Global warming won’t just change the weather—it could trigger massive earthquakes and volcanoes (?)

There's a grain of truth in what he says.  Drastic warming would cause crustal uplift in circumpolar regions -- but all the rest is speculative, entirely dependent on CO2 causing warming.  That there is no correlation between the two seems not to bother him

Bill McGuire is not optimistic about humanity’s future. In his book, Waking the Giant: How a changing climate triggers earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes, he explains why.

By his estimation, carbon dioxide emissions from human activity since industrialization began have changed the trajectory of earth’s climate for the next 100,000 years. We are already experiencing the mayhem and destruction that these changes can wreak, and, in the long term, things are only going to get worse.

On the face of it, the hypothesis that a few degrees’ rise in the average temperature of the atmosphere can cause the earth’s tectonic plates to move sounds ludicrous. Yet, McGuire, professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, shows through careful analysis of historical records that the relationship between the weather and the “solid” earth is incontrovertible.

We caught up with him recently to talk about his hopes and fears. Here’s an edited and condensed version of our conversation.

Q. How is that human activities in the last two centuries could have an effect on the earth’s climate for the next 100,000 years?

McGuire: The climate system takes so long to respond and return to normal. We had a period about 55 million years ago, called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). It was a period of about 10,000 years, where global temperatures rose by about 6°C [11°F]. This is extremely rapid in geological terms. We had palm trees in Russia; crocodiles swimming in the Arctic ocean.

It sounds incredible, but the really scary thing is that we could now see our temperatures go up by 6°C in a few hundred years.

What we are doing now, and if we carry on doing it for the next few centuries, is raise temperatures in 1/50th of time it took to do the same in the PETM. The rate at which we are raising the global average temperature is simply unprecedented.

Q. But wasn’t there a time when the global temperatures were even higher, like 15°C higher than pre-industrial times?

What we’ve done now is that we’ve taken all the carbon from hundreds of millions of years, which has been locked up in fossil fuels, and we’ve stuck it in the atmosphere in a time of two hundred years.

Then there are the feedback effects that will kick in. Human-caused warming will trigger natural events, which will increase temperatures further. One of those is the release of methane permafrost, especially that stuck under the Arctic.

We don’t need to wait till 2100 to trigger that. People who are working on this say that we could see the release of this permafrost at any time. There’s potential for tens of billions of tonnes of methane to be released just like that [snaps fingers]. Some of these releases could bring global warming prediction ahead by as much as 30 years.

People don’t understand these events. They think it’s a gradual ramping up of the temperature. The real impacts are extreme events—storms, droughts, floods—but also potentially even more extreme events, like these methane outbursts.

Q. OK, so, say that happens. Temperatures go up. When do we then see the effects on the solid earth?

We could see that very soon. The big worry is Greenland. It has 2-3 km (1.2-1.9 miles) of ice on top of its lithosphere. That weight is pushing down the crust. Taking that ice off could trigger earthquakes.

We’re seeing that in Alaska. A lot of ice has been lost in the last 100 years, and the faults there are lot more active now. Previously, because of the weight, they couldn’t move but they were accumulating strain because of the earth’s movement.

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Trump Names Energy Adviser Who’s Dubious Of Global Warming Claims

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has enlisted a congressman who is a strong proponent of fracking and a skeptic of global warming to be one of his key energy advisers.

Rep. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota has been asked by the campaign to write a white paper on energy policy.

“Cramer said in an interview his paper would emphasize the dangers of foreign ownership of U.S. energy assets, burdensome taxes, and over-regulation,” Reuters reported.

According to the Associated Press, North Dakota ranks second only to Texas in oil production in the United States, thanks to a fracking boom that has generated billions of dollars of wealth for the state. North Dakota enjoys the lowest unemployment rate in the nation at 3 percent.

Trump has signaled during the course of the primary campaign that he supports continued natural resource development in the United States. He promised the coal miners of West Virginia in the lead up to Tuesday’s election in the Mountain State that he would put them back to work. Thousands have lost their jobs thanks to EPA regulations adopted by the Obama administration to address “climate change.”

Cramer is a global warming skeptic. “These mandates and these wind farms are all based on this fraudulent science from the EPA,” he has said, “meaning their claim that CO2 is a pollutant and is causing global warming. … The idea that CO2 is somehow causing global warming is on its face fraudulent.”

As reported by Western Journalism, while President Obama has argued the science community has definitively proved man-man climate change as a fact, thousands of scientists question those findings.

The co-founder of the Weather Channel, John Coleman, also doubts the global warming claims, writing in an open letter last fall:

“The ocean is not rising significantly. The polar ice is increasing, not melting away. Polar Bears are increasing in number. Heat waves have actually diminished, not increased. There is not an uptick in the number or strength of storms (in fact storms are diminishing).

I have studied this topic seriously for years. It has become a political and environment agenda item, but the science is not valid.”

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For Oil Drillers, Obama Methane Rule Is Worse Than originally Proposed

The Obama administration, yielding to environmentalists demanding action to address climate change, issued limits on methane emissions from oil and gas wells that are even tougher than those it proposed last year.

The final regulations unveiled Thursday will add an estimated $530 million in additional costs per year by 2025, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. That’s at least 25 percent higher than the preliminary version released in August, and it comes as low oil prices force the industry to pare spending on new exploration.

The administration estimates the costs will be offset by savings from averting severe storms, floods and other consequences of climate change. Those savings will total $690 million a year by 2025, according to the EPA. By contrast, the 2015 proposal was estimated to cost $320 million to $420 million in 2025, with potential benefits of as much as $550 million.

"The commonsense steps we’re rolling out today will help combat climate change and reduce air pollution that immediately harms public health," EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy told reporters on a conference call. The mandates, applying immediately to new and modified wells, are a "critical first step in tackling methane emissions from existing oil and gas sources."

Climate Policies

The rule, part of a broader administration campaign to combat climate change, is one of the last major environmental measures President Barack Obama is likely to issue before leaving the White House.

The oil and gas industry is the leading source of methane, an intense but short-lived greenhouse gas shown to warm the atmosphere 84 times more than carbon dioxide when measured over two decades.

Under the rule, companies will have to upgrade pumps and compressors, while expanding the use of so-called “green completion” technology meant to capture the surge of gas that can spring out of newly fracked wells. Such green completion techniques have been required at new and modified natural gas wells since 2015, but Thursday’s rule would broaden the requirement to oil wells too.

Environmentalists’ Pleas

The EPA expanded the final regulation in response to concerns from environmentalists, who said the draft proposal didn’t go far enough. For instance, the agency dropped its proposed waiver for low-producing wells that generate less than 15 barrels per day of oil or its equivalent. That could have exempted thousands of wells each year from the rule’s new leak detection requirements.

The EPA also yielded to environmentalists’ pleas for more frequent inspections, by requiring companies to hunt for methane at compressor stations four times a year instead of twice, as initially proposed. At wells and associated equipment, however, the agency stuck with a semiannual timetable.

The final rule "represents a solid improvement over the original proposal," said Conrad Schneider, advocacy director for the Clean Air Task Force, which had lobbied for the changes. "We feel great that EPA is finalizing the first-ever standards for methane emissions from any industry, and it’s totally appropriate that they’re doing it from the No. 1 emitter."
Battered Sector

The regulation drew an angry response from oil and gas leaders, who insisted even the softer proposal was unnecessary in light of the industry’s work to cut methane emissions. Because methane is the primary ingredient in natural gas, energy companies have a financial incentive to keep it bottled up as it moves from the wellhead to compressor stations and into storage tanks.

The rule effectively asks an already battered industry to do more with less, amid low oil and gas prices, dwindling rig counts and thousands of lost jobs, said Sandra Snyder, a lawyer specializing in environmental regulation at Bracewell LLP.

“Industry has been making great strides to voluntarily reduce its methane emissions because doing so makes economic sense,” Snyder said. “Imposing additional reporting and regulatory paperwork obligations is even more burdensome at this time.”

Industry officials also warn that aggressive new mandates -- on top of other, still-proposed regulations clamping down on gas that is vented or burned on federal land -- could wipe out small, independent producers. Companies could spend more paring incremental methane emissions than they will recover by selling the natural gas they keep from leaking, industry groups said.

‘Burdensome Regulations’

“It doesn’t make sense that the administration would add unreasonable and overly burdensome regulations when the industry is already leading the way in reducing emissions,” said Kyle Isakower, vice president of regulatory and economic policy for the American Petroleum Institute.

Environmentalists said the EPA’s changes made the rule more comprehensive. "The studies that we’ve done tell you that leaks and equipment malfunctions are randomly distributed across the industry and different types of facilities," said Mark Brownstein, vice president of the Climate and Energy Program at the Environmental Defense Fund. "Really the only way you get at it is if you are vigilant in terms of inspecting and maintaining your facilities."

The EPA rule will help the U.S. move closer to fulfilling Obama’s pledge to slash oil and gas sector methane emissions by 40 percent to 45 percent from 2012 levels by 2025. The new methane rule alone won’t be enough to meet the goal, but it provides a legal stepping stone to requirements for 1 million existing wells too.

Obama’s Promise

Obama promised during a March summit with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that the U.S. would go after existing oil and gas sources.

The EPA formally kicked off that process Thursday by releasing a draft information collection request asking oil and gas companies to turn over two waves of data about emissions, pollution-reducing equipment and associated costs. All owners and operators will be asked to respond to the first request, seeking information an Obama administration official said would be readily available. A smaller subset of facility owners would be to provide more detailed data.

Although most of the requirements for new wells would apply immediately, energy companies have a year to submit leak detection and repair plans. Green completion technology will be required at new oil wells within six months, but energy companies would still be forced to reduce emissions at those sites in the meantime, including by burning excess gas.

Plugging Leaks

Some oil and gas companies have moved aggressively -- and voluntarily -- to plug methane leaks. But investors still worry the industry is moving too slowly to solve what could be an existential risk, said Andrew Logan, director of the oil and gas program at Ceres, a network of investors with $14 trillion in assets that promotes sustainable business practices.

"If the industry doesn’t address methane, natural gas risks becoming part of the problem instead of part of the solution to climate change," Logan said in a phone interview. "For an industry that is really betting the farm on natural gas as its key to relevancy in a low-carbon world, that’s a huge problem."

The EPA estimates the final standards will reduce 510,000 short tons of methane in 2025 -- roughly the same effect as slashing 11 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. The EPA didn’t calculate a dollar amount for lower rates of asthma and other potential public health benefits tied to the reduction in volatile organic compounds and other conventional pollutants.

Critics hinted at a possible legal challenge of the new methane rules, like the court battle that has stalled Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

"If these ‘commonsense standards’ for the EPA’s methane rule are anything like the ‘commonsense standards’ used for their power plant rules, we’re in for another long battle of correcting the agency’s mistakes," said Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

McCarthy stressed that the rule was grounded in science, squarely within the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act and "will be solid in the courts."

"It is tremendously cost effective," she said. "It is a rule that industry will be able to comply with."

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Pop bottle science ‘grossly exaggerates’ CO2

One of the half dozen ways in which the proponents of what is increasingly known worldwide as “the global warming hoax” violate the basic fundamentals of scientific procedure is the selective manipulation and distortion of basic data.

The recent letter succeeds in providing a most graphic example of such blatant violation. The writer refers to a so-called “science class experiment” in which a comparison of heat retention is supposedly demonstrated with pop bottles. He conveniently omitted the fact that the concentration of pure CO2 was 2,500 times higher than in the atmosphere.

Since the molecular weight of CO2 is approximately 50 per cent higher than that of the components of air, the single CO2 molecule within the other 2,500 molecules in air would have a tendency to absorb more heat, but to an overall negligible effect.

The use of pure CO2 in the CO2 pop bottle therefore exaggerates the heat retention effect of the CO2 by 2,500 times.

 I find this intentional attempt to grossly exaggerate the effect of CO2 to be appalling and disgraceful. It is disturbing that such deceitful measures are actually used in classrooms

This leads me to have serious questions regarding the ethics of any teachers agreeing to such practises, as well as all global warming alarmists in general. Snider suggests that this farcical “experiment” should be performed in local schools. I would hope that our local teachers place a higher value on ethics and respect for their students.

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Some Canadian insanity

One of the busiest and most beautiful lakes in Alberta is Wabamun Lake.

What makes this even more extraordinary is that the area is also dotted with coal-fired power plants. They’re small, close to zero-emission, reliable, and provide cheap power.

Putting up the same number of wind turbines, for example, would turn the whole area into an ugly hundred square mile wind factory and bird sacrifice zone.

But that’s what Rachel Notley and the NDP are planning to do, remember: eliminate the clean coal power plants.

Well, Enmax, the power company for Calgary, recently announced that they are cancelling their contract to buy coal-fired power. Three other Alberta power companies have done the same thing: TransCanada, AltaGas and Capital Power.

You'd think Notley's government would be thrilled. Except that when all these energy companies bail out of coal-fired power, the province has to pick up the contract.

So now the NDP is panicking, obviously. The Alberta government is already collapsing under debt. Now they realize they will be on the hook for billions of dollars of coal-fired power that they themselves just made useless.

Did the NDP not know this would happen when they went on about “getting out of coal”?

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South Australia is now coal-free -- so it imports coal-powered electricity from a neighboring state

Empty Greenie boasting

South Australia’s last coal-fired power station closed on Monday this week, leaving the state with only gas and wind power generators.

The Northern Power Station, in Port Augusta on the northern end of the Spencer Gulf, has joined Playford B – the state’s other coal-fired power station which has already been retired.

The coal mine at Leigh Creek that supplied brown coal to the power stations also closed earlier this year, so there is no easy option for re-opening the power stations.

The immediate impact of the closure was a brief wobble in wholesale electricity prices, with more energy brought in from Victoria’s brown coal power stations (adding to carbon emissions).

But how could it affect the state in the long term?
Could South Australia run out of power?

Average electricity demand in South Australia is 1.4 gigawatts, and the state record for peak demand of 3.4 gigawatts was set in January 2011. In the past two years the highest demand was 2.9 gigawatts.

Rollout of rooftop solar panels is one of the reasons demand from the grid has been going down. The impact on the peak demand – the time of day when most people are using appliances – is less clear, because if the peak occurs after sunset, solar panels will not reduce it.

With the closure of the 520 megawatt Northern Power Station, South Australia is left with 2,800 MW of capacity in its gas-fired generators, which can be fired up when needed, and 1,500 MW of wind farms, which of course produce energy only when the wind blows. Most gas generation capacity comes from the Torrens Island A (480 MW) and B (800 MW) installations, built in the 1960s and 1970s, respectively.

There have been discussions about retiring Torrens Island A (it was mothballed for a period in 2014), but the departure of Northern appears to have delayed those plans.

The state also has a total of about 600 MW of rooftop solar, but, as noted above, this technically counts as reducing demand rather than adding to supply.

South Australia is also connected to Victoria via two transmission lines, one at Heywood (recently upgraded to 650 MW) and one at Murray Link (220 MW). This gives the state access to a potential 870 MW of Victorian power.

If South Australia gets close to record demand, the state clearly outstrips the capacity of the local gas generators. If the wind isn’t blowing, then the state will depend on the interconnectors.

But there is an unfortunate factor that transmission lines tend to fail under very high temperatures, which correspond to the times of highest demand.

It may sound unlikely, but South Australia is at risk of failing to meet demand.

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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5 Years Later, Deaths Caused by Radiation Leak at Fukushima: 0

Good disproof of the Leftist contention that there is no safe level of radiation.  Moderate doses can even be beneficial

Since the horrific earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor meltdown in Japan on March 11, 2011, there have been no deaths directly caused by the radiation leak from the nuclear plant in Fukushima, which is located on the northeast side of Japan.

The latest update (in April) by the World Nuclear Association on the Fukushima disaster states, “there have been no deaths or cases of radiation sickness from the nuclear accident.”

Also, in a May 11 e-mail to CNSNews.com, Jaya Mohan, information officer for the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), said “no deaths directly caused by radiation exposure after the accident at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant have been reported.”

That conclusion corresponds with what the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in August 2015, and what UNSCEAR confirmed in 2013 and projected for the future.

In its 2015 report, the The Fukushima Daiichi Accident, the IAEA stated, “No early radiation induced health effects were observed among workers or members of the public that could be attributed to the accident.”

The IAEA noted that the “latency time for late radiation health effects can be decades,” but said “given the low levels of doses reported among members of the public, the conclusions of this report are in agreement with those of the UNSCEAR to the United Nations General Assembly.”

The UNSCEAR had reported in May 2013, two years after the Fukushima accident, “Radiation exposure following the nuclear accident at Fukushima-Daiichi did not cause any immediate health effects. It is unlikely to be able to attribute any health effects in the future among the general public and the vast majority of workers.”

“No radiation-related deaths or acute effects have been observed among nearly 25,000 workers (including TEPCO employees and contractors) involved at the accident site,” reported the UNSCEAR.  (TEPCO is the acronym for the Tokyo Electric Power Company.)

“On the whole,” said UNSCEAR, “the exposure of the Japanese population was low, or very low, leading to correspondingly low risks of health effects later in life.. The actions taken to protect the public (evacuation and sheltering) significantly reduced the radiation exposures that would have otherwise been received.”

Three TEPCO workers were killed “directly by the earthquake and tsunami, but there have been no fatalities from the nuclear accident,” reported the World Nuclear Association in April 2016.

The earthquake on March 11, 2011, triggered a massive tsunami, which killed about 19,000 people and destroyed more than a million buildings.

A combination of factors caused by the earthquake and tsunami led three of the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi to go into meltdown – the nuclear fuel rods could not be cooled and subsequently got too hot and started to melt, which led to several explosions and the release of radiation.

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EPA regulations Causing Huge Increase in Housing Prices

In a five-year period, government regulation increased the price of building a home by nearly 25%, a report from the National Association of Home Builders finds. When it comes to buying a new home, the average homebuyer is paying $84,671 more today than he or she was in 2011. Most of these costs come from developing the lot — even before concrete is poured or framing goes up. Thanks, Environmental Protection Agency.

According to the NAHB, in this half decade, regulation has accounted for a nearly 30% increase in the cost of a house. “By comparison, disposable income per capita increased by 14.4% from 2011-2016,” NAHB wrote. “In other words, the cost of regulation in the price of a new home is rising more than twice as fast as the average American’s ability to pay for it.”

Pricing Americans out of homes is a government-caused problem. When will the government think it should impose a government-inspired “solution”? Before the 2008 housing bubble, statists decided that every American should be able to take out a home loan. Will they repeat history and think of a similar situation in a few years? Government regulation weighed down our economic growth. Now it’s come for new homeowners.

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New US federal rule would permit thousands of eagle deaths

From the recent AP article announcing a plan that would allow wind companies and other power providers to "kill or injure up to 4,200 bald eagles a year without penalty" the USFWS gave out official numbers pertaining to the current population status of Golden eagles. A population I might add that has been rapidly declining in the western US.

"The Fish and Wildlife Service estimates there are about 143,000 bald eagles in the United States, and 40,000 golden eagles."

I will explain very clearly why this statement is not even close to being true and I will use official USFWS data to prove it. When I am finished it will be very clear to most that the USFWS is either very incompetent, very corrupt and probably both.

Look closely at these official golden eagle population figures released in 2013. The estimated population for an area totaling 422,391 square miles is a measly 526 golden eagles. In addition the USFWS openly admits that this region is also host to the highest density of nesting golden eagles in the world........

"The highest known density of nesting golden eagles is in central California among the rolling hills of Alameda and Contra Costa counties."

The large geographical area of 422,391 square miles given in the USFWS table, amounts to about 16% of the entire land mass covering the lower 48 states. If there were equal numbers of golden eagles spread out over the entire lower 48 states there would still only be about 3950 golden eagles. This is a figure more than ten times lower than the 40,000 golden eagle population released by the Interior Department on 5/4/2016.

Of course declaring 10 times too many eagles means that ten times as many turbines can be built for the wind industry and ten times as many eagles can be legally killed. Then one must consider that there are virtually no golden eagles remaining in the eastern half of the lower 48 states, so how big is this lie being told?

The truth of the matter is that our golden eagle population in the western US has not only been rapidly declining we have a government agency hiding this fact and then lying to the public with highly embellished fake population statistics.

It is for many reasons like the example just given from my research, that I can boldly proclaim the Interior Department to be a corrupt government agency in collusion with the wind industry.

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Denmark’s Electricity Subsidies Increase by 1000%

The European Commission hopes that its Energy Union strategy will make the EU’s energy supply more secure, affordable and climate-friendly. But the energy market is highly fragmented, and focused on national interests.

The price that the average European household pays per kWh of electricity has risen from 12 cents in 2005 to 18 cents in 2014. However, the prices in individual countries varies significantly. In Bulgaria and Hungary, households currently pay around 10 cents per kWh. In Germany and Denmark, energy is three times more expensive.

Factors that influence cost include a country’s geographical location, energy resources, and world market prices. But energy policies are increasingly a significant factor.

Energy subsidies are growing across the majority of countries in the European Union. Only Austria and Sweden decreased their subsidies from 2008 to 2012. The rest of the EU increased by 57%. Leading the way? Denmark and Greece, which increased subsidies by over 1000%, and Germany, which accounts for roughly 25% of all energy subsidies in the EU.

But despite more subsidies, electricity prices are still increasing. While household electricity prices have risen by 50% from 2005 to 2014, the average price for industrial consumers has increased by 66%.

These prices also vary significantly across the EU. In Germany and the Netherlands, prices for medium-sized industries have remained fairly stable, increasing by approximately 25%. In the United Kingdom and Poland, however, prices have gone up by as much as 100%.

To build a successful Energy Union, the Commission has a tough job ahead of itself: harmonising the different national policies, building a transnational infrastructure, and getting member states to work together, towards a common goal.

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Climate: The Real ‘Worrisome Trend’

By Meteorologist Joe D'Aleo

Who is pushing this end-of-hydrocarbon-energy to prevent an end-of-world-calamity agenda? The list is long and includes politicians and UN globalists (look up Agenda 21) who seek more power and control over every aspect of your life.

Scientists, environmentalists, green NGOs and corporations are all chasing the $1.5 trillion per year that feeds the climate crisis and renewable energy industry. The lengthy list also includes scientifically illiterate population-control socialists and Hollywood cause seekers, who are all supported by environmental journalists who never question any “green” causes or scare stories.

Many use the “precautionary principle” to justify drastic actions that perversely have truly drastic consequences, intended or unintended.

Bad Policy, Bad Impacts

Eco-fanaticism has already pummeled Europe. In the past ten years, the price of electricity in Europe has climbed by an average of 63 percent. Polling indicates that 38% of British households are cutting back essential purchases like food, to pay high and rising energy bills. Another 59% of homes are worried about how they will pay energy bills when the Paris accord is enforced.

Poor and middle class families are impacted worst of all.

Families and businesses in the “Blue States” in the Northeast already pay the highest electricity prices in the United States – twice that of some other states. The changes the EPA and this administration are pushing could double those rates – and the rates in other states.

The thousands of dollars that an average Northeastern family saved on gasoline and heating oil in 2015, thanks to fracking and drilling on private land, was truly welcomed as the only “raise” that many families got in many a year.

However, that too will be a memory, if the EPA’s plans are not blocked by the courts – or a President Trump. Moreover, if elected president, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both plan to eliminate fracking, as well as most conventional oil and gas drilling and production.

With a Hillary Clinton administration and newly Democrat Congress promising to kill fracking and eliminate, hyper-regulate and/or over-tax fossil fuels, energy costs per family would increase thousands of dollars a year. This happened in Europe when the greens took control.

Moreover, soaring energy prices ripple through the entire economy, affecting the cost of all goods and services – including products and services provided by factories, hospitals, schools, small businesses and the shipping of food and other products. Soaring energy prices kill jobs and depress living standards, as companies and communities find they must come up with thousands to millions of extra dollars every year, just to keep the lights, heat and air conditioning on and machinery humming.

That means more industries will head overseas, where energy costs and workers’ wages are far lower, while millions of Americans will be relegated to part-time positions, service jobs at far less than they had been getting, or welfare and unemployment benefits for the newly and perhaps permanently jobless.

Meanwhile, the United States will be expected to send billions of dollars to poor countries and emerging economies, as climate change “reparation, mitigation and adaptation” payments, under the new Paris climate treaty. And those now relatively poor nations, including China and India, will be still burning fossil fuels and taking away our jobs, to lift their people out of poverty.

All the sacrifices by Americans, Europeans and families in other now-developed, now-rich countries will be for naught.

This is what the so-called “progressives” want and are marching in the streets to get.

The Climate Alarmists’ Real Goals

Former Washington State Democratic governor Dixy Lee Ray saw the second Treaty of Paris coming many years ago. “The future is to be [One] World Government with central planning by the United Nations,” she said. “Fear of environmental crises – whether real or not – is expected to lead to compliance.”

Last year, UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres stated bluntly:

"Our aim is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to change the global economic system…. This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history"

In simpler terms, she intends to replace free enterprise, entrepreneurial capitalism with UN-controlled, centralized, socialized One World government and economic control.

In November 2010, IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer presented an additional reason for UN climate policies. “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy,” he said. It is not. It is actually about how “we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”

In addition to everything else that is wrong, destructive and simply perverse about energy and climate policies, these are truly scary developments. And to top it all off, the Obama administration’s Justice Department is now seriously considering the idea of joining state attorneys general in prosecuting companies, organizations and individuals who dare to think independently and refute claims that human-driven global warming is the greatest danger of all to our future well-being.

All of this sounds a lot more like pre-world war two Germany than the United States of America. It is certainly a trend that we should worry about far more than any honestly conceivable threat from any nearly imperceptible human contribution to the climate changes that have always buffeted humanity and our planet.

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Mad Muslim says Islamophobia accelerates global warming

EVERYTHING does!

A recent lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explored the possible impact of Islamophobia on global warming.

The lecture, titled “Is Islamophobia Accelerating Global Warming?” has been reported by Fox News and other outlets and mocked on social media. It took place Monday evening and was presented by the university’s Ecology and Justice Forum In Global Studies and Languages, according to an online advertisement.

The event sought to explore “the relation between Islamophobia as the dominant form of racism today and the ecological crisis.”

“It looks at the three common ways in which the two phenomena are seen to be linked: as an entanglement of two crises, metaphorically related with one being a source of imagery for the other and both originating in colonial forms of capitalist accumulation,” the advertisement explained.

“The talk proposes a fourth way of linking the two: an argument that they are both emanating from a similar mode of being, or enmeshment, in the world, what is referred to as ‘generalized domestication.’”

The talk was administered by Ghassan Hage, currently a future generation professor at the University of Melbourne’s School of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry. Hage is currently working on a book of the same title as the lecture and is known for his 2002 book White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society.

Hage, who was born in Lebanon, openly supports the anti-Israel Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement. Hage compared Israelis to “slave owners” on Twitter in 2013, Fox News highlighted, and also suggested that Palestinian militants are “freedom fighters” in an essay published in 2010.

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 Crisis and Political Power

April 22nd was Earth Day and also the day that 175 countries came to the UN to sign a “climate pact” they hope will limit any rise in global temperatures to well below two degrees Celsius. Global temperatures, the Times reports have risen about one degree since the onset of the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago, in the middle of the 18th century.

This, of course, is all part of the so-called fight against “climate change.”  But is climate change the existential threat such people as Al Gore and the actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who spoke at Friday’s UN ceremony, say it is? I’m skeptical, to say the least, for several reasons.

1) Sound science produces predictions that come true. The science behind climate change does not. Indeed, the experts have been proven wrong time and time again. Around the time of the first Earth Day, scientists were predicting a coming ice age. Then, as global average temperatures rose in the 1980’s, global warming became the big threat. Al Gore in 2005 predicted that the polar ice caps would be gone by 2015, leading to a catastrophic rise in sea levels. But in 2015, the polar ice caps were not gone. They were, in fact, above the average for the period since 1979. The computer climate models predict steady warming. But the warming stopped in 1998. If the computer models cannot accurately predict what is now the past, why should we rely on them to predict the future?

That’s exactly why the threat of “global warming” suddenly became the threat of “climate change,” a much more generalized — indeed, fuzzy — term. The climate on Earth, after all, has been changing since the planet formed 4.5 billion years ago, ranging from periods of tropical warmth as far as the poles to “snowball earth,” when the entire globe was covered in ice. In the early 14th Century, the world grew suddenly and sharply colder. The “Little Ice Age,” as it was dubbed in recent years, lasted until the last half of the 19th Century. Those climate shifts could not have been anthropogenic.

2) Science is always skeptical. But when it comes to climate, we are constantly being told that “the science is settled,”  which translates into the immortal words of  Ring Lardner, “’shut up,’ he explained.” The most forceful advocates of a climate change crisis are exactly the people trying most vigorously to shut down the argument. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island wants to use RICO to go after skeptics. Twenty state attorneys general are trying to go after Exxon for financially backing studies that cast doubt on climate change. People with the facts on their side don’t need to shut down the argument.

3) Sound science needs sound data. But climate data is often “adjusted.”  If a weather station located, say, in Nassau County, New York, was put there in 1925 and is still yielding data today, that data has to reflect changing conditions at that site. In 1925 it might have been in the middle of a potato field. In 2016, while standing on the exact same spot, it’s now behind a suburban strip mall, surrounded by tarmac and twenty feet from the kitchen exhaust fan of a Chinese restaurant. The opportunities to manipulate data rather than adjust it (not to mention the guesswork involved in even honest adjustment) are legion. And climate scientists have been caught red-handed manipulating it and otherwise trying to affect the public perception by dishonest means. People with the facts on their side don’t need to fudge them.

4) Who benefits? When a body is discovered in the library, à la Agatha Christie, the first thing the police want to know is who benefits from that person’s death? So, let’s assume for a moment that anthropogenic climate change is indeed a grave and present threat to civilization. Who benefits from that realization? The answer primarily is two groups. The first group is made up of politicians. Such a crisis could only be handled by government at the highest levels, greatly increasing the power of government over the lives of citizens. And, as James Madison explained, “Men love power.” For politicians, that goes double. That’s why Democrats, such as Senator Whitehouse and the twenty state attorneys general, love the idea of climate change. Democrats are the party of government. They favor anything that increases the power of government.

The second group is made up of climate scientists. If politicians need to cope with a crisis, they’ll need expert advice. And getting to whisper in the ears of the powerful is itself a potent form of power. Also, of course, government agencies such as the EPA fund most climate research and it is in the self-interest of EPA bureaucrats to advance the idea of climate change. Studies that might do so are thus favored. So the scientists have a powerful self-interest in aligning with the government in order to obtain research grants.

5) Chicken Little doesn’t act like he believes the sky is falling. When the UN held a climate conference in Bali in 2007, attendees flew in on so many private jets that many had to be parked at an airport on next-door Java. These conferences, by the way, never take place in, say, Cleveland. They are always in out-of-the-way places, such as Bali, that anyone would be happy to visit on someone else’s nickel. Al Gore a few years ago was embarrassed to have it publically revealed that his monthly electric bill was routinely over $1,000 (and in Nashville, Tennessee, which enjoys very low rates, thanks to TVA). Leonardo DiCaprio usually flies by private jet. I imagine that that is how he arrived in New York last Friday in order to tell the masses of the sacrifices they must make in their life styles in order to save the planet. He was recently seen frolicking in Brazil on a 470-foot yacht.

As Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit says, “I’ll believe there’s a climate crisis when the people who tell me there’s a climate crisis start acting like there’s a climate crisis.” Until then, I’ll believe that “climate change” has little to do with science and much to do with aggrandizing political power.

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United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Testimony of Major General (Retired) Robert Scales April 13, 2016

 Mr. Chairman, thank you very much for inviting me to testify before the Committee on the relationship between climate change and war.

The Administration’s passion to connect climate change to war is an example of faulty theories that rely for relevance on politically correct imaginings rather than established historical precedent or a learned understanding of war.

The theories linking climate change to war come from a larger body of political thought that ascribes human conflict to “Global Trends”. Advocates of the Global Trends theory argue that environmental scourges such as diminishing water supplies, urbanization and the AIDS/HIV epidemic shape the course of human conflict.

Lately, thanks to legitimacy provided by the Obama Administration, climate change has become the most prominent of all the global trends that seek to link global misfortunes to war. President Obama codified his embrace of this particular global trend during his graduation address at the Coast Guard Academy in 2015: “So I’m here today to say that climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security.”

It’s interesting to note the hypocrisy within the scientific communities that argue for a connection between climate change and national security. Scientists generally agree on the long-term consequences of global warming. Radical environmentalists delight in excoriating the so-called “junk science” espoused by climate change deniers.

But they are less than enthusiastic in questioning the “junk social science” that environmentalists and their Beltway fellow travellers use to connect climate change to war.

Of course not all theories from Global Trends activists are off the mark. They have a legitimate argument when they warn of the consequences of pandemics on the course of warfare. The Greek historian Thucydides recounts that the great Athens plague of 430 BCE resulted in the retreat of the Athenian army and navy as well as the death of the great Greek military leader Pericles. The Byzantium emperor Justinian’s ambition to expand his empire to the West was shattered by the horrific Plague of 540 AD. A small band of Spanish conquistadors conquered all of central and south America in just few short decades because their conquests were preceded by Western diseases they carried with them from Europe.

 However, no historical evidence exists that makes a “cause and effect” argument linking war to rising global temperatures. Where does the Administration get their facts about climate change and war? First, they contend that a warming planet causes drought, which leads to mass migration away from areas of creeping desertification.

To be sure rising temperatures combined with over grazing in places like central Africa have caused displacement of peoples. But the misery of these peoples leads to, well, misery, not war. Tribes striving to exist in these often horrific environmental conditions have little energy left over to declare war against a tribal neighbor.

The nations of Central Africa are in the grip of conflicts started by Boko Haram in Nigeria and al Shabaab in Somalia. But these transnational terrorists are motivated to kill by the factors that have always caused nations (or entities masquerading as nations) to start wars. These factors are timeless and immutable. First of course is hatred induced by fear of alien cultures, religions, ideologies, as well as social and racial differences.

The common spark for all wars is jealousy and greed amplified by centuries-long animosities and political ambitions. The catalyst for war is the ignorance of leaders that leads them to misjudge. Humans start wars believing they will be profitable, short, glorious and bloodless. These truths never change.

None are affected in the least by air temperature. But the myth of climate change as an inducement to war continues to curry favor among Washington elites.

One source for connecting war to temperature comes from the political closeness between environmentalists and the anti war movement. Their logic goes like this: “global warming is bad. Wars are bad. Therefore they must be connected.”

Remember, prior to the 1991 Gulf War, environmentalists warned of a decade of global cooling that would come from burning Kuwaiti oil fields. More recently environmental radicals argued against bombing ISIS oil trucks fearing the environmental consequences. Sadly those in the Administration who lobbied against striking a legitimate military target because of imagined environmental damage caused by these strikes may, in all likelihood, have sustained ISIS by refusing to interdict their richest source of income.

The point is that in today’s wars politically correct theories when inserted into a battle plan might well extend wars needlessly and get soldiers killed.

More Here





Conservative groups target ozone law in push for rule's rollback

A coalition of 60 conservative groups is asking lawmakers to overturn the Obama administration’s new ozone pollution rule and change the law under which it was written.

The bill the groups endorse, the Ozone Standards Implementation Act, would for the first time require the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to consider the costs of tightening the ozone standards when it proposes such restrictions.

It would also push back deadlines for new standards and have the EPA consider new ozone rules every 10 years instead of every 5 years.

“The ozone regulation places a tremendous burden on communities across America,” the groups wrote to the heads of the House and Senate committees with jurisdiction over the EPA.

“The result of a nonattainment designation can be disastrous and bring economic activity to a halt. Local governments risk losing federal highway funds. Oil and gas operations, with the royalty and tax revenue they bring, may cease. Manufacturers may be forced to relocate or shut down, destroying jobs in the process,” they wrote.

The coalition includes some big names such as Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, along with state and local groups and others with smaller footprints.

Last year’s ozone regulation is extremely unpopular among conservatives, Republicans, the fossil fuel industry and many business interests.

It lowered the allowable ambient ozone concentration to 70 parts per billion from the previous 75 parts per billion. Businesses fear that complying with the standard could lead states to restrict manufacturing, power generation and other activities that generate pollutants that create ozone.

The EPA and its allies in the environmental and public health communities counter that the public health benefits, including better respiratory health resulting from reduced pollution, greatly outweigh the $1.4 billion in projected costs.

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How Washington Politicians Wasted Billions Trying to ‘Invest in Our Future’

The federal government has wasted billions on energy projects promising to usher in a new energy future.

All Washington can do is play favorites when picking energy options (think Solyndra).

It does this through providing grants, loans, loan guarantees, mandates (like the use of biofuels), and tax subsidies to specific energy technologies—to only name of a few.

Another way in which the government intervenes in the energy market is the annual budget of the Department of Energy. Programs within the Department of Energy supposedly recognize that there’s great potential for wind, solar, fusion, geothermal, biofuels, carbon capturing technology for coal, and much more. These energy sources and technologies themselves may very well be worthy of investment, but that’s not the point. The problem is the government meddling in what is clearly not its role.

The mantra from proponents of government spending on energy is generally the same. To borrow from President Barack Obama, “Rather than subsidize the past, we should invest in the future.”

Half of that statement is correct. Taxpayers shouldn’t subsidize the past. Nor should they “invest” (read: subsidize) in the future. In fact, that’s why the market has investors: to take chances, using their own money, on promising new endeavors. From basic research to full-scale commercialization for any energy technology, every step of the way should be driven by the private sector.

Free enterprise will spur the next energy revolution, just as it has the latest oil and gas revolution that’s lowering the cost of living for Americans. Competition will provide incremental improvements in energy, for conventional natural resources and for renewable technologies.

As energy prices rise and fall, markets respond accordingly. Higher prices at the pump, for instance, incentivize companies to extract more oil and invest in technologies to produce the oil more cheaply and efficiently. Higher prices encourage exploration into alternative power sources for vehicles, whether it is biofuels, batteries, natural gas, or something entirely different.

Markets shift to more efficient and cost-competitive technologies when they make economic sense and meet consumer preferences. In the 1800s, wood was the dominant energy source for families because it was abundant and convenient. Over time, coal replaced wood because it provided more heat per pound and was easier to store and to transport.

Furthermore, the evolution of rail power from steam to diesel occurred even faster because the transition significantly reduced costs and increased productivity. Though legislation encouraged the use of diesel locomotives on a small scale, the dramatic shift mostly happened because of market forces. The cost-effectiveness and increased productivity of diesel-powered trains largely eradicated the use of steam locomotives in just over two decades.

The reality is that Washington isn’t needed to drive energy innovation, which is a difficult pill to swallow for some politicians and special interests. Because those are the folks who want to keep the money flowing to their preferred energy sources because they stand to benefit.

It’s more difficult for politicians to take credit for the successes guided by the invisible hand. But the free market will actually trigger successful investments and reward disruptive technologies, providing more choice and better options for families.

On the surface, their reasons for government funding energy projects may sound appealing to the public. For years, policymakers stressed the need to develop alternative energy sources to reduce dependence on foreign energy sources. Lately, the justification for Department of Energy spending is that America needs to combat global warming, reduce greenhouse gas emission, and be a leader in green tech.

But intentions and results are two very different things. Decades of the federal government trying to commercialize specific energy technologies have left Americans with nothing more than empty promises and squandered money.

Instead of continuing to fund energy programs almost without hesitation, policymakers should trust that the market will determine the true value of potentially innovative technologies. We know what works and what doesn’t. It’s time for Congress to stop dumping money into failed programs and expecting different results. Instead, they should live by this mantra:

A penny saved is a penny earned and a taxpayer dollar spent on energy is a taxpayer dollar wasted.

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Dept. of Energy Spends $90M Towards 3 Commercial Biofuels Plants

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced it’s spending $90 million in taxpayer dollars to advance their goal of producing at least three biofuel commercial plants over the next dozen years.

“The production of biofuels from sustainable, non-food, domestic biomass resources is an important strategy to meet the Administration’s goals to reduce carbon emissions and our dependence on imported oil,” a DOE release says.

“Today’s funding opportunity announcement will advance the Department’s goal of producing at least three total pioneer commercial plants over the next twelve years.”

Lynn Orr, DOE’s Undersecretary of Science and Energy says, “This funding opportunity will support companies that are working to advance current technologies and help them overcome existing challenges in bioenergy so the industry can meet its full potential.”

The $90 million is meant to assist in the construction of bioenergy infrastructure to integrate pretreatment, process, and convergence technologies.

Biorefineries convert plant and algal materials used to derive fuel.

The DOE press release states that the U.S. could produce 1 billion tons of biomass that could, “be used to fuel vehicles, heat homes and replace everyday materials such as plastic — all while potentially displacing over 25 percent of U.S. petroleum use and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 550 million tons.”

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Australia had larger extreme weather events in the distant past

More flooding and longer droughts.  Pesky for the Warmists as CO2 was LOWER at that time (the last 1,000 years)

Australia is systematically underestimating its drought and flood risk because weather records do not capture the full extent of rainfall variability, according to our new research.

Our study, published today in the journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, uses Antarctic ice core data to reconstruct rainfall for the past 1,000 years for catchments in eastern Australia.

The results show that instrumental rainfall records – available for the past 100 years at best, depending on location – do not represent the full range of abnormally wet and dry periods that have occurred over the centuries.

In other words, significantly longer and more frequent wet and dry periods were experienced in the pre-instrumental period (that is, before the 20th century) compared with the period over which records have been kept.

Reconstructing prehistoric rainfall

There is no direct indicator of rainfall patterns for Australia before weather observations began. But, strange as it may sound, there is a link between eastern Australian rainfall and the summer deposition of sea salt in Antarctic ice. This allowed us to deduce rainfall levels by studying ice cores drilled from Law Dome, a small coastal ice cap in East Antarctica.

It might sound strange, but there’s a direct link between Antarctic ice and Australia’s rainfall patterns.

How can sea salt deposits in an Antarctic ice core possibly be related to rainfall thousands of kilometres away in Australia? It is because the processes associated with rainfall variability in eastern Australia – such as the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), as well as other ocean cycles like the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) and the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) – are also responsible for variations in the wind and circulation patterns that cause sea salt to be deposited in East Antarctica (as outlined in our previous research).

By studying an ice record spanning 1,013 years, our results reveal a clear story of wetter wet periods and drier dry periods than is evident in Australia’s much shorter instrumental weather record.

For example, in the Williams River catchment, which provides water for the Newcastle region of New South Wales, our results showed that the longest dry periods lasted up to 12 years. In contrast, the longest dry spell since 1900 lasted just eight years.

Among wet periods, the difference was even more pronounced. The longest unusually wet spell in our ice record lasted 39 years – almost five times longer than the post-1900 maximum of eight years.

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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Arctic ice area: safely higher in 2016 than in 2007

Lubos Motl

The ongoing El Niño is rapidly weakening and may be replaced by a La Niña in the second half of the year. However, it's been the strongest El Niño on the record – slightly beating the 1997-1998 El Niño that used to be known as the "El Niño of the century".

This fact has some correlation with the temperatures that were elevated. Although it's always about hundredths of a Celsius degree, January, February, and March were the warmest months with those names on the RSS AMSU satellite record. However, April 2016 was already cooler than April 1998 again.

What about the Arctic ice? Left-wing "science" media such as The Guardian and The Pig were impressing us with the claim that the Arctic ice has been at record lows for several months.

However, this isn't the case at all. Take The Pig's favorite Arctic graph page. You will see several graphs where 2016 looks like the "lowest sea ice" year. However, it's only the lowest one in comparison with several recent years.

If you look at any of the graphs that goes back at least to 2007, you will see that 2007 – the year when Al Gore's global warming influence could be peaking – saw a significantly lower Arctic sea ice area than 2016 so far. The difference is not "significant" to the extent that a sane person would care about it – the differences are tiny in any "absolute" sense. But these 2007-2016 differences are larger than the differences between 2016 and many recent years.

Up to the early April, you may simply see very clearly that 2007 saw less ice than 2016. There is at least one other graph on the Pig's page where you can go back at least a decade and see that 2007 had less ice than 2016. 2007 was really about "3 standard deviations" below the the average; 2016 is only about "2 standard deviations" below the average. It's a different league. You may also find a not really famous Japanese JAXA where a different definition of the sea ice area is used and 2015, 2016 are record holders – but the difference from years such as 2007 is much smaller than in the datasets where 2007 had the record low sea ice area.

You may remember that there were pretty cool years such as 2008 and 2009 when many climate skeptics loved to talk about the weather. ;-) So they were logically following after some warmer years. 2005 was warm and 2006, 2007 were cooler but the ice tends (and ice losses tend) to accumulate which is why the minima in 2007 were natural.

So the claims about the new records of Arctic sea ice in early 2016 are simply falsehoods. Incidentally, the Antarctic sea ice is near the normal levels – the values are a very good approximation of the average – so the alarmists don't talk about the Antarctica at all. You could have predicted it – they don't have the integrity to talk about any data fairly. But in the case of the Arctic ice, they were simply lying to our face.

The Pig has also talked about the insufferable heat in the Arctic and the polar bears that are melting away. The Inuit tribes live there, know what's going on, and they say that the polar bears are doing very well – which is why the Inuit feel really good when they hunt for them.

But can you appreciate the incredible absurdity of this guy's talking about the insufferable heat in the Arctic? This guy lives in New Mexico, basically a desert. Look at the climate data for Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he lives (the second largest town in NM). The record highs for the 12 months of the year are 26, 30, 32, 36, 40 (May), 43, 43, 41, 39, 35, 31, and 26 degrees Celsius. He not only lives in that hot hell but happily floods the Internet with garbage. And he has the guts to say that the Arctic has become insufferably hot. What doesn't this piece of pork evaporate if he lives in conditions that are some 30 °C warmer than the "insufferable heat"?

The idiocy of this global warming propaganda is just absolutely incredible.

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Crook Cook's Identity Fraud

This is from last year but is relevant to my recent posts about the crook Cook

Cartoonist and professional scrawler UNSkeptical UNScience - SS's John Cook has been fraudulently using Luboš Motl's identity.

Luboš Motl is a Czech theoretical physicist by training who was an assistant Professor at Harvard University from 2004 to 2007. His scientific publications are focused on string theory.
Luboš writes a blog called The Reference Frame (TRF).

On TRF, Luboš writes of John Cook:

"John Cook is the founder of one of the world's most famous "Sky Is Falling" websites about global warming, SkepticalScience.COM. The name of the web wants to express the point that the climate skeptics shouldn't even be allowed to use the term "skeptics".

They only deserve expletives while the "true skeptics" are the champions of panic such as Cook himself. He is a typical example of the alarmist "grassroots movement" who has no relevant education (his top academic achievement is to have been a "former student" – in other words, a dropout) and no significant intelligence but whose persistent activism – in combination with the pathologically corrupt atmosphere in many institutions that favor "a certain kind of views" – has allowed him to become something like an "honorary scientist" and to have earned a huge amount of money, too"

Anthony Watts writes:

"If it wasn’t enough that John Cook dresses himself up as a Nazi in his SkS uniform on his forum, now we have him caught in what looks to be identity theft of a well known scientist.

This isn’t a brush away issue that he can ignore, as Dr. Lubos Motl found out yesterday, John Cook has been using the name of Dr. Lubos Motl to post comments that Dr. Motl has NOT written"

Even some of his partners in crime object to his use of Luboš' identity:

Tim Curtis: would you please stop posting as Lubos Motl. There is reason to doubt his sanity, so I don’t like seeing his name. Further, it is his name, and therefore one you are not entitled to use. …

Rob Honeycutt: John… You freak me out every time Lubos Motl’s name pops up! …

John Cook: Sorry about the Lubos thing. Was posting some Lubos comments for the UWA experiment and forgot to log back in as John Cook.

Cook admits that he has used another scientist's identity commenting on the University of Western Australia. (UWA)

Anthony Watts continues:

What sort of “experiment” was John Cook running by stealing the identity of Dr. Lubos Motl, and writing comments under his name?
Cook is a man who has co-authored two papers about how climate skeptics are not to be trusted because in essence, “they are crazy conspiracy theorists”. Yet, John Cook, now of the University of Queensland after leaving his connections at UWA, has so little moral integrity that he’ll post comments on his own website (the SkS forum, see below) as a skeptical scientist, such as Dr. Lubos Motl?

Who else has John Cook impersonated? Has he encouraged his team to do this? These are valid questions that need answers.
How long can the University of Queensland (UQ) continue to employ this sham scientist?

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Ontario serves as a good lesson for penalties of forsaking coal

I would like to offer my American friends a cautionary tale of what will happen if environmentalists succeed in shutting down your coal-fired power plants.

Ontario was once an industrial powerhouse and the home of thousands upon thousands of well-paid manufacturing jobs. But the province lost at least 300,000 manufacturing jobs in the last 15 years when companies either went bankrupt or left Ontario.

This happened largely because our electricity prices have increased 318 percent since 2002, now giving us the highest rates in North America. A major reason for this staggering rise is that, in the name of “stopping climate change,” we shut down all of our inexpensive coal plants, which, in 2002, provided about 25 percent of our electricity.

Things will be even worse for the U.S. if Hillary Clinton becomes president and continues President Obama’s climate policies. After all, the U.S. gets 37 percent of its power from coal (69 percent in Ohio).

Were it known to be true that our carbon dioxide emissions are causing serious climate problems, then perhaps it could be argued that such a sacrifice would be worthwhile. But the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change lists thousands of peer-reviewed science papers that show that much of what we thought we knew about climate is wrong or highly debatable.

University of Western Ontario applied mathematician Dr. Chris Essex, an expert in the mathematical models that are the basis of the climate scare, explains, “Climate is one of the most challenging open problems in modern science. Some knowledgeable scientists believe that the climate problem can never be solved.”

Ontarians were too frightened of climate activists to oppose the plan to end coal-fired power generation. As a consequence, we are now dependent on the charity of more wealthy Canadian provinces to survive. Who will bail out the U.S. if you follow our tragic example?

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Al Gore: TV News on Extreme Weather ‘Like a Nature Hike Through Book of Revelation’

Or like a hike through his imagination.  EVERYTHING is caused by Global Warming, it appears

Former Vice President Al Gore said on Thursday that the news reports of extreme weather, which he believes is caused by climate change, is like the end days described in the Bible’s New Testament’s Book of Revelation.

“The climate-related extreme weather events – and I won’t go through all of them – but every night on the television news now is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation,” Gore said at the Climate Action 2016 summit in Washington, D.C.

Gore was interviewed by Audrey Choi, CEO of the Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing, who also worked with Gore in the Clinton administration and now works with the Obama administration as a member of the U.S. Community Development Advisory Board.

Choi said that the people evacuated in the Houston, Texas, area recently because of flood waters were the “first climate refugees domestically.”

“We just relocated our first climate refugees, yes, in Houston, Texas two weeks ago,” Gore said, adding that the rainfall in that state equaled “3 ½ days of full flow of Niagara Falls.

Whether the people in Texas were the first of what environmental activists call “climate refugees” may be debatable based on news reports.

In an article posted on Friday on the RT Network website, a Native American tribe living on an island off the coast of Louisiana are the nation’s “first climate refugees.”

The L.A. Times reported in January that Alaskans living in the remote village of Newtok “are among our country’s first climate refugees.”

Gore also referenced the evacuation of people in Alberta, Canada, because of wildfires as victims of extreme weather and then credited something other than climate change for causing this and other similar events.

‘Mother Nature turns out to be more persuasive than any of us,” Gore said. “The laws of physics are a little bit hard to deny.”

In the summit’s program, Gore’s slot was entitled: “Climate Change; A Convenient Truth.”

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OMB Director on Climate Change: ‘When Surging Seas Storm Onto Wall Street That Stifles Commerce'

Should a fantasist be in charge of the OMB?

Shaun Donovan, the director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Barack Obama, said on Friday that the world’s commerce will be harmed when climate change causes the nation’s financial center to be flooded and transportation to come to a halt.

“When the surging seas storm onto Wall Street that stifles commerce globally,” Donovan said at the Climate Action 2016 summit in Washington, D.C.

“When infrastructure buckles, U.S. airports or seaports shut down, we all get stuck,” Donovan said.

Donovan also said that crop damage from a heat wave in Russia in 2010 threatened global “food security” and that climate change is responsible for “political unrest,” including in Syria.

“In Syria, drought contributed to mass migration and urban unrest,” he said.

Donovan said he is “proud” the Obama administration has committed $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund, which is part of the United Nation’s framework.

According to its website, the fund “was established with a mission to advance the goal of keeping the temperature increase on our home planet below 2 degrees Celsius.”

As CNSNews.com reported earlier, Republican lawmakers are strongly opposed to using taxpayer funds to pay for climate change programs abroad.  Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) called the fund a “handout to foreign bureaucrats” that has not been approved by Congress.

“It appears to be the latest example of the administration going around Congress because the American people don’t really support what the president is doing with this initiative,” Barrasso said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting in March.

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Navy, Air Force share concerns about wind turbines

The Naval Air Station at Corpus Christi, Texas, is faced with the same dilemma that the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station (NFARS) confronts: What impact will at least 70 proposed 620-foot-high industrial wind turbines have on military flight operations?

“I do feel like one day we’re going to wake up surrounded by wind farms in South Texas significantly impacting the mission [of the Naval Air Station] in a negative way,” Capt. Christopher Misner, commanding officer of Naval Air Station Kingsville, said during a Texas Senate Committee on Veteran Affairs and Military Installations hearing in April.

Rear Admiral Dell D. Bull, chief of naval air training, is quoted as saying he’s unsure if naval air operations can safely coexist with industrial wind turbines, “and I don’t know how anyone can say otherwise.”

Similar concerns have been raised about plans by Apex Clean Energy to construct massive industrial wind turbines in the Town of Somerset in Niagara County and the Town of Yates in Orleans County.

Three former high-ranking Air Force officers who served at NFARS recently wrote to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other state officials. They said that the presence of the massive structures “will inject a major encroachment into the military operating area around the air base, resulting in a major threat to NFARS when the next Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) recommendations are made, possibly as soon as 2017.”

The Cuomo administration is no doubt examining this “green energy” project very closely. The last thing we need to do is to give the next BRAC any reason to consider base closure in Niagara Falls, putting 3,200 jobs at risk. Apex says its project will lead to only 10 permanent jobs.

In Texas, the Navy is now preparing a study to determine the impact industrial wind turbines will have on flight training. With so many towering structures located in Navy operational areas, pilots will have few options for emergency landings and experts said the turbines will negatively impact radar to the point that air traffic controllers will lose the location of aircraft.

Sen. Donna Campbell, a Texas state senator and the committee’s chairwoman, said she won’t hesitate to take action if military flight training is jeopardized by the wind turbines.

We certainly don’t want that in Somerset and Yates, either.

New York State can’t allow the installation of these wind turbines to threaten Air Force pilot safety, and Cuomo can’t run the risk of giving the base closing commission any reason to shut down NFARS. Lives are at risk; jobs are at risk; the future of the air base is at risk.

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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Extreme weather events have NOT become more frequent in recent times

Warmists never tire of claiming that global warming is causing more extreme weather events, particularly of the windy variety.  Skeptics in turn  point to statistics showing (for instance) that hurricane landfalls on the USA have in fact been much reduced in the last 10 or so years.

The authors below however rightly argue that if you are going to detect trends, you need as long a time series as possible.  What has happened over the last 10 or 20 years may not be typical.  So they go back to 1872 to get their data for analysis. And they devise methods of statistical analysis that take account of the relative rarity of such events.

So they divide their data into two halves, an early half and a later half.  And they find that there has been no change in the frequency of extreme events between the first half and the second half.  From 1872 to 2011, there was no  change in the frequency of extreme weather events

The prophecy that global warming would bring on more extreme weather events was always on fairly shaky theoretical ground  anyway.

The opening clause in their Abstract below would have been needed to get their article published


Need for Caution in Interpreting Extreme Weather Statistics

Prashant D. Sardeshmukh and Gilbert P. Compo

Abstract

Given the reality of anthropogenic global warming, it is tempting to seek an anthropogenic component in any recent change in the statistics of extreme weather. This paper cautions that such efforts may, however, lead to wrong conclusions if the distinctively skewed and heavy-tailed aspects of the probability distributions of daily weather anomalies are ignored or misrepresented. Departures of several standard deviations from the mean, although rare, are far more common in such a distinctively non-Gaussian world than they are in a Gaussian world. This further complicates the problem of detecting changes in tail probabilities from historical records of limited length and accuracy.

A possible solution is to exploit the fact that the salient non-Gaussian features of the observed distributions are captured by so-called stochastically generated skewed (SGS) distributions that include Gaussian distributions as special cases. SGS distributions are associated with damped linear Markov processes perturbed by asymmetric stochastic noise and as such represent the simplest physically based prototypes of the observed distributions. The tails of SGS distributions can also be directly linked to generalized extreme value (GEV) and generalized Pareto (GP) distributions. The Markov process model can be used to provide rigorous confidence intervals and to investigate temporal persistence statistics. The procedure is illustrated for assessing changes in the observed distributions of daily wintertime indices of large-scale atmospheric variability in the North Atlantic and North Pacific sectors over the period 1872–2011. No significant changes in these indices are found from the first to the second half of the period.

SOURCE  





An Inconvenient Truth: Liberal Climate Inquisition Can’t Explain Past Temperature Changes

In the week prior to the administration signing what should constitute an international climate treaty, one think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, was subpoenaed for casting doubt on the agreement’s associated science of climate catastrophe.

As disturbing as such thuggery from state attorneys general would be in any case, the premise of the subpoena is faulty. The Competitive Enterprise Institute did not cast doubt on the dubious climate science. The actual data cast the doubt. The think tank and others have simply pointed out what the data show.

It looks like thoughtcrime has now moved from George Orwell’s novel “1984” to the twisted reality of our judicial system. Pointing out facts should never be a real crime.

The Heritage Foundation’s new Paris-bubble-popping science summary is also a case of letting the numbers tell a story. A story many never hear in the media-hyped spectacle that is international climate policy.DS-climate-science-termperatures-700

For instance, the chart above shows reconstructed average world temperature data for the past 500,000 years. Depending on the magnification and size of your monitor, each pencil dot would span something on the order of 1,000 years. The myriad 10-degree Celsius temperature flips all happened before man-made carbon dioxide could have had any impact—the final temperature spike started at the end of the last ice age.

Now see if you can follow this: The “science thought police” insist that even though none of the temperature variations for the first 499,950 years had anything to do with human activity, virtually none of the temperature increases of the past 50 years had anything to do with nature. Got it?

A question some overzealous attorneys general might be asking right now is, “Where did this ‘denier’ data come from?” The answer is: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center website (to be very clear, it is part of the federal government).

If those who merely point to data that are inconsistent with an imminent climate crisis are thought criminals, how much more subpoena worthy would be those who actually created the data? This expands the thoughtcrime conspiracy to an entirely new set of perps.

Should the hyperventilating attorneys general subpoena the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in its entirety or just the researchers? If donors to think tanks are subpoenaed simply because the think tanks pointed to this data, should not the U.S. Treasury be subpoenaed for actually funding these doubt-creating data?

In any event, it seems disingenuous to wave off huge past temperature changes as entirely natural while branding as science-denying fraudsters those who assert that natural forces are likely still to be playing a significant role. This is a problem for the U.N. Climate Agreement and its signers.

If natural forces have played a significant role in the moderate and unsteady temperature increases of the past 60 years, then what’s the climate hysteria about? If there is no need for hysteria, there is no need for the Paris climate agreement.

SOURCE  





A Few Facts For Climate Alarmists Waging War Against Astrophysicist Willie Soon

Dr. Willie Soon is an astrophysicist in the Solar, Stellar and Planetary Sciences Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He began as a post-doctoral fellow in 1991 and took his scientist position in 1997. His subsequent career is a textbook example of speaking truth to power and bravely facing the consequences.

Dr. Soon produced an important series of astrophysics papers on the sun-climate connection beginning in 1994 and received positive discussion in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s second and third assessment reports (1996 and 2001). In that era, the IPCC still admitted uncertainties about human influence, despite green NGO pressure and U.S. State Department insistence on finding a “smoking gun” in weak data.

Even Bert Bolin, co-creator and first chairman of the IPCC (1988-1997), deplored the denial of uncertainty he saw rising. In his 2007 History of the Science and Politics of Climate Change (page 112), Bolin wrote, “It was non-governmental groups of environmentalists, supported by the mass media who were the ones exaggerating the conclusions that had been carefully formulated by the IPCC.” In 1997 Bolin went so far as to tell the Associated Press, “Global warming is not something you can ‘prove.’ You try to collect evidence and thereby a picture emerges.”

Dr. Soon’s study of solar influence on climate behavior made him a target for alarmists, but he had defenders. In 2013, the Boston Globe acknowledged his guts and sound science with a quote from iconic science leader, Freeman Dyson: “The whole point of science is to question accepted dogmas. For that reason, I respect Willie Soon as a good scientist and a courageous citizen.”

In February of 2015, Greenpeace agent Kert Davies, a vocal critic since 1997, falsely accused Dr. Soon of wrongfully taking fossil-fuel company grants by failing to disclose “conflicts of interest” to an academic journal. The journal’s editors and the Smithsonian Institution found no violation of their disclosure or conflict of interest rules. However, the Greenpeace accusation caused a clamor around the world as lazy liberal reporters repeated it for major media with no fact-checking for accuracy.

The Greenpeace ruckus brought high-level Obama administration pressure on the Harvard-Smithsonian Center to silence climate skeptics – Vice President Joe Biden is a member of Smithsonian’s Board of Regents. The Institution responded with an elaborate new Directive on Standards of Conduct that forced its employees to wade through bureaucratic rules replete with an Ethics Counselor and a “Loyalty to the Smithsonian” clause of a sort not seen since the McCarthy Red Scare.

The Institution announced an Inspector General investigation of Soon, combing his emails and announcing that he had broken no rules. That seriously stung the NGO-Media-Politician coalition, which launched more attacks.

Ten days apart in the Spring of 2016, two outlets published stories scurrilously demonizing Dr. Soon. Both articles were long on bias and bogus claims but short on facts. The two activist/writers, David Hasemyer of the controversial Rockefeller-funded InsideClimateNews and Paul Basken of the for-profit Delaware corporation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, seem to have forgotten journalistic ethics and the facts.

Basken’s March 25 item, “A Year After a Climate-Change Controversy, Smithsonian and Journals Still Seek Balance on Disclosure Rules,” bemoans the fact that last year’s load of Greenpeace false accusations hadn’t caused the Institution to impose harsh enough rules to get rid of all scientists with climate skeptic views. Any fact checking didn’t show.

Hasemyer’s April 5, 2016 piece, “Smithsonian Gives Nod to More ‘Dark Money’ Funding for Willie Soon,” bewails the fact that Soon’s employer didn’t follow their playbook but approved a $65,000 grant from the non-profit Donors Trust, which is despised by greens because it uses anonymous “donor-advised-funds.” Such “dark money” grants are an IRS-approved shield pioneered decades ago by the far-left Tides Foundation for its $1.1 billion worth of grants to radicals, much of it “dark,” which Hasemyer didn’t seem to recall.

Hasemyer also neglected to note that even if Donors Trust’s “dark” grant came from ExxonMobil Foundation, the fossil-fuel philanthropy also gave universities $64,674,989; museums $2,771,150; the Red Cross $2,549,434; the Conservation Fund, Nature Conservancy and similar groups $1,210,000; Habitat for Humanity $798,000, Ducks Unlimited, $402,000 and many more from 1998 to 2014 according to IRS records. Will they be demonized as shills too?

Neither Hasemyer nor Basken displayed any familiarity with what scientists have to go through in order to do science in the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics or how it works, which is the bedrock of sound, ethical journalism on the topic.

The Center combines the Harvard College Observatory and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory under a single director to pursue studies of the universe. It is comprised of six divisions, and Dr. Soon is listed in the Solar, Stellar, and Planetary Sciences (SSP) Division.

About one-third of the Center’s scientists, including Willie Soon, are employed in what are called “Smithsonian Trust positions.” These positions are held mostly by PhD specialists, unlike Federal civil service. According to the Smithsonian Employee Handbook, Federal position paychecks are paid from the Smithsonian’s annual Federal appropriation and Trust position paychecks are paid from the Smithsonian’s Trust Fund. Scientists in Trust positions are paid by the hour with a Smithsonian paycheck.

Scientists in Trust positions must find donors who will give the Smithsonian grants that pay for the science. An employee information document states, “Obtaining competitive funding is an important part of the scientists’ jobs and a measure of their career success.” The grants always go directly to the Smithsonian for the science project with a 30 to 40 percent cut off the top for the Institution’s management and overhead, but never go directly to the scientist. Media attacks on Dr. Soon misrepresenting his success at this duty as nefarious are either ignorant or disingenuous.

Scientists in Trust positions must follow exacting procedures in order to obtain grants for their science according to the rules in the elaborate Contract and Grant Administration document.

The prescribed steps most relevant to Dr. Soon’s position are: First, the scientists must prepare a draft of their proposed scientific project or work. The draft then goes for pre-approval to the Director’s Office, held since 2004 by distinguished astronomer Charles Alcock. The scientists must give the Director suggestions for potential funders, but all decisions are the Director’s.

If the Director approves the draft proposal, he signs it and gives it to the Grant Office, which prepares the presentation package, including a budget, the approved proposal, and a cover letter formally requesting a grant. The Director signs the cover letter and the grant officer sends it to the potential donor.

The donor replies to the Director saying yes or no. If yes, the reply may contain a pledge to be paid when invoiced by the Center or direct payment to Smithsonian, which handles all of the Center’s money. The scientist who performs the project may not know and has no need to know who gave the grant.

When scientists perform an “off the clock” (unpaid) study to be published in a peer-reviewed journal and pays for it out of personal funds, as Willie Soon has on numerous occasions over the years, all Smithsonian approvals and checkpoints must still be passed. Claims that Dr. Soon has pocketed any off-the-clock grant money have all been shown false.

Writers who accuse Dr. Soon of wrongdoing despite firm evidence to the contrary are violating the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists, which states, among many other points: “Ethical journalism should be accurate and fair. Journalists should examine the ways their values and experiences may shape their reporting. Journalists should support the open and civil exchange of views, even views they find repugnant.”

The hostile coverage attacking Dr. Soon could hardly be considered ethical journalism by these professional standards. The writers and publishers of such unethical journalism should be brought to account.

SOURCE  





Feds Offer $25 Million in Grants for Solar Energy Projects; Solar Has Increased ‘23-Fold’ Under Obama

The U.S. Department of Energy announced on Monday that $25 million in grant funding is available for solar power projects through the “Enabling Extreme Real-Time Grid Integration of Solar Energy (ENERGISE) effort.

The money will be awarded to software developers, solar companies and utilities to “accelerate the integration of solar energy into the grid.”

“Since President Obama took office, the amount of solar power installed in the U.S. has increased 23-fold—from 1.2 gigawatts in 2008 to an estimated 27.4 gigawatts in 2015, with one million systems now in operation,” the announcement said.

DOE acknowledged the challenge of “balancing” solar with “traditional utility generation,” but said this funding “will help support companies working to meet that challenge,” although the way in which this will be done is not explained.

“Our ongoing grid modernization work will help accelerate the widespread adoption of the clean energy resources that will define our low-carbon future,” Lynn Orr, Energy Department under secretary for science and energy, said in a statement. “This funding will help that mission by supporting industry partners working to integrate, store, and deploy solar energy throughout our electric grid.

“In doing so, we hope to drive down costs and encourage even more American homeowners and businesses to install solar systems,” Orr said.

The funding announcement is part of the Obama administration’s ongoing effort to promote solar energy while at the same time putting more regulations in place for other traditional energy resources, despite the federal Energy Information Administration statistics that show only 10 percent of energy was generated by renewable sources like solar in the U.S. in 2014, while petroleum (35 percent), natural gas (28 percent) and coal (18 percent) supply the most energy in the United States.

“The SunShot Initiative, which is managed by DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), will oversee the projects associated with this funding opportunity,” the announcement said, noting that SunShot is a collaborative national effort launched in 2011 that “aggressively drives innovation to make solar energy cost competitive – without subsidies – with traditional energy sources before the end of the decade.”

The funding description stated that SunShot “expects to make between 10 and 15 awards ranging between $500,000 and $4,000,000” for near-term projects and “between $500,000 and $2,000,000” for long–term challenge projects.

The Grid Modernization Initiative (GMI), announced in March 2015, represents “a comprehensive effort to help shape the future of our nation’s grid and solve the challenges of integrating conventional and renewable sources with energy storage and smart buildings, while ensuring that the grid is resilient and secure to withstand growing cybersecurity and climate challenges.”

SOURCE





Hillary Clinton Will Continue Obama’s War on Coal

Following Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton’s comments about the decline of the coal industry in the United States, FreedomWorks CEO Adam Brandon responded:

“The reason the coal industry is suffering in this country is because of the policies of the Obama administration. When he first ran for president, Barack Obama made it clear that he intended to bankrupt the coal industry. When he couldn’t get his destructive cap-and-trade plan through Congress, he used the EPA to promulgate regulations on the coal industry that will cost our economy between $29 billion and $39 billion annually.”

“If Hillary Clinton was serious about helping the economies of coal states, she would pledge to reverse the regulatory onslaught of the Obama administration. Unfortunately, she has already indicated that she plans to continue waging the war on coal and double down on radical environmental policies that are devastating coal states and destroying jobs.”

FreedomWorks aims to educate, build, and mobilize the largest network of activists advocating the principles of smaller government, lower taxes, free markets, personal liberty and the rule of law.

SOURCE  





"Green" subsidies kill off a coal-fired electricity generator in South Australia

The coal furnaces at Alinta Energy's Port Augusta power station in South Australia's north will go cold today as it goes offline.

Less than a year ago, Alinta Energy announced the station — which is the city's bigger employer — would close after the company struggled to compete with government-backed renewable energy.

The company closed its coal mine at Leigh Creek, which fuelled its Playford A power station late last year, but trainloads of coal have been making the journey to the power station several times a week until only recently. The mine had employed more than 250 people.

Alinta chief executive Jeff Dimery said the closure was sad for workers but inevitable. "The reality is, the technology we are using here is old, the cost structures are high and there's no longer a place for us in the market," Mr Dimery said. "It was inevitable. It is inevitable that more coal-fired power stations will close into the future."

He said some families had three generations who worked in energy production at the site, which started with the State Electricity Company.

Port Augusta's mayor Sam Johnson said the power station helped diversify the city's economy when it was a rail hub in the 1940s and 50s. "It gave a significant economic injection into Port Augusta both then and over its 62-year history," he said.

"[It's] a bit of a mixed feeling in Port Augusta at the moment and we've all known this now for the last 11 months that it is coming to an end. "It will have a big impact on Port August, big impact on the region and a big impact on the state."

Decommissioning to take up to two years

Mr Johnson said people had already left the area to find work elsewhere, but some had kept their houses with the intention to "return home". About 140 employees at the site will leave over the next fortnight, but some will stay on for decommissioning.

The decommissioning process could take about 18 months to two years to complete. The Playford B power station was mothballed in 2012.

Alinta Energy worker Gary Rowbottom said the mood at the station had been "fairly sombre". "I think everyone's feeling that sadness and wondering what comes next for them," Mr Rowbottom said.

SA Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis said the old coal-fired generator "was past its day". "The truth is, the reason it is closing is it couldn't make money in this market. The reason it can't make money in this market is even though it does pour in relatively cheap power into the grid, renewable energy is cheaper [due to subsidies]".

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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