Microplastics have been found in human organs and blood, including the heart

The Green/Left have been getting hysterical about microplastics for some time but but this is the first substantial link among humans. So it cannot be accepted as a firm link until other studies have confirmed it

Microplastics have been linked to increased risk of death in a small but significant study that is one of the first to establish a correlation between plastic in the body and Australia’s biggest killer – heart disease.

More than half of people undergoing surgery for clogged arteries had blood vessels riddled with microplastics, the study found, and those patients had a far greater chance of heart attack, stroke and death compared to people whose arteries were free from plastic.

Italian scientists recruited 257 people with carotid artery disease, where fatty plaque deposits restrict blood flow to the brain. Microplastics lurked in the plaques of about 60 per cent of patients.

Three years after undergoing surgery, 20 per cent of the patients with microplastics in their arteries had died, or suffered a stroke or heart attack.

Only 7.5 per cent of patients free from microplastics suffered the same fate.

Once the scientists controlled for other risk factors, they put the people with microplastics in their arteries at four-and-a-half times greater risk of heart attack, stroke and death.

The study spurred influential US public health expert Dr Philip J Landrigan to call for single-use plastics to be ditched.

Finding microplastics in plaque was a breakthrough discovery in itself, which raised urgent questions, he said.

“The first step is to recognise that the low cost and convenience of plastics are deceptive and that, in fact, they mask great harms,” Landrigan wrote in a The New England Journal of Medicine editorial.

“Should exposure to microplastics and nanoplastics be considered a cardiovascular risk factor? What organs in addition to the heart may be at risk?”

Microplastics are less than 5 millimetres in size, while nanoplastics are smaller than a micrometre and capable of entering cells. The particles are shed by sources including plastic bottles, food containers, synthetic clothing and car tyres.

This small study is part of a developing line of inquiry into whether ingesting micro and nanoplastics increases risk of cardiovascular disease, which causes a quarter of all deaths in Australia.

Scientists have uncovered microplastics in our brains, lungs and placentas. Last year, they were discovered in the human heart for the first time. The fragments lace our blood, urine and breastmilk. But research into the damage microplastics wreak on health is nascent and contentious.

Much of what we do know is based on animal studies or analysis of cells, which are imperfect proxies of human bodies.

In zebrafish and mice, ingested microplastics quickly migrated to “blood-rich” organs including the heart, kidneys and arteries, a 2023 review reported. The plastics trigger inflammation, oxidative stress and cell death, resulting in abnormal heart rates and impairment of cardiac function within study animals.

More research across the board is urgently needed.

The scientists behind the Italian artery study pointed out their finding identifies a correlation rather than a causation between microplastics and increased risk of death.

It may be that the people with microplastics in their arteries had greater exposure to air pollution (which contains microplastic), which could be behind the increased risk of stroke and heart attack.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/the-tiny-killer-linked-to-heart-attack-stroke-and-death-20240306-p5fabn.html

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No Significant Warming in One of the Most Climate-Sensitive Parts of the Planet, Ice Core Data Show

There has been no significant warming in one of the most climate-sensitive parts of the planet, analysis of Greenland ice core data shows, casting further doubt on the alarmist climate narrative.

We are all familiar with the climate change scare narrative. Red coloured maps of the globe, polar bears stranded on ever diminishing ice floes, extreme weather events etc. When you read a climate change related article or scientific paper it nearly always opens with a statement underlining the severity of the situation facing mankind. What is usually lacking is perspective.

I am not interested in ‘expert’ opinion unless it is supported by empirical data and perspective. Selected sources must be reliable and have ample past data to encompass solar cycle variation. Ideally these data need to come from a region of the planet that is sensitive to global warming. What data from the world of paleoclimatology fit that criteria?

When snow falls, it contains a mix of oxygen isotopes. During warm periods, more heavy oxygen isotopes are found in the snow, while cold periods have more light oxygen isotopes. By analysing these ratios in ice cores, scientists can learn about past temperatures and climate conditions. The ice is laid down in annual layers which can be dated accurately. Consequently, we can construct an accurate temperature record where sufficient ice accumulation exists, such as in polar regions.

If anthropogenic climate change is a real threat, due primarily to the burning of fossil fuels, then we are expecting to see a clear rise in temperature above and beyond the normal variation. This was attempted and published by Michael Mann et al. and is widely known as the hockey stick graph. The main problem with this graph is that it was constructed using 12 sets of proxy measurements which included three sets of ice core data. The ice core data went back only 500 years and the remaining extrapolation relied on tree ring data. There was considerable uncertainty of measurement which was highlighted in his original paper (Figure 1), and a period of 1,000 years provides us with limited perspective in relation to the impact of solar cycles.

Note the light grey area is an estimate of the uncertainty of measurement and extrapolation.

There seems to be a dearth of records that provide temperature proxies for recent times that are relevant to the sudden rise in carbon dioxide levels (1860 to current). However, I did locate data from two overlapping periods from Renland peninsula in Eastern Greenland. The two studies that reported the results from these ice core measurements had quite different themes. The first, which covered the period from 1960 to 10,000 BC, commented on the high temperatures in the Holocene period and the impact on the ice sheet. The second covering 1801 to 2014 examined local site variability. The creation of these datasets was a gargantuan effort. It remains a mystery why these papers did not comment on the temperature trends or indeed try and link the two datasets. Below is a graph combining these two isotope ratio data sets (Figure 2). The black line (far right) is the key as it is a 20 year rolling average of the more recent dataset (brown dots). The first dataset (blue dots) has data points every 20 years, so this rolling average enables a more valid comparison.

These data tell us we’re in one of the coldest spells in the approximately last 9,000 years. Was the only way up? Virtually all global records indicate a steady warming in recent times. I have added green lines to help visualise the ‘normal’ variation in the last 9,000 years. Clearly recent warming is within this normal variation.

I have added another graph (Figure 3) with linear trend lines to each of the datasets to demonstrate how important perspective is in assessing climate change. If we take the trend from 1801 to 2014 (purple dashed) and compare it with that from the last 10,000 years (green line) it seems alarming. But from the longer trend the reader can see that variation in both sets of data is quite normal.

There is also a serious lack of agreement between the Mann hockey stick graph (Figure 1) and these data. It should be borne in mind when making this comparison that the Mann graph attempted to reconstruct temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere whereas the data I have cited here are from a specific area of Eastern Greenland.

The next graph (Figure 4), focusing on the overlap period (1800 to 2014), provides the degree of validity of aligning these two datasets. There appears to be excellent correlation when comparing the black and red lines, implying the data are good proxies for temperature.

In summary, these data indicate there is no significant global warming signal coming from one of the most sensitive parts of the planet. Any warming may be latent, but this seems to be a bit of a stretch.

This absence of a signal could be explained by the fact that the relationship of carbon dioxide to global temperature is logarithmic and above a certain concentration there is minimal direct impact relative to solar cycles.

There are many climate scientists who have devoted their lives to saving mankind but unless these data are invalid, they need to return from the chill winds of the polar regions. Is it game over for the climate change scare narrative?

See original for graphics

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/03/08/no-significant-warming-in-one-of-the-most-climate-sensitive-parts-of-the-planet-ice-core-data-show/

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Climate dieting: Eating our way to a brave green world

It had to happen eventually I suppose. An expert group (advising the National Health and Medical Research Council) has decreed that Australia’s official nutritional guidelines must detail the carbon dioxide footprint of each food group they cover. The implication is clear. When we reflect on our dietary habits, we need to consider not only our own health and wellbeing, but the impact of what we consume on the earth’s atmosphere and weather patterns.

Man, it appears, is no longer an end in himself. For the religious, that divinely ordained creature made in the image of God. And for humanists, the starting point and destination of all ethical value and merit. He is not even Hamlet’s ‘quintessence of dust’, ultimately signifying nothing. No, he is a pest and nuisance, a blight on the otherwise pristine environment. If, for understandable electoral reasons, he can’t be eradicated entirely, his malign footprint must at least be made smaller, according to these experts. The sooner this can be done, the better.

You might think this is peak folly for climate change madness. A veritable ‘jump the shark’ moment. But if insanity, as G.K. Chesterton once observed, is following an idea to its outermost logical consequence, it may only be the beginning.

No doubt, our food packaging will soon have to detail the contents’ carbon footprint, perhaps also the menus in our restaurants and cafes. Perhaps the nutrition experts will come up with a ‘net zero’ sustainability deduction to apply to our recommended daily calorie intake. If we all lose a little too much weight and muscle mass in the process, perhaps to the point of shortening our life spans, that’s an added bonus.

Of course, our carbon dioxide footprint is not limited to what we consume. With every exhalation, after all, we deposit this ‘pollutant’ into the atmosphere. (I will draw a veil over the specific category of human emissions which accompany indigestion.) Vigorous exercise must therefore be frowned upon. And perhaps too any kind of activity, including love-making, which increases our respiration rate.

Indeed, if human life is the problem, perhaps we need to revise our euthanasia guidelines accordingly. As a civilised community, we might still set a high bar for people wanting to take this irreversible step, but if the purely medical arguments in any particular case are finely balanced, climate experts may well argue, why not allow sustainability concerns to decide the matter? Not only would the terminally afflicted be put out of their misery, they would have the consolation, as they take their final climate-damaging breath, of knowing they were saving the planet.

While it may clothe its arguments in morality and appeal to (some confected distortion of) science, the climate change movement is ultimately concerned with power. The power of the few over the many, which Lenin famously identified as the basic question of politics. The more honest climate advocates admit this openly, arguing that no part of our lives must remain untouched in the fight against global warming. All policy and regulatory levers must be deployed in this campaign.

Just think about what this means. In the pursuit of arbitrary, ideologically-informed and utterly pointless emission reduction targets, our traditional policy and regulatory goals are being sacrificed. So too, the integrity of our traditional regulatory regimes.

Our new nutritional guidelines, we are told, will no longer be purely about our health. If this sounds shocking, it is nothing new. Our energy sector regulations long ago abandoned the objective of cheap and reliable power. Indeed, by embracing intermittent wind and solar, they are working against it. Planning and environmental regulatory regimes have been similarly corrupted, giving intermittent energy developers free rein to do their worst in the face of local protests. Even financial and corporate regulation is in play: the quaint idea of a level investment playing field for capital has given way to political incentives to plough money into green activities. History tells us that crony capitalism always ends in tears and a huge taxpayer bill, but apparently this can be disregarded.

As we rush headlong in pursuit of our brave green world, the electorates of other Western countries are starting to have doubts, including in the UK, the US and many continental European countries. And of course, China and India, who account for almost all the planet’s carbon dioxide emissions growth, never joined the crusade in the first place. Why this blindness in Australia? Why this folly?

In 1984, Barbara Tuchman wrote a book, The March of Folly, identifying the worst examples of government folly in history. Her starting point? The Trojans accepting, against all good sense, a wooden horse from their Greek enemy. Governments are guilty of folly, she explains, when they adopt policies which can only end in disaster for their people. The major cause of folly, Tuchman points out, is ‘wooden-headedness’, an insistence on ‘assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs’.

The ‘surpassing wooden-head of all sovereigns’, in Tuchman’s view, was Philip II of Spain who believed he could conquer England with his Armada in 1588. For Philip, according to an unnamed historian, ‘no experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence’. Far from a character flaw, this would seem to be an essential prerequisite for a climate change minister.

The single greatest instance of government folly in my lifetime, and there has been a great deal of competition, was our catastrophic bipartisan response to the Covid pandemic. Our health bureaucrats, both state and federal, were at the very heart of this. You would hope that they have been chastened by the experience, even if they have never (to date) been properly held to account. The experts wanting to hijack our nutritional guidelines appear to have learnt nothing however.

I always try to end my columns with a constructive suggestion. I direct this at all those in government working on climate change interventions. When announced, these should indeed include accurate information on the negative footprint they will leave. Not on the earth’s atmosphere, but on our freedoms, standard of living and quality of life.

Now that would be a public service.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/climate-dieting/

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Why the truth about weather disasters matters

Watching the news, you get the sense that climate change is making the planet unlivable.

We are bombarded with images of floods, droughts, storms and wildfires. We see not only the deadly events nearby but also far-flung disasters when the pictures are scary enough.

Yet the impression this barrage of catastrophe gives us is wildly misleading and makes it harder to get climate change policy right. Data shows climate-related events such as floods, droughts, storms and wildfires aren’t killing more people. Deaths have dropped precipitously. Across the past decade, climate-related disasters have killed 98 per cent fewer people than a century ago.

This should not be surprising because the trend has been obvious for many decades, although it rarely gets reported. A century ago, in the 1920s, the average death toll from weather disasters was 485,000 a year. In 1921, the New York Herald headlined its full-page coverage of droughts and famines across Europe “Deaths for Millions in 1921’s Record Heat Wave”. Since then, almost every decade there have been fewer deaths, with 168,000 average dead per year in the 1960s and less than 9000 dead per year in the most recent decade, 2014-23.

The 98 per cent drop in climate-related deaths is revealed by the most respected international disaster database, which is the gold standard in measuring these impacts. It’s reliable because very deadly catastrophes have been documented fairly consistently across the century.

It is true that smaller events – often with far fewer or no fatalities – are likelier to have been overlooked in the past because there were fewer people and less advanced technology. That is why some media and climate campaigners increasingly point to a rise in reported events (rather than the declining death toll) as evidence that climate change is ravaging the planet.

But all of the increase has been in less serious events, whereas more deadly events are few and declining. The “rise” is due to technology and the global interconnectedness that allows much better reporting of ever-smaller events, wherever they take place.

This is clear because the increase is seen in all categories of disasters measured – not only weather disasters but also geophysical disasters such as volcanoes and earthquakes, and technological disasters such as train derailings. Not even radical climate activists claim that climate change is causing more trains to derail or more volcanoes to erupt.

That is why fatalities provide a much more robust measure. These are falling dramatically because richer, resilient societies are much better at protecting citizens than poorer, vulnerable ones. More resources and innovation mean more lives saved. Research shows this consistently across almost all catastrophes, including storms, cold waves, and floods.

One much-cited study shows that at the beginning of this century, an average of 3.4 million people experienced coastal flooding, with $US11bn in annual damages. Around $US13bn or 0.05 per cent of global GDP was spent on coastal defences.

By the end of this century, there will be more people in harm’s way, and climate change will mean sea levels rise up to a metre. If we do nothing and keep coastal defences as they are today, vast areas of the planet will be routinely inundated, flooding 187 million people and causing damage worth $US55 trillion annually, costing more than 5 per cent of global GDP.

But richer societies will adapt before things get that bad – especially because the cost of adaptation is low in comparison to the potential damage, at just 0.005 per cent of GDP. This sensible adaptation means that despite higher sea levels, fewer people than ever will be flooded. By 2100, there will be just 15,000 people flooded every year. Even the combined cost of adaptation and climate damages will decrease to just 0.008 per cent of global GDP.

These facts help show why seeing the bigger picture matters. Linking every disaster to climate change – and wrongly suggesting that things are getting much worse – makes us ignore practical, cost-effective solutions while the media focuses our attention on costly climate policies that help little.

Enormously ambitious climate policies costing hundreds of trillions of dollars would cut the number of flooded people by the end of the century from 15,000 to about 10,000 a year. While adaptation saves almost all of the 3.4 million people flooded today, climate policy can, at best, save just 0.005 million. The calculation is even more stark for poor countries, which have few resources and little disaster resilience.

Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) suffered the largest recorded global death toll of 300,000 from a hurricane in 1970. Since then it has developed and improved warning systems and shelters. Across the past decade, hurricane deaths have averaged just 160, almost 2000 times lower. To help countries achieve fewer disaster deaths, we should promote prosperity, adaptation and resilience.

Of course, weather disasters are just one aspect of climate change, which is a real global challenge that we should fix smartly. But when we are inundated with “weather porn” and miss the fact that deaths have dropped precipitously, we end up focusing on the least effective policies first.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/why-the-truth-about-weather-disasters-matters/news-story/cef72aaa4229a47274700eed0b8a51dc

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Our Obsession With Control over nature

Paul Abela below seems to think it is self-evident that mankind has no right to control nature. He bolsters that view by saying that changes in the natural world could be disastrous to us and implies the non-sequitur that therefore we should not make changes to the natural world. So he thinks there is both a moral and a utilitarian case for us to meddle as little as possible with nature.

The utilitarian case is easy to refute: Civilization exists BECAUSE we have modified nature extensively. Modifying nature has been very GOOD for us and there is no reason to think that the control over nature that we have is suddenly going to harm us. It could conceivably do so but we are more than ever able to foresee problems coming our way and are more able to prevent those problems from actually arriving or to adapting to them in various ways if they do arrive

The moral case is simply a bald assertion with no supporting argumentation. It runs up against the old philosophical conundrum of how do we find out what is right and wrong? Most analytical philosophers claim that there is no objective instance of right or wrong. It exists in the mind of men but different minds have different ideas of what it is. Is killing babies wrong? The ancient Greeks did not think so and they were highly civilized. So we cannot doubt Paul Abela's enthusiasm for nature but we are perfectly entitled not to share that enthusiasm. Mankind DOES have dominion over nature and there are no philosophical or utilitarian reasons to overturn or limit that

It will cost you anywhere between $32,000 and $200,000. If you can afford it, you’re knowingly signing up for something that has a high risk of death. If you overcome any lingering fears you’ll see plenty of the 322 victims entombed in ice as you struggle slowly towards your destination. Climbing Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world, is not for the faint-hearted. But that doesn’t stop 800 people attempting to summit the mountain each year, with plenty of others waiting in line. It’s a dream for thousands, but it’s a bit of a head-scratcher as to why.

The desire to summit Everest is a product of an obsession that has come to define our relationship with nature. We are addicted to overcoming its boundaries. To tame it. To defeat it. To beat it. The world constantly pits ‘man vs nature’. We compete against it and are obsessed with ‘beating’ it — even though it has no idea it’s competing. And in ‘defeating’ it, we believe we have somehow overcome it.

This obsession with control is deep-rooted in the human psyche. It stems from the idea that nature exists in service of humanity, a belief that has its roots in religion. In Genesis 1:28, God commanded the human race to have dominion over every living thing. A belief shared by the ancient Greeks and best exemplified by Aristotle, who argued, “plants are evidently for the sake of animals, and animals for the sake of Man; thus Nature, which does nothing in vain, has made all things for the sake of Man.”

Little has changed in our attitude to living animals in the last 2000 years. There is a definitive hierarchy of which man is at the pinnacle. Wild animals, which are now remarkably few in number, are slaughtered by poachers to sell their ivory, fur coats, or other body parts. If wild animals aren’t slaughtered, they are placed in zoos for us to gawk at.

Unbelievably, as late as 1969, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) defined conservation as the “rational use of the environment to achieve the highest quality of living for mankind.”

Driven by ego

Our ambivalence to nature and the attitude that it exists in service of man has led to an exploitative relationship developing. Man is driven by ego, we are separate from nature and behave as if it exists for us to do as we please.

Take our framing of the climate crisis as an existential risk that could destroy Earth. It will do nothing of the sort. The climate crisis is a crisis because it will destroy the conditions humanity needs to thrive on Earth. If those conditions change it will remain a haven to life, but that life will take a different form. One that is conducive to thriving in the new environmental conditions that are set to prevail.

It’s humanity that has a problem. Not Earth. Yet, our ego-driven, human-centric view of the Earth means the idea Earth could exist without humanity is incomprehensible.

We have formed a relationship with nature based on being some arrogant controller. How different things would be if humanity had an ‘eco’ perspective, and we used our intelligence and ability to work in symbiosis with nature for the common good. If we felt responsible and duty-bound to look after the Earth and act as its guardian.

Forget about all of that. The benefits to us are all that matters — any negatives to the environment are dismissed as inconsequential — externalities that don’t exist when money and profits, the things that are prized above all else, are there to be made.

The idea that nature may have some intrinsic value is nonsense. Its only role is to create value for humans if and when we choose to use it. That’s why 100 million sharks are killed each year for their meat and to make delicacies such as shark fin soup. It’s why over the last 50 years 17 percent of the Amazon Rainforest has been deforested. It’s why the African Elephant is mercilessly poached so we can slice off their tusks and use the ivory to make jewellery. The tragic ongoing ‘elephant holocaust’ means the African elephant faces extinction.

Our obsession with control needs to be placed into context. Throughout human history, arguably up to the beginning of the twentieth century, we’ve had anything but control. Most people lived on the edge of existence, one failed crop away from famine and starvation. The natural world was dangerous, inauspicious, and brutal. There was little understanding of the processes and rules governing nature.

The image of mother nature being some kind of nurturing force is a product of modern society. As the political scientist Robert Inglehart puts it in The Silent Revolution, for our ancestors, “one’s life expectancy is approximately thirty years. A woman spends most of her adult life in pregnancy and child-bearing, burying most of her offspring before they have grown out of childhood.” To sum it up, life was brutal and full of suffering.

Our ancestors may have believed God gave us dominion over the natural world, but it is only in modern society that we have truly begun to control nature. This ability is the result of the powerful combination of science and technology.

Knowledge is power

Scientific breakthroughs best exemplify the axiom that knowledge is power. Science helps to understand the natural world; technology is the application of this understanding. The combination released humanity from the limits set on pre-industrial societies and led to vast improvements in human well-being. One of the most profound is the eradication of viruses that plagued humanity.

Smallpox, the deadliest disease in human history, is estimated to have killed three hundred million people in the twentieth century alone. Having launched a vaccination campaign against the virus in 1967, the World Health Organization declared its successful eradication in 1977. This triumph is a marvel of modern science.

The ultimate visual expression of our control over nature is the city. These human ecosystems have become enormous in scale. Greater Tokyo, home to 38 million people stretches to 22,000 km². There are 34 megacities with populations of over ten million people.

When you look at a city, you look at a cityscape, not a landscape. The human ecosystem exists outside of nature and separates man from it. It is the ultimate expression of how we have tamed nature and moulded it to suit our needs.

The problem we have now is that technology provides us with too much control. Technology has made us so powerful we’re changing the environmental conditions we need to sustain civilization. This fact would have been incomprehensible to those living a few generations ago. It’s still a little incomprehensible now.

We’ve always existed in a technological age so we take our reality and the high living standards it provides for granted. If the outcomes of our technological age weren’t so apocalyptic, this ability to control the world would be astonishingly impressive.

The way we interact with the environment has transformed beyond recognition and yet we still maintain a deep-rooted desire for control. If we have any chance of overcoming the ecological crisis our relationship with the natural world must transform.

As awareness of our impacts on the Earth has increased, environmentalism has flourished. There have never been more people who not only have an appreciation for the wonders of the natural world, but are seeking to restore it and live in harmony with it.

Environmentalists call for a shift to an eco perspective. This call stems from a place of humility and is grounded in an awareness that nature doesn’t need us to survive, but we depend on it for every conceivable thing.

If the environment changes, we risk suffering social collapse. There must be some kind of acknowledgement that this isn’t a mutual relationship. Earth isn’t benevolent, it doesn’t exist to serve humanity.

The thing is, you can't just wipe the slate clean and reimagine our relationship with nature. While the numbers of environmentalists swell, the human relationship with nature remains dominated by the arrogant controller. As long as it is, we will continue to disregard our influence on the natural world and hurtle towards a future of profound suffering. Seeing how deeply rooted our relationship with nature is, maybe that’s precisely what’s needed to create an epiphany. To shed the shell of the egotistical controller and embrace the humble eco guardian.

https://medium.com/the-new-climate/our-obsession-with-control-0416fb7b0d68

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CFACT Says Offshore Wind Violates Clean Air and Clean Water Acts

In formal comments, CFACT has asked EPA to assess the adverse impact of the giant Virginia offshore wind project on air and water quality. The issue is far-reaching because all big offshore wind facilities could have these adverse effects.

CFACT points to three specific impacts, two of which come from what are called the “wake effects” of operational offshore wind facilities. Both effects have been observed and modeled in large European offshore operations. I discuss these wake effects in my article HERE.

The first effect CFACT calls the reduced energy air plume. They explain it this way:

“The wake effect is the well-established fact that the air flow downwind of an operating wind turbine has significantly less energy than the air flow upwind. This is because the turbine’s job is to remove energy from the air flow, converting it into electricity. By some estimates, 50% of the energy is removed.”

The Virginia offshore wind facility is removing energy from a 150-square-mile area, thus creating a massive reduced energy plume. The adverse impact is that this plume could increase the ozone levels in nearby urban areas. Ozone flourishes in low energy air.

Immediately onshore from the Virginia wind facility lies the city of Virginia Beach. This sounds like a little tourist town, but it is, in fact, Virginia’s biggest city. It is half again bigger than Pittsburgh.

Virginia Beach is presently in compliance with the EPA ozone standard, but not by much, so the adverse impact of the offshore wind-reduced energy plume is a serious concern. This will be a concern for other coastal urban areas that are onshore of big wind facilities. EPA should be required to take a hard look at this potential impact of reduced energy air on ozone compliance.

The second wake effect is, in a way, the opposite in that there is too much energy. Each wind tower causes turbulence in both the air flow and the water currents as they pass by. This turbulent energy disturbs the sea floor so much that it creates a suspended sediments plume that flows with the current.

Here again, we are talking about a 150-square-mile plume generator, so the result could be massive. There is a large body of scientific literature on the potential adverse impact of these sediment plumes on marine life.

CFACT points out that EPA appears to be ignoring this serious impact in violation of the Clean Water Act. An impact of this magnitude should require a permit under the CWA, but no such permit has been made public.

Perhaps it has not occurred to EPA to apply the CWA to offshore wind facilities. But it should. The law applies to the “navigable waters” of the US. The Virginia facility is certainly in navigable waters, as several shipping lanes have to be rerouted around it. All the offshore wind facilities presently in development had better be in US waters as the Feds are collecting billions in lease payments for them.

At this point CFACT is merely raising the question, why isn’t the Clean Water Act employed in offshore wind industrialization?

The third issue CFACT raises is technological. EPA is considering issuing an air quality permit for the construction and operation of the Virginia facility. Their primary concern is the exhaust emissions from the huge number of boat trips involved.

CFACT points out that other countries are starting to use electric boats in order to avoid these emissions. In fact, there are service boats specifically designed to be charged directly from the wind facility’s output.

The Clean Air Act requires EPA to call for the best available control technology. Electric boats would seem to fit this requirement, and the firms employed in carrying out this construction should be required to deploy them.

Given these facts, it appears the EPA has not been doing a proper job of offshore wind impact assessment and permitting under both the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.

https://heartland.org/opinion/cfact-says-offshore-wind-violates-clean-air-and-clean-water-acts/

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The Guardian Should Know That One Mild Winter Is Not Climate Change, Nor Is It Alarming

A recent article in The Guardian, “Vanishing ice and snow: record warm winter wreaks havoc across US Midwest,” describes the very mild winter much of the American Midwest has experienced this year, claiming that it is due to climate change. While a declining trend towards less-severe winters may in part reflect modest warming, the intensity of this winter’s warmth is more likely explained by El Niño.

The Guardian asserts that ice cover across the Great Lakes has been declining since the early 1970s, writing that while the historic average for mid-February is around 40%, “this year it was about 4%.” Grand Forks, North Dakota; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Minneapolis-St Paul, Minnesota, are listed as having recorded their warmest winter, and the Guardian links to evidence in the form of an article from weather.com. Interestingly, directly beneath the states listed in the weather.com post referenced in the article is this statement, “[t]he Twin Cities’ warmest winter, by the way, was 146 years ago in 1877-78, when Rutherford B. Hayes was president.” The Guardian neglected to mention that.

Climate change is the culprit, claims The Guardian, but their own weather.com source lists two natural causes for this year’s mildness, including El Niño and a lack of “persistent blocking patterns – such as the Greenland block – that pull cold air from Canada and lock it into the U.S. for longer than a few days.”

Regarding El Niño, weather.com says “[w]armer winters are typical across the northern tier of states during a strong El Niño.”

Continuing, weather.com reports:

Despite a few recent storms, this season’s winter storm pace across the country is the slowest in 10 years. That’s left just 14% of the Lower 48 covered by snow as of Feb. 26. The warmth also left Great Lakes ice cover at a 51-year low for mid-February, including an ice-free Lake Erie and just a few small bays of Lake Superior with any ice.

In case you missed the point, the ice was this low 51 years of global warming ago, when the Earth was not only cooler, but it was in a cooling trend. A recent post at Climate Realism covers this specific subject in more detail, with H. Sterling Burnett writing “the last time the Great Lakes ice coverage was this low in January was in the early 1970s, a time when global average temperatures were cooling, which many scientists claimed at the time could be a sign of a coming ice age.”

In fact, ice coverage data for the Great Lakes show that coverage is highly variable from year to year. Plotted annual maximum data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory show as much. (See figure below)

The data across all the Great Lakes do indicate that recent years have seen more below-average years, but high years are still found, and it depends on the individual lake. On Lake Superior, Erie, and Huron, for example, most winters touch the 90% ice coverage range. On Lake Michigan, which has lower ice coverage averages, the record ice coverage is tied between two years; 1977 and 2014. Lake Ontario likewise traditionally has less coverage, and has its record high in 1979, and second-highest ice coverage in 2015.

The Guardian also says that a “report published in January found that the number of -35F (-37.2C) readings in northern Minnesota have fallen by up to 90%,” they point out that low temperatures play a role in weed and pest control, which is true enough, however they neglect to mention that extreme cold kills human beings as well, and at much higher rates than extreme heat does. They also fail to mention that longer, colder winters result in fewer crop rotations and production.

In Climate at a Glance: Temperature Related Deaths, multiple studies back up the fact that cold is deadlier than heat all around the world. One study, published in the Lancet in 2021, found that while 600,000 people die globally from heat, over 6 million die from cold. (see the figure, below) Further, cold related deaths have declined at more than double the rate that heat related deaths have increased.

The number of severely cold winters may be modestly trending downwards around the Great Lakes and across portions of the American Midwest, but almost everyone would agree that fewer -35℉ days is a blessing not a curse. This year’s winter is particularly mild not because of climate change but because of natural weather patterns, and a long-term trend in declining extreme cold is actually better for human survival. Contrary to The Guardian’s reporting, climate doomsaying is not an appropriate response to the available data.

https://climaterealism.com/2024/03/the-guardian-should-know-that-one-mild-winter-is-not-climate-change-nor-is-it-alarming/

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Environmentalism: from concern about clean air to throwing soup at the Mona Lisa

Garrett Hardin was a professor of biology and environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara. His “commons” was a metaphor drawn from the traditional English practice of shared grazing and agricultural land to which all members of a community had access. Commons were inherently prone to abuse, Hardin argued, because every user of the commons will exploit it to maximize personal benefit without regard to the other users, leading ultimately to the collapse of the commons as a useful resource.

Hardin extended the metaphor of the commons to include all natural resources, including the air, water, other species, even the entire Earth. The tragedy of Hardin’s expansive commons was the inexorable march to environmental doom, driven by the folly of human freedom. “No technical solution” could halt its march, no ingenious tinkering could fix the problem. Rather, Hardin asserted that the juggernaut could only be arrested through “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.” To save ourselves, we would have to give up many freedoms we take for granted, specifically “relinquishing the freedom to breed.”

Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” is perhaps the most influential paper ever to come out of the field of ecology. Within its six pages were sown the seeds that have grown into the vast industry that is modern environmentalism. If you’ve ever wondered how environmentalism got from simple concern for clean air and water and preservation of wilderness and its wonderful creatures, to Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion and throwing soup at the Mona Lisa, it was Garrett Hardin who drew the map.

Hardin’s path to the tragedy of the commons was itself mapped out by the English economist and cleric, Thomas Malthus. When Thomas Carlyle famously cast economics as the “dismal science” — a “dreary, desolate… quite abject and distressing science” — it was Thomas Malthus he had in mind. Malthus’s economic philosophy was one of finitude and futility. Human populations always grew faster than could the food supply, he asserted, leading inexorably to famine, disease, perpetual poverty and war: the “Malthusian catastrophe.” Malthus’s economics stands in marked contrast to that of his near-contemporary Adam Smith’s more hopeful economics of free trade, free markets and the inscrutable “invisible hand” that would guide societies to prosperity and liberty. The history of economics has been a long contention between these two competing ideas.

Malthusian economics considered people to be aimless particles pushed this way and that by powerful and indifferent forces. People are considered to have no agency whatsoever, or whatever agency they might have, encompass no other sentiment but selfishness. The only way out of the Malthusian catastrophe would be restraint of human nature, through “mutual coercion mutually agreed upon,” as Garrett Hardin put it. Tyranny

A big part of Malthus’s appeal at the time was his mathematical argument, which imparted a faux certainty to his claims. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace both were inspired by Malthus’s mathematics, for example, however, Malthus’s mathematics were simplistic and naïve and failed to account for the fact that humans do, in fact, have individual agency — and that the range of moral sentiments was far wider than mere selfishness.

Nevertheless, Malthusianism continues to find devoted acolytes wherever simplistic and naive mathematical presumptions reign. Presently, it is climate change that fits that bill, and it is climate change where the Malthusian tragedy of the commons is again rearing its head — no, having its head propped up, Weekend at Bernie’s style — by a group of twenty-three scholars (they always seem to come in packs) in the prestigious pages of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. There, they call for a “new paradigm” (that buzzword) to stave off the tragedy of the Anthropocene “planetary commons.”

Their new paradigm goes beyond mere governments managing common resources, like sea-floor mineral prospecting. Rather, they are advocating a more ambitious program to take control of the “biophysical systems” that impart resiliency to the Earth’s function. These systems include the atmosphere, hydrosphere (oceans, lakes, rivers and aquifers), the biosphere (encompassing all of the Earth’s biota), the lithosphere (all terrestrial ecosystems, and the cryosphere — ice and snow). Exerting such control, they say, will require “mobilization of efforts at an unprecedented scale, including future research” (read spending), which can only be done through a “nested Earth system governance approach.” This will mean “[adjusting] notions of state sovereignty and self-determination,” taking on “obligations and reciprocal support and compensation schemes … comprehensive stewardship obligations and mandates,” all with the aim to protect “Earth-regulating systems in a just and inclusive way.” You get the idea: “following the science” means a world government that subordinates those pesky notions of self-government and national sovereignty.

Doomsday scenarios are nothing new in the genre of “climate action.” Usually, such contributions bristle with weasel words such as “may,” “possibly,” “perhaps” and the ilk (e.g. the impending extinction of insects). Not so the planetary commons paper, which bristles with alarmist certitude. We are driving the Earth toward dangerous instability, rapidly pushing us past “tipping points” where the Earth will be plummeted irreversibly into disaster, making the Earth inhospitable to life itself. We are sinners in the hands of an angry goddess.

The whole thing is a house of cards, which a little digging will expose. Let’s begin with that word in the title: “Anthropocene.” What does it mean? It sounds science-y, but in fact “Anthropocene” is a neologism proposed in 2000 that demarcates the past 250 years from the Holocene, the geological epoch that began around 11,000 years ago, and which encompasses the rise of modern humans. It is no accident that the Holocene-Anthropocene boundary is set at 250 years before the present: it coincides with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

The Anthropocene is the stand-in for the eschatological End Times. Like the End-Times, it is defined by a basket of horrors and portents:

An order-of-magnitude increase in erosion and sediment transport associated with urbanization and agriculture; marked and abrupt anthropogenic perturbations of the cycles of elements such as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and various metals together with new chemical compounds; environmental changes generated by these perturbations, including global warming, sea-level rise, ocean acidification and spreading oceanic “dead zones”; rapid changes in the biosphere both on land and in the sea, as a result of habitat loss, predation, explosion of domestic animal populations and species invasions; and the proliferation and global dispersion of many new “minerals” and “rocks” including concrete, fly ash and plastics, and the myriad “technofossils” produced from these and other materials.

No mention is made, of course, of the dramatic reductions of poverty, extensions of life spans, improved agricultural productivity, cleaner air and water, safer environments that also mark the Industrial Revolution. Those are Hardin’s “technical solutions,” to be dismissed as the false consciousness that merely delays the springing of the Malthusian trap. We best be wary.

The Anthropocene is not a scientific term: it is an entirely political construction. Being able to sell it as scientific has long been a coveted tool to advance the climate change agenda. This has meant a long march through the institutions that govern geological nomenclature. That effort came to fruition in 2019, at a meeting of the International Union of Geological Sciences in Cape Town, where a vote was taken to formally recognize the Anthropocene as a geological epoch. It passed by a supermajority of 88 percent in favor, which by the rules of the Society, closed off the matter from further debate. What was the actual vote? Thirty-three individuals voted to recognize the Anthropocene, and four dissented. Was this scientific consensus? Technically it was, but we keep in mind the deceptive power of percentages: the 2022 membership of the Geological Society of America totaled 18,096. Remember these figures the next time we hear about a scientific “consensus.”

With the Anthropocene established as a formal geological epoch, the door was opened for climate activists to advance a political agenda masquerading as “science.” The planetary commons paper, for example, asserts that we have already passed six of nine “tipping points,” putting us THIS CLOSE to catastrophe. That sounds dire, to be sure. But just what determines a tipping point, and how do we know we’re past it? One of the references cited in support of this claim is a paper (with many of the same authors as the planetary commons paper) which defines the “safe operating space” for the nine variables. What determines the limits of the “safe operating space”? Why, it’s the presumed conditions prior to the Anthropocene! The circle is thereby closed: the politically-defined Anthropocene is used to set the politically defined “safe operating space” for the Earth, which sets the course for “navigating” through the perilous Anthropocene. Follow the science! The agenda is clear: reverse the Industrial Revolution and return civilization to the illusory halcyon of the Holocene. This is the climate change echo chamber at work: a collection of mutually-reinforcing arbitrary presumptions dressed up in a science-y costume.

It would be amusing were it not for the costume being flashy enough to take in the mid-wit rubes that constitute our present-day ruling class. Danger lurks there, which was expressed eloquently 264 years ago by Adam Smith in his 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments:

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it… He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

Garrett Hardin was, in his time, also a “man of system,” and it’s worth remembering that our last flirtation with the tragedy of the commons did not end well, especially not for Garrett Hardin himself, who now seems to be somewhat of an embarrassment to our present-day presumptive “persons of system.” We seem to have learned nothing since 1968, or for that matter, since 1759.

Will history repeat, this time as farce? Or will it be tragedy?

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/environmentalism-from-concern-about-clean-air-to-throwing-soup-at-the-mona-lisa/

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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EPA regulations on outboard motors send firm broke

In 1907 Ole Evinrude, born Ole Andreassen Aaslundeie, an immigrant from Gjovik, Norway invented the first gasoline powered internal combustion two-stroke outboard engine practical enough for commercial production, and two years later, an icon was born. Evinrude Outboard Motors produced boat engines continuously for over 11 decades in their factory in Sturtevant, Wisconsin, just outside of Milwaukee, becoming a favorite of fishermen and watersports enthusiasts across North America and beyond. In 1935, Evinrude merged with competitor Johnson Outboards to form Outboard Marine Corporation (OMC.) OMC became a multi-billion dollar publicly traded fortune 500 company and dominated the outboard market for the better part of the 20th century. When OMC filed for bankruptcy in 2000, they still maintained one third of the outboard market despite the rise of the American giant Mercury Marine and foreign brands like Yamaha, Honda, and Tohatsu. In 2001, OMC’s Evinrude and Johnson brands were purchased by the Canadian company Bombardier Recreational Products (BRP.)

New EPA regulations on emissions in the 90s and early 2000s nearly ended the production of two-stroke outboard motors entirely. Evinrude and Johnson attempted to modify existing technology in order to comply with the new regulations leading to mechanical problems and ultimately contributing to OMC’s demise, however despite BRP discontinuing the Johnson brand in 2007, Evinrude endured. New four-stroke outboards built by Evinrude’s competitors, while heavier and slightly less powerful, were very reliable and produced fewer emissions than the older two-stroke technology. However, in 2004, the engineers at Evinrude created their new E-TEC outboards that were much cleaner, even becoming the first outboard technology to win the EPA’s U.S. Clean Air Excellence Awards, which recognizes low emission levels. E-TEC engines typically emit 30-50% less carbon monoxide than comparable four-stroke outboards.

Evinrude and their two-stroke engines continued to cede market share to their four-stroke competitors over the following years, although the E-TECs, and Evinrude’s new E-TEC G2 motors maintained a loyal customer base until the spring of 2020 when parent company BRP was forced to pull the plug for good. “Our outboard engines business has been greatly impacted by COVID-19, obliging us to discontinue production of our outboard motors immediately. This business segment had already been facing some challenges and the impact from the current context has forced our hand,” said José Boisjoli, President and CEO of BRP. “We will concentrate our efforts on new and innovative technologies and on the development of our boat companies, where we continue to see a lot of potential to transform the on-water experience for consumers.”

Just like that 300 workers at Evinrude’s Wisconsin factory were out of a job and a company that had survived The Great Depression, two world wars, and bankruptcy was gone. Governor Tom Evers (D-WI), the man who deemed Evinrude’s workers “non-essential” won re-election in 2022 and Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) who made it illegal to use a boat with an outboard motor when she locked down her state, won re-election in a landslide. Even former President Trump has refused to accept any blame for the destruction caused by the lockdowns and his empowerment of Dr. Anthony Fauci, and will almost certainly be the GOP’s nominee for president again this year.

Innovators at Evinrude, starting with Ole Evinrude himself, created the first marketable outboard, made them lighter and more practical, and 100 years later created engines that were more fuel efficient and environmentally friendly than their four-stroke competitors. There is no telling what potential innovations across the American economy, not only by this one company, are now impossible, or at the very least delayed, due to the calamitous economic conditions created artificially by the state.

Voters seem more than willing to forget what their governments did to them in the spring of 2020 and beyond. As Herman Melville said “then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago,” our oceans, lakes, and rivers will surely forget old Ol Evinrude and his trusty outboards, but American boaters and anglers will remember all of the times Evinrudes got our families back to the boat launch in one piece, and something tells me those old engines will continue to do so for decades to come.

https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/02/27/covid-casualty/?omhide=true

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Former World Bank economist warns of energy transition’s fiscal risks

London, 5 March – In the run-up to Budget Day (6 March), a new paper by a former World Bank economist and published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation warns that the UK’s current decarbonisation timeframe is unrealistic and threatens to be economically and socially unsustainable.

Professor Gordon Hughes’s paper comes two weeks after the “European Climate Investment Deficit report” warned that EU member states would have to fill an annual investment gap of €406 billion if its 2030 climate goals are to be met.

In his paper, Hughes reveals that a realistic estimate of Britain’s planned energy transition also has an astronomical price tag. Large investments in capital-intensive technologies for producing and consuming non-carbon energy is estimated to be a minimum of 5% of GDP for the next two decades and might easily exceed 7.5% of GDP.

Prof Hughes said:

“There is no chance of borrowing an additional 5% or more of GDP annually for two decades to finance the energy transition. The only viable way of financing the UK’s energy transition is a drastic reduction in consumption to free up resources for the huge level of new capital investment required. Realistically the reduction in private consumption would have to be 8% to 10% for 20 years. Such a shock has never occurred in the last century outside war periods and even then never for more than a decade.”

He added:

“Ignoring the macroeconomic and fiscal constraints will almost certainly lead to yet another long-running policy fiasco like HS2 with results that achieve little in concrete terms. Rather than pretence and muddle, it would be better to extend the period and pace of the energy transition to match the resources that can realistically be afforded.”

Lord Frost welcomed Prof Hughes’s economic realism and said:

“The message in this briefing note could hardly be more urgent. Either we must be honest with the public and be clear that they are going to have to pay at a currently unanticipated level. Or we must extend the time period for the transition - that is, delay the net zero 2050 target, perhaps out till 2070 or 2075.

Failure to do either - sadly, perhaps the most likely outcome - will mean that we simply muddle on, pretending we are making progress, spending at high levels, but achieving little. Meanwhile the rest of the world outside the West will look on, incredulous at this unprecedented act of economic self harm.”

https://mailchi.mp/cd067d7b8405/former-world-bank-economist-warns-of-energy-transitions-fiscal-risks-201336?e=cc88839e92

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CO2 Coalition Takes the Science to Wyoming

Wyoming has vast resources of coal, oil and natural gas. With 40% of the nation’s coal resources, the state has been the United States’ top producer since 1986, primarily from the Powder River Basin located in the northeastern part of the state. It is also a national leader in the production of oil and natural gas, ranking in the top 10 in production of both products.

Yet, even though the Wyoming economy is heavily dependent on the mining and extraction of fossil fuels, its governor, Mark Gordon, has adopted a strong “decarbonization” policy. The science tells us that this is not a winning strategy for the people of Wyoming.

The CO2 Coalition believes that public policy on such matters should be driven by scientific review and analysis, not political agendas. To provide such an analysis, we have produced this report, Wyoming and Climate Change: CO2 Should Be Celebrated, Not Captured.

We also sent a team of climate experts from the CO2 Coalition,

including Dr. William Happer, Dr. Byron Soepyan and Gregory Wrightstone to Wyoming to provide the facts concerning the huge benefits of carbon dioxide. This team presented the science at a hearing of the Wyoming Senate Agriculture Committee (pictured above.)

The team also presented accurate science regarding Wyoming's climate to students at Gillette College, Laramie County Community College, and at the University of Wyoming.

https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Taking-the-Science-to-Wyoming.html?soid=1101509381788&aid=CMRLR5KMLE0

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Unusable solar farms in Australia

Northern Territory Chief Minister Eva Lawler says government-owned Power and Water Corporation could purchase four privately owned solar farms across the Top End in a bid to finally bring them online.

The handful of solar farms were built near Katherine and in Darwin's rural area. However, they have been sitting disconnected from the Top End grid for at least four years.

Power and Water has long held concerns about bringing the facilities online, fearing their power generation could be volatile and destabilise the Darwin-Katherine grid.

When asked whether the solar farms could be purchased by the NT government, Ms Lawler said: "That's a possible option."

"We need to be able to control the energy that comes from those, so it is an option," she said.

Ms Lawler said the solar farms the government was interested in buying were currently owned by energy company ENI, but she refused to provide an estimated cost.

The comments sparked criticism from opposition shadow treasurer Bill Yan, who questioned whether such a purchase would be the best use of taxpayer dollars. "The more important point is, can we afford to buy these things," he said.

He also criticised the NT government's renewable energy rollout, saying the construction of these solar farms before infrastructure could handle them was "putting the cart before the horse".

"Territory Labor led all these contracts to companies to build all these giant solar farms across the Top End," he said.

"All of a sudden, the territory government found out they couldn't hook them up. The grid wasn't stable enough."

The architect of the NT's "Roadmap to Renewables", Alan Langworthy, last year criticised the government's handling of the transition to 50 per cent renewables by 2030, saying "unrealistic" regulation was stymieing the commissioning of solar projects.

https://www.msn.com/en-au/money/markets/nt-government-flags-possibility-of-buying-idle-solar-farms-from-private-operators-amid-renewable-energy-push/ar-BB1jl3Nb

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Sea levels around NYC could surge up to 13 inches in 2030s due to climate change: state study

This was first predicted as imminent in the '80s by Jim Hansen, one of the early prophets of global warming, but there is still no sign of it happening

Sea levels surrounding New York City are expected to rise at least 6 to 9 inches in the 2030s and potentially up to 13 inches in some areas due to climate change, according to state projections.

The assessment done by the state Department of Environmental Conservations also claims that sea levels in the lower Hudson River could swell by 23 inches in the 2050s and up to 45 inches in the 2080s.

“Sea level rise is one of the most direct and observable effects of climate change in New York and DEC is required by law to develop science-based sea level rise projections to guide decision making and permitting in the areas most at risk,” the DEC said in a statement.

By the year 2100, downstate sea levels could surge by 25 inches to 65 inches. A worst-case scenario could see a staggering 114-inch rise by the end of the century under rapid ice melt projections.

Such a dramatic rise in sea levels could decimate low-lying residential areas in the Big Apple that were pummeled during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

The DEC posted its projections of sea levels in the New York State Register, based on studies of global climate models. The agency is required to periodically post sea-level projections under the Community Risk and Resiliency Act.

“New York is leading the nation to address the impacts of climate change, which include heatwaves, floods, more frequent storms, and sea level rise,” the DEC said.

The sea level projections do not create any edicts or compliance obligations on local governments — though they are intended as a guide to assist state and local planners and regulators in making decisions to address more storm-related floods.

Ultimately, both the rate of sea level rise and the level of rise over time will be determined by the severity of global greenhouse gas emissions, officials said.

Continued high emission rates will lock in continued rapid warming of the ocean and lead to higher rates and levels of sea level rise, DEC said.

Addressing climate change without hurting businesses and consumers is easier said than done.

Gov. Kathy Hochul has faced criticism this year over a green push targeting a key chemical used in refrigerators and air conditioners that critics say could force business owners to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars in new equipment.

Small business owners warned the aggressive timetable to phase out hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, starting next year, could cripple businesses, icing out jobs and triggering price hikes on food items and other consumer products, as they attempt to comply with the costly mandate.

https://nypost.com/2024/03/03/us-news/sea-levels-in-nyc-could-surge-up-to-13-inches-in-2030s-due-to-climate-change-state-study/

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The American revolt against green energy has begun

In a story filled with all the standard climate alarmist narratives, USA Today recently reported on the rising movement by local governments in the United States to refuse to permit unwanted wind and solar industrial sites in their jurisdictions.

After setting the stage by parroting the Biden administration goals of “100 per cent clean energy by 2035, a goal that depends on the building of large-scale solar and wind,” USA Today points to the reality that such big, intrusive, ugly, and destructive industrial sites have been rejected by twice as many county governments as approved them. The writers complain that the rejections come about by some combination of “outright bans, moratoriums, construction impediments and other conditions that make green energy difficult to build,” but don’t go on to describe why the rejections are taking place.

Simply put, these huge industrial sites – we simply must stop using the friendly-sounding term “farms” to describe them – create all manner of negative consequences for local communities. Consequences like loud noise from wind turbines, hundreds of dead birds and bats sprinkled across the countryside, thousands of acres of productive farm or ranchlands taken out of production for many years if not permanently, spoiled views, enormous “graveyards” filled with 150-foot blades and solar panels popping up all over the place, and impacts to local wind and weather patterns that are only now beginning to be understood.

Those consequences and more have become increasingly clear as time has progressed, and that is making it harder for developers to gain acceptance from the communities that would serve as hosts. Such pushback is likely to grow more strident in the coming years as it becomes clear to citizens that their state governments have failed to enact effective regulatory structures requiring timely and full retirement and remediation of these industrial sites when their useful life has expired. By that time, these sites will most likely have been sold off by the big developers who built them to smaller companies that will be unlikely to be able to bear the enormous costs involved in full removal and remediation.

But by then, it will be too late for the communities to protect their rights. The only real way to protect a city or county from these myriad impacts is to refuse to allow them to be built.

Fortunately, the US legal system has been built in a way that protects the rights of all stakeholders to any industrial development. Those stakeholders include local citizens, their businesses, their local infrastructure, their archeological sites, and their government entities – those are givens. But US society has seen fit over the decades to extend similar protections to animals, plants, the water, and the air as well.

Whenever we hear developers of energy or any other industrial projects complain of lengthy and complex permitting processes with which they must comply, we must remember that almost all the hurdles they must overcome to obtain their permits relate to regulations designed to protect these stakeholder rights. In the US, those regulations relate to major environmental statutes like the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and others, like the Antiquities Act. The term “streamlining permitting” is in fact code for scaling back on those stakeholder protections.

This is the clear trade-off with which the US and other western democracies must grapple if they are to achieve their climate goals. We must recognize that essentially every “solution” that has been advanced by the climate alarmist community and the globalist elites pushing their agenda requires the implementation of authoritarian policies designed to scale back stakeholder rights, pick winners and losers in the marketplace, and force reluctant consumers to pay the price.

These kinds of forced solutions are in fact incompatible with the maintenance of a free society that protects the rights of all stakeholders. That reality is the central conundrum of this forced, heavily subsidized energy transition – which is not, in fact, a transition at all – and it is the reason why so many local governments are rejecting these proposed industrial sites. The climate alarmists understand this, which is why their rhetoric has grown more shrill and heated over time.

In democracies, we decide major issues like this through elections. So long as we ensure those elections are conducted freely and fairly, it seems unlikely voters will be willing to surrender their rights in favor of achieving nebulous climate goals.

https://news.yahoo.com/news/american-revolt-against-green-energy-162426016.html

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Electric cars release more toxic emissions than petrol-powered vehicles and are worse for the environment

Electric vehicles may release more pollution than petrol-powered vehicles, according to a report that has recently resurfaced.

The study, which was published in 2022 but has begun circulating again after being cited in a WSJ op-ed, found that brakes and tyres release 1,850 times more particulate matter compared to modern exhaust pipes which have filters that reduce emissions.

It found that EVs are 30 percent heavier on average than petrol-powered vehicles, which causes the brakes and tyre treads to wear out faster than standard cars and releases tiny, often toxic particles into the atmosphere.

Hesham Rakha, a professor at Virginia Tech told Dailymail.com that the study is only 'partially correct' because even though EVs are heavier, their tyres will emit more microplastics into the air, but this could also be true for sedans versus SUVs.

Rakha said it is very challenging to determine the difference between the amount of microplastics emitted from EV tyre treads and petrol-powered vehicles because you have to separate the microplastics that are already in the air from other sources with what's coming off the tyres.

Rakha and his team at Virginia Tech are in the process of conducting field tests to determine how much microplastics are emitting from EV and petrol cars by using traffic simulators that will mimic an urban setting.

He added that he doesn't expect there to be a major difference between the EV and petrol-powered vehicles, saying that they haven't measured it yet, but expect the difference to be about 20 percent.

This doesn't mean that people should gravitate away from electric cars because they 'are more efficient depending zero emission,' Rakha said, but added the caveat that 'it also generates a lot of CO2 when charging your vehicle.'

EV batteries weigh about 453kg, and can result in tire emissions that are nearly 400 times more than exhaust pipe emissions.

Particle pollution can increase health problems including heart disease, asthma, lung disease and in extreme cases, can lead to hospitalisation, cancer, and premature death.

New petrol-powered cars are created to be 'cleaner,' by updating the trims of their internal combustion engines to include particulate filters that reduce emissions.

The EVs increased weight due to their lithium-ion batteries cause the tyre treads to wear faster, ultimately producing more emissions.

The study, conducted by the firm Emissions Analytics, said the main difference between exhaust pipe and tyre emissions is that the majority of particulate emissions released from the tyre go directly into the soil and water, while exhaust negatively affects the air quality.

The effects of tire composition come down to the materials the tyre is made from, the study reported.

Light-duty tyres are typically made from synthetic rubber which is developed using crude oil natural rubber adds fillers and additives, some of which are recognised carcinogens.

Emissions Analytics tested the tire wear on both EV and gas-powered vehicles after driving them at least 1,600km.

The researchers used a sampling system to collect particles immediately behind each tire and then measured the size of the particles emitted from the tread.

It found that the greater the vehicle's mass and weight, the more rapidly the tyre particulate emissions would be released due to the increased torque between the tires and the road.

A separate 2020 report by the Emissions Analytics firm said that tyres are likely to be a major concern in the coming years as ‘consumers switch to bigger and heavier cars.’

‘Research shows they contribute to microplastic marine pollution, as well as air pollution from finer particles,’ the report continued.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13156803/Electric-cars-release-toxic-emissions-petrol-powered-vehicles-worse-environment.html

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A reality check for climate alarmists: net zero is impossible

A stable energy supply sourced from wind and sunshine was obviously impossible from the beginning but the Left have always had big problems with the obvious

One of Australia’s richest mining magnates, Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, says you can already feel climate change, it has caused “deaths, devastation and hardship” all around the world already, Australia has “run out of time” and he knows how to fix it.

Forrest’s prescription promises “economic growth over generations” along with “full employment” and a “pristine environment” with “cheap energy being produced everywhere in our country”. Too easy; the only resource lacking, he says, is the “courage to get on with it”.

To deliver this energy and environmental nirvana he wants the coal, oil and gas industries to be “taxed out of existence”. Strangely, he does not include his own iron ore industry, which relies on fossil fuels for extraction, transport and blast-furnacing into iron and steel.

This simplistic combination of rampant alarmism and magic pudding economics is not rare. It is omnipresent in the rantings of Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, Greens leader Adam Bandt, Extinction Rebellion and the teals, but it is unusual coming from a titan of industry, albeit one in receipt of substantial government subsidies here and abroad for “green hydrogen” projects.

We were warned by the weather bureau and climate alarmists last spring that this summer would be extraordinarily hot and dry. Given that all turned out to be a damp squib, they are turning their forecasts a little further afield with the Nine Entertainment newspapers (in cahoots with the Climate Council) offering an online tool this week to show us how many days over 35C we can expect in our suburbs in 2050 and 2090.

It is as if these people have become so bored by the lack of public debate about their Chicken Little claims that they have opted for self-parody to amuse themselves. Not only do they seek to raise the fear of Gaia over these long-range predictions, they implore us to “take action” to make sure our particular postcode can keep the mercury below 35C for a day or two more in the summer of 2090.

The Greens voters of Penrith and Broadmeadows might be pretty cheesed off in 2090 when it still turns out that it’s only those affluent coastal postcodes that get the sea breeze. The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald might encounter some sweaty subscribers with buyer’s remorse in the autumn of 2091.

In this climate of fearmongering and idiocy we need more reality checks. For starters we might ease the sense of crisis by levelling with the public that the prime reason many heat records have been broken in Australia in recent decades is because the Bureau of Meteorology revised most of its early temperature records downwards and because it ignores any records before 1910, thereby eradicating from calculations known hot periods such as the Federation drought. (It argues this was scientifically valid and necessary, but the fact it has been done is worth sharing more widely, for context if nothing else.)

Still, temperatures will do what they will, and global emissions are still rising. It is a scientific fact that whatever Australia does on emissions cannot affect global climate, and natural climate variations can easily override any human interventions, good or bad. From the upper echelons of state and federal governments we are fed two strands of argument that are seldom challenged. The first is the alarmism and the other tells us renewables are the only way to deliver the emissions cuts required.

“So, while moving towards a renewable grid is a massive transformation,” Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen says, “it is necessary for our economy, for our energy security and for the climate. Stop the delay, distraction, deception and denial. Get with the program.”

Clearly we need to address the practical reality of moving to net zero, and the pretence that this can be done easily without a heavy economic cost. We can start with the International Energy Agency, which works closely with the UN and is all on board with the net zero zeitgeist. In its Global Energy Transitions Stocktake it recognises that “half the emission reductions needed to reach net zero come from technologies not yet on the market”. Got that? We cannot ever get to net zero unless we develop technologies that are “under development” or yet to be invented.

Czech-Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil is the author of 40 books mainly focused on outlining complex realities and dilemmas. His 2022 book How the World Really Works contains bad news for those climate activists who just want to “do something” about climate change and believe the solution is easy – just decarbonise.

“The real wrench in the works,” warns Smil, is that “we are a fossil-fuelled civilisation whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years.”

He is not a complete pessimist, just anchored in the reality: “Complete decarbonisation of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable economic retreat, or as a result of extraordinarily rapid transformations relying on near miraculous technical advances.”

This is because we rely on fossil fuels not just to generate most of our electricity but to fuel our road, rail, air and sea transport, heat homes, power industry, mine minerals, create chemical and plastic products, manufacture fertilisers and grow food. While wealthy countries such as ours can make some expensive changes to improve efficiency and reduce emissions, more than half of the world’s population is still racing to get the energy it needs, massively expanding global energy demand.

“Annual global demand for fossil carbon is now just above 10 billion tons a year,” writes Smil, “a mass nearly five times more than the recent annual harvest of all staple grains feeding humanity, and more than twice the total mass of water drunk annually by the world’s nearly eight billion inhabitants – and it should be obvious that displacing and replacing such a mass is not something best handled by government targets for years ending in zero or five.”

Other practical realities deepen the dilemma. The challenges for renewables relate largely to scale and efficiency. Smil again: “Large nuclear reactors are the most reliable producers of electricity, some of them now generate it 90-95 per cent of the time, compared to about 45 per cent for the best offshore wind turbines and 25 per cent for photovoltaic cells in even the sunniest of climates – while Germany’s solar panels produce electricity only about 12 per cent of the time.”

Other researchers have tried to quantify the mineral resources needed to manufacture enough turbines, solar panels, batteries and electric engines to get to net zero.

In his paper Mining for Net Zero: The Impossible Task, Alan G. Jones finds we will have to dramatically increase the mining effort, which is already higher than at any time in history.

“For example,” Jones writes, “one estimate is that there needs to be as much copper mined over the next 20-25 years as has been mined to date.”

Another geoscientist who has been based in Finland and Australia, Simon Michaux, has warned about the scale of replacing fossil fuel energy with renewables and hydrogen. “So, we are discussing bringing in a power system significantly larger than the one we have now,” Michaux reminds us, “with power systems that are not as effective and more expensive.”

Michaux has run detailed calculations on all the key resources such as lithium, nickel, copper and cobalt required globally, and the amount we are capable of extracting. The results are sobering.

“We don’t have enough mining production or mineral reserves to manufacture the first generation of renewable technology,” he finds.

But it is even worse than that because, as he points out, all the kit, from wind turbines to solar panels, from electric engines to batteries, will have to be replaced within 10 to 25 years, and again and again.

Chris Greig, a senior research scientist from Princeton University in the US, has costed the transition for Net Zero Australia. “Such is the level of investment required to build out new-generation storage facilities such as batteries and pumped-hydro, and transmission lines, that up to $1.5 trillion will need to be deployed by 2030 to put Australia on track to meet its 2050 commitments,” declares the study he co-authored. That is an amount proximate to the size of our entire GDP to be invested over just the next six years. Good luck.

And if the resources, innovation and funding required do not make this all fanciful enough, try considering the land, approvals and practicality of installing it. Bowen has boasted about needing to install 22,000 500-watt solar panels every day for eight years, as well as more than one 7-megawatt wind turbine every day connected by at least 10,000km of new transmission lines across the same period.

Most of this will be in regional and coastal communities that do not want them. And all of it, spread diffusely across the country, will be vulnerable to disruption by storms and bushfires.

Yet they seriously try to argue that nuclear power, sited compactly on existing industrial/generation sites, requiring no additional transmission lines, will be too slow and expensive.

It is time to take the ideology and fantasy out of energy policy and address the reality.

The climate and renewables zealots are in denial.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/a-reality-check-for-climate-alarmists-net-zero-is-impossible/news-story/9bc08179967d266774c53bfed7876a16

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Heads Up Media – Texas Wildfires Have Nothing to Do with Climate Change

A few days ago, a wildfire started in north Texas and grew quickly, driven by strong southwesterly winds. Named the Smokehouse Creek Fire, it has burned more than 1.1 million acres and is now the largest wildfire in Texas history. The mainstream media has been quick to blame climate change for the fire, with headlines like this one from NBC News: Wildfires ravage Texas amidst climate change crisis, or this one from ABC13 in Houston: How climate change is increasing wildfire risks across Texas. These stories are false; multiple lines of real-world data refute any connection between these fires and climate change.

NBC News claims:

The Texas Panhandle is no stranger to face-blasting winds nor roller-coaster dips in temperature. But the fires would not have had the same chance to take off if not for unseasonably warm temperatures and dry conditions made more likely by climate change.

ABC13 claims:

Additionally, climate change could increase Texan’s risks for wildfires over the next 30 years. ABC13 Meteorologist Elyse Smith has previously covered this topic through ABC’s Weathering Tomorrow initiative, which uses data from our partners at the First Street Foundation. It shows how wildfire risk, as well as heat, flood, and wind risks, will be impacted by climate change through the year 2050.

If either of these news outlets had bothered to do a ‘fact check,’ they would find their claims are unsupported by real world data.

Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for Texas show that the state has experienced a declining trend in number of very hot days and a slight increase in precipitation

With fewer hot days and increased precipitation recorded in the long-term climate records, the claim that Texas is more susceptible to wildfires now that in the past because of climate change is clearly false.

Both media outlets suggested that the area where the fires are is drier than normal. This too is false.

According to the US drought monitor, the area now beset by the wildfire is not abnormally dry and certainly not experiencing drought conditions:

Nor is the adjacent region of Oklahoma caught up in the wildfire suffering under abnormally dry or drought conditions.

According to Climate at a Glance: U.S. Wildfires:

Wildfires, especially in arid parts of the United States, have always been a natural part of the environment, and they likely always will. Global warming did not create wildfires. In fact, wildfires have become less frequent and less severe in recent decades. One of the key contributing factors has been that the United States has experienced fewer droughts in recent decades than in periods throughout the twentieth century.

According to the National Park Service, wildfires in Texas have always been a part of the state’s history. However recently invasive species now cover much of the region. According to the Texas A&M Forest Service:

Invasive species cause many negative impacts to the Texas landscape, from the displacement of native trees to potentially wiping out entire species.

Much of the Texas panhandle region is overgrown with cedar, acacia and invasive mesquite trees which use up a lot of groundwater. Previously, natural fires in the region helped control the spread of this problem, but with modern fire suppression, fuel loads have increased.

Even the most recent International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment of global climate agrees. On Page 90 – Chapter 12 of the UN IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. Emergence of Climate Impact Drivers (CIDs) the table in Figure 5 shows the incidence of “Fire weather” has not emerged from climate change:

Finally, recent satellite data show no correlation between wildfire acreage burned and carbon dioxide levels. In fact, global wildfire area burned declined substantially between 2000 to 2018, even as carbon dioxide levels increased. If climate change was driving an increase in wildfires you would see it in the global data, but it shows just the opposite.

Actual data and various lines of hard evidence show that there is no connection between climate change and the wildfires now ravaging parts of north Texas and Oklahoma, or anywhere else for that matter. Sadly, once again the media is pushing the “climate catastrophe,” narrative in which every extreme weather event or natural disaster is caused by climate change, despite the clear evidence that this is false. In this case, rather than doing investigative due diligence, neither NBC nor ABC bothered to check facts before publishing these scare stories, which suggests that their reporters and editors are either lazy, incompetent, blinded by political ideology, or all three.

See original for graphics

https://climaterealism.com/2024/03/heads-up-media-texas-wildfires-have-nothing-to-do-with-climate-change/

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Net-zero targets have hamstrung British prosperity

Britain’s ‘net-zero economy’ is booming, creating more better-paid jobs than any other sector, but it is all being put at risk by the government’s reversal on policies on electric vehicles and heat pumps.

That, at any rate, is what the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) wants us to believe. In a report this week, these groups claim that the net-zero target has spawned an industry worth £74 billion, up 9 per cent in just a year. It has created 765,000 jobs which are 1.6 times as productive as the average UK job and which offer average wages of £44,600, compared with £35,400 for the rest of the economy. Yet, ‘at a time when the US and EU are ramping up investment and tax breaks in the pursuit of clean industries setting up shop on their soil, the UK has been chopping and changing’, with ‘mixed signals, policy U-turns and contradictory political rhetoric’ discouraging investment. In other words, never mind about such trifles as the 2,500 jobs to be lost at Port Talbot as the blast furnaces are closed, taking with them Britain’s remaining capacity for primary steel-making – there are better-paid green jobs out there for anyone who wants them.

To claim that net zero has sparked an industrial boom in Britain, you have to be pretty inventive with the figures

This analysis falls at the first hurdle. The EU is doing pretty much the same as Britain in retreating from net-zero targets when they collide head-on with reality. Just as Rishi Sunak’s government put back the proposed ban on new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 to 2035, the EU – which never planned to ban them until 2035 in the first place – has revised its rules so that internal combustion engines will still be allowed after 2035 as long as they are capable of running on synthetic fuel. The German government, like Britain’s, was forced to water down proposals to ban gas boilers when it became clear how much it was going to cost households. As for the US, while Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act has made subsidies available for green energy projects, it has never imposed such tight targets for decarbonising the economy as Britain has. Indeed, America has more than doubled oil and gas output in the past 16 years as it sought energy security.

Moreover, the CBI’s claims are at odds with what is really happening to jobs in renewable energy in Britain and Europe. The Danish wind company Orsted – formerly Denmark’s national oil and gas producer – cut 800 jobs and suspended its dividend last month after losing £2.5 billion in the third quarter of 2023. In the past six months eight European solar companies have either gone bust or reported financial difficulties as China increasingly corners the market for clean energy. According to the Inter-national Renewable Energy Agency, 5.55 million of the world’s 13.7 million jobs in renewable energy are in China, and only 1.8 million in Europe. Why China? Because energy is a lot cheaper there, for one thing. But China certainly isn’t using clean energy to manufacture Europe’s wind turbines and solar panels – 60 per cent of the country’s electricity is still generated by burning coal.

Investment and jobs are welcome in clean energy, just as in any industry. However, there is little joy in celebrating the creation of ‘net-zero jobs’ if, overall, the target to achieve net zero is costing you many more jobs while you lose your remaining industrial base due to high energy costs and excessive regulation imposed by net-zero targets. Ineos owner Jim Ratcliffe warned last week that Europe will lose almost all of its remaining chemicals industry over the next 20 years, in a speech that was woefully under-reported by a media more interested in his plans for Manchester United Football Club. One of the reasons, Ratcliffe said, was that in Britain his company is paying five times as much for its gas and four times as much for electricity as it does in the US. At the moment, Ineos in Europe is paying £130 million a year in carbon taxes, but by 2030 that will rise to £1.7 billion. The German industrials giant BASF has already announced that it is to shrink European operations while investing £8 billion in a new plant in China, as well as investments in the US.

To claim that net zero has sparked an industrial boom in Britain, you have to be pretty inventive with the figures. The CBI’s report doesn’t identify all the 23,750 businesses it claims as part of the net-zero economy, but the five it does name include a company that makes electrical transformers– which are used throughout the electricity industry, regardless of how electricity is being generated – and the waste company Veolia. The latter has been included, it says, because it manages landfill sites, which involves separating organic waste and collecting methane gas from waste tips. Yet landfill sites operators have been collecting methane for decades, long before net zero.

Investing in clean technologies is a good idea. Many of them will fail but some will go on to become great generators of wealth. But as China proves, you don’t need a legally binding net-zero target to make money selling the technology to others. As the US is showing, what really powers industrial growth is cheap energy. That is where Britain, like Europe, is falling down. If we are losing out on investment and job creation, that has less to do with the relaxation of one or two net-zero targets. Britain, after all, leads the world purely in terms of the reduction in territorial carbon emissions, which have halved since 1990. It has rather more to do with the expense and bureaucracy being imposed on businesses in a desperate attempt to reach overly demanding net-zero targets.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/net-zero-targets-have-hamstrung-british-prosperity/

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More Fabricated Nonsense About The ‘Hottest Evah’

Journalists are meant to be skeptical. But not on trendy causes, at least not in recent times

Thus a piece in The Daily Digest starts out “It seems impossible but some people still deny climate change science” and continues, beneath a caricature of Donald Trump:

“We all know somebody who thinks this ‘climate change stuff’ is a bunch of hogwash. Forty years ago, it was easier to understand, but as of late, it is pretty mind-blowing that some people can have this level of cognitive dissonance.”

But does the journalist (who we doubt was even around 40 years ago) really know such a person?

Or are they only talking to one another, and failing to examine assumptions or check facts because it’s, like, mind-blowing that anyone could disagree with us, man? But at a certain point even journalists sometimes check the details, and that’s when it really gets mind-blowing.

MSN ran the headline “US weather: Heat explosion to smash America in freak 20C winter heatwave” and said:

“The US is about to roast in a freak winter heatwave as a plume of sweltering air surges up from the tropics.”

Still, it’s a kind of progress that they then noted it’s a freak event, not a trend, and the heat is coming from the tropics not from your SUV.

And they also noted how cold weather elsewhere was breaking records in Alaska, even thickening fuel oil so furnaces and stoves stopped working, while NBC took notice of a snow storm that dumped two feet of snow on California.

These days we count it lucky when a story says “Norway hit by hurricane-force winds: Is climate change making Europe’s extreme storms worse?” and answers by saying “Unsurprisingly, many across the UK, Ireland, Norway, Sweden and other storm-hit European countries this winter will be wondering whether climate change is partly to blame” then admits it’s not.

As in:

“This is the furthest through the list we have ever been at this stage,” a Met Office weather service spokesperson confirmed to Euronews Green last week.

But since storms only started being named in 2015, it’s not the best way of measuring climate change impacts.

‘It’s quite a complex issue and not quite as simple as [the] increasing frequency of heatwaves in the UK as a result of human-induced climate change,’ they added.”

Even though ‘human-induced climate change’ is not increasing the frequency of heat waves, nor has the UK seen an increase.

Meanwhile in The Atlantic an article that started “California’s Climate Has Come Unmoored / The weather of catastrophe is here” soon went on to detail how “unmoored” California’s weather has always been, from Joan Didion’s 1968 “Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse” to “The damage from the 1862 flood was so bad that it bankrupted the state.”

But it then concludes that, as everybody knows, everything has changed:

“Meteorologists have described it [the 1862 flood] as a once-in-30,000-years disaster, but there is reason to believe that another one could come much sooner, because the planet is warming, and warmer air holds more moisture.”

Again, the narrative has run away from the facts. On purpose, it seems.

The flood that might be coming is more real, far more real, than the one that actually did come.

The British Red Cross advises that:

“In the coming decades, it is predicted periods of hot weather and heatwaves will be longer and more extreme.”

Note the passive voice, which makes it hard to check who made the prediction. But we tried anyway, and found instead that according to the official British Met Office the UK in 2023, the “Hottest year ever”TM, the hottest day came in September and the heatwave in question “would not have been particularly unusual” during the summer, adding:

“The seven consecutive days with temperatures exceeding 30°C in the UK was the longest such spell on record with the previous longest runs five days in the Septembers of 1929 and 1911.”

Given the urban heat island effect it is fair to say that in fact a stretch of hot weather in September 2023 was nothing out of the ordinary, having happened a century ago, possibly more frequently.

Especially since, the Met adds of the September peak of 33.5°C at Faversham in Kent, on the 10th, that “While this is a notably high value it was not record-breaking, falling well short of the UK September record of 35.6°C set at Bawtry (South Yorkshire) on 2 September 1906.”

Yes, 1906.

What’s more, the hottest day of the year rarely comes so late, having “only occurred in September on four previous occasions in 2016, 1954, 1949 and 1919.”

So it’s episodic, cyclical and typical.

Except that in this hottest year ever, Britain didn’t break 30C in August, didn’t break 31C in July, and didn’t break 33C in June.

The tendency nowadays is to rely on theory not evidence. For instance in the New York Times “Climate Forward”, Manuela Andreoni writes of storms and flooding on the American east coast and south to Louisiana that:

“So far this week, Californians have not seen the kinds of weather-generated disasters that struck last winter, with flooding in Ventura County in December and in San Diego in January, my colleague Jill Cowan reports.

Storms are part of the natural cycle that replenishes the water supplies that several states will rely on during the drier months to come, Judson Jones, The Times’s meteorologist, told me.

‘The problem comes when there’s too much at one time,’ he said. Climate change makes that a lot more likely. Warmer air holds more moisture, which means storms in many parts of the world are getting wetter and more intense, as my colleague Ray Zhong explained during deluges last year.

Coastal areas are especially vulnerable to climate change, not just because of storms and floods, but from rising seas and erosion.”

OK, more likely, you say. Though the amount of extra moisture isn’t specified and would, you’d think, at least reduce drought.

But the real question is whether it’s actually making it more common. Climate is a complex phenomenon even in a world where many things are more complex than some people seem to think.

There are a lot of hypothetical mechanisms that could operate and might be worth testing if the result they could produce actually seems to have arrived.

But is the U.S. having more flooding?

As we’ve noted, California has been notorious for cycles of searing drought and inundating floods since anyone started keeping track.

As for, say, Louisiana, the U.S. National Weather Service (yes, we have Google on our computers, apparently unlike many journalists) says “On this page you learn what types of flooding are typical in Louisiana”.

Types, you’ll notice. Not just one. And it lists “Significant Louisiana Floods in 2005, 1927, 1965, 2011 and 1995.

The 1927 event, aka the “Great Mississippi Flood of 1927”, was “the most destructive river flood in the history of the United States”.

A century ago. Before there was climate.

Still, everybody knows that if something bad happens now, or something unusual, it’s proof that climate is way more climatic than it was before it was.

https://principia-scientific.com/more-fabricated-nonsense-about-the-hottest-evah/

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Why new green jobs are at risk if old industries die

All the post-pandemic talk of resurrecting Australia’s manufacturing sector and securing local supply chains seems like a lifetime away, amid talk that yet another manufacturer could go quietly into the night this year.

The fate of Qenos’s Melbourne and Sydney manufacturing plants is not yet set in stone, and the fact that the company – owned by China National Chemical – has recently spent money rebuilding a cooling tower at its Botany Bay plastics plant offers hope not all of its Australian facilities will be closed.

But if one or both of the plants are shuttered, they will join a raft of major plant closures since all the hullabaloo about securing domestic supply chains during the pandemic – including Incitec Pivot’s Gibson Island fertiliser plant in Brisbane, Exxon’s oil refinery in Melbourne’s Altona, a similar facility owned by BP in Kwinana, south of Perth, and Alcoa’s alumina refinery also in Kwinana. Similar threats hang over BHP’s nickel smelter in Kalgoorlie and refinery in Kwinana.

All of these plants are old, sub-scale by global standards, and suffer – compared to international competitors – from higher labour, gas and energy costs, and from rising pressure to comply with environmental standards.

But the threat to Qenos’s local facilities is also a timely reminder of the knock-on effects of the closure of manufacturing plants.

Tight gas markets have played a part in Qenos’s troubles – its gas bills reportedly doubled in 2023. But the major cause of its most recent problems was the shuttering in 2021 of Exxon’s Altona refinery, which supplied the LPG used as a feedstock for Qenos’s plastics production lines.

That happened under the previous Morrison government – and amid plenty of warnings about the downstream effects of its closure, including from Qenos, which was forced to close half the lines of its own production facility in the wake of the exit of the Exxon plant.

Any decision by BHP to close its Kalgoorlie nickel smelter will also ripple through the broader WA mining industry. The smelter supplies sulphuric acid, a by-product of its operations, to other parts of the state’s mining industry – and, in particular, to Lynas’s new cracking and leaching plant outside of Kalgoorlie.

As Lynas boss Amanda Lacaze said, the manufacturing and processing industry in Australia is an ecosystem, not a collection of unrelated operations.

And perhaps more important is the loss of the technical know-how that comes with the closure of these type of facilities.

Much is made of the loss of blue-collar jobs in manufacturing. But workers in these types of plants need substantial technical skills to keep these plants open, along with the expertise of chemists and a host of other professionals. And, despite the hype around “green jobs” in energy, hydrogen, lithium and rare earths, it is difficult to build that kind of expertise from scratch.

Companies that rely on gas for power and as an input are caught between the pressure to ditch fossil fuel extraction and the political and commercial cost of requiring gas producers to reserve more production for the domestic market.

Those pressures may mean that Australia is destined to shed the remaining industries that are dependent on petrochemical products as a feedstock.

Saving Australia’s remaining manufacturing and chemicals industries – and building new ones – will take actual policy designed to attract investment, backed by long-term support from successive governments of both political persuasions.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/talk-of-qenos-closure-highlights-the-risk-of-letting-manufacturing-industries-quietly-die/news-story/76fc21cd8481ff32e73998965e6d9674

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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