Morano on the authoritarian Elizabeth Warren

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano appeared on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends” to discuss Democratic senators attempt to vastly expand federal “climate” rules for U.S. businesses and discuss the new 2018 book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change.”

Excerpt: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is leading a push to compel companies to disclose more information about how their businesses impact and could be impacted by climate change. On Friday, Warren introduced the Climate Risk Disclosure Act of 2018, which would mandate that publicly traded companies provide extensive climate-related information, such as greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuel investments, and risk management strategies for things like rising sea levels and increased temperatures.

Not everyone, however, is a fan of Warren’s legislation… “This is virtue signaling of the highest order for her Democratic base, Marc Morano, the editor of ClimateDepot.com, said on “Fox & Friends” Wednesday. He argued that Warren’s bill would give the U.S. government and the Securities and Exchange Commission extensive power to go after companies and “shake them down.”

“They’re going to use these disclosures now — and they’re going to [be] the size of the phone book in the end — and they’re going to go after them and sue them for money for causing bad weather,” Morano said.

He drew a parallel to how the Washington Post editorial board wrote a column that said President Trump is “complicit” in extreme weather like Hurricane Florence, due to his skepticism of human-induced climate change and his administration’s efforts to “dismantle” environmental regulations.

“Donald Trump does not get credit for our economic growth, but the media is perfectly willing to blame him for a hurricane,” Morano said. “How does that work? It makes no sense whatsoever.”

SOURCE





Feel-Good Bans on Straws and Plastic Bags Don’t Help the Ocean

They increase plastic use, energy consumption, and health risks. Better idea: Improve trash collection in Third World countries.

Politicians in Seattle and San Francisco are being cheered on by some voters for their recent bans on plastic straws, having already banned plastic bags years ago. California in 2016 became the first state to ban plastic bags, New York and New Jersey are mulling similar laws, and countries from Slovenia to New Zealand are planning on banning them in 2019.

Supporters of laws prohibiting plastic products encourage politicians to make meaningless gestures rather than focus on ridding the oceans of plastic and other waste. A 2015 study in the journal Science found that of the estimated 4.8 to 12.7 million metric tons of plastic that entered the ocean from 192 of the world’s coastal countries, as little as 0.9 percent of it came from the United States.

A more recent study, from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, found that 90 percent of plastic polluting the world’s oceans comes from ten rivers, eight of which are in Asia; two are in Africa. In other words, developed countries such as the United States and New Zealand aren’t part of the problem, and taking away the freedoms of their citizens isn’t part of the solution either.

As with most government dictates, plastic bans can have unintended consequences such as increasing energy use and water pollution, heightening public-health risks, increasing overall use of plastics, or harming groups in society such as the disabled and poor. For example, a recent Danish Environmental Protection Agency study found that an organic cotton bag uses more than 150 times as much energy and causes over 600 times as much water pollution when compared with low-density polyethylene (LDPE) grocery-store bags.

A University of Arizona study found that 97 percent of users of reusable grocery bags never wash or bleach them. The research found bacteria levels in bags “significant enough to cause a wide range of serious health problems and even lead to death.” Paper bags have their own drawbacks vs. LDPE ones. These are even more pronounced when one considers how much more frequently supermarkets double up paper bags in an effort to match how remarkably strong LDPE is for its weight. A Scottish report concluded that paper bags, compared with plastic bags, resulted in “higher environmental impact” when it comes to “consumption of water, emissions of greenhouse gases, and eutrophication of water bodies (rivers, lakes, etc.).”

Referring to plastic grocery bags as “single use” is almost certainly a misnomer. An Australian government study estimated their re-use rate to be as high as 75 percent. Consumers in jurisdictions with bans who reused LDPE grocery bags to line their household trash cans, pack lunches, or even pick up their dog’s poop most often have little choice but to purchase significantly higher-density plastic bags for these purposes. Bans on plastic straws have also been documented to lead to increased use of plastics, most notably at Starbucks, where the new nitro lids actually use more plastic than the old lid-straw combo they’re meant to replace. To the extent that restrictions on plastics force consumers to switch to other products, the overall environmental impact can be significantly negative.

Banning plastic bags and straws is akin to sticking your finger in the hole of a dike with a thousand holes; it’s not going to help our oceans. If you worked in a small business that was losing $1,000 a month and you told your boss you’d come up with a way to save a dollar next month, you’d soon be out of a job. Cheering on politicians who propose and implement token bans on plastic encourages them to avoid doing the hard work required to solve the real problem.

Drastic reductions of plastic and other waste in our oceans will come about only through working with countries in Asia and Africa to stop plastic pollution at the source. The developed world needs to encourage or assist governments in developing countries to better manage their waste. Private-sector innovation also shows promising ways it might help.

The Ocean Conservancy and the McKinsey Center for Business and Environment found that improving trash-collection rates to just 80 percent in only five core Asian countries could reduce ocean plastic waste by 23 percent at a cost of around $5 billion a year. Foreign-aid budgets could be redirected to assist cities with waste collection. The Christian relief and development agency Tearfund is urging the British government to spend the equivalent of half a billion dollars of its annual foreign-aid budget to do just that. This would represent a tenfold increase; other governments could do the same.

Private-sector innovation might yield even more promising solutions. David Katz recently gave a TED talk outlining how innovation could help solve this problem. Noting that 80 percent of ocean plastic is coming from countries with extreme poverty, Katz set out to motivate Third World citizens to recycle. He created the Plastic Bank, the world’s largest chain of stores for extremely poor people. Everything in the stores — including school tuition, Wi-Fi, cell-phone minutes, and electricity — can be purchased with plastic garbage.

Using this concept of “social plastic,” Katz has partnered with global corporations such as Britain’s Marks and Spencer and Germany’s Henkel. These companies are incorporating in their products and manufacturing the resources that the Plastic Bank encourages the world’s poor to recycle.

Significant investments are necessary to create effective waste-management systems in developing countries. With this in mind, Circulate Capital was recently formed with the support of major corporations, including 3M, PepsiCo, Dow, and Procter and Gamble. With a focus on South and Southeast Asia, this new investment fund is seeking to remove capital as a barrier to the projects required to prevent plastic and other waste from flowing into the world’s oceans. Operating from the principle that tangible social change and strong financial returns are not mutually exclusive, the fund is actively seeking proposals from businesses interested in projects in three areas of the waste-management supply chain: waste collection, the processing of mixed solid waste, and the transformation of “waste” plastics into new products.

The Plastic Bank’s David Katz has rightly observed that, when faced with an overflowing sink, “it would be pointless to mop or plunge or scoop up the water if we don’t turn off the tap first.” Politicians in developed nations are ignoring the source of the ocean’s problems when they place bans on their citizens that will effectively do nothing to improve the marine environment. Solving this problem requires hard work and tough choices, something too many politicians are shirking. Voters who encourage their leaders by supporting these token gestures are simply perpetuating the problem. In the meantime, entrepreneurs such as Katz and private-sector investors are on track to do more for our oceans than the developed world’s governments combined.

SOURCE




Europe’s Business Lobby Prepares Pushback Against EU’s New Climate Goals

The memo from BusinessEurope, dated 13 September, shows how Europe’s biggest employer association intends to “challenge” EU plans to aim higher in the fight against climate change.

The document, which will be discussed at an internal meeting on Wednesday, says the main line to take about the EU’s climate policy should be “rather positive, as long as it remains a political statement with no implications” on the EU’s existing commitments under the Paris Agreement.

Miguel Arias Canete, the EU climate action commissioner, has suggested updating the EU’s greenhouse gas reduction target for 2030, arguing that the EU’s level of ambition had “de facto” been raised after an agreement was struck on renewables and energy efficiency targets earlier in June.

Currently, the EU envisages cutting its emissions by “at least 40%” by 2030 based on 1990 levels. That target would effectively be raised to 45% following the deal on renewables and energy efficiency, Cañete said.

The EU’s top energy and climate official revealed on Wednesday (20 June) that the bloc is now set to increase its emissions reduction pledge from 40% by 2030 to 45%, after EU negotiators sealed agreements on three clean energy laws in the past fortnight.

That was later backed by Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, who said in his annual “State of the Union” address to Parliament that it was “scientifically right” to raise the EU’s climate goals.

But Germany is sceptical of any such move, fearing for the competitiveness of its export-dependent industry.

In August, Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke out against revising the EU’s climate objectives, saying “we should first stick to the goals we have already set for ourselves”.

The internal memo from BusinessEurope follows the same line, recommending “to oppose the new increase in ambition, using the usual arguments” that Europe cannot take action on its own, and should seek a level playing field with global competitors before making any moves.

It suggests “to minimise the issue” by arguing that raising the ambition “is not what matters most. What is key is to persuade other major economies to catch up with the EU’s ambition,” the memo argues.

BusinessEurope also recommends “to challenge the process” by asking for more cost-benefit studies and requiring “more transparency on the calculations”.

SOURCE





UK Energy Regulator Caught Covering Up Green Scandals

Ofgem — the UK government regulator responsible for energy — has been caught covering up two major scandals in the ‘low carbon’ energy industry.

The cost of these scandals — involving smart meters and the renewable heat incentive (RHI) — may run into the tens of billions of pounds.

But rather than protect the consumer, which is supposedly its job, Ofgem has taken the side of the vested interests profiting from these industries. It has done this by using draconian gagging orders to silence two whistleblowers who had wanted to expose the scandals.

Ironically, the story was broken in The Guardian — a newspaper which has long been committed to supporting the corruption- and incompetence-riddled green industry that the whistleblowers were hoping to expose.

One of the whistleblowers told the Guardian he was “continually threatened … for trying to tell the truth. For doing my job and uncovering an issue, Ofgem made my life hell.”

He said the regulator had attempted to “scare me witless with threats of imprisonment” and he felt “utterly ashamed” of Ofgem’s behaviour.

Ofgem said it encouraged staff to report suspected wrongdoing and took their concerns seriously.

Both men worked for Ofgem in entirely different areas of the business and were regarded as qualified experts in their respected fields.

One was Greg Pytel, an economist with oversight of the rollout of the £10.9bn smart meter programme, which is due to be completed in 2020.

Smart meters are electronic devices for homes and businesses that measure the use of electricity and gas. They are designed to make billing easier and to help energy companies manage the supply of electricity more efficiently.

The second whistleblower, who has asked to remain anonymous, worked on the renewable heat incentive (RHI), which offers financial rewards to promote the use of new technologies such as green boilers.

The scheme, which started in 2011, has been controversial – and could eventually cost taxpayers £23bn. Both projects are key to the government’s stated aim of making the UK a low-carbon economy.

So that’s industries worth a total in excess of £30 billion, neither of which would exist were it not for government regulation.

There is no demand whatsoever for smart meters — the public is rightly suspicious of them and the take-up, despite copious government propaganda hailing their merits, has been risibly small.

As for the renewable heat incentive — this was a madcap scheme, introduced by David Cameron’s feeble coalition government, where businesses were paid large sums of money to heat their boilers with wood instead of coal or gas.

This money-for-old-rope scheme was widely abused, especially in Northern Ireland where it effectively bankrupted the government.

As The Times reported at the time:

Flaws in the scheme were exposed by a whistleblower who said businesses were buying biomass boilers solely to collect the subsidy. The whistleblower alleged that one farmer expected to make £1 million over 20 years for using a biomass boiler to heat an empty shed, while heating a number of empty factories would net their owner £1.5 million.

Northern Ireland’s auditor-general, Kieran Donnelly, says the RHI had “serious systemic weaknesses from the start” because it did not have the built-in spending controls imposed on a similar scheme in Great Britain. He added that the scheme was vulnerable to abuse and possible fraud.

Perhaps the even bigger scandal here, though, is the behavior of Ofgem (which stands for Office of Gas and Electricity Markets). It’s a non-ministerial government department.

Here is its remit:

Its primary duty is to protect the interests of consumers, where possible by promoting competition. The Authority‘s main objective is to protect existing and future consumers’ interests in relation to gas conveyed through pipes and electricity conveyed by distribution or transmission systems.

So what, exactly, is it doing acting so flagrantly against the interests of consumers by helping to cover up incompetence and corruption which will undoubtedly cost them millions if not billions of pounds?

Simple. Ofgem’s higher loyalties are to the government and to its determination to force through its renewable energy agenda at whatever cost.

As I’ve argued before, green energy is a charter for crooks and liars. Corruption and mismanagement and extravagant waste are not bugs of the renewable energy industry but features.

But the environmentalist zealots who infest Ofgem and similar government departments do not wish us to know this, therefore they lie and distort and cover-up. It really is that simple. And that depressing.

SOURCE




Pro-coal Coalition MPs schedule private dinner to discuss 'Australia's energy future'

We know that there is no consistency on the Left but this is a lulu. A policy from the conservative side of politics that they failed to suport when conservative PM Turnbull proposed it -- the "NEG" -- is now set to be Leftist policy.  It's far from an ideal policy but at least it should keep the lights on.  It shows that Turnbull was a better policy-maker than many give him credit for. He was only slightly right of centre but getting things done while leading a very precarious government required something like that

The pro-coal Monash Forum is attempting to convene a private dinner when federal parliament resumes in mid-October with Trevor St Baker, part-owner of the Vales Point coal generator and founder of the business electricity retailer ERM Power.

With the energy minister, Angus Taylor, working up options for cabinet to lower power prices and boost generation capacity by expanding existing plants, upgrading ageing legacy generators and pursuing new investments, the Coalition’s pro-coal ginger group has scheduled dinner with St Baker in Parliament House on 16 October.

According to an invitation circulated among members of the Monash Forum, seen by Guardian Australia, Coalition MPs will meet for dinner and discussion on “Australia’s energy future”.
Coalition won't replace renewables target after it winds down in 2020

St Baker has previously signalled interest in pursuing a replacement for the Hazelwood power station if the federal government settles on a favourable energy policy, and members of the Monash Forum want the businessman to update them about his investment plans.

Planning for the soiree comes as industry associations and energy associations met in Canberra on Thursday with the shadow climate change minister, Mark Butler, and the Labor leader, Bill Shorten, and urged them to persist with the national energy guarantee.

Malcolm Turnbull, as one of his last acts in the top job, dumped the policy after an internal, conservative-led insurgency. The new prime minister, Scott Morrison, and his cabinet have now taken a formal decision to dump the emissions reduction component of the Neg.

Before the policy was junked, the Turnbull government and the then energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, spent months lining up stakeholders to support the policy, which was designed by the Energy Security Board.

Business groups and energy associations are dismayed by the abandonment of the policy because they fear there is now no clear investment signal to guide investment in generation assets with 30 and 40-year operating lives. The groups sent a clear message to Labor that the current mess needed to be resolved.

Shorten and Butler – who are yet to make a final decision on whether to keep or junk the Neg – convened a meeting in parliament on Thursday with AiGroup, the Business Council of Australia, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Energy Users Association of Australia, the Australian Energy Council, the Clean Energy Council and the Smart Energy Council.

According to people present at the meeting, the groups made the case that Labor should persist with the Neg rather than junking it and pursuing a brand new policy for the electricity sector.

In his opening remarks to the meeting, Butler said Labor had heeded the message from industry players that reaching a bipartisan consensus was important, so Labor had attempted to be constructive when the Turnbull government brought forward various policy options, culminating in the Neg.
Steep emissions reductions targets won't drive up power bills, modelling shows

Butler said there was always going to be a difference between Labor and the Coalition on the level of ambition of emissions reduction but he said “getting the rules agreed upon would have been a monumental step forward in resolving the energy crisis and set us up for the investment and jobs that we need over coming years that will start to clean up our energy sector and bring power prices down”.

He told the groups Labor understood there was strong buy-in from stakeholders for the Neg, and Labor wanted “to make sure that good thinking is not entirely lost”.

“We want to make sure the energy policy we put forward at the next election is the most compelling policy that we can possibly come up with from business and household points of view, and we need your help with that,” Butler said.

While Labor is yet to make a final decision, Shorten gave a strong hint at the start of the week that the opposition would keep the Neg as part of a suite of climate policies for the next election. “We are prepared to use that as part of our framework going forward,” he said on Sunday.

SOURCE 

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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Hurricane Florence was due to ocean COOLING

Even before Hurricane Florence barreled into the North Carolina coast, a misleading claim about the storm and global warming echoed across the internet.

Florence made landfall in North Carolina as a Category 1 hurricane on Friday, but the day before, The New York Times published a video claiming the storm had formed in “unusually warm waters” in the Atlantic Ocean, heated up by man-made global warming.

In comparing Florence to last year’s Hurricane Harvey, the NYTimes’ reporter said “both of these hurricanes formed in unusually warm waters.” That’s false, according to Cato Institute atmospheric scientist Ryan Maue.

“Ocean surface temperatures along Florence track were abnormally cool for most of its life-cycle partly due to the unusual, higher latitude of the storm,” Maue tweeted on Tuesday night. “The integrated [sea surface temperature] track-based anomaly averaged from Sept 4-11 was 0.6°C below 1985-2017 ‘normal.’”

Florence formed in colder than normal waters in the eastern Atlantic Ocean. Florence also reached major hurricane strength (Category 3 or higher) in cooler waters, before heading into warmer waters where it didn’t do what weather forecasters expected — it weakened and fell apart.

In fact, what’s amazing is how strong the storm got and how long it stayed together over “marginal” ocean temperatures, Maue tweeted.

The National Hurricane Center initially forecast Florence to hit land at Category 3 or 4 strength on the Saffir-Simpson scale, making it a major hurricane at landfall. Forecasters likely expected the warmer waters close to the U.S. coast to intensify the storm.

Instead, Florence weakened as it approached the Carolinas, despite the warmer waters close to the coast. Florence made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane, though the storm still brought heavy rainfall and flooding across the southeast.

However, NYTime’s video on Hurricane Florence ignored such data. Likewise, Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann claimed warmer than normal water temperatures “supercharged” Florence.

Mann blamed an “ocean heat wave,” linking to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) article published about one week before Florence made landfall.

However, the article Mann cited as evidence is referring to the warm coastal waters of New England and eastern Canada — hundreds of miles from Florence’s actual track.

But even the warmer waters near the U.S. coast were actually close to the 30-year average, Maue said.

SOURCE




Eco-Socialism? Hundreds Of Academics Call For An End To Economic Growth

More than 200 academics signed onto a public letter calling on governments to eschew economic growth in order to plan for a “post-growth economy” based on wealth redistribution.

“For the past seven decades, GDP growth has stood as the primary economic objective of European nations,” 238 academics wrote in public letter published by The Guardian on Sunday.

“But as our economies have grown, so has our negative impact on the environment,” they wrote. “We are now exceeding the safe operating space for humanity on this planet, and there is no sign that economic activity is being decoupled from resource use or pollution at anything like the scale required.”

“Today, solving social problems within European nations does not require more growth. It requires a fairer distribution of the income and wealth that we already have,” the academics wrote

The letter echoes the 1960s-era “population bomb” fears. Back then, academics, like former White House science czar John Holdren and biologist Paul Ehrlich, argued out of control population control would outstrip the Earth’s ability to support humanity.

Ehrlich and Holdren predicted the world would eventually move, like it or not, to a “no-growth” economy where famine, hunger and poverty would run rampant until the population stabilized.

Those predictions turned out to be wrong as humanity’s physical and material well-being has increased substantially since then as population growth exploded.

However, hundreds of academics are echoing the Malthusian fears of the 1960s, and calling for governments to prepare for a “no-growth economy” where gross domestic product (GDP) is not a concern.

“If current trends continue, there may be no growth at all in Europe within a decade,” the academics wrote in their letter. “Right now the response is to try to fuel growth by issuing more debt, shredding environmental regulations, extending working hours, and cutting social protections.”

“This aggressive pursuit of growth at all costs divides society, creates economic instability, and undermines democracy,” they wrote.

Copenhagen Consensus Center president Bjorn Lomborg, also known as the “skeptical environmentalist,” called the academics’ demands “silly,” especially the argument “that degrowth can improve our quality of life.”

“The claim that no-growth or de-growth would be good for us is simply wrong,” Lomborg tweeted on Monday.

The academics called for policies that emphasized wealth redistribution and environmentalism over those that add to the material well-being of a country. The letter, however, does not address population growth.

“Resource use could be curbed by introducing a carbon tax, and the revenue could be returned as a dividend for everyone or used to finance social programmes,” academics wrote in their letter.

“Introducing both a basic and a maximum income would reduce inequality further, while helping to redistribute care work and reducing the power imbalances that undermine democracy,” they wrote. “New technologies could be used to reduce working time and improve quality of life, instead of being used to lay off masses of workers and increase the profits of the privileged few.”

SOURCE





Fracking takes a step forward in Britain

Cuadrilla has today received hydraulic fracturing consent from the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) for its second horizontal shale exploration well at its Preston New Road site in Lancashire. Consent was granted for the first horizontal well in July this year. Planning and permits required for both wells are already secured.

Francis Egan, CEO of Cuadrilla, said:

“We are delighted to receive this consent. We are currently completing works on site in readiness to start hydraulically fracturing both wells in the next few weeks. The UK’s need for a new and reliable source of natural gas, the cleanest fossil fuel, is underlined by a new report¹ suggesting the UK is going to have to rely on more coal to generate electricity. That would be a massive backwards step in reducing carbon emissions, as would continuing to import gas over long distances by pipe and ship. We are very proud to be the first operator in the UK to make significant headway in shale gas exploration.”

The first horizontal shale well was completed by Cuadrilla in April 2018 through the Lower Bowland shale rock at approximately 2,300m below surface and extends laterally for some 800m. The second horizontal shale gas well was completed in July 2018 and was drilled through the Upper Bowland shale at an approximate depth of 2,100m below the surface, extending laterally for some 750 metres through the shale. These are the first two horizontal shale exploration wells to be drilled onshore in the UK. Following hydraulic fracturing of these first two horizontal wells Cuadrilla will run an initial flow test of the gas produced from both wells for approximately six months.

SOURCE




Tougher Laws On Pipeline Protests Face Test In Louisiana

After a high-profile campaign to oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016, a number of states moved to make it harder to protest oil and gas projects. Now in Louisiana, the first felony arrests of protesters could be a test case of these tougher laws as opponents vow a legal challenge.

The controversy here is over the Bayou Bridge Pipeline, the last leg of the Dakota Access. If completed, it will bring crude oil from the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota, through Louisiana, where it will be exported abroad.

On a recent day, deep in the Atchafalaya swamp of South Louisiana, twigs snap under the rubber boots of about 40 protesters as they march through shaded woods. Many have tied bandannas around their faces, leaving only their eyes exposed. In the distance, backhoes fling mud as construction workers clear a path for the new Bayou Bridge Pipeline.

"Y'all are trespassing!" a construction worker shouts.

"Go home!" a protester yells back.

After a few minutes, the construction workers shut off their equipment and the protesters celebrate. But later, things get heated after the sheriff's department shows up. A deputy pins one woman to the ground, and the two sides engage in a muddy tug of war until she tumbles free.

It's incidents like this that have helped push lawmakers to take action. Earlier this year, Louisiana state Rep. Major Thibaut proposed a bill with stricter penalties for pipeline protesters.

"You know that there's a right way to do things and a wrong way," Thibaut told a state legislative committee. "And if you want to protest against something ... get your permit and you go do it in a legal fashion."

Trespassing in Louisiana is normally a misdemeanor offense. But the new law deems oil and gas pipelines to be "critical infrastructure," a classification that includes places like nuclear plants, oil refineries and water treatment facilities. As of Aug. 1, trespassing near oil and gas pipelines in the state is now a felony offense, with a possible sentence of up to five years in jail.

Several states have either passed or are considering similar laws, including Oklahoma, Iowa and Pennsylvania.

The oil and gas industry is a big part of many states' economies, including Louisiana. Craig Stevens, who represents pipeline interests with Grow America's Infrastructure Now, says these new laws will help ensure pipelines are not delayed and will also help keep both workers and protesters safe.

"It wasn't too long ago when there were, I think, four protesters that broke through and tried to penetrate, and actually did pierce a pipeline up in the Midwest," he says. "And they used blowtorches. I mean that's the type of thing could actually explode and kill somebody."

Pipeline opponents say more than 10 people have been arrested under Louisiana's stricter law. Journalist-activist Karen Savage captured the first arrests on video, which shows several security officers pulling three protesters from kayaks onto an airboat.

Those arrested said they didn't think they were doing anything illegal since they were on water, which is considered public property.

"It's a ridiculous over-criminalization of people who protest," says Bill Quigley, a law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans who represents protesters here and in other states.

Quigley calls the new law unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds, and he says he plans to challenge it in court. He hopes doing so will encourage other states to walk back their own laws.

So far, it's not clear whether the local district attorney will prosecute those charged with felonies. But at the Bayou Bridge protest, anti-pipeline organizer Cherri Foytlin says she and others won't be deterred.

"I hope to God no more felonies," she says. "But if there is, then they will be righteous ones."

The next day, Foytlin and three others were also arrested.

SOURCE




Computer Climate Simulations Just Crashed

Ross McKitrick and John Christy have an important new paper out in Earth and Space Science.



This is the latest fusillade in the long battle over whether the climate simulations that lie behind demands for decarbonisation and other political action actually amount to nothing but a hill of beans (as they say on the other side of the pond).

Computer climate simulations predict that manmade global warming will cause the troposphere over the tropics to warm much faster than the surface, and there have been a series of scientific papers arguing whether these predictions are being borne out in practice. In a blog post published yesterday, McKitrick relates some of the back story, including attempts by one mainstream scientist to withhold his data, and the subsequent revelation that he had truncated it in a way that fundamentally altered the conclusions that would be drawn. McKitrick also outlines a series of subsequent papers that have concluded that real-world warming in the troposphere is much less than predicted:

[W]hether we test the tropospheric trend magnitudes, or the ratio of tropospheric to surface trends, across all kinds of data sets, and across all major trend intervals, models have been shown to exaggerate the amplification rate and the warming rate, globally and in the tropics.

So it’s not looking too good for the models. The next logical step is to consider what this means for the bigger picture, and this is where the new paper comes in. As McKitrick points out, if climate simulators get the rainfall in the Amazon wrong, it’s perhaps not the end of the story – that part of the model might be adjusted. But he and Christy are suggesting that what the models indicate about the tropical troposphere is essentially a diagnostic of their structures – almost all climate models agree that it will warm rapidly and it should only be greenhouse gases that can cause such a warming.

In other words, if the models get this wrong, something is fundamentally wrong.

Which is why it’s so important that the authors conclude their paper thus:

Comparing modeled to observed trends over the past 60 years…shows that all models warm more rapidly than observations and in the majority of individual cases the discrepancy is statistically significant. We argue that this provides informative evidence against the major hypothesis in most current climate models.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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Container ship crosses Arctic route for first time in history due to melting sea ice

The above heading is an example of hiding something in plain sight.  It gives the impression that the transit through the Northeast passage was something new.  In fact it has been one of Russia's commercial maritime trade routes for the past 70 years. So the key thing to note in the heading above is the word "Container".  It was the first CONTAINER ship to go through

And it was certainly no epic triumph.  The ship itself was a mini-icebreaker with an ice-strengthened hull and ice cover in the Arctic is at its annual minimum in September -- but even then the ship needed "help from Russia's most powerful nuclear icebreaker" to get through.  Basically it was a nothing event and the firm behind it does not plan to repeat the exercise


A commercial container ship has for the first time successfully navigated the Northern Sea Route of the Arctic Ocean, a route made possible by melting sea ice caused by global warming.

Maersk Line, the world’s biggest container shipping company, told The Independent its ship, Venta Maersk, was expected to reach its final destination of St Petersburg next week.

The new ice-class 42,000 ton vessel, carrying Russian fish and South Korea electronics, left Vladivostok, in the far east of Russia, on the 23 August.

With help from Russia's most powerful nuclear icebreaker, it followed the Northern Sea Route up through the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska, before travelling along Russia’s north coast and into the Norwegian Sea.

The route has seen growing traffic during summer months already, with cargos of oil and gas regularly making the journey.

SOURCE





Climate change is real. Welcome to the new normal

An extremely unoriginal bit of Warmism below.  Tony Heller and Joe Bastardi have comprehensively debunked it so I will say no more

By Eugene Robinson

Hurricane Florence has drenched eastern North Carolina with more than 30 inches of rain, an all-time record for the state. Last year, Hurricane Harvey stalled over Houston and dumped more than 60 inches of rain, an all-time record for the whole country. Also last year, Hurricane Maria ravaged the island of Puerto Rico and caused, according to an independent study, nearly 3,000 deaths.

Welcome to the new normal.

Tropical cyclones are nothing new, of course. But climate scientists say that global warming should make such storms wetter, slower and more intense — which is exactly what seems to be happening. And if we fail to act, these kinds of devastating weather events will likely become even more frequent and more severe.

Climate change is a global phenomenon. Authorities in the Philippines are still trying to assess the damage and death toll from Typhoon Mangkhut, a rare Category 5-equivalent storm that struck the archipelago Saturday with sustained winds of 165 mph. Mangkhut went on to batter Hong Kong and now, as it weakens, is plowing across southern China.

Every human being on the planet has a stake in what governments do to limit and adapt to climate change, including leaders who, like President Trump, prefer to believe global warming is some kind of hoax. I doubt the citizens of Wilmington, N.C. — a lovely resort town that was turned into an island by widespread flooding from Florence — feel there is anything illusory about the hardship they’re going through.

SOURCE





North Dakota Is Now Pumping as Much Crude as Venezuela

North Dakota’s oil production surged to a new record in July, putting the mid-western state on par with OPEC member Venezuela.

Home to the Bakken shale play, North Dakota pumped 1.27 million barrels a day in July, according to state figures released Friday. That’s roughly the same output as Venezuela during the month. The South American nation, whose oil industry has collapsed amid a prolonged financial crisis, saw production fall further in August to 1.24 million barrels a day -- about half the level seen in early 2016, according to data from OPEC secondary sources.

Soaring output from shale formations, including the Bakken, helped the U.S. overtake Russia and Saudi Arabia to likely become the world’s biggest oil producer earlier this year, according to preliminary estimates from the Energy Information Administration. At the same time, Venezuela’s output is expected to tumble even lower, to 1 million barrels a day by the end of the year, according to the International Energy Agency.

SOURCE






Pelosi Reignites Obama Push To Shut Down Huge Chunk of Coal Industry

The Left never learn

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is renewing the Obama administration’s war on coal by supporting efforts to attack coal use in America.

On Thursday, the California Democrat criticized the coal industry during a speech at the Global Climate Action Summit in California, NTK Network reported.

“Under President Obama, we went on to pass the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act in the House. But we were stopped in the Senate by the coal industry,” Pelosi said. “For this and other reasons, I’m so grateful to Michael Bloomberg’s ‘Beyond Coal’ initiative working with the Sierra Club. It is so essential.”

On its website, “Beyond Coal” says it wants to “replace dirty coal with clean energy by mobilizing grassroots activists in local communities to advocate for the retirement of old and outdated coal plants and to prevent new coal plants from being built.” Among its objectives is to shutter a third of the nation’s coal plants by 2020.

In a New Yorker interview, Bloomberg said coal’s day is done no matter what anyone says to the contrary.

“Coal will go away in any place where there’s a free market, for sure, because the market just forces that, the economics force it,” he said, “It does not help that our federal government is opposed to some rational things and is putting out some of the drivel that they do.”

Pelosi’s most recent criticism of the coal industry was not the first time in recent weeks Pelosi attacked coal.

In an August speech at the Public Policy Institute of California she praised herself for her efforts against a small coal plant that operated in Washington, D.C., The Daily Caller reported.

“And it really is a moral issue if you believe as I do that this is God’s creation we have to be good stewards of it,” Pelosi said. “We have evangelicals and others with us — er, some, those who believe in God’s creation. So, in any case, this was a big thing for us. I had to fight some Democrats. Senator Byrd had a coal-powered plan fueling the Capitol, you know … and that’s gonna go, with all due respect to West Virginia we’re not gonna have a coal-powered plant floating around.”

Pelosi’s view is contrasted with that of President Donald Trump, who has strongly supported the coal industry, and at a recent rally had a coal miner join him on stage, according to The Daily Caller. Trump was telling the story of a miner who spoke to him about the revitalization of the coal industry.

“He said, ‘Sir, what you’ve done for the coal industry is incredible. Because we were dead, and now we’re vibrant again,’” Trump recalled.

The man then came on stage and talked about how under former President Barack Obama “the coal industry absolutely had the boot of government on its throat.”

“Many, many jobs were lost,” said the miner, whose name was not announced. “And many towns were destroyed by this. It was just a horrible thing. Horrible suffering happened in this country. Really for made-up reasons, I think. And what your administration does — has done — is bringing us back to life.”

In 2016, as part of his effort to change America’s energy sources, Obama pushed for a reduction in coal and other fossil fuels, The Washington Post reported. He said his administration would “push to change the way we manage our oil and coal resources, so that they better reflect the costs they impose on taxpayers and our planet.”

That tone was emulated in the 2016 presidential campaign by Democrat Hillary Clinton who in March 2016 said, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” according to Politico.

SOURCE




California Climate Policies Facing Revolt from Civil-Rights Groups

Hugely expensive green mandates will hit poor Californians the hardest.

In April, civil-rights groups sued to stop some of California’s policies designed to address climate change. Then on Monday, California governor Jerry Brown signed into law SB 100, which requires the state’s utilities to obtain all their electricity from carbon-free sources by 2045. Before signing the bill, Brown said the legislation was “sending a message to California and to the world that we’re going to meet the Paris agreement.” In fact, it will only increase the hardships that California’s climate policy imposes on the poor, as detailed in the lawsuit.

High electricity prices should be a concern for California policymakers, since electric rates in the state are already 60 percent higher than those in the rest of the country. According to a recent study by the Berkeley-based think tank Environmental Progress, between 2011 and 2017 California’s electricity rates rose more than five times as fast as those in the rest of the U.S. SB 100 will mean even higher electricity prices for Californians.

In addition to cost, the all-renewable push set forth in SB 100 faces huge challenges with regard to energy storage. Relying solely on renewables will require a battery system large enough to handle massive seasonal fluctuations in wind and solar output. (Wind-energy and solar-energy production in California is roughly three times as great during the summer months as it is in the winter.) According to the Clean Air Task Force, a Boston-based energy-policy think tank, for California to get 80 percent of its electricity from renewables would require about 9.6 terawatt-hours of storage. This would require about 500 million Tesla Powerwalls, or roughly 15 Powerwalls for every resident. A full 100 percent–renewable electricity mandate would require some 36.3 terawatt-hours of storage, or about 60 Powerwalls for every resident of California.

Increasing reliance on renewable energy also means increasing land-use conflicts. Since 2015, more than 200 government entities from Maine to California have voted to reject or restrict the encroachment of wind-energy projects. In 2015 the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously in favor of an ordinance banning large wind turbines in the county’s unincorporated areas. Three other California counties — San Diego, Solano, and Inyo — have also passed restrictions on Big Wind. Last year, the head of the California Wind Energy Association lamented that “we’re facing restrictions like that all around the state,” adding that “it’s pretty bleak in terms of the potential for new development.” The result of the anti-wind restrictions can be seen in the numbers. Last year, California had about 5,600 megawatts of installed wind capacity. That’s roughly 150 megawatts less than what the state had back in 2013.

The land-use problem facing Big Wind in California is the same throughout the rest of the U.S. and Europe: People in cities like the idea of wind turbines. People in rural areas increasingly don’t want anything to do with them. Those rural landowners don’t want to see the red blinking lights atop those massive turbines, all night, every night, for the rest of their lives. Nor do they want to be subjected to the harmful noise — both audible and inaudible — that they produce.

Even before SB 100 passed, though, California’s leaders were already facing a legal backlash from minority leaders over the high cost of the state’s climate policies. On April 27, The Two Hundred, a coalition of civil-rights leaders, filed a lawsuit in state court against the California Air Resources Board, seeking an injunction against some of the state’s carbon dioxide–reduction rules. The 102-page lawsuit declares that California’s “reputation as a global climate leader is built on the state’s dual claims of substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions while simultaneously enjoying a thriving economy. Neither claim is true.”

The gist of the lawsuit is this: California’s high housing, transportation, and energy costs are discriminatory because they are a regressive tax on the poor. The suit claims that the state’s climate laws violate the Fair Employment and Housing Act because CARB’s new greenhouse-gas-emissions rules on housing units in the state “have a disparate negative impact on minority communities and are discriminatory against minority communities and their members.” The suit also claims the state’s climate laws are illegal under the Federal Housing Act, again because their effect is felt predominantly by minority communities. It also makes a constitutional claim that minorities are being denied equal protection under the law because California’s climate regulations are making affordable housing unavailable to them.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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USA Today op-ed ignores evidence to claim climate change had no role in Hurricane Florence

Under the above heading an article appeared which challenged an article by climate skeptic Roy Spencer.  Spencer dismissed on various grounds any connection between storm Florence and global warming. The article is a rather complex piece of formatting so I am not going to reproduce it here but it is readily accessible here.  I imagine Spencer will do his own reply to it in due course but, as a critique, it ranges from weak to hilarious so I thought I might make a few brief comments on it.

For a start two of the "4 scientists" are well known Warmists -- Kerry Emmanuel and Andrew Dessler -- so any judgments they make cannot be regarded as unbiased. Knowing that what they say will be under expert scrutiny, however, they are unusually cautious in their utterances, which enables us to see how weak their case is.

They draw on two types of "evidence" to support their conclusions: The first is "scientific studies" which are simply modelling exercises.  And, given the stellar record of failure that attends Warmist predictions based on modelling, such "studies" must be regarded as just a game played among friends.  Beyond that the studies must be regarded as equivalent to an advertisement for the sale of the Brooklyn bridge.  The studies concerned are in fact worse than the usual Warmist modelling in that they generate no testable predictions so are not science at all. They are just games.

The second type of evidence used in criticism of Spencer does at least use empirical observations.  They point to various weak trends over a limited time period.  And it is that line of argument that amuses me most.  Regardless of  how accurate their accounts of trends are, they have no way of tying those trends to global warming.  I am prepared to accept all the trends they quote as gospel but I see nothing in them that can be shown as due to global warming.  There is no way we can show that those trends are non-natural. 

You can pick out runs in any body of data but showing that they are non random requires access to the whole body of the data concerned, or at least a representative sample of it -- and the whole body of climate data spans millions of years so that is quite impossible. So the only way they can tie their quoted trends to anthropogenic global warming takes them back to their modelling again -- so it is all faith, not science.

I first put up this critique on Facebook and received the folowing spot-on comment from Roy Spencer:  "Why 4? If they were correct, it would only take 1"





Fair's fair!






Al Gore's claim about Hurricane Florence doused by scientists

Meteorologist Ryan Maue says Gore's assertion made 'without any evidence'

Another climate-change claim by former Vice President Al Gore is coming under fire, this one involving Hurricane Florence.

Mr. Gore said Friday that two major storms from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans had never made landfall at the same time, referring to Hurricane Florence, the Category 1 hurricane that struck North Carolina on Friday, and Super Typhoon Mangkhut, which hit the Philippines early Saturday.

“This is the first time in history that two major storms are making landfall from the Atlantic and the Pacific simultaneously,” Mr. Gore told the crowd at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, which wrapped up Friday.

He cited the storm activity on opposite sides of the globe as an example of climate change driving unusual and extreme weather, but meteorologist Ryan Maue was quick to dump cold water on Mr. Gore’s assertion.

“Al Gore just (fraudulently) claimed without any evidence that we’ve never had hurricanes in both the Atlantic and Pacific making landfall at the same time,” tweeted Mr. Maue, an adjunct scholar at the free-market Cato Institute.

University of Colorado Boulder meteorologist Roger A. Pielke Sr. also took issue with the claim by Mr. Gore, known for his 2006 climate-change film, An Inconvenient Truth, and the 2017 follow-up, An Inconvenient Sequel.

“Such statements show that he is not familiar with the history of tropical cyclone landfalls,” said Mr. Pielke in an email.

Numerous articles and even books have been written fact-checking and challenging Mr. Gore’s climate predictions and pronouncements, including meteorologist Roy Spencer’s An Inconvenient Deception, and “Al Gore’s Science Fiction: A Skeptic’s Guide to an Inconvenient Truth,” a 154-page paper by the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Marlo Lewis Jr.

In his Friday remarks, Mr. Gore also blamed climate change for driving wildfires, drought, floods, mudslides, “rain bombs,” the May water shortage in Cape Town, South Africa, and record dead trees in California.

Mr. Maue said the “first time in history” claim appeared to originate with an NBC News report last week headlined, “In rare event, Atlantic, Pacific storms churn at the same time.”

The article cited Colorado State University meteorologist Phil Klotzbach, who described the busy storm season in the Pacific and Atlantic as uncommon but said nothing about simultaneous landings being unprecedented.

“The thing that’s interesting now is the Pacific is still active, but the Atlantic is very active, which isn’t normal,” Mr. Klotzbach told NBC. “I’m surprised to see the Pacific and Atlantic active at the same time.”

Mr. Maue, whose comments were first reported in the Daily Caller, said the NBC article “completely missed the mark on ongoing hurricanes and their rarity.”

SOURCE





Climate Science Versus The FangZhi

The Fang Zhi is kind of a government gazette that has been issued by Chinese governments for thousands of years. Data on extreme weather events and famines are included in this gazette. The data show that floods and droughts are common in China and that they are periodically particularly severe.

A cyclical pattern of famines caused by severe drought followed by devastating floods may be traced back through all of recorded history in China. The period of this cycle has been estimated to be about fifty years. A peculiarity of this weather cycle is that floods and droughts can occur at the same time in China because weather in Southern China is about 180 degrees out of phase with that in Northern China. History has recorded many cases when the south is flooding from torrential rainfall while the north is in drought or conversely when the north is flooding and the south is dry.

Much of the sociology, philosophy, literature, and politics of China have been shaped by the flood and drought cycle. Some scholars go so far as to claim that all of Chinese history is a story of the people’s fight against famine caused by this calamitous cycle of weather. One of the largest infrastructure projects in history is the failed attempt to link southern Chinese rainfall with northern Chinese rainfall using a very ambitious canal network. The construction and maintenance of granaries on an immense scale has consumed a succession of Chinese dynasties while famines have been the downfall of others. The 2005 drought in Hainan and Guangdong along with torrential rains and floods in Northern China fits the known pattern of extreme weather in China.

If you truncate history at 1961, however, these weather events will appear to be unusual and unnatural. An equally unnatural cause for this kind of weather may then be assessed. In particular, those with a predisposition to the global warming/climate change hypothesis contained in the Kyoto Protocol and the UNFCCC will find in these events the kind of evidence they need to support their predisposed position (See for example, Waiting in vain for rain that’s two years late has Hainan’s farmers fretting about their future, The Nation, Bangkok, June 3, 2005).

Fossil fuel consumption has risen dramatically since 1961. The data also show what appears to be an irregular increase in the CO2 content of the atmosphere in parallel with rising fuel consumption. At the same time we find the average temperature of the earth has been rising since 1979. It is tempting to draw a causal link from fossil fuels to CO2 and from CO2 to temperature and from there to extreme weather events. These relationships appear so convincing that no further scientific evidence is sought to support the subsumed causalities.

Yet statistical analysis of the observational data do not show the correlations that would exist if this chain of causation to be true were true. The correlation argument is presented in more detail in two related posts. HUMAN CAUSED CLIMATE CHANGE, SPURIOUS CORRELATIONS IN CLIMATE SCIENCE.

In the Chinese weather data, the global warming enthusiasts have been undone by the Fang Zhi. Their claim that fossil fuel consumption is to be blamed for this year’s drought in southern China and floods in northern China appears grossly childish and specious in light of history.

SOURCE





Australia: Greens MP cops onslaught of online abuse after supporting proposed fishing ban

It seems to me that authoritarians who try to interfere with other people's lives should expect retribution for that.  Trying to stop people from going fishing is incredibly authoritarian

A Greens MP is currently being bullied online after he showed support for the governments controversial 'lock outs'.

Justin Field's Facebook page has been flooded with cruel abuse, memes and even death threats since the New South Wales MP backed the proposal.

'You're a f***ing germ piece of s***…we will destroy you at the next election you f***ing germ…die you bastard,' one user said on Facebook. 'Prepare to get your legs broken Justin,' wrote another.

Mr Field, a Greens MP in the NSW upper house, has also been called a 'grub' and a 'maggot', with one user going as far as saying they hoped he was 'taken out of the equation'.

Mr Field's wife has also been targeted, with users demanding she make him respond to their vile comments.

The backlash began after Mr Field's vocally supported the governments plan to ban recreational fishing in 25 cities along the coast in a bid to help fish stocks recover.

Mr Field responded to the online hate in interview with The Sydney Morning Herald, acknowledging that although he expected debate and a 'certain rough and tumble in politics', people have gone too far.

He claimed that the raised platform of key figures in talk-back radio and print media have deliberately misinformed the public about the proposal.

'I think some politicians, fishing personalities and the media have been spreading deliberate misinformation to drum up fear and anger over the proposal and that has played a role in the level of hate being expressed about the plan,' Mr Field wrote.

Since the onslaught of comments, the NSW government has back flipped on the plan, just weeks after announcing the proposal.

Primary Industries Minister Niall Blair said on Monday they will be not going ahead with the fishing bans, calling the original proposal 'absolutely unacceptable'.

'The Government has now rewarded this appalling behaviour by effectively walking away from a Sydney Marine Park proposal,' Mr Field said on Facebook following the announcement.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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Yes, You Can Blame Bad Storms on Climate Change. The question is no longer an unanswerable hypothetical (?)

Fickling and Flam below are echoing yet again the claim that you CAN tie individual storms to global warming.  They don't mention that such claims are all the results of modelling, which is intrinsically unreliable, particularly in biased hands. And, unlike some modelling, the claims cannot be checked against reality so are not science.  They are all just Fickling and Flam.

Fickling makes an interesting claim: "The science behind these studies is relatively new, but draws on long-established methods. “These are techniques that climate scientists stole from epidemiologists and public health researchers,” says Sophie Lewis, a research fellow at the University of New South Wales"

That is an unfortunate admission indeed.  Fickling and Lewis are obviously unaware of the replication crisis in medical and psychological research -- a crisis which stems from the fact that such research CAN be tested for realism.  And it has been found in up to 70% of cases to be unreplicable. Doing the same experiment twice, the second experiment gives quite different results from the first experiment. With true claims you would get the same result on both occasions

And if that is true of the more rigorous research in those fields, what does it say about the credibility of the more speculative, epidemiological research? Anybody who is inclined to think that epidemiological conclusions are reliable should read John Brignell's hefty book, "The epidemiologists: Have they got scares for you!".  Brignell goes through hundreds of epidemiological studies and shows they are rubbish.

And you don't actually need Brignell to show you that.  Epidemiological studies in medicine produce such different conclusions about the same question that from time to time you have meta-analytic studies, such as the Cochrane studies, which endeavour to separate the wheat from the chaff.  And the studies on any given topic are often so weak that the Cochrane researchers don't even consider most of them.  They usually find only a small number -- as few as four out of a hundred or more -- studies that offer useful evidence.  And even there the final conclusions are often tentative

And the now debunked but but sometimes still heard claim that red meat and fat are particularly bad for you came out of epidemiological research by Ancel Keys and others.

So if you think climate studies are better than that I've got this great bridge I want to sell you


There’s a familiar refrain that goes up when extreme weather events bear down on population centers, as Hurricane Florence and Typhoon Mangkhut are now doing in the western Atlantic and Pacific Oceans: While carbon emissions from human activity may be causing a general warming, it’s impossible to draw a direct link between any one event and climate change.

That’s a comforting thought. Droughts, hurricanes, floods and heatwaves have been a feature of the global climate since long before humans walked the earth. Who’s to say whether this latest round of disasters is a result of our industrial and agricultural practices, or simply the normal weather variations of a chaotic atmosphere?

As my colleague Faye Flam wrote this week, there’s a natural tendency to assign blame in the wake of terrible events, and the answer to the question is often more complicated than a simple yes or no. At the same time, it’s no longer right to suggest that attribution is an unanswerable hypothetical, like pondering how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. We know a great deal about it — and the answers are troubling.

Studies of the European heatwaves that have become an almost annual occurrence in recent years have shown that they were several times more likely to happen as a result of climate change, for instance. The odds of the coral bleaching suffered by the Great Barrier Reef in 2016 were 175 times greater than they’d have been without human-induced emissions. And three anomalous warm spells in 2016 would have been impossible in a preindustrial climate, according to papers published this year in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

The science behind these studies is relatively new, but draws on long-established methods. “These are techniques that climate scientists stole from epidemiologists and public health researchers,” says Sophie Lewis, a research fellow at the University of New South Wales.

Researchers use computer models of the climate and run thousands of simulations to establish the odds of events happening at current and preindustrial concentrations of atmospheric carbon. The level of accuracy has risen drastically in recent years as computing power has increased, the number of people working in the field has gone up, and an expanding volume of weather data, climate modelling and extreme events has produced more information to work with.

Importantly for a scientific field, where falsifiability is essential, it’s often the case that no link can be proved. In 35 percent of the 131 peer-reviewed studies published in the American Meteorological Society’s annual reviews of extreme event attribution since 2011, no connection to climate change could be demonstrated.

Floods in Chennai in 2015 and an Indian heatwave the following year had no clear tie to climate change, according to studies published by the World Weather Attribution Project, a scientists’ group. Cold snaps in North America and Europe in 2017 were probably less likely than they’d otherwise have been thanks to human emissions — because the atmosphere is getting warmer, after all. Droughts in the horn of Africa between 2015 and 2017 also showed no clear link to climate change and may in some cases have been less likely, although the water shortage in Cape Town last year was about 3.3 times more probable.

There are still widely varying degrees of accuracy that can be achieved. Large, long-lasting events like heatwaves and cold snaps have become so well understood that researchers are increasingly not focusing their attention on them. “That’s established science now, so it would be like a public health journal publishing on the risks of smoking,” says Lewis.

More complex, short-term events like storms and high winds can be harder to analyze — though even there, the rains that inundated Houston during Hurricane Harvey in 2017 are reckoned to have been three times as likely thanks to climate change.

“For extreme short-timescale rainfall it is very easy to show a link,” said David Karoly, leader of the earth systems and climate change hub at Australia’s National Environmental Science Program. “As the temperature rises, the atmosphere holds more moisture, which is likely to lead to changes in the amount of rainfall.”

While analyses of events in the early 2000s could take more than a year, they’re increasingly now being done in real time, too. One study published last week attempted to isolate the climate-change impact of Hurricane Florence in advance, estimating that it would be stronger and drop 50 percent more rainfall than if it had hit in a preindustrial climate.

The results of this don’t just matter to scientists and climate campaigners. Insurers have a natural interest in the odds of disastrous events, and have been collecting data on extreme weather for decades. The Actuaries Climate Index, a study of anomalous weather events in the U.S. and Canada dating back to the early 1960s, has shown a marked rising trend in recent years that ought to give insurers and reinsurers pause in considering how to protect against future risks.

We’d think it bizarre to state that there’s no link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, even though causation in individual cases is impossible to prove. In the same way, we should drop the comforting belief that the origins of individual weather disasters are mysterious and unknowable. Over the coming years, more and more extreme events will happen — and scientists will grow increasingly sure of our role in causing them.

SOURCE





Bill Nye Gets Dealt Blistering Fact-Check by an Actual Scientist

We are all probably watching the weather developments in the Carolinas — big storms tend to make us sit up and pay attention, no matter where we are.

But something else I hope you have also paid attention to are the left’s psychotic claims that President Donald Trump is to blame for the climate change that supposedly caused Hurricane Florence.

Well, facts are funny things: They have a pesky way of collapsing the liberal narrative. On Friday, Tucker Carlson interviewed Former NASA scientist Dr. Roy Spencer, who blew the liberal climate change theories out of the water.

In the interview, Dr. Spencer threw cold water all over Bill Nye the Science Guy’s statements that Hurricane Florence is caused by climate change.

Dr Spencer acknowledges the earth has gotten warmer, but he doesn’t think the change in temperature is due to climate change. He believes it’s part of the earth’s natural weather cycles. And Bill Nye isn’t going to like Spencer’s scientific data that supports his findings.

Dr Spencer explains to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson: “Well, it has gotten warmer as you said, since the 1950s there has been a warming trend, but what we haven’t seen in terns of any long term weather measurements is whether there’s been any change in severe weather. There hasn’t been any increase in hurricanes. That’s on a global basis in the United States.”

“The frequency of hits of the United States by major hurricanes has gone down by 50 percent since the 1930s and 1940s. There’s been no increase in droughts, no increase in floods. Tornados are down but still weather varies a lot especially hurricanes, year to year, decade to decade.”

“So there is a huge amount of variability, OK, some stall, produce a bunch of rain. Certainly North Carolina is going to have a major flooding disaster, but this is what Mother Nature does naturally, and if there’s a human influence there you wouldn’t know it because there’s so much natural variability,” said Dr. Spencer.

Enter common sense as Carlson asks the obvious question as to why people are claiming global warming is to blame for hurricanes if the data doesn’t support it?

Dr. Spencer’s refreshingly candid remarks might just floor the global warming fanatics. It appears he believes as I do, that they are just saying “stupid things.”

“I don’t know, why do people like The Washington Post say such stupid things? It’s because the people who are informing us in the media about global warming are people like Al Gore, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Neil deGrasse Tyson, people that don’t know anything about atmospheric science,” he said.

Dr. Spencer also responded to Carlson’s challenge of Nye’s qualifications as a scientist. “He’s not a trained scientist. I believe he’s an engineer of some sort.” “Plus he has a widely viewed YouTube video called ‘Climate 101’ where he faked an experiment,” Spencer added.

Liberals would do well to pay attention when choosing to follow the lead of their so-called experts.

On Tuesday, an article by The Washington Post accused President Trump of being “complicit” in facilitating global warming.

“Yet when it comes to extreme weather, Mr. Trump is complicit. He plays down humans’ role in increasing the risks, and he continues to dismantle efforts to address those risks. It is hard to attribute any single weather event to climate change. But there is no reasonable doubt that humans are priming the Earth’s systems to produce disasters.”

On Wednesday, Bill Nye the Science Guy told MSNBC that Florence was the direct result of climate change: “Now I look forward of course to all the hate tweets. It’s going to be great, about a guy who took a lot of physics can’t possibly read a graph. I got all that. But everybody, this is not in anybody’s best interests to continue to deny climate change.”

Hurricane season is just beginning and from the looks of things it’s going to be a long one. And I have no doubt there will be more “stupid” discourse from liberals about climate change and why the president is responsible for it.

Maybe the bright side in this discussion is that more real scientific experts are coming forward with hard facts that will continue to weaken the liberal global warming narrative.

SOURCE





Keep carbon taxes in the ground

Permanently bury these job-killing proposals, after pounding wooded stakes through their hearts

Paul Driessen

The House of Representatives recently passed a sense of Congress resolution that a carbon tax would kill jobs, damage the revitalized U.S. economy, and disproportionately impact poor, minority and working class families. The vote also reflects the fact that America is still over 80% dependent on fossil fuels – and helps explain why a misguided Carlos Curbelo (R-FL) was able to convince only one colleague (Brian Fitzpatrick, R-PA) to cosponsor his carbon tax bill back in July. In the meantime:

Doug Ford became Ontario’s new premier by vigorously opposing the carbon taxes and pricy wind and solar electricity that Canadians have come to despise. He quickly eliminated $2 billion in taxes a year by canceling 200 heavily subsidized renewable energy projects implemented by his predecessor. Meanwhile, the Trudeau government is facing increased resistance to its plans for a steadily escalating carbon tax.

In Australia, Angus Taylor’s appointment as Energy Minister means wind and solar subsidies will soon be terminated. This will undoubtedly delight residents of South Australia, home of a 50% renewable energy program, the world’s highest electricity prices, two weeks of zero wind/zero electricity in two years (September 2016 and 2018), and some 200,000 families no longer able to afford electricity.

Germany’s solar industry is collapsing as its subsidies plummet; its wind turbine subsidies are scheduled to end in 2020; ancient villages and forests have been bulldozed to allow coal mining to fuel its new generating plants; and the country’s Green Party has admitted that “de-carbonizing” the German and world economies can be accomplished only by limiting or eliminating democracy worldwide.

And yet, like Dracula monsters, carbon tax proposals keep rising from the dead.

Several big corporations, Republican officials Jim Baker, Hank Paulson and George Schultz, and their Climate Leadership Council now claim that 56% of American voters support taxing carbon, while only 26% oppose the idea. So says their recent survey. You ask, How is that possible?!?

To begin with, they didn’t call it a tax. They cleverly labeled their scheme a “carbon dividend” (who doesn’t like dividends?) and claimed “the vast majority of American families” would somehow come out ahead if it is implemented. The survey didn’t mention that their program would be administered by our ever-friendly Internal Revenue Service or that the tax would begin at $43 per metric ton of “carbon” emitted. (Trudeau’s hated tax begins at “a mere” US$7.68 per ton and rises to “only” US$38.47 by 2022.)

They didn’t mention that the tax would be imposed on foundries, factories, refineries, coal- and gas-fired power plants, other industrial facilities, and even (at a lower rate) on products imported from other countries. Nor did they intimate how much these advisors, companies and thousands of members of the $2-trillion-per-year Global Climate Industrial Complex would benefit financially from the arrangements.

Equally important, constant assurances that “market-based” carbon tax schemes like this $43-per-ton version would be “revenue neutral,” receipts would be returned to taxpayers in the form of tax reductions elsewhere, and revenues would be used to reduce federal budget deficits are illusory. Can the Council somehow guarantee that the next Congress will not (promptly) reverse these “net-gain” provisions?

But let’s get to the nuts and bolts of “carbon taxes” and “clean, green, renewable” energy.

As MIT emeritus professor of atmospheric physics Richard Lindzen points out, those who control carbon control life. And make no mistake, these are taxes on carbon-based fuels: on 83% of the energy we use. They are taxes on everything we make, ship, eat and do – on our lives, livelihoods, living standards, transportation, heating, cooling, refrigeration, healthcare, clothing and everything else we touch.

By using the word “carbon,” tax proponents deceptively suggest they want to tax soot, pollution, toxic emissions. But with modern scrubbers and other pollution controls, what comes out of U.S. power plant and factory “smoke stacks” today is almost entirely water vapor and carbon dioxide.

Fossil fuels are what made our health and economic progress over the past 150 years possible – and continue to do so. Carbon (coal, oil and natural gas) is what we burn to generate electricity, power factories and operate vehicles. Carbon dioxide is what is created and emitted by that combustion process.

So these Climate Leadership members want to tax carbon dioxide: the gas of life, the miracle molecule that we exhale and that makes life on Earth possible. In fact, the more CO2 in the atmosphere, the faster and better food crop, forest and grassland plants grow; the better they survive droughts, diseases and viruses. Rising atmospheric CO2 levels are actually “greening the Earth,” including forests worldwide.

The Council’s goal is to “keep fossil fuels in the ground,” and force a transition to wind, solar, ethanol and other “renewable” energy. In the process, the activists, politicians, lobbyists and crony corporatists expect to get incredibly wealthy and gain increasing control over global economies and living standards.

How would $43 per metric ton of carbon dioxide affect you? It would raise your electricity and gasoline costs to the exorbitant rates families and businesses already pay in California, Denmark and Germany. Every aspect of your lives would be impacted. Millions of jobs would be lost. In just one example, at California’s or Germany’s business rate (18¢ per kWh), a hospital that now pays 8¢ per kWh and $1.6 million a year would see its electricity costs rise by an unsustainable $2 million annually!

To top it off, all this incredible pain and lost liberty would bring no climate benefits. Even assuming for the sake of argument that carbon dioxide has replaced the sun and other powerful natural forces that do control Earth’s climate – poor nations are burning more carbon fuels every year, emitting more CO2 and other greenhouse gases, and building or planning to build some 1,600 new coal-fired power plants.

It is sheer nonsense to claim that 400 ppm CO2 and another 1 degree C (1.4 F) of global warming will bring “unprecedented cataclysms” and “existential threats” to people and planet. Carbon dioxide has some effect, but saying it controls the climate ignores five Pleistocene glacial and interglacial periods, the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods, the Little Ice Age, the Dust Bowl and Anasazi drought, the record 12 years of no major hurricanes making U.S. landfall, and other natural weather and climate changes.

Scientists simply do not yet know enough about Earth’s climate or what caused past climate fluctuations even to separate current human influences from natural influences – much less predict future changes.

Poor countries signed onto Paris climate treaty because they expected to get $100 billion every year in “climate adaptation and mitigation” money from (currently) wealthy countries that the treaty says must slash their fossil fuel use, carbon dioxide emissions, economic growth and living standards – while now poor nations dramatically increase theirs. With rich countries unable and refusing to pay up, the treaty is likely to implode like the house of cards it is, before or during the [Katowice,%20Poland]COP24 summit in Katowice, Poland.

Last but not least, renewable energy is not renewable, clean, green or sustainable. Manufacturing wind turbines, solar panels, backup batteries and ultra-long transmission lines requires removing billions of tons of rock and earth to extract and process millions of tons of exotic ores, limestone, iron, manganese, copper, petroleum-based fiberglass and composites, and other materials – all using fossil fuels.

The vital exotics come from Mongolia, China and Congo, under minimal to nonexistent environmental, health and safety standards. But that’s somebody else’s backyard, so virtue preening climate activists can just ignore the emissions, habitat destruction, water pollution, health effects and premature deaths.

No wonder alarmists are ranting nonstop at their Global Climate Action Circus, devoting $1 billion a year to climate activism and “education,” and working with and for Democrat governors and state attorneys general to advance their radical agenda, draft laws and regulations, and attack and even prosecute climate chaos skeptics. This abuse of government law enforcement powers and taxpayer dollars must end.

What needs to be kept in the ground is not the fossil fuels that make modern health and living standards possible, while spurring plant growth. It is carbon tax proposals, preferably with large wooden stakes driven through their hearts. May sanity and reality yet prevail.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and author books and articles on energy, climate change, economic development and human rights.





FAKE NEWS: Weather Channel Reporter Caught Exaggerating During Storm Coverage

Have the lies in the mainstream media become so prevalent that there is no longer any escape from the fake news?

The answer seems to be no after a reporter for The Weather Channel who was covering Hurricane Florence was busted after a video of him clearly exaggerating the effects of the winds and rain hit Twitter and has now gone completely viral.



Mike Seidel was in Wilmington, NC on Friday and appeared to be holding on for dear life as the storm barreled down on the area but questions – and much scorn – quickly arose when two people casually strolled by in the background and it was all caught by the camera.

The video shows longtime Weather Channel meteorologist and reporter Mike Seidel as he tried to gain his footing as the storm’s winds bore down on him.

“This is about as nasty as its been,” Seidel, who was reporting from Wilmington, N.C., says in the clip while bracing against the wind.

The camera then pans over to a pair of figures casually walking on a road behind the reporter.

“So dramatic!” one Twitter user wrote with the video clip. “Dude from the weather channel bracing for his life, as 2 dudes just stroll past.”

After seeing this, how could you ever watch hurricane coverage without being suspicious again?

If Seidel ends up being sacked by TWC due to public relations fallout over this stunt, he is a cinch to land a similar gig at CNN. In fact, he’s already passed the audition with flying colors.

SOURCE






Ruling Australian conservative party has been taken over by climate denialists, says Labor party leader

If only it were true.  There is a great deal of skepticism among Federal conservatives but it has not yet become formal policy

Bill Shorten has confirmed Labor is prepared to adopt the government’s junked national energy guarantee if it wins power, as he declared the Liberal Party had been taken over by “climate denialists”.

The Opposition Leader said the framework of the NEG could be used by a future Labor government to create a policy that would lower carbon emissions.

“The government did some work on this national energy guarantee and we are prepared to use that as part of our framework going forward. That’s not our final position, I hasten to add, and we’ll have consultation and discussion with my colleagues,” Mr Shorten told the ABC.

“I think that people are sick and tired of the climate change wars. The climate denialists for all intents and purposes, like Tony Abbott, have taken over the Liberal Party. They didn’t want the clean energy target. They didn’t want an emissions trading scheme.

“The real issue here is that we’ve now got a climate denialist party in power, and the only policy they can do now they’ve rejected the national energy guarantee is one that will drive up power prices and do nothing to encourage more renewables.

“So I’m hoping to work with the sensible part of the Liberal Party, with industry, with environmentalists, and we’ll come up with a framework which will look a lot like, I hope, parts of the national energy guarantee and, of course, we want to see lower prices and more renewables.”

“It just led to a loss of jobs, higher prices and greater unreliability and a lack of investment,” he said.

Mr Shorten failed to endorse his energy spokesman, Mark Butler, who said he did not support the Adani coal mine.

“I think that that is essentially Mark’s judgment, that he doesn’t think it is going to happen and he doesn’t support it. I think that a lot of people feel that way. Our policy is that we won’t put a single taxpayer dollar into the project. There’s a lot of scepticism if the project is ever going to happen,” he said.

SOURCE

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