A commodity in demand and as result fantastic opportunities for Western Australia," Mr Brinsden said.

The interest in lithium is being pushed by the sales of electric cars, which currently account for three percent of the motor vehicle market and expected to reach 22 percent of the market by 2025.

Tesla is leading the charge — in a month it has already pre-sold 400,000 of the Model 3 electric car, even though it won't be released until 2018.

"Electric vehicles are coming," Kevin Johnson from Argonaut said.

"There is nothing you can do about it."

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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