The science behind climate change and its impact on bushfires (?)

I rather enjoyed this article, long-winded though it is.  Prof. Karoly is an old global warming warrior from way back so he has had a long time to perfect his arguments for global warming and, in the version of his talk below, he does present a much more detailed case than one usually encounters.

All of the assertions below are however unreferenced and most have been challenged many times.  And as is normal in Leftist writing, there is no mention of any of the facts which are contrary to his case.  The article leaves out almost all of the many facts which tend to contradict the global warming hypothesis.  Such argumentation is of course completely unscholarly and identifies the article as propaganda only.

Prof Karoly's scientific background does however show in a number of useful ways so it is a pity that such a long article will remain mostly unread -- as there are a number of basic scientific points below that Warmists would do well to note.

The one that stands out most below is his perfectly correct and perfectly basic point that global warming CANNOT explain Australia' drought or any other drought.  Anybody who has watched a kettle boil will know that heating water causes it to give off water vapour so warming the oceans will also give off more water vapour -- and that comes down again as rain.  So a warmer world would be a wetter world.  So, if anything, drought proves that global warming is NOT going on.

So in his words on the drought, Prof. Karoly contradicts the claims made by almost all Warmists.  There will be much reaching for indigestion remedies by almost all Warmists who read those of his words.

What Prof. Karoly leaves out:

It's hard to believe but in an article that is allegedly about bushfires, there is no mention of the biggest influence on the fires:  Fuel accumulation in the form of fallen branches and leaves.  Without fuel, there would be no fires. If it's not about global warming he doesn't want to know about it, apparently.

If only for the sake of argument, most climate skeptics are prepared to concede that atmospheric CO2 has SOME warming effect. The dispute is about its magnitude.  Is the warming effect large or is it utterly trivial?  The Warmists have little more than assertions for their claim that it is large.  There are, on the other hand, both theoretical and empirical reasons to say that the effect is trivial.

On the theoretical side, the fact that CO2 forms much less than one percent of the atmosphere should indicate that any effect from it will be trivial.  More importantly, however,  a heated atmospheric molecule will radiate heat in ALL directions, not just downwards towards the earth. And the higher up the molecule is, the less heat from it will hit the earth.  Rather than seeing heated CO2 molecules as a blanket or a greenhouse roof, a better analogy for their effect would be a bucket with a small hole in it.  Only what gets through the hole hits the earth.

But all theories must be tested against the facts so what are the facts?  The most basic fact is that over the last 150 years or so we have experienced only about one degree Celsius of warming.  Is that trivial?  If you walked from one room into another where the temperatures in the two rooms differed by only one degree you would not normally notice anything.  You would need an instrument to detect the difference.  So I think "trivial" is an excellent word for that difference.

But a much less impressionistic piece of evidence for the triviality of CO2 induced warming is also available.  If CO2 has the effect hypothesized and the effect is large, we should notice increased warming every time the CO2 levels rise.  But that is not remotely true.  Increases in CO2 mostly have no noticeable warming effect.  CO2 levels can shoot up with absolutely no discernable effect on global temperatures.

Perhaps the most striking example of that is the "grand hiatus". For 30 years between 1945 and 1975, CO2 levels leapt but global temperatures remained flat. See here.  How come?  CO2 molecules don't have a little computer inside them telling them to take a holiday from emitting heat.  They emit heat all the time. So if they were emitting heat from 1945 to 1975, that heat must have been tiny in amount, so tiny as to be undetectable.

30 years of no effect would be notable in itself but 1945 is supposed to  be the year in which anthropogenic global warming began -- with all the postwar reconstruction.  The 1945 to 1975 period is a critical test of the global warming theory -- and it fails that test utterly.

So it takes only a few basic facts to show that Prof. Karoly's pontifications are a castle built on sand


Charis Chang reports:

When considering the science around climate change, one expert believes it’s useful to compare it to another famous hypothesis – the theory of gravity.

Not many people would think to cast doubt on the theory of gravity, and according to Professor David Karoly, who leads the Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub in the Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Program at CSIRO, the evidence that human activity is causing global warming is so strong it is equal to this theory.

“The theory on the human impact on climate change is just as strong, or stronger, than the scientific basis for the theory of gravity,” Prof Karoly told news.com.au.

Prof Karoly said that there was also evidence climate change was a factor in recent devastating bushfires in Australia.

Prof Karoly will explain the science at a free public lecture as part of the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute 2020 Summer School public lecture in Melbourne on Wednesday, January 29. His speech will also be streamed online.

When we talk about science, Prof Karoly believes it’s helpful to remember we are not talking about “beliefs”.

Science is in fact a process that tests a hypothesis to provide conclusions about the way nature works.

Not convinced? Here’s the science.

Some say the world’s climate has always changed and in the past there have been ice ages and warmer glacial periods, which is true.

The difference is whether humans have caused the changes.

We know that humans could not have had any influence on the past ice ages for example, because there were no humans on the planet.

So how do we know that the climate changes now are due to human activity?

Prof Karoly said there were two approaches.

The first approach involves examining “observational data”. If we want to identify long-term trends we need to look at data collected over a wide area and across at least 30 years.

To figure out why the Earth is warming, there are some logical factors to look at first.

The main things that impact the Earth’s climate are sunlight from the sun, how it is absorbed in the atmosphere and how energy is lost from Earth and sent into space.

One thing that can impact the amount of sunlight we get includes the amount of clouds, ice and snow because they all reflect sunlight, making it cooler.

However, greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere can also affect temperatures. These gases make the planet hotter because they absorb heat radiation from the Earth and prevent this from being released into space as quickly.

Greenhouse gases can include carbon dioxide, methane and water vapour. “When greenhouse gases increase, the surface temperature of the Earth increases,” Prof Karoly said.

So what does the data tell us about these factors?

‘SOMETHING WEIRD IS HAPPENING’

Analysis of air bubbles from ice cores trapped in ice in Greenland and Antarctica showed that over the last 10,000 years, carbon dioxide varied a small amount, hovering around 280 and 290 parts per million.

But if you look at the last 150 years, it’s a different story. Carbon dioxide now sits at 400 parts per million.

“This has increased by more than 40 per cent,” Prof Karoly said.

“It is higher than at any time in the last 10,000 years. In fact, it’s higher than any time in the last million years.”

“So that suggests … something weird is happening.”

Prof Karoly said you had to go back more than three million years to find a time when carbon dioxide was around 400 parts per million.

“Three million years ago when carbon dioxide was higher, temperatures were more than two degrees warmer and sea levels were more than 10 metres higher,” he said.

Humans were not around three million years ago so they can’t be blamed for the high amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

So what was cause of these higher levels of carbon dioxide?

Some experts have suggested the carbon dioxide was actually being released from the ocean.

“A warmer ocean can’t absorb as much carbon dioxide,” Prof Karoly said. “As it heats up, it can’t hold as much carbon and this is released into the atmosphere.”

However, the type of carbon dioxide the ocean releases is different to that released by burning fossil fuels and land clearing.

Prof Karoly said the carbon dioxide has a different chemical composition so scientists are able to distinguish between the two.

“Carbon dioxide released from the ocean doesn’t use up oxygen,” Prof Karoly said.

Over the last 40 years, scientists have been able to monitor the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere and the fall in oxygen has exactly matched the increase in carbon dioxide that you would expect if it was coming from the burning of fossil fuels and decomposition of vegetation from land clearing.

“What we now know, is that the increase to carbon is not natural, it’s due to human activity, from the burning of fossil fuels and land clearing,” Prof Karoly said.

This is not just a theory, it is based on “observational evidence”, that is, scientists have data that shows the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is coming from fossil fuels and land clearing.

AND NIGHTS ARE GETTING HOTTER

We can also look at other observational data to help strengthen the theory.

If the Earth was warming up because of increasing sunlight, then you would expect temperatures during the day to increase and for it to be cooler at night (because there is no sun at night!).

However, what scientists found is that nights were actually warming up more so than days.

This points to greenhouse gases playing a role.

As noted above, greenhouse gases trap heat radiation from the Earth and stop it from being released into space as quickly.

This effect can be seen for example, on nights with more clouds, which don’t cool down as much as there is more water vapour in the atmosphere.

In contrast, deserts are more cool at night because there is not as much water vapour over these areas, and it’s a similar story in coastal areas.

So if nights are warming up more than days, it’s unlikely that the sun is playing a role in this, it’s more likely that greenhouse gases are trapping heat on Earth and pushing up temperatures.

Scientists have also looked at temperatures in the Earth’s stratosphere, which is the layer of the atmosphere from about 10km up.

The stratosphere warms because the ozone layer it contains absorbs the sun’s ultraviolent radiation.

If there was more sunlight, you would expect the upper atmosphere to warm up because it was absorbing more ultraviolet rays.

But if there was an increase in greenhouse gases then you would expect the stratosphere to be cooler because carbon dioxide is efficient, not only at absorbing heat radiation but also at releasing it into space, cooling it down.

“Observations have shown that the surface and lower atmosphere have warmed, and the upper atmosphere has cooled in the last 50 years — the entire time we’ve been monitoring it through balloons and other satellites,” Prof Karoly said.

“This pattern of temperature change has happened everywhere and cannot be explained by increasing sunlight,” he said. “And it’s been getting stronger, which is exactly what you would expect from increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”

NOW ADD COMPUTERS TO THE EQUATION

The first approach to looking at climate change is “observational data” but you can also use complex mathematical models of the climate system.

Around the world, Prof Karoly said more than 50 complex climate models had been developed to test climate theories on a larger scale.

While some may question how scientists could simulate the climate when they can’t forecast the weather over long periods of time, Prof Karoly said it was because the climate models looked at levels of radiation, which determine long-term climate.

“Models solve physical equations for the absorption and transmission of radiation in the atmosphere, and for the motion of the air, and for the motions of the ocean,” he said.

These simulations have shown that without human influences there would not be any long-term warming trend.

Temperatures would have stayed pretty much the same with only two-tenths of a degree of warming.

Instead the world has warmed by 1.1 degrees and the warming over Australia has been even higher than the global average, at 1.5 degrees.

This is because land warms up faster than the ocean.

WHAT ABOUT THE BUSHFIRES?

So how does this relate to the catastrophic bushfires that have raged across Australia in recent months?

Higher mean temperatures give rise to a greater chance of heatwaves and hot extremes, Prof Karoly said.

“We have good observational data of the current summer and the last 50 years,” he said.

“There have been marked increases in heatwaves and hot days in all parts of Australia.”

Australia experienced its hottest and driest year on record in 2019 and December 2019 had a number of Australia’s hottest days ever recorded.

“We have also seen increases in sea levels, exactly what you would expect from climate change and the warming of ocean waters and melting of ice sheets and glaciers on land.”

When it comes to the intensity of bushfires, Prof Karoly said there are certain factors that were known to be important.

The McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index was developed to measure the degree of fire danger in Australian forests and the likelihood they will occur.

It combines factors including the temperature of air, wind speed, the dryness of the air (measured by relative humidity) and the dryness of the fuel and the ground (measured by rainfall over the previous month).

“So the combination of high temperatures, strong winds, low humidity and no rainfall leads to extreme fire danger,” Prof Karoly said.

These were exactly the conditions experienced in NSW and southern Queensland in September and October where there were record high temperatures and low humidity.

These conditions were also experienced in Canberra, coastal NSW and particularly East Gippsland in Victoria, which was why there was extreme fire danger in these areas.

The next question is whether climate change caused these conditions.

Prof Karoly says climate change has led to higher temperatures, as discussed above, but it’s unlikely it had a major role in the drought conditions.

He said if the rainfall in 2019 was related to climate change you would expect wetter conditions in northern Australia, not the record dry year experienced in 2019.

Climate change has also been linked with the long-term rainfall in the cool season in south-east Australia.

Prof Karoly believes the drought in 2019 may actually be due to “natural variations” and the “Indian Ocean Dipole”.

The IOD refers to the seesawing temperatures in the Indian Ocean, with colder waters closer to northern Australia and hotter waters closer to Africa.

There were also changes in wind patterns in the south of Australia and over Victoria and NSW, which led to stronger westerly winds that reduced the rainfall over the NSW coast and East Gippsland, where the worst fires and conditions have been.

Prof Karoly believes it was the stronger westerly winds and the Indian Ocean Dipole that ramped up the fire intensity, however, this was combined with the extreme temperatures caused by climate change, sparking Australia’s deadly fire season.

“So it was a combination of natural climate variability and climate change,” he said.

SOURCE 






Minnesota Had More Wind and Solar in 2018 than Ever Before But CO2 Emissions Went Up

Minnesota had more wind turbines and solar panels in 2018 than in any year prior, but carbon dioxide emissions from the electricity generation sector increased compared to 2017 and 2016 levels, according to the most recent data released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

According to EIA, Minnesota power plants emitted 29.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2018, compared to 28.3 million in 2017, and 29.6 million in 2016. This means our carbon dioxide emissions were about half a percent higher in 2018 than 2016, when we had much fewer wind turbines and solar panels installed in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

The graph below shows the total installed capacity for wind and solar from 2005 to 2018. You’ll see that the amount of wind and solar on the grid has increased by 871 megawatts (approximately 24 percent) since 2016, yet carbon dioxide emissions increased during this time frame.

But why? One reason is that Minnesota generated less electricity from wind in 2018 than in 2017.

As you can see in the graph below, the amount of installed wind capacity in Minnesota reached a new all-time high in 2018 (so did electric bills), but wind generation was about four percent lower in 2018 than in 2017. There could be multiple reasons why the wind was less useful in 2018 than 2017, including lower wind speeds or mechanical failure, but regardless of the reason, the take away from the data should be the same: more wind turbines does not necessarily mean more  electricity generation from wind.

This data presents an inconvenient reality for liberal politicians who claim human carbon dioxide emissions are causing an existential climate crisis.

How in the world can these politicians credibly claim that climate change is an existential crisis, while saying that we can only build impossibly expensive wind, solar, and battery storage when emissions have increased even though we have 24 percent more renewable capacity on the grid than we did in 2016?

Despite all of the sanctimonious platitudes wind and solar supporters spout about creating a better world for the children, they are not the adults in the room. If they were, they would seek to reduce emissions as cost effectively and efficiently as possible using a suite of technologies like new nuclear power, large hydro, and carbon capture and sequestration. Instead, they seem to always advocate for the opposite.

Minnesota’s renewable energy mandate is already harming every person in our state by increasing electricity prices. Xcel Energy’s recent bid to increase prices by $52 per year through the Renewable Energy Standard rider acts as one more regressive wind and solar tax, hurting low-income families and seniors the most. If we are going to build a stronger Minnesota for everyone, the foundation of our state should be lower energy prices, not higher ones.

SOURCE






Climate Expert Shreds Claims Made By Ocasio-Cortez, Thunberg In Congressional Testimony

Michael D. Shellenberger, President of Environmental Progress, ripped the far-left extremist rhetoric parroted by fringe activist Greta Thunberg and socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) during his testimony in front of the House Committee On Science, Space, and Technology on the science of climate change.

Without using their names, Shellenberger — who is a regular contributor in some of America’s largest publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Forbes — ripped apart many of the extreme claims made by Ocasio-Cortez and Thunberg.

Shellenberger began by highlighting his background, telling the Committee: “I am an energy analyst and environmentalist dedicated to the goals of universal prosperity, peace, and environmental protection. Between 2003 and 2009 I advocated for a large federal investment in renewables, many of which were made as part of the 2009 stimulus. And since 2013 I have advocated for the continued operation of nuclear plants around the world and thus helped prevent emissions from increasing the equivalent of adding 24 million cars to the road.”

“I also care about getting the facts and science right. I believe that scientists, journalists, and advocates have an obligation to represent climate science accurately, even if doing so reduces the saliency of our concerns,” Shellenberger continued.

“No credible scientific body has claimed climate change threatens the collapse of civilization much less the extinction of the human species. And yet some activists, scientists, and journalists make such apocalyptic assertions, which I believe contribute to rising levels of anxiety, including among adolescents, and worsening political polarization.”

Shellenberger’s remarks are an apparent shot at Thunberg’s claim that “we are in the beginning of a mass extinction” and Ocasio-Cortez’ claim that “we have 10 years left to plan and implement a Green New Deal before cataclysmic climate disaster.”

“My colleagues and I have carefully reviewed the science, interviewed the individuals who make such claims, and written a series of articles debunking them,” Shellenberger continued. “In response, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change invited me to review its next Assessment Report, and Harper Collins will publish our research findings this June.”

“While climate change may make some natural disasters more frequent and extreme, the death toll from extreme events could and should continue to decline, as it did over the last century by over 90 percent, even as the global population quadrupled,” Shellenberger continued. “Does that mean we shouldn’t worry about climate change? Of course not. Policymakers routinely take action on non-apocalyptic problems. And the risk of crossing unknown tipping points rises with higher temperatures.”

It’s important to note that Shellenberger is not a climate change denier, rather, he looks at what the science says and does not over-exaggerate scientific findings to advance a political agenda.

Shellenberger noted that the most important measure that governments need to undertake in order to reduce climate change “is the expanded use of nuclear energy.”

“Thanks in part to decades of public and private investment in fracking, natural gas is today cheap and abundant and thus needs little in terms of new public policy,” Shellenberger continued. “Solar and wind energy are popular but their inherent unreliability, large land use requirements, and large materials requirements mean they make electricity expensive, have large environmental impacts, and are inherently limited in their capacity to replace fossil fuels.”

“The U.S. invented nuclear energy for civilian use in the 1950s and yet over three-quarters of new nuclear reactors globally are being built by the Chinese or Russians,” Shellenberger continued. “Everyone recognizes that for the US to compete in building nuclear plants abroad we must build them at home and yet electric utilities may close half of America’s nuclear plants over the next two decades.”

Shellenberger noted the following must happen to implement a “Green Nuclear Deal,” which Shellenberger noted is important national security, the economy, and the environment:

First, there must be a significant program of domestic nuclear power plant construction to give US firms the experience they need to compete abroad.

Second, the president must be directly involved in selling foreign leader on US technology, just as President Eisenhower did in the 1950s, and Presidents Xi and Putin are doing today.

Third, the US must offer competitive financing for such foreign plant construction.

And fourth, the construction of nuclear plants abroad must be centralized under one or two entities at most, as the US did with General Electric and Westinghouse in the 1950s, and as China and Russia are doing with their state-owned firms today.

SOURCE





Thank God for tide gauges

Climate activists are spruiking phony sea level rise data

Between 1764 and 1767 William Hutchison, a mariner who was then Harbour Master at Liverpool in England, carefully recorded the times and heights of high tide at the Liverpool Old Dock. In the 19th Century the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, that was to become the Liverpool Observatory, established state-of-the-art tidal stations along the nearby Mersey Estuary. In 1929 this Observatory merged with the Tidal Institute at the Liverpool University and this was to become a world-famous centre for sea level research. Today the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) maintains a database of tide gauge data from all over the world.

After the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change was formed in 1988 successive IPCC technical committees carefully examined the PSMSL tide gauge data as the computer climate models were predicting the acceleration of sea level rise. After all, a discovery of sea level acceleration would provide additional evidence of increased global warming due to rising carbon dioxide levels and proof of anthropogenic climate change.

Alas! Alas! There was almost a level of disappointment in the early IPCC reports. Despite all their efforts the committees in 1990 (13 experts), 1995 (24 experts) and 2001 (36 experts) stated that they could find no acceleration of sea level rise in the 20th century despite the rise of CO2 during that time. ‘There is no firm evidence of acceleration in sea level rise during this century’, said the IPCC Report of 1990 (Chapter 9, p.262).

All of this was to change in 2007 and the scientific mess left by that 2007 IPCC sea level committee is still with us today. The panel now numbered 70 scientists. The Head Coordinators were Dr Bindoff (University of Tasmania) and Dr Jurgen Willebrand (Leibnitz Institute of Marine Science).This was the first IPCC meeting when satellite-based sea level rise data were available. The first sea level satellite (Topex – Poseidon) was launched in 1992 and replaced by the Jason 1 satellite in 2001. The satellites were showing sea level rise around 30 cm per 100 years while the tide gauges examined at earlier IPCC meetings showed a much lower sea level rise of 15-18 cm per 100 years.

Without any detailed analysis of the discrepancy between tide gauge data and satellite data, this IPCC committee concluded the satellite data was more reliable. This was a false ‘eureka’ moment with a spurious conclusion that the higher readings of the satellite were proof that sea level rise throughout the 20th Century had suddenly changed from a steady rate of 15-18 cm/100 years to a rate of 30 cm/100 years in the 1990s. This interpretation was made without any detailed review of the reliability of tide gauge data from all over the Earth and technical altimetry problems in a satellite system; a system where a one millimetre of error in its 1,366 km orbital distance from the Earth’s surface translated to a sea level rise error of 10 cm in 100 years!

The sea level debate became an even larger can of worms in 2018. The University of Colorado, which manages the Jason satellites on contract to NASA, reported that not only had there been no acceleration of sea level rise in the satellite data there had been a deceleration in the last decade (2008-2018); so even the satellite data had not been able to detect acceleration of sea level! It was proposed that a cooling event due to the 1991 volcanic eruption of Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines had delayed the sea level acceleration that would have eventuated by 2018 but would still emerge from the noise of internal climate variability in the coming decade barring another major volcanic eruption.

This lack of sea level rise acceleration was consistent with a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association report in 2016 on 200 tide gauges from the east and west coasts of the USA and from some Atlantic and Pacific islands. The US report showed there was no acceleration of sea level in these records. So two methods with vastly different results still showed no sea level acceleration! It was now crystal clear that the reports of no sea level acceleration (IPCC reports of 1900, 1995 and 2001) were correct and that the reports of sea level acceleration (IPCC reports of 2007 and 2014) were based on false logic; the spurious by-product of differences between two measuring systems.

The technical altimetry problems with the satellite system were eventually exposed in 2012 when NASA reported that there was a level of error that contaminated climatological data records, such as measurements of sea level height from altimetry missions. Consequently, NASA proposed to ditch the flawed Jason satellite system in favour of a new system called GRASP, or Geodetic Reference Antennae in Space. Unfortunately, its budget has never been approved.

So where are we today? The higher sea level rise estimates of the flawed satellite system are those most frequently quoted and fit with the many catastrophic climate scenarios. The United Nations’ climate Conference of the Parties in Madrid in December 2019, for example, quoted these higher sea level rise measurements and ignored the more reliable lower sea level rise estimates based on thousands of tide gauges. In Australia some scientists and engineers are still using the higher and dodgy satellite sea level rise data as a ‘prudential’ benchmark for coastal policies and have even adjusted tide gauge data upwards to the satellite data.

In 2014, for example, an engineering report for two NSW councils, Shoalhaven City and Eurobodalla, adjusted the Sydney Fort Denison tide gauge data, which showed a sea level rise less than 10 cm per 100 years, to the satellite measurements of 30 cm per 100 years. This absurd 300+ per cent upward adjustment of real tide gauge data was called a ‘linear fit’ (whatever that means!).

How can recent scientific articles published in ‘peer-reviewed’ literature stridently announce to the scientific community and the world media accelerated ice loss into the ocean from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets when there is no corresponding acceleration of sea level rise due to that ‘extra ice’. These articles tinged with panic do not make sense. The lack of any evidence of sea level acceleration in the PSMSL tide gauge data, the NOAA tide gauge data or even in the flawed NASA satellite data shows that these articles are either biased or based on insufficient data derived from flawed ice mass measurement methodologies. In contrast, the data from thousands of tide gauges clearly show no acceleration of sea level rise in the last 120 years.

SOURCE





Australia: Vital hazard reduction burns were stopped before Australia's deadly bushfire crisis due to residents complaining about poor air quality

Firefighters have revealed they were forced to cancel or delay hazard reduction burns in critical areas due to residents complaining about the smoke.

During the winter and autumn months the NSW Rural Fire Service deliberately burns parts of the bush to reduce the fuel load ahead of summer.

But several burns were stopped or cut short to keep air quality levels from deteriorating.

The elderly, infants and those with asthma often struggle with the thick smoke from the fires.

NSW RFS spokesman Inspector Ben Shepherd told the Daily Telegraph that public health was an important consideration.

'We speak with National Parks weekly during the hazard reduction season about the burns planned and the impact of smoke,' Mr Shepherd said.

'We look to see if we can change the lighting pattern to reduce the smoke impact.

Mr Shepherd said unpredictable weather can make directing the smoke very challenging.

Air quality issues played a key role in reducing the size of a burnoff in Bowen Mountain, an hour west of Sydney, which later lost several homes to the roaring Grose Valley fire.

More burns were reduced for air quality reasons in Putty, an area near Gospers Mountain which was consumed by a 'mega blaze' that went on to burn an area seven times the size of Singapore.

Other burns at Wiseman's Ferry, Ku-ring-gai Chase, Dural, Pennant Hills and Hawkesbury were postponed.

It comes after revelations that a Independent Hazard Reduction Audit Panel report recommended the government increase hazard reduction burning in 2013.

The report said that while it was not a solution, hazard reduction would be an critical tool in fighting bushfires going forward.

'Increases in fuel reduction will be required to counteract increasing risk that is likely to arise from climate change,' it said.

SOURCE 

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Oil companies going Green

They're scared of CO2 regulation.  But, regardless of "renewable" fancies, the demand for oil and natural gas will still be there -- and there will still be a buck in it.  And if governments legislate harshly enough to cause public inconvenience, they will be thrown out

The threat that financial institutions will refuse to lend for fossil fuel projects is a real one but China is always looking for good overseas investment opportunities so that alone will put a big hole in the bucket.  China is very hard to bully, as Mr Trump has found


Occidental Petroleum has a compelling riposte to Greta Thunberg’s signature rebuke in Davos, that “nothing is being done” about climate change.

It also has a grim warning for those of its peers in the fossil industry (a minority) that persist in thinking that business can go on as usual with just a few tweaks here and there: a slew of major oil and gas companies will disappear in the Great Disruption of the coming decade, and it says they will deserve their fate.

“We’re fighting for our industry’s life,” said Vicki Hollub, Occidental’s chief executive, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The political landscape has suddenly changed beyond recognition and the world’s governments are about to clamp down drastically on carbon emissions, led by Europe. She said the laggards will be punished mercilessly.

Her emblematic Houston-based fossil company aims to achieve the impossible: to become net carbon negative on all its operations and the oil it sells in order to insulate itself against the enveloping climate backlash. Her premise is that financial markets will simply ‘disfund’ those companies that refuse to do likewise.

The imperative for Big Oil is to confound the critics by offering Negative Oil. “The ones that don’t get on board will be the ones that don’t survive, and I am convinced that markets will make that happen,” she said.

Lord Greg Barker, chairman of EN+ Group, has an equally surprising story to tell. He heads the biggest aluminium producer outside China, leader of a smelting industry deemed to be beyond the pale by climate activists.

Yet it is going to roll out its first sheets of carbon-free aluminium as soon as 2021. Over 95pc of the group’s base power already comes from green hydro.

The Russian-owned EN+ has developed an ‘inert anode’ technology that cuts CO2 emissions from the smelting process itself to zero, and will ultimately lead to net “negative aluminium”.

The task is to make it fully workable on a large scale. A carbon price would make that much easier by setting the global rules and drawing in billions of green funding.

Epoch change

“The 2020s are going to be very different to the last decade. People who think that is going to be just a slow continuation, of gradually getting used to the climate agenda, are in for a big shock,” he told a Davos forum.

Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, said the $110 trillion alliance of global asset managers and investors now demanding decarbonisation – or at least a proper audit of carbon risk –  had just grown to nearer $120 trillion with the Damascene conversion of BlackRock’s Larry Fink. When the world’s biggest fund manager speaks, markets listen.

"We are seeing a fundamental reshaping of the financial system. What the market will do is to pull forward the adjustment," he said in Davos.

Companies that fail to take climate change seriously will go bankrupt and it could happen sooner than widely supposed. The Governor fears a Lehmanesque “Minsky Moment” for the international system if this is not handled in an orderly fashion.

Occidental says it is already injecting 20m tonnes of CO2 each year into rock formations within the Permian Basin in Texas. “This is equivalent to taking four million cars off the road,” she said.

It is the start of a massive expansion of carbon capture and storage. Ultimately this brings into view the Holy Grail of negative emissions.

Mrs Hollub said more CO2 is sequestered in the process of enhanced oil recovery than is later burned by cars and aircraft in transport fuel. For the world as a whole it is akin to a closed loop. 

“A lot of people don’t understand how you can put CO2 into an oil reservoir and generate lower carbon oil, but you can have net negative reservoirs. The challenge we face is getting people to understand the good things that we are doing,” she said.

“The Permian Basin has the capacity to store 150 gigatonnes of CO2. That would be 28 years of US emissions. That’s the prize,” she said.

Occidental’s ‘green’ strategy will not convince those who have lost all trust in the fossil industry and wish to shut it down entirely but it does show the moral complexity of the energy debate.

The more far-sighted oil and gas companies are an integral part of the net-zero transition. They bring the world’s best engineers to the task.

Environmental Schumpeterism

Lord Barker, who used to run the UK’s climate policy as a minister, said there are going to be spectacular winners and losers over the 2020s. Climate science has raised the stakes abruptly and political patience has snapped.

“This is where the rubber really hits the road. There are going to be stranded assets; there are going to price shocks, and I think we’re going to see carbon pricing. Those companies that don’t recognise the carbon intensity of their business are going to be left on the sidelines,” he said.

Lord Barker said the old debate about whether poorer countries should be given a free pass on coal power and rising emissions had been overtaken by market forces. New renewable power is in any case cheaper in most places than new coal plants.

“We have to have an honest conversation with developing economies like India and China: you can’t keep a manufacturing model and supply world markets if it is based on coal. Either you need CCUS (carbon capture) or you accept that it will shrink.”

“Investors now thinking about where to put their money in the 2020s won’t put it in carbon-intensive in economic models that rely on coal, that is the reality of investment flows. There isn’t a future for carbon intensive industries.”

Rachel Kyte, the World Bank’s former climate chief, was brutally clear: “the 2020s are going to be disruptive. You either capture carbon or you don’t put carbon molecules up there at all. You will be regulated on that basis.”

“The current incumbents won’t be the incumbents in 2030 unless they are very smart. Some are going to make it. Some aren’t,” she said.

SOURCE 





Peer-reviewed Study: Recent data on plant growth shows a net benefit, not a "social cost" of carbon dioxide emissions

The latest peer-reviewed studies show that carbon dioxide emissions are twice as powerful a plant food as previously assumed in the Cost-Benefit analysis of CO2 used by the U.S. Government. As a result, for the next 30 years, the Social Cost of Carbon under reasonable assumptions about CO2-based warming will be negative ... meaning that CO2 is a benefit to the economy, not a cost.

That's the conclusion of a just-published peer-reviewed journal article by CO2 Coalition and Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Patrick Michaels and co-authors Kevin Dayaratna of the Heritage Foundation and Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph, Ontario. 

The paper, titled Climate sensitivity, agricultural productivity and the social cost of carbon in FUND, was published in Environmental Economics and Policy Studies January 18, 2020.

Via email from info@co2coalition.org




Treasury Secretary Just Stated Obvious About Teen Environmental Oracle Greta Thunberg & the Left Is Melting Down

You'd think Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin had pulled a Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, or Bill Clinton, judging by the reaction by the Left.

But no.

Reporters and other Leftists were scandalized – How Dare You! –that Mnuchin stated what all the world can see but fails to say out loud: Greta Thunberg is a kid who needs a little more seasoning before lecturing the world on economic theory.

He did it with one joke about the leftist teenage environmental oracle who went to Davos to demand the world function without fossil fuels.

Here's what Mnuchin had the temerity to say in answer to this question: "Does Greta Thunberg's call for an end to fossil fuel investment threaten U.S. economic growth?"

Stand back for the answer, the flames might singe your eyebrows or calve a glacier or something. CNBC reports Mnuchin told a scrum of reporters:

“Is she the chief economist or who is she? I’m confused,” Mnuchin said, before adding this was “a joke. That was funny.”
“After she goes and studies economics in college she can come back and explain that to us,” Mnuchin said.

Greta huffed – or was it her father? He and climate activist Adarsh Prathap ghostwrite some of her social media – that she's in her gap year before college, thank-you-very-much:

"In June, Bloomberg reported that Thunberg had graduated from secondary education with 14 As and three Bs. Thunberg reportedly took home Bs in Swedish, physical education, and home economics, according to Bloomberg. While those are solid grades for anyone, let alone a student repeatedly missing school to protest in front of Swedish Parliament, Thunberg reportedly told the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter that she likely would have pulled off straight As had it not been for her weekly climate strikes."
I mean, after looking at those credentials. A 'B' in Home Ec?

Mnuchin later said that "our environmental policies are misunderstood." He said the president is in support of clean air and clean water and he got out of the Paris Accord because it was bad for the U.S. economy.

SOURCE 





Why the capitalist class has gone green

Our rulers promote eco-austerity to disguise their own failure to improve living standards.

It has become something of a running joke that every year, the international political and business elites hop in their private jets to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland to discuss… climate change. Last year, some 1,500 jets were taken to the usually sleepy Swiss ski village. At the same event, broadcaster Sir David Attenborough was interviewed by His Royal Highness Prince William.

Donald Trump may have put a fly in the ointment by using his Davos address to denounce the ‘prophets of doom’ of the environmental movement, rejecting their ‘predictions of the apocalypse’. But climate change nevertheless remained at the top of the agenda, and this time the world’s super-rich and powerful were given a stern telling-off by Greta Thunberg. The organisers at Davos have asked all delegates to go carbon-neutral by 2050.

Trump was essentially correct to say the gloomsters have got it wrong in the past when predicting ‘overpopulation’, ‘mass starvation’ and the ‘end of oil’. But one thing he got very wrong – and he is far from alone in this – was his assertion that the climate agitators who want to ‘destroy the economy’ are somehow ‘radical socialists’. A cursory glance at the super-rich delegates around the room should have put paid to any notion that there is something radical or socialist about the environmental movement. Environmental activists were not only protesting outside the World Economic Forum, but many were also invited inside, including delegates from Extinction Rebellion.

And this is nothing new. The World Economic Forum began in 1971, but has been discussing the ‘climate emergency’ since only its third annual meeting in 1973. Aurelio Pecci was an Italian industrialist who founded the influential Club of Rome think-tank, which includes among its members businessmen, heads of state and former heads of state from every continent, high-ranking civil servants, scientists and economists. Pecci was invited to Davos to deliver a speech on the Club of Rome’s report, The Limits to Growth, which argued that global economic growth would soon become environmentally unsustainable. The Limits to Growth later became the best-selling book on environmentalism ever printed.

Companies have long been keen to brand themselves as sustainable and eco-friendly, even those which sell fossil fuels. BP Amoco rebranded as Beyond Petroleum in the year 2000. Canadian research firm Corporate Knights – the self-professed ‘voice of clean capitalism’ – recently produced its 16th annual ranking of the 100 most sustainable companies with over $1 billion in revenue. In first and third place were former oil companies Ørsted and Neste respectively.

In recent weeks, Goldman Sachs has announced that it will no longer invest in Arctic oil or coal-power stations. Larry Fink, head of BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager with $7 trillion worth of holdings, recently defined climate change as the world’s biggest threat to profit. BlackRock says it will invest in more sustainable companies. These moves are partly a result of pressure from some institutional investors who are more sensitive to politics than most bankers. The Government Pension Investment Fund of Japan – the world’s largest pool of retirement savings – pulled $1.5 trillion out of BlackRock, citing environmental and social concerns. It is estimated that around $12 trillion worth of institutional investment has been ‘divested’ from coal.

But the reason the capitalist class has embraced environmentalism goes far beyond branding. Even the potential of some money drying up (and pots of state money appearing for clean energy) are not the biggest factors. Most significant is the capitalist class’s loss of faith in itself and in its ability to grow the economy and raise living standards. It has been clear for the past 40 years that while global growth has transformed the lives of billions in the global South, growth in the West has been depressed. Low productivity growth, low investment and low wage growth, especially when compared with the postwar boom, have become depressing features of all the major Western economies. These problems were exacerbated by the 2008 crash. The capitalist class has not been delivering the goods for a very long time – and they know it. As Politico reported from Davos last year, ‘the global winners here in Switzerland aren’t so sure they’re up to the task of running the world anymore’.

Environmentalism, however, offers a way out. As George Monbiot memorably described it, environmentalism is a ‘campaign for austerity’. Environmentalists urge us to think of less as more and of ‘small as beautiful’. In short, to lower our expectations and our collective horizons. Environmentalism denigrates progressive aspirations for a world of abundance as ‘unsustainable’. To be well-fed, well-travelled and even to have children invites condemnation in the topsy-turvy world of environmentalism.

Climate-change activists have made carbon dioxide public enemy No1. But CO2 emissions are really just a proxy for industrial development. The fact that African countries produce less CO2 is indicative of their lower levels of development than the West – and the dreadful poverty this entails for many of their inhabitants. In Britain, the Conservative government celebrates a 38 per cent reduction in carbon emissions since 1990. But while energy efficiency has improved enormously, a still significant amount of emissions reductions is down to deindustrialisation. While Britain’s economy has grown overall, you don’t need to be a Ken Loach aficionado to understand the destructiveness that the closure of factories and mines has had on certain communities.

Overall, the ‘climate emergency’ bolsters the business elite who can no longer justify its elevated position in society by pointing to better living standards.

SOURCE 





Australia: Land-clearing laws blamed for Kangaroo Island bushfires:

Native vegetation laws that prevent farmers from clearing land and the extent and adequacy of controlled winter burns will form a key part of a major South Australian government inquiry into the summer bushfire crisis.

Premier Steven Marshall’s commitment comes as the mayor of fire-ravaged Kangaroo Island, former Liberal MP Michael Pengilly, lashed out at the “idiocy” of the state’s Native Vegetation Act, saying the destruction of more than half the island this month “proves the old adage ‘burn or be burned’”.

“We used to be able to burn to protect ourselves and regenerate the native vegetation, and that’s what has gone,” Mr Pengilly said.

“That’s the ridiculous part. We have to have common sense across the country. What has been put in place, particularly in SA through the Native Vegetation Act, has just allowed everything to get out of control.

“We have massive loads of fuel that haven’t been touched. It is an offence for a farmer to burn off a little patch of scrub and try to keep something in the back pocket for when there is a proper fire.

“And now it’s gone, the whole bloody lot. It’s like we have been sitting on dynamite. I am not saying anything would have stopped that fire but the fuel load made it worse. The idiocy of the Native Vegetation Act is that it has stopped any serious kind of control for four decades. And today, well, here we are.”

The Weekend Australian travelled to Kangaroo Island this week and also visited the fire-affected Adelaide Hills wine region with Mr Marshall, who confirmed that issues relating to land clearing and burn-offs had been raised with him by many affected landowners.

“There obviously has to be a huge review into every aspect of the bushfires,” Mr Marshall said.

“We will be reviewing not only all of our fires here in SA but taking note of the reviews that are done interstate. If we can learn to be more ­resilient in the face of bushfires that’s precisely what we will do. There is plenty of time for that ­review and it will be done fully.

“All of the prescribed burns and cold burns that were in the schedule on Kangaroo Island were completed ahead of the fires.

“Whether they were adequate is something that will be part of the report. We will go back and look at whether the regime we had in place was enough.”

Mr Marshall said he understood the anxieties of farmers over land clearing but also noted that the January fire that emerged from the Flinders Chase National Park and tore east across the island was of a magnitude the island had never experienced.

He said he had been told by the Country Fire Service that in some cases the fire was spotting 2km to 5km ahead of the front, meaning even a radical increase in land clearing may not have stopped the inferno from spreading.

“This was different from the 2007 fires on KI which were a slow burn,” he said. “I’m not sure what would have helped on January 3. It was absolutely catastrophic.”

The Premier appointed himself Tourism Minister this month to ­elevate the status of the portfolio as it is battered by cancellations and in some areas closures of attractions and the loss of infrastructure.

This week he launched the #bookthemout campaign urging Australians to visit Kangaroo ­Island and the Adelaide Hills.

“We are really proud that we were the first to get on the front foot with this type of campaign,” he said. “Tourism operators have been doing it extraordinarily tough as a result of cancellations and it is ­important that we tell the story … that places like Kangaroo Island and the Adelaide Hills need all the support they can get.”

SOURCE 

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

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

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My palm oil problem: how can I save orangutans?



Orangs are gorgeous and I would like to save them too -- but there seem to be no good options -- JR

Watching a documentary about orangutans is like seeing a simian snuff movie. In the most recent one I saw with my family, we watched as a baby was orphaned, her mother starved after their forests were burnt down for palm oil. The baby turned her sweet Yoda eyes on the camera. My children, genuinely distressed, turned their eyes on me for moral guidance. It’s at that point that I thought to look at the list of ingredients on the packet of chocolate biscuits we had just eaten. Oh. They had palm oil in them. We were growing fat on baby orangutan tears.

Modern life is complicated. On the one hand we like orangutans. On the other we like chocolate biscuits, possibly, in my case, even more. It’s not that I want my chocolate biscuits to kill orangutans. It’s just that I’m not really doing much to stop it. And I’m not the only one.

So I thought I’d spend a week without palm oil. It feels, if not simple — palm oil is estimated to be in half of all packaged goods sold by UK supermarkets — at least clear and righteous. I palm off my palm oil-filled Nutella and go on a mega shopping expedition to Sainsbury’s and Tesco, accompanied by one of Britain’s leading palm oil experts, Jane Hill, a professor of biology at the University of York.

One of the first things that you need to give up palm oil is super-strong eyesight. That afternoon we make our way around the aisles of the supermarkets squinting at ingredients in micro fonts. Hill takes her glasses on and off, twisting a box of Oreo cookies to the light. I’m yo-yoing the Mr Kiplings in front of my face like a Where’s Wally? of ingredients panels, straining for “palm oil” to come into focus. “Oi, Jane!” I call from the shampoo aisle, “what about sodium palm kernelate?” Together we look like the most neurotic shoppers in north London, and that’s saying something.

The second thing you need, to do the right thing on palm oil, is a strong stomach for complexity and compromise. Hill tells me that she has been visiting Borneo every year or so for the past 15 years, drawn to catalogue its ancient forests. The way she talks, they sound like Eden. But we’re burning down paradise for oil palm, arguably the most destructive crop in the world. Every year she went back, 1.3 million more hectares of Bornean forest were gone. Orangutans are on a fast track to extinction, probably within decades. I nod, my face grave. And that’s why, Hill tells me, I should be eating more palm oil. More nodding.

Wait, what?

“Yes, that’s correct,” she says. “Boycotting palm oil could have the opposite effect to that intended, resulting in forests still being lost and more decline for wildlife.”

It turns out that, confusingly, oil palm is a kind of environmental wonder crop. It needs a fraction of the fertiliser and pesticide of oil crop rivals, and most importantly it requires up to ten times less land. To switch to soya or coconut oil could put more habitat at risk. “Sustainable” palm oil is one way forward, via certificates from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). Palm-boycotting — which critics call “palm-phobia” — is the other approach. Some big British shops, such as Selfridges and Iceland, are trying to remove all palm from their own-brand products. They subscribe to the hard line taken by Greenpeace, that sustainable palm is just not achievable.

I’m only on aisle one when Hill hits me with this dilemma and I’m tempted to dump my basket with exhaustion. I’ve taken three granola bars in and out of my basket, for having palm, not having palm and finally the wrong type of palm. The thing I’ve learnt about palm oil: it’s slippery.

I need a moment to understand how we have got into this mess. Oil palm is native to west Africa. Chinua Achebe, in his finest novel, Things Fall Apart, wrote of Nigeria that “proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten”. As demand for soap in Europe boomed with the Industrial Revolution, William Lever sought out more west African forest to cultivate for palm, using cruel “forced labour” practices to boot. Now Unilever is considered one of the world’s largest users of palm oil and, in recent years, a leader in RSPO palm.

Palm can only thrive in proximity to the Equator: a few Dutch and French fortune-hunters had been drawn to bring African palm to Indonesia and Malaysia at the end of the 19th century, but the Brits were especially successful. Now Indonesia and Malaysia account for more than 80 per cent of global production.

Palm, under a dizzying range of names, is a staple of our bathroom cabinet, from toothpaste to lipstick. But up until the 1990s the preferred fat of choice in the food industry was animal, high in saturated fat, or margarine, riddled with trans fats. The industry was looking for something better, and palm oil was perfect. Unlike runny sunflower oil, it’s sticky and rich, like delicious thick cream (with a rather symbolic blood-red colour).

Unilever’s European food factories began going heavy on palm oil in 1995 and the rest of the food industry followed suit. Now two thirds of palm is used for food, from ice cream to bread, and our appetite is only whetted. When McVitie’s swapped palm oil out of its digestives in 2010, a public outcry over “dunkability” had the palm oil — RSPO-certified — returned. At present rates, the land used for palm oil, so often competing with virgin forest, is forecast to double by 2050.

“When we talk about palm, two things always come up,” Hill says. “Orangutans and Nutella.”

Ah yes, Nutella, the first product I dumped and public enemy of the palm-phobes. About two thirds of the reviews of Nutella on Ocado are spitting with middle-class fury about palm: “Stop using palm oil!” and “Won’t buy until palm oil goes.” Hill disagrees.

“Is Nutella sustainable? The answer is yes. Unilever has been driving the sustainability agenda for years.”

At this point I drag Hill over to the Nutella jar on the supermarket shelf. Nowhere does it mention its palm is sustainable. She sighs. She has worked with the RSPO for years, as well as researching how trustworthy it is. It’s far from perfect. “RSPO standards are a work-in-progress,” she says. “Commitment to zero deforestation only came in last year.”

Hmm. Is it just me, or is hacking down forests stretching the definition of sustainable? Last week, in its latest review of the impact of palm oil manufacture, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) found big food retailers to be falling short on their commitment to eliminate the environmental damage being caused by the supply chain. Still, Ferrero, the maker of Nutella, scored 21.5 out of 22 on the WWF Palm Oil Buyers Scorecard, and M&S and the Co-operative Group featured among the top 10 per cent of those rated, so at least that’s progress.

Hill says that if I want to do right by the orangutans, I need to consume more RSPO palm because “it produces a lot of food very quickly and efficiently”. It is better to eat sustainable palm oil, Hill says, than to switch to less sustainable fats.

Yet almost no manufacturers, that of Nutella included, label their RSPO products. Normally companies shout about every tiny “eco” gesture, however trivial, but in the world of palm there is a reverse twist. When companies attempt to do the right thing, they make it hard for the consumer to find out. When does that ever happen? It is a perplexing economic case study.

This means that hunting for “good palm” requires not only laser focus to spot it on the packet, but also a phone at the ready, possibly using the array of new palm-oil shopping phone apps to cross-reference parent companies. For example, Cadbury’s Dairy Milk uses RSPO palm in Europe and no palm oil in the US recipe. Most of the big UK supermarkets have committed to RSPO palm oil in their own-brand products, but we search in vain for any sign of this on their products.

Packaging is littered with logos: packets of Maltesers have the Fairtrade symbol and Tesco own-brand chocolate is stamped with the Rainforest Alliance logo. Sainsbury’s does use RSPO palm oil, but its own-brand chocolate cake would rather advertise its cardboard “comes from a sustainable source” than mention its sustainable palm. After examining dozens of products, we come across our first RSPO logo on a packet of Jordans Country Crisp, and even there it’s muted; the one for the Wildlife Trusts is far more prominent.

Why is such a confusing area made even more confusing by a lack of labelling? The RSPO logo is a palm frond, nicknamed “the green spider”. Some joke that it looks too much like a cannabis leaf — you may think that breakfast cereal will give you a mellow start to the day. An investigation last year by the website Eco-Business found that 70 companies in the UK were licensed to use the RSPO logo (the second highest in Europe, after Germany), but few did. Their inquiries to these companies got no answers as to why, but palm experts suspect that these brands are so aware of palm negativity, they want even responsible palm use to slip by unnoticed. The RSPO logo only alarms when it should reassure.

“The public are cynical about trusting big organisations to do the right thing,” Hill says.

I go home. My conversations with Greenpeace have me convinced that the RSPO has a long way to go, but my conversations with Hill have me convinced that sustainable palm is worth fighting for, especially in the context of feeding the world’s booming population in the most efficient way.

I speak to Bhavani Shankar, a professor of economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas), University of London, who has been studying palm oil for years. He believes that we should get real about palm: few, after all, get freaked out by soya bean oil as an ingredient, yet it’s the second most popular edible oil in the world, just behind palm, but with the same, or worse, deforestation issues. Instead of a world dominated by cheap palm and soya oils, or “unrealistic” bans, Shankar says that we should aim for a diversity of more local oils. In other words, demand olive oil in your food, the way you would free-range eggs.

“The unsustainability is the dominance of a single oil,” Shankar says.

The Nutella comes back on to our shelf after I give my children the, er, gold-standard reassurance that it’s “probably OK”. Every other product has me tapping at my laptop, doing the kind of deep research on multinationals that is far from “sustainable” alongside the packed-lunch rush. It’s just about possible for food, but checking for palm oil derivatives in washing powder and shampoo requires a scientific thesaurus. It’s an eye-straining if not eye-popping week.

If the “green spider” RSPO logo isn’t being used, I wish the government would legislate to label harmful palm. Similar to cigarettes, dirty palm products could display an orphan monkey or similar. And why stop at palm, for that matter, when meat fed on cheap, deforesting palm and soya crops are part of the issue? I finally check out with Hill. What feels wrong, I tell her, is that I am allowed to kill orangutans with my chocolate biscuits. It feels wrong to put the fate of these precious forests in the hands of us consumers who can’t read all the small print.

“Yes,” Hill says. “But that’s the same with so many decisions that are left up to us: cheap flights, cheap meat, fast fashion.”

SOURCE 






Climate policies harm black and brown communities

Presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren at the most recent candidates’ debate in Iowa repeated the canard that climate change “particularly hits black and brown communities.” On this Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, it should be alerted that it is climate change policies promoted by her and fellow alarmists that would particularly hit black and brown communities by raising their cost of living and eliminating many of their jobs.

The several proposals for a “Green New Deal” for America have the common central feature of replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy on the assumption that such energy is feasible in the near-term, and that carbon emissions will decline to lower the Earth’s temperature.

Carbon emissions and temperature data, in fact, have risen far more slowly in recent decades than what is claimed by the climate models posited by the alarmist camp of scientists, as CFACT recently explained. Accordingly, the Earth and its inhabitants do not face an “existential threat,” nor are we sooner facing the “point of no return.”

If America is to turn away from fossil fuels and transform to more carbon-free renewable energy sources, there is plenty of time for further research and development to make it practical. This would allow a far more seamless transition over decades as technological advances continue apace.

Instead, the current political effort to rapidly destroy America’s fossil fuel and gasoline auto industries through premature government mandates for non-fossil fuel use is reckless and harmful – particularly to black and brown communities. Upper income households can afford the resulting rise in energy and utility costs for heating our homes or driving our cars. By contrast, lower income households will struggle making financial ends meet.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 12 percent of Americans lived below the poverty line in 2017. Disaggregated by race, the poverty rate for black and brown Americans is substantially higher, at 21 percent of blacks and 18 percent of non-white Hispanic Americans.

The laws of mathematics are simple: poor people have less disposable income than wealthy people to absorb inexorable higher energy costs resulting from climate policies. For people living in poverty this will exacerbate their condition, especially for black and brown Americans since greater percentages of them already are poor.

Then there is the baleful effect of climate policies on jobs, particularly in fossil fuel and related manufacturing and transportation industries, which are heavily cost-sensitive to energy. Curtailing fossil fuels would result in less extraction and increased transportation costs, resulting in fewer jobs overall, which would particularly hit black and brown Americans.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 5.4 percent of Americans work in construction and extraction industries (mining, drilling, etc.) and 6.4 percent work in transportation and material moving industries.

For Hispanics, 11.4 percent of them work in construction and extraction industries, more than double the overall percentage of Americans, while 8.2 percent work in transportation and material moving jobs, nearly one-third higher than the overall percentage of Americans. For blacks, 10 percent work in transportation and material moving occupations, nearly double the overall percentage of workers.

For black and brown males, the percentages that work in these energy sensitive industries are even higher. Accordingly, they will suffer greater harm from climate policies that target these job sectors.

Another way to examine the economic and societal harm of climate alarmist policies on minority workers is to understand their disproportionate representation in those affected industries. For example, a BLS study of 2014 industry data showed that Hispanics comprise more than 43 percent of farming, fishing and forestry employment, the latter category of which is particularly vulnerable to climate policy restrictions on logging. Hispanics also comprise nearly one-fifth of the workers employed in mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction.

Industry and job sector transformation in America is not a new phenomenon. It is part of our history and the natural outcome of technological advances. Agriculture employs a much smaller percentage of Americans than a century ago, and manufacturing employment, while having increased in recent years, has declined in recent decades as a share of the workforce.

Still, the climate policies that prematurely force the declination and destruction of fossil fuels will unnecessarily raise costs and accelerate thousands of job losses, especially for blue collar workers, as former Vice President Joe Biden recently acknowledged. As the data shows, greater economic harm will result in more vulnerable black and brown communities by worsening their poverty and employment opportunities.

SOURCE 





In State of the Commonwealth speech, Baker presses for more aggressive climate action

[Massachusetts] Governor Charlie Baker on Tuesday pledged more aggressive action in tackling climate change and the region’s transportation woes, using his State of the Commonwealth address to press for increased MBTA funding, quicker cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, and stronger support for a hotly debated carbon pact.

Addressing lawmakers and a television audience, the second-term Republican laced his 35-minute speech with new initiatives and attempts to rally the Democratic-led Legislature behind many of his biggest priorities.

Baker vowed to move the state toward net-zero emissions by 2050, effectively accelerating the goals already laid out in law. His pledge won early plaudits from advocates who’ve pushed for more ambitious action on climate change.

Baker, who has generally opposed calls to raise taxes to funnel more money into the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, proposed $135 million in additional funding in the coming fiscal year for the beleaguered agency.

And he previewed a new $15 million partnership with vocational schools that he said would “turbocharge” the training provided to both adults and teens, changes he estimates will better prepare tens of thousands of would-be trade workers.

Without invoking President Trump by name, Baker leaned into his trademark calls for pragmatism as the country barrels into a divisive campaign to elect a president in November.

“People who deal with much greater troubles than ours will rightly question us if we waste our time, and theirs, on the politics of personal destruction,” Baker told a packed House chamber. “They want us to be better than the yelling they see on TV and across social media.

“We all know campaigns are contests, and the siren call of sloganeering and cheap shots will be everywhere this year. Let’s rise above it,” he added to a lengthy standing ovation, one of 15 he received during the night.

In many cases, Baker’s address cited his administration’s accomplishments as much as it posed new arguments for proposals. He framed his push for a long-stalled bill to help ease the housing crunch in terms of equity, saying the status quo “has been hurting families for years.”

“Our current zoning laws aren’t working. They’re a wall between the well-off and the up-and-coming,” Baker said, adding: “Let’s find the common ground on housing policy that must be in here somewhere.”

He also refocused his argument for complex health care legislation that he said would put a greater emphasis on primary care and behavioral health services. He said the system should reward clinicians who “invest in time and connection with patients and their families,” but it does not. “And this is a major problem,” he said.

It was transportation and climate change, however, that made up large parts of his address.

The state’s Global Warming Solutions Act, signed in 2008, includes a target of 80 percent emissions reduction by 2050. Baker’s commitment to net-zero emissions by then was immediately hailed by environmental groups, many of which have been critical of him in the past. The pledge is a “crucial directive [that] puts Massachusetts in the vanguard of states and nations combating climate change,” said Brad Campbell, president of the Conservation Law Foundation.

The Senate is preparing to unveil on Thursday its own bill addressing climate change, which Senate President Karen E. Spilka said Tuesday will include the accelerated 2050 goal. House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo indicated he, too, supports the new target.

In a thinly veiled shot at the Trump administration, Baker said there have been “significant steps backward in Washington” in addressing climate change. He also trumpeted a stalled proposal he called critical to helping fund climate-resiliency projects through a tax hike on real estate transfers.

He devoted part of his speech to pitching lawmakers on a regional pact known as the Transportation and Climate Initiative, or TCI. It’s designed to curb carbon emissions but would probably raise gas prices. Without action, he said, the state won’t meet its objectives on reducing all greenhouse gas emissions.

SOURCE 





Obama's crooked EPA administrator still spouting off


She's obsessed.  I guess it gives her life meaning

Recently, as meteorologists from around the country assembled in Boston for their annual convention, Gina McCarthy took center stage, carrying an even darker forecast than those of epic storms like the Blizzard of ’78, which she keenly remembers.

It’s nothing less than an urgent bulletin. Our planet is warming. It’s not an opinion. It’s real.

And the consequences are more dire than canceled school classes or thousands of cars stranded on highways from Marshfield to Marblehead.

“The big deal is that global warming is changing the entire system of the way energy is distributed in the planet,’’ McCarthy told me the other day at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she is a professor.

“Our climate is temperate. It’s not going to be anymore. The climate isn’t tomorrow. Or five years from now. The climate is forever. It’s a system of change over 30 to 40 years. So you are literally going to see places that flourish as farmlands today that will be deserts tomorrow. This is an entire shift in how the globe’s going to look if we don’t do something about it.’’

Gina McCarthy intends to do something about it.

And those who know her track record — her long and well-earned reputation for no-nonsense, plain-spoken advocacy, her tenacity in the face of nay-sayers or climate-change deniers — say she is a formidable weather system all her own. Inexorable. Relentless. Blunt.

“Gina is a rock star,’’ said Jenni L. Evans, president of the American Meteorological Society. “We see climate change. It’s there. She will talk about how to think about it. How do we give people a sense of self-determination and not a sense that they should slit their wrists?’’

There is nothing academic or hypothetical about this. Evans grew up in Australia, parts of which have been blackened by historic wildfires.

Last year, record temperatures were broken in France and Germany. Greenland’s ice sheet saw historic melting. Average global temperatures were the second highest on record, less than one-tenth of a degree cooler than 2016.

So Evans knows what hangs in the balance. And so does McCarthy, who has made this work the centerpiece of her professional life.

As a young woman, she was the health agent for Canton’s Board of Health. Governor Michael Dukakis named her to a hazardous waste facility site safety council. After that, she served four Republican governors in Massachusetts and one in Connecticut, Jodi Rell.

In March 2013, President Obama nominated McCarthy as the nation’s 13th administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, which she led until 2017, becoming the chief architect of Obama’s plan to combat climate change.

And now, the Natural Resources Defense Council has named McCarthy as its president and chief executive, calling her one of the most effective environmental champions of the modern era.

The challenges, particularly in the age of Donald Trump, are daunting.  According to a recent New York Times analysis, Trump has rolled back more than 90 environmental rules and regulations, raising the prospects for a significant increase in greenhouse gases. That means dirtier air. It means weaker auto pollution standards. It means looser rules governing toxic industrial emissions.

“We haven’t reached the point of no return, but we don’t have as much time as we thought we had,’’ said Mitch Bernard, NRDC’s chief counsel. “The next 10 years will be critical in terms of trying to avert the most severe catastrophes from the changing climate.

“Gina is going to try to mobilize the energy and enthusiasm that is out there, especially among young people, for appropriate and vigorous action on climate. Climate change is not out there on the horizon. It’s creating misery and huge health problems.’’

Still, amid all those storm clouds, McCarthy finds a way to be optimistic. For one thing, she’s shut off the endless cable TV chatter, a limitless electronic feedback loop of bad news, an echo chamber that serves only to reinforce embedded political views on the right and the left.

And then she looks for silver linings.  “The environment has had tremendous improvement,’’ said McCarthy, who, at age 65, is old enough to remember wiping oily residue off her legs after taking a dip in a polluted Boston Harbor. “But it didn’t improve by people saying, ‘We can’t do it.’ It improved by saying, ‘OK, we’ve got to do it.’ That’s my attitude. I’m not going to give up. I’m not going to claim defeat.

“I’m not going to focus on President Trump and his nonsense, which I know I can’t fix right now. We can fight it. And one of the reasons to go to NRDC is because that’s what they do. They fight it every day so we can get into the courts. And in most cases, we’re winning.”

During the Trump presidency, the NRDC has sued the federal government 96 times, fighting his administration on issues ranging from efficiency standards for lightbulbs to endangered species. Its track record? The NRDC says it has emerged victorious in 54 of the 59 cases so far resolved.

“Those are pretty good odds,’’ McCarthy told me. “I’m optimistic because they don’t govern well. So even on the stuff they’re rolling back in the courts they think they’ve stacked, we can win.’’

What does McCarthy want? More electric cars and buses. Energy efficient lightbulbs and toilets. More trees and playgrounds. Public transportation systems that work. Farms that don’t contaminate drinking water supplies.  “I need people to be motivated to act,’’ she said. “Not to be hiding out in their closets.’’

There are no closets in her future. No sandy beaches either. Retirement, she told me, will have to wait. “I can’t let it go,’’ she said. “How do I do that? I don’t just have three kids, I have two grandchildren. And I listen to the young people now. And they’re all debating, and many of them deciding not to have children. That breaks my heart. They don’t see a future.’’

From across the table, she shook her head slowly and sadly. And then, with resolve, added this: “So somehow the energy they’re generating needs to be channeled into something more meaningful than giving up. I just think we have to figure out where the positive energy is. It’s out there. We’ve got to nurture that and at some point you’re going to see people who, like this president, prey on people’s most negative thoughts and amplify those as if that’s a path to the future.  “And I’m not going to buy that. And I’m never going to buy that. And I’m never going to stop fighting it.’’

SOURCE 





Australia: How a tiny group of Greenie protesters managed to stop backburning in East Gippsland over worries baby birds would die - before fires ravaged the area killing four people and forcing mass evacuations from the beach



Greenies fighting to save baby birds blocked vital hazard reduction burns in a tiny Victorian town two months before residents had to be evacuated as a deadly bushfire closed in.

Holding placards that read 'be firefighters not firelighters' and 'spring burns kill baby birds', the protesters refused to leave the planned burn area in Nowa Nowa, Victoria in September.

Firefighters were forced to abandon what they considered a necessary step in bushfire mitigation before the government reduced the planned burn area by more than 97 per cent to appease activists.

The backdown has played out in similar scenes across the country with devastating consequences as hazard reduction burning drops to dangerous levels.

'Burning in spring is the worst time because the animals are breeding and trees are flowering and it is still so dry,' Mary from Nowa Nowa told her local ABC outlet during the protest.

'The Department of Environment, Land and Water and Planning (DELWP) is dividing the community because they are telling us this has to be done to save our lives but in fact they're just destroying the environment.'

The department scaled back the planned burn from 370 hectares to just nine in what would prove a disastrous move as Australia entered a summer of disaster.

Just two months later, the town's 200 residents would have to be urgently evacuated as the East Gippsland bushfire - which killed four people, destroyed 340 homes and burnt 1 million hectares - raged. The insurance bill from the Gippsland area alone is expected to surpass $100 million.

The ABC has since blurred the faces of the activists to protect their identities, having become a target for trolls in the wake of the East Gippsland fires. 

But also coming under fire online was the Victorian government and its agencies for bowing to the wishes of Greens and reducing its planned burns in the Nowa Nowa area by roughly 97.5 per cent.

A Royal Commission into the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires found that 385,000 hectares of hazard reduction needed to be carried out annually across the state.

But DELWP's annual reports reveal only one-third of that goal was accomplished in 2018/19, with 130,000ha burned.

SOURCE 

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

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

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Green?  50,000 Tons Of Non-Recyclable Wind Turbine Blades Dumped In The Landfill

Funny, no one seemed to consider what to do with the massive amount of wind turbine blades once they reached the end of their lifespan.  Thus, the irony of the present-day Green Energy Movement is the dumping of thousands of tons of “non-recyclable” supposedly renewable wind turbine blades in the country’s landfills.

Who would have thought? What’s even worse, is that the amount of wind turbine blades slated for waste disposal is forecasted to quadruple over the next fifteen years as a great deal more blades reach their 15-20 year lifespan.  Furthermore, the size and length of the newly installed wind turbine blades are now twice as large as they were 20-30 years ago.

Honestly, I hadn’t considered the tremendous amount of waste generated by the so-called “Renewable” wind power industry until a long-term reader sent me the link to the following article, Landfill begins burying non-recyclable Wind Turbine Blades:

Hundreds of giant windmill blades are being shipped to a landfill in Wyoming to be buried because they simply can’t be recycled.  Local media reports several wind farms in the state are sending over 900 un-reusable blades to the Casper Regional Landfill to be buried. While nearly 90 percent of old or decommissioned wind turbines, like the motor housing, can be refurbished or at least crushed, fiberglass windmill blades present a problem due to their size and strength.

“Our crushing equipment is not big enough to crush them,” a landfill representative told NPR.

Prior to burying the cumbersome, sometimes nearly 300-foot long blades, the landfill has to cut them up into smaller pieces onsite and stack them in order to save space during transportation.

Wyoming isn’t the only landfill accepting worn-out wind turbine blades.  They are also being dumped in IOWA and SOUTH DAKOTA.  Although, there’s probably a lot more landfills across the country, especially in Texas, that are accepting old wind turbine blades.  Texas has the largest amount of wind-generated energy in the United States at 27,036 MegaWatts, followed by Iowa (8,965 MW), Oklahoma (8,072 MW), Kansas (6,128 MW), and California (5,842 MW). (source: Wikipedia)

So, with Texas powering more wind energy than the next three  states combined, they will be discarding an enormous amount of wind turbine blades in the state’s landfills over the next 10-20 years.

Now, why is the Wind Power Industry discarding its blades in landfills?  Unfortunately, due to the way the blades are manufactured, it isn’t economical or practical to recycle them even though some small-scale recycling has been done. 

The wind turbine blades are a toxic amalgam of unique composites, fiberglass, epoxy, polyvinyl chloride foam, polyethylene terephthalate foam, balsa wood, and polyurethane coatings.   So, basically, there is just too much plastic-composite-epoxy crapola that isn’t worth recycling.  Again, even though there are a few small recycling centers for wind turbine blades, it isn’t economical to do on a large scale.

As I mentioned, the wind power units built today are getting much taller and larger.  Check out the 83.5 meter (274 feet) long wind turbine blade being transported for a 7 MegaWatt system:

This picture was taken in 2016.  So, in about 15-20 years, this blade will need to be replaced.  Just think of the cost to remove three massive blades this size, cut them up, transport them to the landfill and cover them with tons of soil.  Now, multiply that by tens of thousands of blades. According to the data from Hochschule Bremerhaven & Ahlstrom-Munksjo, the wind industry will generate 50,000 tons of blade waste in 2020, but that will quadruple to 225,000 tons by 2034.  I have read that some estimates show an even higher amount of blade waste over the next 10-20 years.

I don’t believe the public realizes what a horrible waste of resources that wind energy is when you start to look at the entire operation from beginning to end. Wind energy is definitely not RENEWABLE.  And, even worse… the wind turbines are not lasting as long as the 20-25 years forecasted by the industry.  A study that came out in 2012 by Gordon Hughes, researching the relatively mature Dutch and U.K. Wind Industry, suggested that only a few of the wind farms would be operating for more than 12-15 years.

SOURCE 





EPA’s Science Blowout: Air pollution revisited

A unique event in regulatory science just happened. One that could only have occurred in the rock ’em, sock ’em Trump era.

An Environmental Protection Agency science advisory panel informed the EPA administrator that 25 years and $600 million worth of the science underpinning the agency’s flagship air quality regulatory program is essentially worthless. Many of these problems are discussed in a new report from the Texas Public Policy Foundation, “The EPA’s Pretense of Science: Regulating Phantom Risks.”

Though this is a huge victory for those of us who have been critical of the EPA “science” for decades, it has come almost too late. The Clinton, Bush and Obama EPAs used this “science” to inflict trillions of dollars’ worth of compliance costs on Americans, not to mention incalculable lost economic opportunities.

The EPA’s Clean Air Act Science Advisory Board wrote to Administrator Andrew Wheeler on December 16 that the agency’s most recent assessment of the health effects of particulate matter like soot and dust (PM) in outdoor air is not comprehensive, systematic or adequate for determining that PM caused health effects.

The immediate regulatory implication of the letter is to inform Wheeler that there is no scientific basis for further tightening of the national air quality standard for PM, consideration of which EPA is undertaking as required by the Clean Air Act.

PM in outdoor air was first weaponized by the Clinton administration in 1997 as part of its controversial bid to tighten the air-quality standard for ozone (ground-level smog), then estimated to impose as much as $100 billion worth of compliance costs per year. EPA tried to offset these costs by claiming that its new standards would prevent 20,000 premature deaths per year. When valued at $5 million per prevented death, the ozone regulation was magically paid for.

When EPA’s outside science advisers and Congress separately challenged the EPA’s claim that PM killed by asking for the supporting scientific data, EPA ignored the science advisers and the brusquely told Congress that the agency saw no useful purpose in providing the data.

Reluctant to challenge anything environmental, the Bush administration failed to get a grip on the EPA and the agency staff proceeded to strengthen its PM case not with better science but rather with more science. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent to get thousands of papers published claiming that PM killed.

The stage was then set for the Obama administration, which launched the war on coal behind the claim that reducing coal plant emissions via regulation would prevent tens of thousands of premature deaths every year. Obama EPA administrator Lisa Jackson even testified to Congress that PM “doesn’t make you sick …  it just kills you,” and that if PM was adequately regulated, as many as 570,000 lives could be saved every year.

Not only did the Obama EPA continue to ignore congressional requests for the underlying scientific data but it also ignored a House subpoena for the data.

To manage the problem of overly inquisitive outside science advisers, EPA replaced its largely independent outside air-quality science advisers with panels of almost entirely EPA-funded university researchers.

By stiff-arming Congress and rigging the statutorily mandated scientific review process, EPA successfully prosecuted the war on coal, driving the largest coal companies into bankruptcy and erasing 94 percent of the market value of the coal industry.

Then came the Trump administration.

The first thing to go was the EPA’s system of “pal review” from its outside science advisers. With new conflict-of-interest rules, Trump EPA administrator Scott Pruitt banned agency grantees from serving as reviewers. Pruitt then proposed to ban reliance by the agency on scientific data that wasn’t made publicly available upon request, setting off a furious response ginned up by those hiding their research data. Pruitt’s successor, Wheeler, then dissolved the extant panel of Obama administration-chosen PM science advisers.

And after available science advisory panel slots were filled with Trump administration picks, a more balanced board of science advisers has now, by majority vote, returned the panel back to where it was in 1996, when it first advised Clinton EPA administrator Carol Browner that the EPA had no evidence that PM caused premature death.

The claims, actions and consequences of this EPA saga have been extraordinary. Massive funding of university researchers to make dubious claims of mass death, arrogant hiding of taxpayer-funded scientific data, agency disregard for congressional oversight, rigged peer-review, destruction of the coal industry, huge ongoing compliance costs and much more.

And the drama is far from over. Wheeler will in 2020 make the final decision on the air-quality standards and the science transparency rule. Meanwhile the other side is furiously working to undermine both efforts while doubling down on their claims that PM kills. But their data remains secret.

SOURCE 




UK: Wind farms built to tackle climate change could be final nail in coffin for seabirds, RSPB warns

Wind farms built to tackle climate change could be the "final nail in the coffin" for sea birds, the RSPB has warned as it publishes a new report into their feeding hotspots.

The UK is a globally crucial place for these birds, as it contains 8 million breeding pairs. They are in fast decline - seabirds have faced a 70 per cent drop worldwide since the 1970s, and numbers continue to fall.

When the birds feed, they fly out to sea to find food sources such as sandeels. The RSPB has tracked over 1,000 of Britain's four most threatened bird species — kittiwakes, guillemots, razorbills and shags — and found they feed at certain "hotspots". Many of these are sandbanks where small fish are found - which happen to be the places developers find it easier to build offshore wind turbines.

The new research, published in the journal Biological Conservation, found that the hotspots are bigger than all the Special Protection Areas in the UK, where human activity on bird life is curbed.

It has also identified areas in which the building of infrastructure including wind farms should be banned, the RSPB said.

Gareth Cunningham, the bird charity's chief marine policy officer, told The Telegraph: "We are in the middle of the climate emergency and one of the methods for addressing that is offshore wind. Currently there's very little monitoring done on offshore wind farms.

"Wind farms need to be built where the sea is fairly shallow, sometimes this means they are built on areas which are meant for foraging.

"The new data shows where birds go so we need to not put offshore wind in these hotspots. We need environmentally sensible installations. We have a biodiversity emergency — we don't want to make this worse while tackling climate emergency. We need to deal with climate change but we need to make sure the measures we take to address climate change aren't the final nail in the coffin for seabirds."

Wind farms can harm these little birds because collision with the blades can cause death as they try to fly to their feeding spots. Even the birds which wisely dodge the structures are harmed; they are forced to take large detours, putting chicks at risk of starvation as they wait for their parents to return.

Dr Ian Cleasby, lead author of the research, said: “The sight and sound of hundreds of thousands of seabirds flocking to our shores is an amazing natural spectacle and something that we must help protect for future generations to enjoy. The results from this research provides better evidence that allows us to identify important areas of sea that should be part of protected areas and help to improve how we plan for development at sea to reduce conflicts between the needs of our seabirds and human activities at sea”

This comes as the government commits to a Seabird Conservation Strategy, to be published in December 2020, and has designated new Special Protection Areas for terns in the Solent  and near Middlesbrough .

These new areas will protect the birds from human activity, such as fishing or outdoor recreation. The new and extended locations join 47 existing sites in English waters.

Environment Minister Rebecca Pow said: "As the devastating impacts of climate change are only too visible, it is vital that we take decisive steps now that make a real difference to help protect our wildlife and allow vulnerable species to recover.

"We have already protected important nesting sites for seabirds, such as the little tern, and these new and additional protections to their feeding grounds, together with the development of a new strategy to protect our seabirds, will help the coastal environment recover, develop and, importantly, thrive."

Tony Juniper, Natural England Chair, added:  "Many of Britain’s sea and shorebird populations are globally important and for that reason we have a particular responsibility to protect and enhance them. I am delighted that, following an extensive evidence-based assessment by Natural England, these new areas, confirmed today by Government, will help to do that. They will ensure that species of conservation concern, such as terns and waders, have access to secure food sources, including during their critical annual breeding seasons."

SOURCE 




Regulatory Action Center Supports EPA's Cost-Saving Methane De-Regulation

FreedomWorks Foundation's Regulatory Action Center (RAC) is driving comments in support of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) reform on methane. This new rule would remove regulatory barriers erected by the Obama administration. It would save the American taxpayer tens of millions of dollars and help lower energy costs for U.S. households. You can make your voice heard HERE to support this crucial reform.

Existing Obama-era regulations on methane impose stringent regulations for the transmission and storage of methane. This means that even though the mere storage of methane did not contribute significantly to air pollution, the Obama administration counted it against organizations that store and transmit methane as if it had polluted the environment. This is predatory regulatory overreach at its finest.

The Trump Administration, under the leadership of Administrator Wheeler, has ruled that the Obama EPA erred in its judgment. In order to be regulated under Section 111 of the Clean Air Act, the agency must determine that there is a significant impact on air pollution. Otherwise, any regulation is unlawful. The EPA also expects minimal environmental impact by this de-regulation, because of its allowance for modifications and the aforementioned issue of methane storage not contributing to air pollution.

EPA’s regulatory impact analysis estimates that the proposed amendments would save the oil and natural gas industry $17-$19 million a year, for a total of $97-$123 million from 2019 through 2025. This is cost-saving to the American taxpayer and is an important step towards lowering the energy bills for all Americans.

SOURCE 




Tony Abbott says 'every extreme weather event' in Australia is being used as 'proof of climate change' by eco fanatics who have become 'religious' in their beliefs

He is clearly still aware that global warming is hokum

Tony Abbott says climate change zealots are wrongly using 'every extreme weather event' as undeniable proof of global warming, with the former prime minister denying it was the main cause of Australia's unprecedented bushfire crisis.

Mr Abbott launched a stinging rebuke of eco warriors at an event for the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, in Washington D.C. on Tuesday - where he also lauded US President Donald Trump's first term in office.

The former Liberal Party leader and volunteer firefighter said deadly bushfires were inevitable in Australia and pointed to the century-old Dorothea Mackeller poem 'My Country' which describes the country as a land 'of droughts and flooding rains'.

Mr Abbott said climate change activists were almost 'religious' in their beliefs that global warming was to blame for the ongoing fires, which have devastated a record amount of land.

'I'm not one of those people who sees the current bushfires as confirmation of all we have feared about the changing climate,' he told The Sydney Morning Herald.

'I see the current bushfires as the sort of thing we are always going to be prone to in a country such as ours.'

Mr Abbott said those who believe climate change is the most important factor in extreme weather events use it as the reason for fires, floods and Hurricane Sandy - which devastated the Carribean in 2012.

'If you think climate change is the most important thing, everything can be turned to proof. I think that to many it has almost a religious aspect to it,' he said.

Mr Abbott, Australia's 28th prime minister, led the country between 2013 and 2015 while served 19 years as a volunteer firefighter for the Rural Fire Service.

He supported Prime Minister Scott Morrison's stance that climate change had some role in causing bushfires, and praised his response to the state of emergency caused by the fires.

SOURCE 

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

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

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