Tuesday, August 25, 2020
New World Temperature Record Set - Is Climate Change To Blame?
The question mark above is well warranted. By "Climate change" they presumably mean anthropogenic global warming. And the anthropogenic global warming theory is that CO2 in the atmosphere causes warming. And CO2 levels have been rising steadily.
According to Cape Grim CO2 levels rose from 401ppm at the end of 2016 against the latest reading of 410ppm. So obviously it will be hotter now than in 2016. Problem: It's not. As the article below states, reality is the other way around: 2016 was our hottest year.
So we once again see that the global warming theory fails a test against reality. As a scientific theory it must be rejected. As a political theory, of course, it will sail on for many years yet/i>
It’s possible that this week, we set a new record for the hottest recorded temperature on Earth. The Furnace Creek Visitor Center in Death Valley recorded a temperature of 54.4C (129.9F) this Sunday, August 16, 2020. The temperature was high enough to cause the unofficial temperature display to start behaving strangely. If you haven’t been concerned about climate change before, perhaps it’s time to sit up and take note - this is just the latest in records that are being set since the year 2000.
The previous high temperature was 53.3C in Kuwait in 2011. In 1913, there was a potential high temperature in Furnace Creek of 56.7C, but this reading is of questionable accuracy.
Currently, scientists are verifying the new temperature claim.
This is the latest in a disturbing trend. The record hottest year on Earth was 2016, followed by 2019, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2014, 2010, 2013 and 2005 (tied), and 1998. Almost all of those years have been within the last two decades. And scientists predict that we will continue to set records.
And 2020 is not looking good either. Seven percent of the Earth set new records for June temperatures this year, such as Asia, Scandinavia, Western Europe, Mexico, and large swaths of the ocean. The Arctic had its first 100F day when a town in Siberia named Verkhoyansk reached 38C (100.4F). Droughts and dryness have also been affecting the production of soybeans, sorghum, and cotton in the middle United States.
Normally, hot years are linked to El Niño events or active solar cycles, but 2020 has had neither. In fact, it’s been the weakest 11-year solar cycle in the last 100 years.
The Earth Has Warmed In The Past, What’s Different About Now?
By using tree rings, glaciers, sediments in the oceans, rocks, and even coral reefs, we can gain an understanding of how hot the Earth was in the past, and how the temperature changed. For example, as we moved out of the last Ice Age, the temperature rose 4 to 7 degrees C.
But - now here’s the important part - this warming occurred over 5,000 years. We’ve seen the temperature of the Earth rise 0.7 degrees C in the past century. That’s 10 times faster than the average rate.
SOURCE
New paper: Fossil fuel dependent technologies help feed the world and save global biodiversity
Indur Goklany
I have a paper, Reduction in global habitat loss from fossil‐fuel‐dependent increases in cropland productivity, that has been accepted for publication in Conservation Biology, a peer-reviewed journal of the Society for Conservation Biology.
It focuses on habitat lost to agricultural uses, which is generally considered to be the major cause for global biodiversity loss. Currently, 37% of global land area is in agricultural uses.
It shows that:
At least 62.5% of global food production is due to increased agricultural productivity from fossil-fuel-dependent technologies.
Absent fossil fuels, at least another 20% of global land area would have to be converted to cropland to maintain global food production, further threatening global biodiversity.
This exceeds the total amount of land currently set aside globally for conservation in one form or another (15%), which some have called the world's greatest conservation success story (or words to that effect).
Global food supplies would also drop, at least temporarily, to levels about a quarter below those experienced by the Chinese people during their last Great Famine of 1959-61. Food prices would skyrocket to balance supply and demand.
It also implies that estimates of the Social Cost of Carbon that do not, among other things, the consequences of CO2 related emissions on global hunger and habitat loss, are not fit for purpose.
Email from Indur Goklany: igoklany@outlook.com
WHO warns coronavirus vaccine alone won't end pandemic: Future must be greener
The morphing of the public health bureaucracy and the climate establishment is at hand
World leaders and the public must learn to manage the virus and make permanent adjustments to their daily lives to bring the virus down to low levels, the WHO said.
Throughout history, outbreaks and pandemics have changed economies and societies, the agency said.
The World Health Organization said Friday that a vaccine will be a "vital tool" in the global fight against the coronavirus, but it won't end the Covid-19 pandemic on its own and there's no guarantee scientists will find one.
World leaders and the public must learn to manage the virus and make permanent adjustments to their daily lives to bring the virus down to low levels, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a news conference from the agency's Geneva headquarters. "At the same time, we will not, we cannot go back to the way things were."
Throughout history, outbreaks and pandemics have changed economies and societies, he said.
"In particular, the Covid-19 pandemic has given new impetus to the need to accelerate efforts to respond to climate change," he said. "The Covid-19 pandemic has given us a glimpse of our world as it could be: cleaner skies and rivers."
The virus has infected more than 22.7 million people worldwide and killed at least 794,100 in more than seven months, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. There are at least 30 potential vaccines currently in clinical trials, according to the WHO, but there is no guarantee they will be safe and effective, he said.
SOURCE
UK infrastructure investor suffers big losses from two Australia solar farms
That "free" electricity from the sun turns out to be not so free after all
UK infrastructure investor John Laing has revealed yet more big losses from its Australia renewable energy portfolio, this time focused on the two big Australian solar farm investments hit by connection delays, equipment problems and grid congestion issues.
The two solar projects affected are the wholly-owned 175MW Finley solar farm, located in south west NSW in a newly congested part of the grid, and its 90 per cent owned 200MW Sunraysia solar project, which is in the same region but which has also run into technical difficulties and has so far failed to obtain registration from the Australian Energy Market Operator nearly a year after mechanical construction was complete.
In its interim results released late last week, John Laing reported losses of £43 million ($A79 million) from the two solar assets. This follows its write downs of £66 million a year earlier due to changes in marginal loss factors in Australia – a result that led to a decision to cease new investment in wind and solar assets and to try and sell the Australian portfolio.
It adds to the growing number of write-downs and losses on new solar projects from a range of affected parties – contractors, developers and asset owners – due to issues ranging from cost-overruns, delays, commissioning problems, grid congestion and system strength issues. More are now being affected by falling wholesale prices, such as New Energy Solar’s Manildra solar farm, among others.
In the latest period, some £11 million came from transmission issues, presumably Finley, which is among a number of solar assets warned about “material constraints” in the network west of Wagga Wagga due to congestion issues. That suggests that many of the solar assets in the area may also face write downs by their owners.
“This primarily relates to a loss on one of our solar projects as a result of transmission-related issues,” the company says. “Due to the instability of the power system in south-western New South Wales, AEMO imposed a constraint on this network. This limits the flow of power on the main transmission line.”
The losses from Sunraysia make up the rest of the £43 million cited from the two solar farms. “Sunraysia, which is still in construction, experienced technical issues,” it says, adding later that the technical issues are related to “transformers”.
“There have also been ongoing delays with the Australian Energy Market Operator registration process which is holding up the project’s connection to the grid,” it adds.
John Laing says a “remediation plan” for Sunraysia is in place. But the solar farm has also become the centre of a legal dispute between John Laing and co-investor Maoneng, and the main contractor Decmil.
In a presentation to analysts, recently appointed CEO Ben Loome said some of the issues that have affected the business are the result of “not fully assessing risk return dynamics. A lot of this activity came at a time when investment in renewable energy was becoming more competitive and commoditised.”
John Laing earlier this year put its Australian renewable energy portfolio up for sale after taking the decision not to invest in any new assets. It pulled the two solar assets from the sales process, citing the uncertainty over connections and grid congestion.
Loome said the company will not be hurried to make a sale. “We have got to make sure each of projects is properly prepared for sale – so we can maximise value,” he said in the presentation. “We will be pursing realisations over the next 1 or 2 years. We are not under pressure to sell any assets ”
But John Laing says the sale process is being affected by the Covid-19 pandemic and changes to Australia Foreign Investment Review Board rules, and the 49.8 per cent owned Granville wind farm being built in Tasmania is being delayed by Covid-19 issues and “weather conditions.” Completion of construction is targeted for the beginning of 2021.
Its other assets in Australia include the Cherry Tree wind farm in Victoria, the Kiata wind farm in Victoria (72.3 per cent), and minority stakes in each of the three big Hornsdale wind farm assets in South Australia.
The John Laing accounts also reveal another £50 million in losses from its renewable energy portfolio because of lower prices, although it does not specify the extent of these losses across the individual regions of its US, European or Australian portfolio.
John Laing has contracts in numerous civil works projects across a number of countries, including a hospital in Adelaide and light rail in Sydney, but the problems with its renewables portfolio drove its result to a £95 million loss in the first half.
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
*****************************************
Monday, August 24, 2020
The First Undeniable Climate Change Deaths
Undeniable? Then how come I am denying it?
People in temperate climates regularly die in "heatwaves" -- temperatures that would be unremarkable in the tropics.
So the only thing of interest here is whether the temperatures concerned were unusual. And it does appear that they were. But where do you go from there?
"Attribution science" was enlisted to show a link to global warming. I won't dwell on the impossible task that is attribution science. It defies logic. But even if we accept its conclusions as correct, what was the cause of the global warming? Was it the increased level of CO2 in the atmosphere?
CO2 levels and temperature are poorly correlated so we need to use Occams razor here. And in applying Occams razor we note that the earth has been slowly warming since the Little Ice Age -- long before the modern human activities that Warmists decry. So the simple explanation for increased global temperatures is that they are a continuation of a natural process and have nothing to do with human emissions of CO2
So even if we accept that the deaths were caused by global warming, how do we know what caused global warming? We cannot know that. All we can do is guess. And the influence of CO2 is an implausible guess
In 2018 in Japan, more than 1,000 people died during an unprecedented heat wave. In 2019, scientists proved it would have been impossible without global warming.
July 23, 2018, was a day unlike any seen before in Japan. It was the peak of a weekslong heat wave that smashed previous temperature records across the historically temperate nation. The heat started on July 9, on farms and in cities that only days earlier were fighting deadly rains, mudslides, and floods. As the waters receded, temperatures climbed. By July 15, 200 of the 927 weather stations in Japan recorded temperatures of 35 degrees Celsius, about 95 degrees Fahrenheit, or higher. Food and electricity prices hit multiyear highs as the power grid and water resources were pushed to their limits. Tens of thousands of people were hospitalized due to heat exhaustion and heatstroke. On Monday, July 23, the heat wave reached its zenith. The large Tokyo suburb of Kumagaya was the epicenter, and around 3 p.m., the Kumagaya Meteorological Observatory measured a temperature of 41.1 degrees Celsius, or 106 F. It was the hottest temperature ever recorded in Japan, but the record was more than a statistic. It was a tragedy: Over the course of those few weeks, more than a thousand people died from heat-related illnesses.
On July 24, the day after the peak of the heat wave, the Japan Meteorological Agency declared it a natural disaster. A disaster it was. But a natural one? Not so much.
In early 2019, researchers at the Japan Meteorological Agency started looking into the circumstances that had caused the unprecedented, deadly heat wave. They wanted to consider it through a relatively new lens—through the young branch of meteorology called attribution science, which allows researchers to directly measure the impact of climate change on individual extreme weather events. Attribution science, at its most basic, calculates how likely an extreme weather event is in today’s climate-changed world and compares that with how likely a similar event would be in a world without anthropogenic warming. Any difference between those two probabilities can be attributed to climate change.
Attribution science was first conceived in the early 2000s, and since then, researchers have used it as a lens to understand the influence of climate change on everything from droughts to rainfall to coral bleaching. As scientists have long predicted, the vast majority of extreme weather events studied to date have been made more likely because of climate change. But the 2018 Japan heat wave is different. As people who lived in Japan knew at the time, the oppressive temperatures were more than unusual. They were unprecedented. In fact, without climate change, they would have been impossible.
These people are the first provable deaths of climate change.“We would never have experienced such an event without global warming,” says Yukiko Imada of the Japan Meteorological Agency.
On June 7, 2019, Imada, Masahiro Watanabe, and others published an attribution study of the 2018 Japan heat wave in the journal Scientific Online Letters on the Atmosphere. They found that the deadly event of the previous summer “could not have happened without human-induced global warming.”
This heat wave is not the first extreme event found to be only possible because of climate change. But it is the first short-lived event, and the first to have direct impacts on human health. Given that tens of thousands were hospitalized and more than a thousand died due to the heat wave, in a sense, these people are the first provable deaths of climate change.
For Watanabe, the result wasn’t unexpected. It was more of a grim inevitability. “It was not that surprising,” he says of his unprecedented result. An event like this was “naturally expected as global mean temperature continued to rise.” But for both Watanabe and Imada, it holds real historical significance. “It is very sensational for me because human activity has created a new phenomenon. Human activity has created a new phase of the climate,” says Imada.
You couldn’t live through this heat wave without realizing that something was unusual. Ayako Nomizu lives in Tokyo. “When I was growing up in the ’80s, if we had 31 or 32 degrees centigrade, that was hot,” she says. “We would say ‘Oh, my God, it’s gonna be really 32 degrees?’” Summers recently, and especially 2018’s, concern her. “Now we are seeing 37, 38 [degrees]. It’s crazy. We didn’t really have this kind of heat before.” Nomizu works for Climate Action 100+, a group that helps investors and companies transition to clean energy, so for her, the connection between climate change and the extreme heat in summers is obvious.
Kazuo Ogawa, a 65-year-old landlord who lives in Tokyo, says he has never experienced anything like the heat wave of 2018. His memories of the experience are visceral. “I was so uncomfortable. I took a shower three times a day, I changed my T-shirt three times a day,” he says.
This kind of heat, as the hospitalization numbers and death toll show, is dangerous. Especially so in Japan, where most people didn’t grow up with air conditioning because it was never needed, and where heat exhaustion was basically unknown until recently. To Ogawa and many Japanese, this is a new problem. “Heat exhaustion is called netsuchusho in Japanese. I never heard of this phrase, this illness, 30 years ago,” Ogawa said.
Heat exhaustion and its more deadly version, heatstroke, are simply the physiological changes that occur when someone has an extremely elevated body temperature. There are a lot of mechanisms humans have evolved to prevent dangerous overheating—sweating and other internal changes like increased heart rate and the transfer of blood from organs to the skin can usually keep the body at a safe temperature—but there is a limit to what the body can handle. If the outside temperature gets too intense or high humidity prevents sweat from evaporating and pulling warmth out of the skin, internal body temperature will start to rise. When this happens, blood vessels dilate in an attempt to get rid of more heat, causing a drop in blood pressure that leads to the first symptoms of heat stress—lightheadedness and nausea. As the body continues to heat up, organs swell, and cell-signaling processes, especially in the brain, are disrupted. At this point people begin to fall unconscious, and if their temperature is not lowered quickly, the damage can be fatal.
SOURCE
Recent global warming trends are inconsistent with very high climate sensitivity
The Warmists are dialing back their predictions of danger. They think that more CO2 will produce less warming than they once did
Research published this week in Earth System Dynamics reports that the most sensitive climate models overestimate global warming during the last 50 years.
Three scientists from the University of Exeter studied the output of complex climate models and compared them to temperature observations since the 1970s.
Recent developments in cloud modeling have produced models that portray very large sensitivity to rising greenhouse gas concentrations.
A subset of models even showed that a doubling of CO2 could lead to over 5°C of warming, questioning whether the goals of the Paris agreement are achievable even if nations do everything they can.
The lead author of the study, Ph.D. candidate Femke Nijsse from the University of Exeter, said: "In evaluating the climate models we were able to exploit the fact that thanks to clean air regulation, air pollution in the form of climate-cooling aerosols have stopped increasing worldwide, allowing the greenhouse gas signal to dominate recent warming."
The amount of warming that occurs after CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are doubled is called the equilibrium climate sensitivity.
The study found that based on the latest generation of climate models the equilibrium climate sensitivity is likely between 1.9 and 3.4 °C.
Co-author Mark Williamson, of Exeter's Global Systems Institute, added: "Global warming since 1970 also provides even better guidance on the rate of climate change in the future.
"We find a likely range for the 'Transient Climate Response' of 1.3-2.1 °C, whether we use the latest models or the previous generation of models."
The new study is only one piece of the puzzle.
A recent review paper found that low estimates of climate sensitivity can be excluded because they are, in general, not consistent with climate changes in Earth's past.
Co-author Professor Peter Cox explains the significance of these findings: "It is good to see that studies are now converging on a range of equilibrium climate sensitivity, and that both high and low values can be excluded.
SOURCE
The naff symbolism of modern eco-protest
Earlier this month, activists from Extinction Rebellion (XR) poured red paint on the steps of Trafalgar Square and threw luminous green ink into its fountains. The colours, representing ‘ecocide’ (green) and genocide (red), were intended to raise awareness about the impact of Covid-19 on indigenous Brazilian people.
Or perhaps the aim was merely to draw attention to XR themselves. After all, it’s not clear how pigment poured over the UK capital’s iconic landmarks is going to make a difference to indigenous people. What will Londoners do with their new-found ‘awareness’? And what kind of solidarity is created by acts that most people will see as nothing more than petty vandalism?
Moreover, XR’s latest stunt might have been better directed towards fellow environmental campaigners at the WWF. As has been exposed by indigenous-rights organisation Survival International, the massive green NGO stands accused of an endless list of human-rights abuses against indigenous people living – or trying to live – in the path of WWF’s conservation agenda. Such ‘solidarity’ ought to raise questions about the green movement. Instead, WWF continues to be given tens of millions from the UK taxpayer.
XR and WWF are not the only green NGOs to have developed a strange interest in indigenous peoples. In 2013, Greenpeace’s recruitment of Canada’s First Nations voices to their Save the Arctic campaign was frustrated by the Inuit Circumpolar Council’s rejection of the ‘questionable use of the Indigenous voice’.
It turns out that some indigenous people, living in very cold places, might find fossil fuels quite useful, and some might even aspire to work in the oil and gas industries. But greens take for granted the idea that indigenous peoples want to live ‘traditional’ lifestyles. This presupposition speaks to the green fetish for lifestyles which are closely dependent on nature. When they are not murdering and evicting indigenous people or using them as political puppets, greens celebrate indigenous people as symbols of pre-industrial authenticity. But not as people. When voiceless indigenous people come into opposition with Western NGOs, greens turn out to be as indifferent to them as any logging, mining or agricultural corporation.
The image of helpless, voiceless victims helps green NGOs to cast simple moral categories over the messy business of societies and their development. But Greenpeace and WWF let the cat out of the bag. This is how they want all humans to be: both literally and figuratively powerless, living pre-industrial lifestyles. As soon as indigenous people become politically independent – that is, able to assert themselves politically – or participate in the economy as producers and consumers, or simply stand in the way of green ambitions, their symbolic power fades.
Many have observed the recent trend of political protest’s convergence with performance art. Green NGOs and campaigners, unable to produce mass support for their political views, have had to turn protest into a different kind of spectacle than the one produced by demonstrations of the popular will through the weight of numbers. Every eco-protest today is sparsely populated, but rich with deeply naff symbolism, combined with seemingly transgressive performance – colours and vandalism – to attract attention.
This formula for protest probably reflects the full extent of the protesters’ understanding of the issues facing indigenous people (or people in the developing world more broadly). Indigenous people are just useful symbols to green campaigns: objects of both pity and aspiration. But eco-warriors’ grasp of the ‘environment’ is also entirely symbolic. Trees become lungs, nature becomes Gaia, and industry becomes sin. Greens claim that their perspective is grounded in science, but the logic of the symbolic order haunting green claims is much more often based on mystical mumbo-jumbo and allegories of fire and brimstone than on any attempt to understand society’s interactions with the natural world.
The problem for the ecological zealots that think nothing of inflicting themselves on the rest of society is that very few people speak their language, much less share their views. Most people don’t want to be the eco-serfs in the green lunatics’ designs for an eco-political order that will please Gaia. Most people don’t think their interests are going to be served, let alone understood, by people in fancy dress committing acts of vandalism against a nation’s monuments.
If you think environmentalists are champions of indigenous people’s – or any people’s – rights, you probably think Avatar was a documentary.
SOURCE
Revealed: how the Great Barrier Reef is really doing
Even the academics are finding it hard to moan about it
Is it dying or thriving? The state of the Great Barrier Reef has become a hot button topic, but a report out today gives the most complete picture of the state of our most valuable national icon.
Reports of the death of the Great Barrier Reef may have been exaggerated, with new research showing “encouraging” signs of coral growth in two-thirds of 86 monitored reefs.
The annual report of the health of the reef by the Australian Institute of Marine Science, published today, has been welcomed by tourism operators who say they are battling widespread perceptions the reef is already dead.
Today’s report shows modest increases in coral coverage in the reef’s central and southern zones, and a stabilisation in the north, after several years of hits from bleaching, cyclones and outbreaks of the crown-of-thorns starfish.
Head researcher Dr Mike Emslie said the survey, which is now in its 35th year, showed “the reef is resilient, but this resilience has limits”.
Dr Emslie’s team conducted their assessment between September 2019 and June 2020 at reefs scattered from below Rockhampton to the very tip of Cape York. The work is done by means of a “manta tow”, in which a marine scientist is pulled along a section of the reef underwater for two minutes, and afterwards calculates the percentage of sea floor covered by coral.
“Out of the 86 reefs we surveyed this year, two thirds were low or moderate, with less than 30 per cent coral cover,” he said. “There were 23 reefs that had high coral cover, which is 30 to 50 per cent, and only five had very high coral cover, over 50 per cent.”
Comparing this year’s results to previous years of coral coverage gives a different perspective on the health of the reef.
In the northern reef, coral coverage in 2020 was just half of what it was at its recorded peak, and in the southern reef it was at 60 per cent of its best-ever result. The peaks in both areas were recorded in 1988.
Coral coverage in the central part of the reef reached its highest level ever recorded in 2016, Dr Emslie said, but this year the coverage had fallen back to 61 per cent of that peak.
“The reef is taking repeated hits from coral bleaching, cyclones and crown-of-thorns outbreaks. While we have seen the Great Barrier Reef’s ability to begin recovery from these pressures, the frequency and intensity of disturbances means less time for full recovery to take place,” Dr Emslie said.
The full effect of last summer’s mass bleaching event – the third in five years – would not be known for several months, he added.
“The 35-year data set we’ve got shows that the long term trajectory of hard coral cover is actually ratcheting down,” Dr Emslie said.
“There are lot of good reefs still out there, but there’s also lots of impacted reefs. People can still go out and see the Great Barrier Reef in all its glory but we really need to be aware of what the long term data is telling is.”
Gareth Phillips, CEO of the Association of Marine Park Tour Operators and himself a reef scientist, said people who worked on the reef were seeing its recovery day to day, but negative publicity about the condition of the reef had been affecting visitor numbers prior to the coronavirus outbreak.
“The overwhelming message is ‘Go now to see what’s left, and what you will probably see is this stark white reef that’s just on it’s last legs’. It’s just completely false,” he said.
“Marine operators do not deny that the reef has gone through some substantial pressures but as this report has shown, the reef has ability to recover,” Mr Phillips said. “It’s exactly in line with what the operators have been trying to say – that the reef is not dead and it is a beautiful place.”
Tourism operations on the reef were currently running at about 10-15 per cent of their pre-COVID capacity, Mr Phillips said, but he rejected popular suggestions this lack of activity could help the reef “heal”.
“Tourism actually has a positive impact on the reef,” he said. “With recent bleaching events, the tourism locations had very little impact because (operators) showed good stewardship. They monitor the reef. They’re a critical part of its management.”
The lack of commercial enterprise on the reef during the lockdown was also leading to an increase in illegal fishing in the area because the tourism boats provide surveillance, Mr Phillips said.
Cairns Tourism Industry Assocition president Kevin Byrne said operators were “continuously fighting against this over-egging of the decline of the Great Barrier Reef”.
The perception that the reef was dying was “fuelled by the contest of academics to try and paint the most gloomy picture,” he said. “The reef needs to be managed, it doesn’t at the moment need to be saved.”
According to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, there were 2.1 million “visitor days” to the reef in 2019.
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
*****************************************
Undeniable? Then how come I am denying it?
People in temperate climates regularly die in "heatwaves" -- temperatures that would be unremarkable in the tropics.
So the only thing of interest here is whether the temperatures concerned were unusual. And it does appear that they were. But where do you go from there?
"Attribution science" was enlisted to show a link to global warming. I won't dwell on the impossible task that is attribution science. It defies logic. But even if we accept its conclusions as correct, what was the cause of the global warming? Was it the increased level of CO2 in the atmosphere?
CO2 levels and temperature are poorly correlated so we need to use Occams razor here. And in applying Occams razor we note that the earth has been slowly warming since the Little Ice Age -- long before the modern human activities that Warmists decry. So the simple explanation for increased global temperatures is that they are a continuation of a natural process and have nothing to do with human emissions of CO2
So even if we accept that the deaths were caused by global warming, how do we know what caused global warming? We cannot know that. All we can do is guess. And the influence of CO2 is an implausible guess
In 2018 in Japan, more than 1,000 people died during an unprecedented heat wave. In 2019, scientists proved it would have been impossible without global warming.
July 23, 2018, was a day unlike any seen before in Japan. It was the peak of a weekslong heat wave that smashed previous temperature records across the historically temperate nation. The heat started on July 9, on farms and in cities that only days earlier were fighting deadly rains, mudslides, and floods. As the waters receded, temperatures climbed. By July 15, 200 of the 927 weather stations in Japan recorded temperatures of 35 degrees Celsius, about 95 degrees Fahrenheit, or higher. Food and electricity prices hit multiyear highs as the power grid and water resources were pushed to their limits. Tens of thousands of people were hospitalized due to heat exhaustion and heatstroke. On Monday, July 23, the heat wave reached its zenith. The large Tokyo suburb of Kumagaya was the epicenter, and around 3 p.m., the Kumagaya Meteorological Observatory measured a temperature of 41.1 degrees Celsius, or 106 F. It was the hottest temperature ever recorded in Japan, but the record was more than a statistic. It was a tragedy: Over the course of those few weeks, more than a thousand people died from heat-related illnesses.
On July 24, the day after the peak of the heat wave, the Japan Meteorological Agency declared it a natural disaster. A disaster it was. But a natural one? Not so much.
In early 2019, researchers at the Japan Meteorological Agency started looking into the circumstances that had caused the unprecedented, deadly heat wave. They wanted to consider it through a relatively new lens—through the young branch of meteorology called attribution science, which allows researchers to directly measure the impact of climate change on individual extreme weather events. Attribution science, at its most basic, calculates how likely an extreme weather event is in today’s climate-changed world and compares that with how likely a similar event would be in a world without anthropogenic warming. Any difference between those two probabilities can be attributed to climate change.
Attribution science was first conceived in the early 2000s, and since then, researchers have used it as a lens to understand the influence of climate change on everything from droughts to rainfall to coral bleaching. As scientists have long predicted, the vast majority of extreme weather events studied to date have been made more likely because of climate change. But the 2018 Japan heat wave is different. As people who lived in Japan knew at the time, the oppressive temperatures were more than unusual. They were unprecedented. In fact, without climate change, they would have been impossible.
These people are the first provable deaths of climate change.“We would never have experienced such an event without global warming,” says Yukiko Imada of the Japan Meteorological Agency.
On June 7, 2019, Imada, Masahiro Watanabe, and others published an attribution study of the 2018 Japan heat wave in the journal Scientific Online Letters on the Atmosphere. They found that the deadly event of the previous summer “could not have happened without human-induced global warming.”
This heat wave is not the first extreme event found to be only possible because of climate change. But it is the first short-lived event, and the first to have direct impacts on human health. Given that tens of thousands were hospitalized and more than a thousand died due to the heat wave, in a sense, these people are the first provable deaths of climate change.
For Watanabe, the result wasn’t unexpected. It was more of a grim inevitability. “It was not that surprising,” he says of his unprecedented result. An event like this was “naturally expected as global mean temperature continued to rise.” But for both Watanabe and Imada, it holds real historical significance. “It is very sensational for me because human activity has created a new phenomenon. Human activity has created a new phase of the climate,” says Imada.
You couldn’t live through this heat wave without realizing that something was unusual. Ayako Nomizu lives in Tokyo. “When I was growing up in the ’80s, if we had 31 or 32 degrees centigrade, that was hot,” she says. “We would say ‘Oh, my God, it’s gonna be really 32 degrees?’” Summers recently, and especially 2018’s, concern her. “Now we are seeing 37, 38 [degrees]. It’s crazy. We didn’t really have this kind of heat before.” Nomizu works for Climate Action 100+, a group that helps investors and companies transition to clean energy, so for her, the connection between climate change and the extreme heat in summers is obvious.
Kazuo Ogawa, a 65-year-old landlord who lives in Tokyo, says he has never experienced anything like the heat wave of 2018. His memories of the experience are visceral. “I was so uncomfortable. I took a shower three times a day, I changed my T-shirt three times a day,” he says.
This kind of heat, as the hospitalization numbers and death toll show, is dangerous. Especially so in Japan, where most people didn’t grow up with air conditioning because it was never needed, and where heat exhaustion was basically unknown until recently. To Ogawa and many Japanese, this is a new problem. “Heat exhaustion is called netsuchusho in Japanese. I never heard of this phrase, this illness, 30 years ago,” Ogawa said.
Heat exhaustion and its more deadly version, heatstroke, are simply the physiological changes that occur when someone has an extremely elevated body temperature. There are a lot of mechanisms humans have evolved to prevent dangerous overheating—sweating and other internal changes like increased heart rate and the transfer of blood from organs to the skin can usually keep the body at a safe temperature—but there is a limit to what the body can handle. If the outside temperature gets too intense or high humidity prevents sweat from evaporating and pulling warmth out of the skin, internal body temperature will start to rise. When this happens, blood vessels dilate in an attempt to get rid of more heat, causing a drop in blood pressure that leads to the first symptoms of heat stress—lightheadedness and nausea. As the body continues to heat up, organs swell, and cell-signaling processes, especially in the brain, are disrupted. At this point people begin to fall unconscious, and if their temperature is not lowered quickly, the damage can be fatal.
SOURCE
Recent global warming trends are inconsistent with very high climate sensitivity
The Warmists are dialing back their predictions of danger. They think that more CO2 will produce less warming than they once did
Research published this week in Earth System Dynamics reports that the most sensitive climate models overestimate global warming during the last 50 years.
Three scientists from the University of Exeter studied the output of complex climate models and compared them to temperature observations since the 1970s.
Recent developments in cloud modeling have produced models that portray very large sensitivity to rising greenhouse gas concentrations.
A subset of models even showed that a doubling of CO2 could lead to over 5°C of warming, questioning whether the goals of the Paris agreement are achievable even if nations do everything they can.
The lead author of the study, Ph.D. candidate Femke Nijsse from the University of Exeter, said: "In evaluating the climate models we were able to exploit the fact that thanks to clean air regulation, air pollution in the form of climate-cooling aerosols have stopped increasing worldwide, allowing the greenhouse gas signal to dominate recent warming."
The amount of warming that occurs after CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are doubled is called the equilibrium climate sensitivity.
The study found that based on the latest generation of climate models the equilibrium climate sensitivity is likely between 1.9 and 3.4 °C.
Co-author Mark Williamson, of Exeter's Global Systems Institute, added: "Global warming since 1970 also provides even better guidance on the rate of climate change in the future.
"We find a likely range for the 'Transient Climate Response' of 1.3-2.1 °C, whether we use the latest models or the previous generation of models."
The new study is only one piece of the puzzle.
A recent review paper found that low estimates of climate sensitivity can be excluded because they are, in general, not consistent with climate changes in Earth's past.
Co-author Professor Peter Cox explains the significance of these findings: "It is good to see that studies are now converging on a range of equilibrium climate sensitivity, and that both high and low values can be excluded.
SOURCE
The naff symbolism of modern eco-protest
Earlier this month, activists from Extinction Rebellion (XR) poured red paint on the steps of Trafalgar Square and threw luminous green ink into its fountains. The colours, representing ‘ecocide’ (green) and genocide (red), were intended to raise awareness about the impact of Covid-19 on indigenous Brazilian people.
Or perhaps the aim was merely to draw attention to XR themselves. After all, it’s not clear how pigment poured over the UK capital’s iconic landmarks is going to make a difference to indigenous people. What will Londoners do with their new-found ‘awareness’? And what kind of solidarity is created by acts that most people will see as nothing more than petty vandalism?
Moreover, XR’s latest stunt might have been better directed towards fellow environmental campaigners at the WWF. As has been exposed by indigenous-rights organisation Survival International, the massive green NGO stands accused of an endless list of human-rights abuses against indigenous people living – or trying to live – in the path of WWF’s conservation agenda. Such ‘solidarity’ ought to raise questions about the green movement. Instead, WWF continues to be given tens of millions from the UK taxpayer.
XR and WWF are not the only green NGOs to have developed a strange interest in indigenous peoples. In 2013, Greenpeace’s recruitment of Canada’s First Nations voices to their Save the Arctic campaign was frustrated by the Inuit Circumpolar Council’s rejection of the ‘questionable use of the Indigenous voice’.
It turns out that some indigenous people, living in very cold places, might find fossil fuels quite useful, and some might even aspire to work in the oil and gas industries. But greens take for granted the idea that indigenous peoples want to live ‘traditional’ lifestyles. This presupposition speaks to the green fetish for lifestyles which are closely dependent on nature. When they are not murdering and evicting indigenous people or using them as political puppets, greens celebrate indigenous people as symbols of pre-industrial authenticity. But not as people. When voiceless indigenous people come into opposition with Western NGOs, greens turn out to be as indifferent to them as any logging, mining or agricultural corporation.
The image of helpless, voiceless victims helps green NGOs to cast simple moral categories over the messy business of societies and their development. But Greenpeace and WWF let the cat out of the bag. This is how they want all humans to be: both literally and figuratively powerless, living pre-industrial lifestyles. As soon as indigenous people become politically independent – that is, able to assert themselves politically – or participate in the economy as producers and consumers, or simply stand in the way of green ambitions, their symbolic power fades.
Many have observed the recent trend of political protest’s convergence with performance art. Green NGOs and campaigners, unable to produce mass support for their political views, have had to turn protest into a different kind of spectacle than the one produced by demonstrations of the popular will through the weight of numbers. Every eco-protest today is sparsely populated, but rich with deeply naff symbolism, combined with seemingly transgressive performance – colours and vandalism – to attract attention.
This formula for protest probably reflects the full extent of the protesters’ understanding of the issues facing indigenous people (or people in the developing world more broadly). Indigenous people are just useful symbols to green campaigns: objects of both pity and aspiration. But eco-warriors’ grasp of the ‘environment’ is also entirely symbolic. Trees become lungs, nature becomes Gaia, and industry becomes sin. Greens claim that their perspective is grounded in science, but the logic of the symbolic order haunting green claims is much more often based on mystical mumbo-jumbo and allegories of fire and brimstone than on any attempt to understand society’s interactions with the natural world.
The problem for the ecological zealots that think nothing of inflicting themselves on the rest of society is that very few people speak their language, much less share their views. Most people don’t want to be the eco-serfs in the green lunatics’ designs for an eco-political order that will please Gaia. Most people don’t think their interests are going to be served, let alone understood, by people in fancy dress committing acts of vandalism against a nation’s monuments.
If you think environmentalists are champions of indigenous people’s – or any people’s – rights, you probably think Avatar was a documentary.
SOURCE
Revealed: how the Great Barrier Reef is really doing
Even the academics are finding it hard to moan about it
Is it dying or thriving? The state of the Great Barrier Reef has become a hot button topic, but a report out today gives the most complete picture of the state of our most valuable national icon.
Reports of the death of the Great Barrier Reef may have been exaggerated, with new research showing “encouraging” signs of coral growth in two-thirds of 86 monitored reefs.
The annual report of the health of the reef by the Australian Institute of Marine Science, published today, has been welcomed by tourism operators who say they are battling widespread perceptions the reef is already dead.
Today’s report shows modest increases in coral coverage in the reef’s central and southern zones, and a stabilisation in the north, after several years of hits from bleaching, cyclones and outbreaks of the crown-of-thorns starfish.
Head researcher Dr Mike Emslie said the survey, which is now in its 35th year, showed “the reef is resilient, but this resilience has limits”.
Dr Emslie’s team conducted their assessment between September 2019 and June 2020 at reefs scattered from below Rockhampton to the very tip of Cape York. The work is done by means of a “manta tow”, in which a marine scientist is pulled along a section of the reef underwater for two minutes, and afterwards calculates the percentage of sea floor covered by coral.
“Out of the 86 reefs we surveyed this year, two thirds were low or moderate, with less than 30 per cent coral cover,” he said. “There were 23 reefs that had high coral cover, which is 30 to 50 per cent, and only five had very high coral cover, over 50 per cent.”
Comparing this year’s results to previous years of coral coverage gives a different perspective on the health of the reef.
In the northern reef, coral coverage in 2020 was just half of what it was at its recorded peak, and in the southern reef it was at 60 per cent of its best-ever result. The peaks in both areas were recorded in 1988.
Coral coverage in the central part of the reef reached its highest level ever recorded in 2016, Dr Emslie said, but this year the coverage had fallen back to 61 per cent of that peak.
“The reef is taking repeated hits from coral bleaching, cyclones and crown-of-thorns outbreaks. While we have seen the Great Barrier Reef’s ability to begin recovery from these pressures, the frequency and intensity of disturbances means less time for full recovery to take place,” Dr Emslie said.
The full effect of last summer’s mass bleaching event – the third in five years – would not be known for several months, he added.
“The 35-year data set we’ve got shows that the long term trajectory of hard coral cover is actually ratcheting down,” Dr Emslie said.
“There are lot of good reefs still out there, but there’s also lots of impacted reefs. People can still go out and see the Great Barrier Reef in all its glory but we really need to be aware of what the long term data is telling is.”
Gareth Phillips, CEO of the Association of Marine Park Tour Operators and himself a reef scientist, said people who worked on the reef were seeing its recovery day to day, but negative publicity about the condition of the reef had been affecting visitor numbers prior to the coronavirus outbreak.
“The overwhelming message is ‘Go now to see what’s left, and what you will probably see is this stark white reef that’s just on it’s last legs’. It’s just completely false,” he said.
“Marine operators do not deny that the reef has gone through some substantial pressures but as this report has shown, the reef has ability to recover,” Mr Phillips said. “It’s exactly in line with what the operators have been trying to say – that the reef is not dead and it is a beautiful place.”
Tourism operations on the reef were currently running at about 10-15 per cent of their pre-COVID capacity, Mr Phillips said, but he rejected popular suggestions this lack of activity could help the reef “heal”.
“Tourism actually has a positive impact on the reef,” he said. “With recent bleaching events, the tourism locations had very little impact because (operators) showed good stewardship. They monitor the reef. They’re a critical part of its management.”
The lack of commercial enterprise on the reef during the lockdown was also leading to an increase in illegal fishing in the area because the tourism boats provide surveillance, Mr Phillips said.
Cairns Tourism Industry Assocition president Kevin Byrne said operators were “continuously fighting against this over-egging of the decline of the Great Barrier Reef”.
The perception that the reef was dying was “fuelled by the contest of academics to try and paint the most gloomy picture,” he said. “The reef needs to be managed, it doesn’t at the moment need to be saved.”
According to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, there were 2.1 million “visitor days” to the reef in 2019.
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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Sunday, August 23, 2020
Hotter Tropical Soils Emit More Carbon Dioxide: Sixty-five billion metric tons of the plant-warming gas could enter the atmosphere by 2100
This article is one of the more contemptible to come out of the NYT. Does CO2 really WARM plants? First I have heard of it. It is usually said to warm the whole globe. Its effect on plants is to promote their growth. And does soil "spew" anything? It certainly doesn't emit carbon. Carbon is a solid element. CO2 is a gas.
And what does it matter anyway? Atmospheric CO2 levels and global temperature are very weakly correlated so claiming a causal relationship between the two is tendentious
Humble dirt could pack an unexpected climate punch according to a new study published in the journal Nature. An experiment that heated soil underneath a tropical rainforest to mimic temperatures expected in coming decades found that hotter soils released 55 percent more planet-warming carbon dioxide than did nearby unwarmed areas.
If the results apply throughout the tropics, much of the carbon stored underground could be released as the planet heats up. “The loss rate is huge,” said Andrew Nottingham, an ecologist at the University of Edinburgh, who led the study. “It’s a badnews story.” The thin skin of soil that covers much of our planet’s land stores vast amounts of carbon — more, in total, than in all plants and the atmosphere combined. That carbon feeds hordes of bacteria and fungi, which build some of it into more microbes while respiring the rest into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Many of these microbes grow more active at warmer temperatures, increasing digestion and respiration rates.
The finding “is another example of why we need to worry more” about how fast the globe is warming, said Eric Davidson, an environmental scientist at the University of Maryland College of Environmental Science in Frostburg who was not involved in the research.
Ecologists began in the early 1990s building apparatuses to artificially heat soils. Such experiments in temperate and boreal forests have shown that carbon-rich soils almost always belch carbon dioxide when warmed. In 2016, a group of researchers estimated that by 2050, soils could release so much of the gas that it would be like adding the carbon emissions of a new country the size of the United States.
But that study left out the perpetually warm, mega-biodiverse tropics, where a third of all soil carbon resides. Figuring out the fate of this carbon would require grappling with the many pitfalls of doing research in the tropics: humidity, storms and hungry animals that can take a toll on research equipment — chewing through electrical wires or protective coverings, for example — and on researchers themselves.
In 2014, Dr. Nottingham, then a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh, traveled to Barro Colorado Island, a humancreated island in the Panama Canal area that’s home to the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He buried electrical wires in five circular plots to a depth of nearly four feet. For protection from the elements and ravenous insects, he shielded the wires inside metal structures shaped like freakishly large spiders. Measurements were logged inside weatherproof boxes.
“Our experiment was basically me as a postdoc making things out of a D.I.Y. shop,” Dr. Nottingham said. The team encountered a number of hiccups, including electrical connections that blew up and cost the researchers nearly a year and much of their budget to repair.
Starting in November 2016, the wires’ electrical resistance began warming the soil by almost 6 degrees Fahrenheit, within the range of how much the tropics are projected to warm by century’s end according to current climate models. Other equipment measured the carbon dioxide coming out of both experimental plots and nearby plots that weren’t artificially warmed as well as microbial activity in the plots.
An experiment warming soil in El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico had turned on two months earlier but was pummeled by back-to-back Category 5 hurricanes in September 2017; the study team didn’t turn the power back on for a year.
The results from Dr. Nottingham’s team are sobering: Over two years, warmed soils spewed out 55 percent more carbon than control plots. “This is a very large response,” said Dr. Margaret Torn, an ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley Lab in California, who runs a similar warming experiment in a California forest that reported a roughly 35 percent increase in carbon emissions after two years. “It’s one of the largest I’ve heard of.” If the entire tropics were to behave similarly, the researchers estimate that 65 billion metric tons of carbon would enter the atmosphere by 2100 — more than six times the annual emissions from all human-related sources.
Scaling the results to account for the entire tropics is complicated, however. The soils on Barro Colorado Island are richer in nutrients than many others, such as those of much of the vast Amazon rainforest, Dr. Davidson noted. That could make it easier for the Panamanian microbes to ramp up their activity. Microbial communities in African and Asian soils are very different from those in the Americas, Dr. Torn added.
And while there is agreement that climate models need to treat soil more realistically, how best to do that is unclear. The new study strikes a blow against simple theories predicting that tropical soils will respond weakly to warming, said Kathe Todd- Brown, a soil scientist at the University of Florida in Gainesville who was not part of the research team. But to really get a handle on the problem, she said, modelers will need information about how microbes respond to variations in soil moisture and nutrients in addition to temperature.
SOURCE
Maine Supreme Court Declares Power Line Initiative Unconstitutional
In an unusual move, Maine’s state Supreme Court has declared unconstitutional a ballot initiative that would, if passed by the voters, have blocked a power line project running through Maine to Massachusetts. The state Supreme Court sent the case back to the Superior Court, directing it to rule that the initiative is unconstitutional and barring any legal challenge by Secretary of State Matt Dunlap (D) to keep it on the ballot.
Who Decides Power Line’s Fate?
In 2019, Maine’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC) approved Central Maine Power’s (CMP) proposed project to construct a 145-mile transmission line cutting through western Maine to Massachusetts, per a deal between the two states, to bring power from hydroelectric plants in Quebec to the region. CMP said the power line is necessary to ensure reliable power, as the region’s coal power plants are being shuttered and new natural-gas power plants and the pipelines to deliver the fuel are being blocked by lawsuits across the northeast region. PUC agreed.
Opponents of the initiative gathered enough signatures to put a ballot initiative before the voters in the November 2020 elections that would reverse PUC’s decision and block the power line.
Supporters of the power line project, including CMP and a subsidiary, New England Clean Energy Connect (NECEC), challenged the constitutionality of the ballot initiative in court. The plaintiffs argued Maine’s law was clear, that more than 100 years ago the state legislature had delegated to PUC the sole authority over most utility-related decisions. CMP and NECEC also argued it was appropriate for the courts to decide the constitutionality of the ballot initiative.
Supreme Court Reverses Precedent, Lower Court
The decision by the Supreme Court to prevent the initiative from being put before the voters was unprecedented. Courts in Maine have never before blocked an initiative which had garnered the appropriate number of valid signatures. Instead, the courts had always interpreted Maine’s constitution as allowing voters decide an issue at the ballot box. This was the precedent the Superior Court followed when it dismissed opponents’ challenges to the ballot initiative in June, ruling courts did not need to decide the constitutionality of the referendum before the election.
The plaintiffs appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, arguing court system did have the power under Maine’s Constitution both to hear the case and to block this particular initiative. During oral arguments, Dunlap testified the Secretary of State’s assistant district attorney general agreed it would be proper for the Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality of this particular ballot question, and asked it to do so.
“[The referendum] exceeds the scope of the people’s legislative powers conferred by … the Maine Constitution,” the Supreme Court ruled in its August 13 decision, directing the Superior Court to bar the initiative as unconstitutional.
Calls Decision Legal, Beneficial
The Supreme Court’s ruling was correct as a matter of law and will benefit Maine’s economy and its environment, Thorn Dickinson, president of the NECEC, told WBUR.
“They determined that the initiative failed to meet the constitutional requirement,” said Dickenson. “It was clear to me, anyway, that this would be the likely outcome.
“The ruling by the Maine Supreme Court is a victory for the state of Maine and our future, both environmentally and economically,” Dickinson said in a separate press release.
SOURCE
The Green New Deal Means Monumental Disruption
Kamala Harris co-sponsored the Senate resolution to support the Green New Deal. Now Joe Biden has endorsed the plan. Naturally, people want to know what the GND will cost – usually meaning in state and federal government spending. But that is the wrong question.
The real question is, how much do Green New Dealers expect to get out of it, at whattotalcost? Mr. Biden says he wants the feds to spend nearly $7 trillion over the next decade on healthcare, energy and housing transformation, climate change and other GND agenda items. But that is only part of the picture.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who has a degree in some socialist version of economics) and the folks who helped her write Biden's so-called Climate Plan have a clear idea of how much money they want, and pretty much know where they expect the money to come from. Here it is in its clearest form, as stated by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s then chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti:
“The resolution describes the 10-year plan to transform every sector of our economy to remove GHG [greenhouse gases] and pollution. It says it does this through huge investments in renewables, at WW2 scales (which was 40-60% of America’s GDP).”
World War II was a time of great sacrifice and hardship, as part of a dramatic and historic mobilization to win a horrific global war. However, that hard reality doesn’t matter to these folks. They say we are now waging a war to stop catastrophic climate change. So money, sacrifice and disruption are irrelevant.
Our nation’s GDP is around $20 trillion a year, or $200 trillion in ten years. 40-60% of that is $80-120 trillion. For simplicity, let’s call it an even $100 trillion to finance the Green New Deal utopian dream.
$100 trillion! The ways and means of raising this stupendous sum are also clear in their minds. It will be done the same way WW2 was financed, however that was. To them, it’s obvious that we can simply do this, because we did it before. The specifics don’t matter. Government elites will figure them out.
But even this arrogant, cavalier attitude is only part of the picture.
If you read what Green New Dealers say, confusion arises because people think the GND is an ordinary policy proposal:“Here’s what we want done, and this what it should cost.” It is nothing like that. The Green New Deal is more along the lines of,“Here’s the level of effort we require to transform our entire economy, and this is what we should be able to do with that much money.”
People tend to interpret Green New Dealer talk of a WW2-like mobilization as a simple metaphor. But these folks mean it as an actual measure of what they are determined to do. So far they have glossed over and ignored the extreme hardships of mobilization. Here’s just one example – not from front lines mayhem, but from the United States home front during World War II.
“Gasoline, meat and clothing were tightly rationed. Most families were allocated 3 US gallons of gasoline a week, which sharply curtailed driving for any purpose. Production of most durable goods, like cars, new housing, vacuum cleaners and kitchen appliances, was banned until the war ended. In industrial areas housing was in short supply as people doubled up and lived in cramped quarters. Prices and wages were controlled.”
No doubt the Green New Deal mobilization would impose different hardships. But all mobilizations are oppressive. You can’t commandeer half of the GDP without inflicting severe disruption on people’s lives.
The argument is sound in its way, provided there is a need for all-out war – which there is not. The minor to modest temperature, climate and extreme weather changes we’ve been seeing (in the real world outside computer models) explain why most Americans see no need for a painful war. So does the fact that China, India and other emerging economies are not about to give up fossil fuels anytime soon.
In fact, polls show that roughly half of Americans do not even believe in the idea of human caused global warming, much less that it is an“existential threat,” as Senator Harris claims it is. The latest Gallup poll found that only 1% of US adults consider “climate change/environment/pollution” to be “the most important problem facing this country today.” That’s down from a meager 2% in the May 28-June 4 poll.
Even more revealing, a 2019 AP-NORC poll found that 68% of adult Americans were unwilling to pay even an extra $10 on their monthly electricity bill to combat global warming. Indeed, 57% of them would not be willing to pay more than $1.00 in added electricity charges to fight climate change!
Just wait until they see what the Biden-Harris-AOC-Democrat Green New Deal would cost them.
And it’s not just that their costs would likely skyrocket from an average US 13.2¢ per kilowatt hour (11.4¢ or less in ten states) to well beyond the nearly 20¢ per kWh that families are already paying in California and New York, or the 30¢ that families are now paying in ultra-green Germany. Or that factories, businesses, hospitals, schools and everyone else would also see their costs escalate – with blue collar families, the sick and elderly, poor and minority communities hammered hardest.
It’s that the Green New Deal would force every American to replace their gasoline and diesel cars and trucks with expensive short-haul electric vehicles; their gas furnaces with electric systems; their home, local and state electrical and transmission systems with expensive upgrades that can handle a totally electric economy. They’ll see their landscapes, coastlines and wildlife habitats blanketed with wind turbines, solar panels, transmission lines and warehouses filled with thousands of half-ton batteries. Virtually every component of this GND nation would be manufactured in China and other faraway places.
The cost of this massive, total transformation of our energy and economic system would easily reach $10 trillion: $30,000 per person or $120,000 per family – on top of those skyrocketing electricity prices. And that’s just the energy component of this all-encompassing Green New Deal.
These are stupendous, outrageous costs and personal sacrifices. Every American, at every campaign event and town meeting, should ask Green New Deal supporters if they think America needs to – or can afford to – cough up $10 trillion or $100 trillion over the next ten years. And not let them get away with glib, evasive answers, or attempts to laugh these questions off as meritless or irrelevant.
The American people are not about to be mobilized into an all-out war against dubious climate change, with price tags like these coupled with repeated blackouts, huger personal sacrifices, and massive joblessness in every sector of the economy – except among government ruling classes.
They’ve already seen news stories about the latest rolling blackouts in California (here, here, here and here) – resulting from one-third of that state’s electricity coming from “renewable” sources, and with a good portion of that being hydroelectric, much of it imported from other states. They must be wondering what their lives, livelihoods and living standards would look like under100%wind and solar power.
And yet, once again, even all this insanity is only a small part of the picture.
Remember, the Green New Deal is also about government run healthcare – and an economy and nation where “progressive” and “woke” legislators, regulators, judges and activists tell companies what they can manufacture and sell ... and tell us what we can buy, eat and drink; how and how much we can heat and cool our homes; and what we can read, hear, think and say, as they “transform” our culture and traditions.
The GND is being promoted by politicians, news and social media, “educators” and others who also want to eliminate free enterprise capitalism; have totally open borders, even for criminals and people who might have Covid and other diseases; and want to defund the police, put rapists, looters and arsonists back on our streets, and take away our right and ability to defend ourselves, our homes and our families.
The time to think long and hard about all of this is NOW. Not sometime after the November 3 elections.
SOURCE
Australia: Ban on uranium mining in New South Wales is set to be lifted after 30 years in an effort to create new jobs - but environmentalists are furious
Uranium mining is set be allowed in New South Wales - creating a wave of new jobs - after the government struck a deal with One Nation to lift a ban on the industry.
A bill to be voted on in the upper house of parliament next week calls for the repeal of legislation banning nuclear facilities and uranium mining in the state.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian and Deputy Premier John Barilaro are understood to have thrown their support behind bill by directly working out a deal with One Nation.
The deal has left some Coalition members in the Liberals and many of Mr Barilaro's Nationals colleagues fuming.
In an effort to appease their party a deal had been struck which would allow uranium mining but keep the existing ban on nuclear facilities, according to 7 News.
Nuclear energy generation is currently banned by the federal government so this part of the deal would only signal intent not to push for any of the power plants.
If the federal government were to lift the ban then the deal would also allow New South Wales to follow suit, according to The Daily Telegraph.
The ban on the industry has been in place since the late 1980s and would likely see significant backlash from nuclear energy opponents in repealed.
Australia has been estimated to hold 30 per cent of the world's uranium reserves - the largest of any single country.
As such, the industry could generate a significant amount of jobs and revenue for the state according to The Minerals Council of Australia chief executive, Tania Constable.
'Australia is endowed with the world's largest uranium resource but is only the third largest producer,' she said.
Ms Constable said if the bans are repealed, it would help strengthen Australia's position as a global uranium producer.
South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory are currently the only states and territories that allow the mining of uranium.
The arguments against mining of the radioactive metal include the environmental aspects, the dangers of nuclear power, and indigenous land issues.
The draft legislation has also attracted criticism form conservationists. The Australian Conservation Foundation has argued the country doesn't need to explore 'dangerous' nuclear options.
'The state ban on uranium mining has served NSW well and should remain,' Australian Capital Territory nuclear campaigner Dave Sweeney said in a statement. 'Uranium mining in New South Wales would risk the health of the environment and regional communities for scant promise of return.'
Cabinet will need to give their final approval of Ms Berejiklian's and Mr Barilaro's deal with One Nation on Monday.
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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Friday, August 21, 2020
Trump administration finalizes oil drilling plan in Alaska wildlife refuge
The Trump administration on Monday finalized its plan to open up part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and gas development, a move that overturns six decades of protections for the largest remaining stretch of wilderness in the United States.
The decision sets the stage for what is expected to be a fierce legal battle over the fate of the refuge’s vast, remote coastal plain, which is believed to sit atop billions of barrels of oil but is also home to polar bears and migrating herds of caribou.
The Interior Department said on Monday that it had completed its required reviews and would begin preparations to auction off drilling leases. “I do believe there could be a lease sale by the end of the year,” Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said.
Environmentalists, who have battled for decades to keep energy companies out of the refuge, say the Interior Department failed to adequately consider the effects that oil and gas development could have on climate change and wildlife. They and other opponents, including some Alaska Native groups, are expected to file lawsuits to try to block lease sales.
“We will continue to fight this at every turn,” said Adam Kolton, executive director of the Alaska Wilderness League, in a statement. “Any oil company that would seek to drill in the Arctic Refuge will face enormous reputational, legal and financial risks.”
Though any oil production within the refuge would still be at least a decade in the future, companies that bought leases could begin the process of seeking permits and exploring for oil and gas.
President Trump has long cast an increase in Arctic drilling as integral to his push to expand domestic fossil fuel production on federal lands and secure America’s “energy dominance.” Republicans have prized the refuge as a lucrative source of oil and gas ever since the Reagan administration first recommended drilling in 1987, but efforts to open it up had long been stymied by Democratic lawmakers until 2017, when the G.O.P. used its control of both houses of Congress to pass a bill authorizing lease sales.
“ANWR is a big deal that Ronald Reagan couldn’t get done and nobody could get done,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with Fox & Friends on Monday.
It remains unclear how much interest there will be from energy companies at a time when many countries are trying to wean themselves from fossil fuels and oil prices are crashing amid the coronavirus pandemic. Exploring and drilling in harsh Arctic conditions remains difficult and costly.
Nevertheless, by proceeding with the lease sales, the Trump administration has made the Arctic refuge a potential issue in the presidential campaign, and the region’s fate may ultimately hinge on the election’s outcome. The Democratic nominee for president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., has called for permanent protection of the refuge.
However, even if he were to win the White House, it could prove difficult for his administration to overturn existing lease rights once they have been auctioned to energy companies.
SOURCE
Kamala’s anti-fracking position
Everyone is talking about Joe Biden’s new VP candidate, Kamala Harris. The media has painted her as a bold moderate - but did you know that Kamala actually supports a ban on fracking?
Not only would this hurt hundreds of thousands of hard working Americans, it’s also not backed by science. We explain Kamala’s anti-fracking position and how some in the media are trying to paint those who mispronounce Kamala (Comma-lah) as racist!
Email from Ann and Phelim info@unreportedstorysociety.com
Some conservatives believe in global warming
Most of what Curbelo claims about climate change is demonstrably false and is simply talking points regurgitated from the climate alarm establishment. Contrary to what he claims, the rate of sea level rise has not increased, ocean “acidification” is not taking place, extreme weather is not increasing, etc.
It is possible that Curbelo does not care what the truth is. If this is the case, there is no point in trying to talk to him. But it is also possible that he is reasonably sincere and has been misinformed.
Florida Republicans are at the forefront of conservative efforts to address climate change. Far before Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s January climate bill, conservative policymakers from the Sunshine State were enacting local policies aimed at fighting climate change, and advocating for such policies on the federal level.
Prominent among these policymakers was Carlos Curbelo, who represented Florida’s 26th district, which is especially vulnerable to rising sea levels, from 2015 to 2019. The centerpiece of Curbelo’s work on the issue was the MARKET CHOICE Act, a bill that called for a tax on carbon emissions whose cost would be offset by eliminating the federal gas tax. “To be frank, I didn’t have high expectations it would become law,” Curbelo says in an interview. “My goal was to provoke a discussion and draw interest to the issue and it certainly did that.” He might not have known it at the time, but the bill marked a pivotal moment for the GOP: Climate-change policy had made its way onto the Party’s agenda.
It is no accident that this development came out of Florida, a state whose economy and identity are inextricably tied up in its environment, which is in turn threatened by climate change. “I didn’t run for Congress with the idea to become an environmentalist” Curbelo says in an interview. “What really motivated me was a meeting with NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration]. . . . They showed me the data, the risk that my district faced.”
Curbelo notes that Florida’s barrier reef — the third largest in the world — is “being hurt by ocean acidification, which is a direct result of greater CO2 in the atmosphere.” The fishing and tourism industries that from such a big part of the state’s economy are directly dependent on the health of the ocean and sea levels. All in all, Floridians “really depend on the health of the environment more than some [other] places in the country,” Curbelo says. So concern about climate change is “not ideological; it’s pragmatic.”
Curbelo and other conservatives who care about climate change have reason to hope that such pragmatism is starting to filter through the rest of the GOP. Curbelo notes that there’s been a “drastic change in rhetoric” on the Right in recent months. For years, the party ignored the issue and, in essence, ceded it to Democrats by declining to expend any energy or political capital on it. But this year, several conservatives have come out in support of a “clean energy innovation” approach, hoping to offer an alternative to what they see as unworkable progressive proposals.
What catalyzed this change? Curbelo chalks it up to two things: science and politics.
“A lot of Republicans for years have been watching the science carefully, and the science is so compelling now that it’s motivated Republicans to speak out,” Curbelo says. While rising sea levels have long threatened trillions of dollars of coastal property in Florida, the interior of the country is starting to feel the effects of a warming climate now, too. “Changing weather patterns have really complicated life for farmers,” he says. “Extreme weather events have caused a lot of destruction. . . . We’re seeing larger and stronger storms with a greater frequency, because these storms get their energy from the oceans and the oceans are getting warmer.”
The scientific reality has in turn driven home the political dangers that climate-change poses to Republicans. For many on the right, “the case for taking care of the environment has always been there but I think the political reality of it has really hit in the past year,” says Quill Robinson of the American Conservation Coalition (ACC), a group of young conservatives focused on environmental issues. ACC polling has found that climate change is an important issue for 82 percent of voters between the ages of 18 and 35, including 77 percent of those who describe themselves “right-leaning.” 60 percent of respondents indicated that climate change “will impact who they vote for in 2020.” Robinson argues that Republicans can’t afford to write off these voters. “If you’re a member of Congress saying climate change is a hoax, you’re hurting yourself politically,” he says.
That’s because there exists a real demand for a pragmatic approach that does not seek to reinvent the American economy as we know it. 53 percent of left-leaning respondents, 58 percent of moderate respondents, and 67 percent of right-leaning respondents in the ACC poll said they wanted “an alternative environmental movement that promotes free-market, limited government solutions.” Many voters are wary of the revolutionary climate-change plans proposed by the environmental Left, and that has paved the way for conservatives’ entrance into the debate.
Alex Trembath of the Breakthrough Institute says that by presenting the issue as something that “threatens the sort of end of society or the extinction of the human race,” progressives have narrowed the range of possible solutions and created gridlock. Domestically, proposals that aim to cutting emissions to an exact degree by an exact date can make for a good soundbite, but they are almost always economically and/or politically infeasible. Globally, agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen Accord have had little success at spurring collective action to curb emissions. As a result, Trembath says, Republicans have recently been emboldened and “entered the fray.”
The dirty secret of the climate-change debate is that there is no “silver bullet,” no foolproof way of definitively solving the problem. We don’t have the resources or infrastructure to cut emissions as drastically as some would like, and the green technologies advocated by progressives simply can’t make a big enough dent in emissions. “We’ve known for a long time that wind and solar weren’t going to decarbonize the American economy” on their own, Trembath says. What’s needed is a “much wider portfolio of technologies.”
McCarthy’s climate-change plan seems to take that message to heart. It focuses on innovation and natural solutions over large-scale economic reforms, and while it’s not a huge step forward, it’s a start. McCarthy contends that Republicans “can bring you a healthier, cleaner, and safer environment through innovation” while “[what] Democrats want is greater control and command.” His plan calls for planting 1 trillion new trees, managing soil health, and promoting conservation and recycling. It would also invest heavily in R&D in hopes of developing new emissions-cutting technologies, and give tax breaks to companies that use carbon-capture to reduce emissions.
All of this policy ferment on the right is critical, given the lack of feasible, large-scale emissions-cutting solutions. Trembath shares a hypothetical: Say we agree to enact a mandate on the steel industry that calls for a 50 percent reduction of emissions by 2030. “There’s just no way to do it. . . . We don’t know how to make fertilizer at scale without natural gas,” he says. It’s virtually impossible to make a significant dent in the emissions generated by America’s big industries without doing away with those industries altogether, which is a political and economic non-starter. So Republicans are hoping to unleash innovation that yields “a wide and more scalable set of technologies.”
Trembath believes that going forward, Republicans must demonstrate a “commitment to [climate change] beyond ‘basic science,’ backing carbon capture, nuclear energy, renewables, and other clean-energy technologies,” and focus on “technology-specific clean-energy innovation” to cut emissions. After years in which the only congressional climate-change proposals to even receive any press have been massive, government-driven overhauls of the economy with the potential to stifle growth, he sees an opening for conservatives to offer a more practical approach — and he might just be right.
SOURCE
The petty tyrants in your shower
When President Trump objected to federal regulations of shower heads and when the Department of Energy this week proposed to undo President Barack Obama’s shower rules, Trump’s critics decried the actions as petty and the subject matter as too picayune.
But Trump's critics are the ones with a question to answer: If the flow of a person’s shower head is too petty to be deregulated, then how was it momentous enough to be regulated in the first place?
The story of how Washington got into our showers started in 1992, but the real action took place in 2010.
A Democratic Congress passed and Republican President George H.W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 1992, which dictated the maximum flow rates on “showerheads, faucets, water closets, and urinals.”
The law banned any shower head that allowed water to flow out at a greater rate than 2.5 gallons per minute (which comes out to 5.3 ounces per second) “when measured at a flowing water pressure of 80 pounds per square inch.”
This was an overreach. People pay for their own water. If a family wants a lower water bill, it can always buy a low-flow shower head. Why Congress thinks it has the authority to make showers weak is a question each "aye" vote back in 1992 should have to answer for.
But even this intrusion into the most personal moments of a person's day was not enough for Obama. He wanted to make sure that no showers, including those with more than one shower head, ever spat out more than that congressionally mandated 5.3 ounces per second. Obama could have accomplished this crackdown on multihead showers by pushing legislation to that effect through Congress, where his party controlled both chambers.
But outlawing people’s showers isn’t terribly popular, so Obama opted to use regulatory means. He rewrote the language to redefine “shower head.”
You may think you know what a shower head is. It’s a fitting on the end of a pipe that disperses water into a spray in your shower. But Obama’s Energy Department decided that the term no longer meant that. What you call a shower head, Obama declared, is now a “nozzle.” A multihead shower was now a multinozzle shower head. And thus, if each “nozzle” is pumping out the legal maximum of 2.5 gallons per minute, then under Obama's redefinition, you are taking an illegal shower.
Trump's Energy Department did not propose to change the 1992 law, as reporters are now wrongly claiming, but to revert to the 1992 law. And when reporters tell you that Trump “wants to change the definition of a shower head,” they are telling you half the truth. He wants to change it back to what everyone thinks it always was.
You may think the federal government shouldn't be tinkering with the definition or the flow of a shower head. We couldn't agree more, and that's why Trump's action here is the right one.
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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Thursday, August 20, 2020
Environmentalists should not oppose natural gas
Opposition to infrastructure investment for the production and transport of conventional energy is de rigueur on the environmentalist left, a stance widely justified as an important bulwark for the protection of environmental quality. This is part of the “keep-it-in-the-ground” dimension of the ideological opposition to fossil fuels, itself a deeply anti-human drive intended explicitly to hinder economic growth and increased flourishing among the world’s poorest.
The “environmental-protection” rationale for that opposition to investment is silly, a reality demonstrated by only one observation: New energy-infrastructure investment by definition replaces older facilities and provides alternatives that are cleaner, environmentally safer, and less dangerous for workers and communities. The shutdown of older infrastructure without replacement incontrovertibly leads to a reduction in the stock of productive capital, a reduction in the supply of energy and the economic value of the natural-resource base, and less aggregate wealth. How a poorer society can protect environmental quality more effectively than a wealthier one has never been explained, except for the incoherent argument that the substitution of utterly inefficient, unreliable, and expensive “clean” (actually, very dirty) wind and solar electricity in place of fossil-fired power will effect that end.
In light of these realities, continued investment in infrastructure for the production and transport of conventional energy is an absolute necessity both economically and environmentally. That is why the ideological opposition to new pipeline investment is perverse, a central component of the larger political opposition to fossil fuels. Recent examples of this resistance include opposition to the Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines, as well as the Atlantic Coast and Northeast Supply Enhancement gas pipelines. An environmental-safety comparison of alternative-transport systems — pipelines, railroads, and trucks — is complex, but there is substantial evidence that pipeline transport is safer under a broad range of conditions.
And it is not as if there is no regulatory oversight of pipeline-construction projects. Consider the Permian Highway Pipeline (PHP), a 430-mile project currently under construction, which will transport gas produced in west Texas to the Gulf Coast. Apart from the eternal resistance of the environmental lobby, the project also faces opposition from the residents of Texas Hill Country, who are politically active and would prefer that the pipeline be routed elsewhere. (They have been joined in that opposition by those famous musicians and noted experts on energy policy, Willie Nelson and Paul Simon.) Political pressures and litigation threats lead regulators to exercise oversight over minute details: Since March, the Texas Railroad Commission (RRC) has conducted more than 75 inspections of welding, coating, trench integrity, safety issues, and recordkeeping. At a more general level, the RRC has the right political incentives precisely because of the underlying politics (it prefers to avoid future embarrassment), and can anyone doubt that the pipeline operator (Kinder Morgan) would prefer to take appropriate cautions now so as to avoid major problems after operations begin?
Such an extensive inspection and review process is appropriate as a means of providing confidence that future environmental issues will prove minor as they emerge. It is a vast improvement over the legalisms of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), reform of which has been proposed by the Trump administration. NEPA for decades has been a source of massive delay and cost increases for federal projects. Like much environmental legislation, it has yielded actual environmental harm because of its inherent bias toward the status quo over new investment promising improved environmental outcomes. NEPA is a useful tool for opposition to new infrastructure projects even as the underlying arguments presented in support of such opposition are largely spurious.
A sharp reduction in investment in energy infrastructure would make the economy poorer, and in the long run poorer is dirtier. Such an investment decline would leave older, more environmentally harmful, and more dangerous infrastructure in place. Pipelines largely are safer and more benign environmentally than other infrastructure. A rigorous and continuing inspection regime is vastly more consistent with environmental protection than opposition through litigation. And both regulators and private-sector operators have powerful incentives to pursue safety and benign environmental outcomes.
SOURCE
Hawaii beach property linked to Obama, a climate alarmist, bypasses coastal protection laws
A beachfront compound in Hawaii where former President Barack Obama reportedly plans to retire has used a planning loophole to retain a seawall that is likely causing beach erosion, according to ProPublica.
State officials and community members told the outlet that Obama plans to reside in the $8.7 million compound on Oahu's Waimanalo Beach, which was purchased by his close friend Marty Nesbitt in 2015.
The Obamas made a big home buy of their own last year: an $11.75 million waterfront mansion on Martha's Vineyard, Mass., in December 2019.
Permits obtained by ProPublica reportedly show that Hawaii developers are building three homes, two pools and a security perimeter on the property after tearing down the site's mansion, which was famous for being the house from "Magnum, P.I."
However, a century-old seawall is set to remain thanks to a loophole that allowed the sellers to obtain an easement on the seawall for a one-time payment of $61,400, despite environmental experts who warn it could cause coastal damage and beach erosion, according to ProPublica.
The easement, reportedly acquired through Hawaii's Department of Land and Natural Resources, allows developers to essentially lease the public land that sits under the seawall for the next 55 years.
An investigation by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica found that state officials have awarded seawall easements to more than 120 property owners over the past two decades. They include business and real state executives from Hawaii, the mainland U.S. and Japan, a former Honolulu City Council chairman, and a former managing director of a large hedge fund. Some have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to bypass rules designed to protect the public shoreline.
In addition, building permits show that developers are pursuing an expansion of the seawall. Local residents have noted that the existing beach along the property has nearly disappeared, according to the ProPublica report.
The Revised Ordinances of Honolulu states that, for the purpose of shoreline setbacks, it is "a primary policy of the city to protect and preserve the natural shoreline, especially sandy beaches; to protect and preserve public pedestrian access laterally along the shoreline and to the sea; and to protect and preserve open space along the shoreline."
According to research from Hawaii's School of Ocean and Earth, Science and Technology, however, multi-agency seawall building on eroding shores approved by the state has resulted in the loss of one quarter of beaches around the island of Oahu.
"Had city, state, and federal staff operated in an integrated fashion, focused on a single over-riding policy to ―to protect and preserve the natural shoreline, this unconscionable level of environmental destruction probably would not have happened," researchers wrote.
Nesbitt, now chair of the Obama Foundation board and co-CEO of a Chicago-based private-equity firm, told ProPublica in a written response to questions that the steps he’s taken to redevelop the property and expand the seawall are “consistent with and informed by the analysis of our consultants, and the laws, regulations and perspectives of the State of Hawaii” and that any damage the structure caused to Waimnalao Beach occurred decades ago and "is no longer relevant."
Hawaii's Department of Land and Natural Resources, Nesbitt, and Obama's personal office did not immediately return FOX News' requests for comment.
SOURCE
DNC Panelist Admits: The Green New Deal is About Destroying Capitalism
Surrogates for former Vice President Joe Biden are falling all over themselves in an attempt to frame the candidate and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, as a "moderate" ticket worthy of running the White House.
But delegates and DNC participants are telling a different story. During a panel discussion on the opening day of the convention, one woman admitted that the Green New Deal is about destroying capitalism.
More on the Marxist foundation of the Green New Deal:
In Europe, you will often hear politically savvy people refer to Green Party politicians as "watermelons." The reason is that although they might be environmentalist "green" on the outside, these leftists are secretly communist red if you look beneath the surface.
They typically resort to such subterfuge because environmentalism is more popular than Marxism. A former East German communist is bound to be unpopular, but perhaps not so much if he rehabilitates himself as a renewable energy enthusiast.
The case of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, is different in that she openly advertised herself as a socialist in a country with a well-grounded historical aversion to such alien ideologies. But her grand policy initiative, the $93 trillion Green New Deal, was still billed as if it were a legitimate environmentalist idea. We were supposedly trying to save the world from imminent destruction. As Ocasio-Cortez herself put it, "We're, like, the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change."
Democrat vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris is an official sponsor of the legislation, spearheaded by far left Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.
“We need a Green New Deal based in climate and environmental justice, which means building a clean economy that protects communities that have been neglected by policymakers for far too long. I’m proud to work with Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez on this comprehensive proposal, and I’m hopeful that it brings a Green New Deal closer to reality," Harris said in July 2019 when she officially announced her partnership with AOC.
During a campaign stop during the Democrat primary, Harris said she unequivocally supports the goals of the Green New Deal and argued the United States needs to "figure out a way" to get there.
The facade of the "moderate" Democrat ticket continues to crumble.
SOURCE
Canada: departure of finance minister suggests Trudeau will pursue ‘green’ recovery plan
With a projected C$343bn (US$260bn) Covid-shaped deficit, a collapsing oil and gas sector, and a province on the verge of bankruptcy over a botched energy project, Canada is at a crossroads.
Does it pursue an ambitious “green” post-pandemic economic recovery plan that goes against the wishes of a number of influential and powerful industries – not to mention several provincial leaders – or does the tenuous Justin Trudeau-led minority government freeze in the headlights?
The apparently acrimonious departure of the finance minister, Bill Morneau, late on Monday, suggests Trudeau has made his choice.
Over his five-year tenure, Morneau was seen by many Canadians as taking a conservative approach to spending on environment – and more recently, on Covid relief. Trudeau, in contrast, made environmental promises a centerpiece of last year’s re-election campaign. It was inevitable that the two would eventually arrive at an impasse.
Now, Trudeau’s right-hand woman Chrystia Freeland will take over the finance portfolio in addition to her role as deputy prime minister. As one of the key architects of the new Nafta agreement, Freeland has experience marrying economic objectives to broader social and environmental goals, making her better-positioned to carry out Trudeau’s environmental promises.
But the road ahead still won’t be easy., said Bruce Laurie, the president of the environmental thinktank the Ivey Foundation as well as a member of a taskforce advocating for a green post-Covid recovery.
“When you have politicians in three or four provinces that are just emerging from climate denialism, and a system of federation where the provinces at the end of the day have almost full responsibility for environmental, resource and energy decisions, it creates a virtually unmanageable country,” he said. “That’s a bigger challenge than Morneau and finance.”
Canada’s post-pandemic recovery is creating a moment of reckoning, one in which Trudeau has to decide whether to pursue his ambitious green aspirations even if they come at a political cost.
For years, he has been accused of talking out of both sides of his mouth when it comes to energy, investing in solar, wind and hydro but also building new pipelines.
Under the Paris agreement, Canada vowed to reduce greenhouse gases by 30% below 2005 levels by 2030 – a goal that will probably be impossible to meet with so much of the economy presently relying on Alberta’s oil sands. It will be even tougher if the Trans Mountain, Coastal GasLink and Keystone XL pipelines go ahead.
Related: What if Canada had spent $200bn on wind energy instead of oil?
Kyla Tienhaara, the Canada Research Chair in economy and environment and an assistant professor in environmental studies at Queen’s University, told the Guardian that a majority of Canadians still support federal investment in green sectors such as wind and solar energy despite the country’s deficit.
Further, Tienhaara said Alberta’s recent economic hardship is not purely a consequence of Covid: companies such as Shell have been leaving the region for years.
“That’s because the oil there is very costly to extract, both environmentally and economically. It’s the first type of oil that is going to go in the transition, and the transition is inevitable. Renewable energy is just becoming so much more economically sensible,” she said.
Laurie, meanwhile, has briefed key Liberal caucus ministers on his taskforce’s “five bold moves” to make sure Canada’s post-Covid recovery is as sustainable and resilient as possible. The reception was positive, he said, and Trudeau is “100% committed” to acting on climate change.
The challenge is rounding up the cavalry – and making a decision about Morneau is essential to a strong showing, especially in Trudeau’s minority government.
This is the time, said Lourie, for the Liberals to show leadership by pitching an economic model that delivers on the country’s environmental responsibilities.
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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Wednesday, August 19, 2020
Get Serious: More C02 Isn’t Making Earth ‘Uninhabitable’
Once again I feel I have to bring up the generally forgotten point that only a small part of the world is average in temperature -- and the tropics are ALREADY much warmer than the global average. Yet people live in the tropics perfectly well.
I myself was born into a place -- Far North Queensland -- with an average temperature that was wildly above the global average. 100 degree F temperatures were common and temperatures in the 90s were experienced for at least half the year
We tended to drink a lot of beer but otherwise life went on pretty much as it did elsewhere. And life would go on untroubled by the two degree rise that Warmists panic about
But what about the melting glaciers? Someone will ask. Over 90% of the glacial ice is in Antarctica and the average temperature there is many degrees below zero so very little there is going to be melted by a puny 2 degree rise
Former Federal Reserve Board vice chairman and Princeton University economist Alan Blinder recently wrote the following in the Wall Street Journal: “cumulative CO2 emissions heat up the atmosphere, causing climate changes of all sorts—most of them bad. Because this huge negative externality has been allowed to run rampant, we are gradually making the Earth an inhospitable place for humans.”
Increasing CO2 emissions have been “making the Earth an inhospitable place for humans?” Really?
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data show that over the last one hundred years, CO2 emissions and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere indeed have both sharply increased.
And NASA data show that since 1920, our planet’s temperature has risen by 1.25 degrees Celsius.
But the data also show that the increase in CO2 emissions and the rising temperature have not been “making the Earth an inhospitable place for humans.”
The University of Oxford’s Our World in Data has reported that since 1920, the world population has quadrupled from less than two billion to over seven and half billion.
It also has reported that the share of people living in extreme poverty fell from 74 percent in 1910 to less than 10 percent by 2015.
And EM-DAT (The International Disaster Database) data show that since 1920, the number of people killed by natural disasters has declined from almost 55,000 per year to less than 10,000 per year.
Sustaining a population that has grown by about six billion people, lifting most of those people out of extreme poverty, and reducing the number of natural disaster deaths by over 80 percent show that whatever impacts increasing CO2 emission and atmospheric levels and rising temperatures have, they are not making the planet “an inhospitable place for humans.”
The data instead suggest that increasing CO2 emissions and atmospheric levels and rising temperatures are making the planet more, not less, hospitable for human life.
The Heartland Institute has extensively documented “increased plant and forest growth, bigger crop yields and longer growing seasons as benefits derived from rising concentrations of carbon dioxide.”
Better yet, an extensive 2015 study found that cold kills over 17 times more people than heat.
Twenty-two scientists from around the world analyzed over 74 million deaths in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States in 1985-2012.
The cold caused 7.29 percent of these deaths, while heat caused only 0.42 percent. And “moderately hot and cold temperatures” caused 88.85 percent of the temperature-related deaths, while “extreme” temperatures caused only 11.15 percent.
But what about the economic catastrophe that global warming supposedly will cause in the coming decades? If future global warming has any negative impact on the nation’s economy, it is likely to be minimal.
The National Bureau of Economic Research estimated in 2019 that if the planet’s temperature rises by 0.01 degrees Celsius per year through 2100, the total U.S. GDP in 2100 will be 1.88 percent lower in 2100 than it would otherwise be.
Yet based on the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of a 1.4 percent annual real long-term potential labor force productivity growth rate, the nation’s per person GDP will be about 204 percent higher by 2100.
With the reduction that NBER estimates based on global warming, GDP per person would be an almost indistinguishable 200 percent higher.
NBER’s extreme case projection that if the planet’s temperature rises by 0.04 degrees Celsius per year through 2100 (five times the actual rate of increase since 1880), total U.S. GDP will be 10.52 percent lower in 2100 than it would otherwise be, similarly would leave GDP per person about 172 percent higher.
In other words, after taking account of the supposedly harmful impact of global warming, U.S. income per person in 2100 will be about triple today’s level.
Professor Blinder undoubtedly teaches his students that sound science depends on data. When it comes to the impact of increasing CO2 emissions, he needs a refresher course.
SOURCE
California Gov. Gavin Newsom: Time to ‘Sober Up’ About Green Energy’s Flaws
California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday that the state had to “sober up” about the fact that renewable energy sources had failed to provide enough power for the state at peak demand, and needed “backup” and “insurance” from other sources.
Newsom addressed journalists and the public in the midst of ongoing electricity blackouts that began on Friday, as hundreds of thousands of Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) customers in northern and central California lost power.
There is currently high demand for electricity across the state, as the entire West Coast has been hit by a heat wave and record-breaking temperatures.
One reason the state lacked power, officials admitted, was its over-reliance on “renewables” — i.e. wind and solar power.
There was not enough wind to keep turbines going, Newsom said, and cloud cover and nightfall restricted solar power.
“While we’ve had some peak gust winds,” he explained, “wind gust events across the state have been relatively mild.”
That was good for fighting fires, he said, but bad for the “renewable portfolio” in the state’s energy infrastructure. In addition, high demand for electricity in the evening hours, coupled with less input from solar plants, created strain.
On Friday, Newsom said, the state had fallen about 1,000 megawatts short; on Saturday, it fell 450 megawatts short. Sunday saw only “modest or minor” interruptions. But on Monday, he said, the state would be 4,400 megawatts short of “where we believe we need to be.”
“This next few days, we are anticipating being challenged,” Newsom said, as the heat wave was predicted to last through Wednesday.
“We failed to predict and plan these shortages,” Newsom admitted boldly, “and that’s simply unacceptable.” He said he took responsibility for the crisis, and for addressing it immediately, so that “we never come back into this position again.”
Newsom said the state would try to address shortfalls through conservation, and through procuring new sources of energy.
Though the state would continue its “transition” to 100% renewable energy, Newsom said, “we cannot sacrifice reliability as we move forward in this transition.”
He promised “forecasting that is more sober” regarding solar energy, and a stronger focus on energy storage.
California’s shift toward “green” energy has led the way for Democrats nationwide, who hope to impose even more ambitious targets for renewable energy nationwide.
As Breitbart News noted Monday:
California has been rushing to replace fossil fuel energy sources with “renewables,” primarily wind and solar power, in pursuit of its own version of the “Green New Deal.”
In 2018, then-Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed a law requiring the state to obtain 100% of its energy needs from renewables by 2045, though no one could explain how the state would do that.
In 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced the Green New Deal, which aimed to achieve the same goal by 2030.
And in 2020, former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for president, adopted a version of the Green New Deal that commits the U.S. to reach 100% renewables in electricity generation by 2035.
Newsom asked the public to help manage the current crisis by conserving energy. Air conditioning, he said, should be set to 78º from 3:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., for example, and children should be reminded to turn lights off in rooms as they left.
In 2019, Newsom canceled the state’s high-speed rail project — long seen as a key “green” project — because he said it “would cost too much and, respectfully, would take too long.”
SOURCE
New book brings clarity to a world without fossil fuels
Electricity from wind and solar are the rage these days, as governments around the world are advancing their energy policies believing that intermittent electricity can replace the fossil fuels industry. The purpose of the recently released book “Just GREEN Electricity – helping Citizens Understand a World without Fossil Fuels” is to help citizens understand a world without fossil fuels.
The book is an “aha moment” that every green advocate should experience. The inventions of the automobile, airplane, and the use of petroleum in the early 1900’s led us into the Industrial Revolution and victories in World Wars I and II. The healthier and wealthier countries of today now have more than 6,000 products manufactured from petroleum derivatives that did not exist before 1900.
Today, we have a medical industry, electronics, communications, plastics, transportation, militaries, and a space program that did not exist prior to 1900.
Possibly to the dismay of those promoting current energy policies, intermittent electricity from wind or solar cannot produce the thousands of products manufactured from petroleum derivatives that help the world economies “make products and move things” around the globe.
Many in the world believe we are facing climate change caused primarily by fossil fuels that will cause irreversible damage to the planet and humankind unless we act now and, therefore, we must curtail or quit all fossil fuel use, this book will enlighten you on understanding a world without fossil fuels.
The book reviews why China and India — two of the world’s most populous countries — are rejecting the use of intermittent electricity from wind and solar for scalable, reliable, affordable, abundant and flexible electricity from coal; and discusses the worldwide environmental degradations and humanity abuses for the materials mined for solar panels, wind turbines, and EV batteries.
With billions living in abject poverty in underdeveloped lands, the authors believe this book will make you look at electricity, fossil fuels, and nuclear energy in a new and fresh way while obtaining a better understanding of the lifestyle demands of societies within developed countries, and how it is different from most of the world’s population now living in developing countries.
Meanwhile, leaders around the globe are suggesting intermittent electricity from solar panels and wind turbines can save us. The reality, however, is much more complicated.
Ronald Stein and Todd Royal, two seasoned veterans of the energy industry, explore the implications of a world reliant on intermittent green electricity without fossil fuels in the book “Just GREEN Electricity – Helping Citizens Understand a World without Fossil Fuels” that will enhance your energy literacy. They are also the authors of the five-star rated “Energy Made Easy – Helping Citizens Become Energy Literate” in 2019.
Energy is multifaceted, and the just published book allows the reader to grasp enough knowledge quickly so they can participate in discussions with family, friends, co-workers, or while watching news reports. The main purpose of the both books is to help citizens become energy-literate.
It is dangerous and delusional to believe anything can be explained in sound bites, much less energy. This book will make you look at energy and ELECTRICITY in a new, fresh way, and perspective. We believe this is desperately needed with the upcoming U.S. Presidential election, and global events taking place in China, Russia, Iran, Africa, India, and South America.
Energy is more than electricity. Electricity by itself cannot support the military, airlines, cruise ships, supertankers, container shipping, and trucking infrastructures. Nor can electricity alone, and especially that generated solely from intermittent renewable sources such as wind and solar, provide the thousands of products from petroleum that are essential to our medical industry, transportation infrastructure, our electricity generation, our cooling, heating, manufacturing, and agriculture—indeed, virtually every aspect of our daily lives and lifestyles.
Electricity needs fossil fuel derivatives for its parts to function, and in the context of Brexit, the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, the instability in the Middle East, and the U.S. – China trade war/tensions, are circumstances electricity faces. The book “Just GREEN Electricity – Helping Citizens Understand a World without Fossil Fuels” explains them all in a clear, concise, well-researched and documented way, while showing the deep ramifications of a world without fossil fuels, nuclear power, and the products from petroleum derivatives that support lifestyles and economies around the world.
SOURCE
How Coal Can Help The Billions Without Electricity
The movie “Juice” brilliantly illustrates through a visual representation of how billions are without electricity; and without electricity and the energy from mainly fossil fuels, life returns to the Dark Ages.
Whereas liberal documentary filmmaker Michael Moore exposes the fallacy, human misery, and environmental degradation that occurs when towns, cities, counties, states, nations, or continents rely on renewable energy to electricity from wind turbines (enormous emitters of greenhouse gases) and solar panels, or destructive biomass is used for electrical generation.
Literally, life has no purpose, happiness, and meaning without electricity and sources of energy that are abundant, scalable, reliable, affordable, and flexible.
That describes coal – but isn’t coal outdated, outlawed, and the worst form of energy possible?
In fact, coal has always been and now at the forefront of what could save billions without hope, a future, and the key to environmental stewardship the West desperately craves.
At this time, approximately 1,600 coal-fired power plants are being planned, permitted, or currently under construction.
Hard to believe since this reliable source of electricity is under attack in western nations such as the U.S. and the entire European Union.
Elsewhere, coal is used more than ever. China, Japan, and India are using and building newer “high-efficiency low-emission (HELE), ultra-supercritical coal-fired power plants.”
HELE electricity-generating plants operate at higher than normal temperatures and increased efficiency. A HELE-plant additionally operates at emission and pollutant levels “45% lower than from existing coal-fired power plants.”
Official Indian energy policy is for coal to be its main energy source of electrical generation. Japan is working towards building 22 HELE plants to replace nuclear power after the Fukushima accident. China wants to build 300 HELE plants domestically and internationally.
Any Green New Deals, Paris Climate Agreements, or excoriating of coal by the EPA are offset by Japan, India, China, and the EU, which is building twenty-seven coal-fired plants to counter the energy to electricity dysfunction from overreliance on the wind and sun.
The West, led by the U.S. and EU, is committing energy suicide when they refuse to embrace and regulate out of existence lower-emitting by up to forty-five percent, rich in energy density, and always firing 24/7/365, HELE coal-fired power plants.
Countries rich in coal but unable to afford sophisticated and lower-emitting but expensive natural gas-fired power plants and billion(s) dollar(s) liquid natural gas terminals (LNG) could use coal to leave lives without fulfillment, and sophistication.
The book The End of Doom describes in rich detail that poorer peoples, nations, and continents generally destroy their environments searching for basic necessities the U.S. and Europe take for granted.
MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel says:
“If you want to minimize carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2070 you might want to accelerate the burning of coal in India today (as an example). It doesn’t sound like it makes sense. Coal is terrible for carbon.
“But it’s by burning a lot of coal that they (India) make themselves wealthier, (similar to America in the early 1900s), and by making themselves wealthier (any poor region of the world), they have fewer children, and you don’t have as many people burning carbon, you might be better off in 2070. We shouldn’t be forced to choose between lifting people out of poverty and doing something for the climate.”
Billions without energy or electricity who are mainly using wood and cow dung, which are the worst emitting forms of energy, could be generating sustainable energy and electricity utilizing coal to save their local environments, and lives.
HELE plants generate overwhelmingly more energy to electricity than renewables under current technological constraints.
The main factor why is “HELE plants have a capacity factor of 86%, while wind has a capacity factor of 35%, and PV solar has a capacity factor of, at best, 22%.”
Counterintuitive for today’s energy wisdom, and climate-change nihilism, coal can lead to cleaner air and healthier children and families.
Climates changing are about more than the Earth warming or not over mankind’s activities. We are living in the “Asian century,” and they need more energy, power, and electricity than at any point in mankind’s history that coal provides.
Aggressive climate change action that the U.S. Democratic Party and European Green parties advocate for are “egregiously misleading” when coal is demonized in favor of lowering human flourishing.
The mantra of “coal is death” is unbelievably exaggerated when economic reality meets an environmental movement termed a “climate-industrial-complex.”
Nowhere is the poor kept in the rotting pits of life more than when coal-fired power plants are not allowed to be built to the detriment of billions of Chinese, Africans, and Indians. Soul-crushing poverty the West can’t even imagine becomes the norm.
Multilateral development is then crushed when organizations such as the World Bank don’t allow the Asian century to flourish, or the second half of this century where Africa is likely to become the largest region in the world.
Asserting renewables and climate-change-mitigation programs bring “co-benefits” is a bald-faced lie, and justifies the worse kind of environmental racism.
These bold souls in India, China, Africa, and elsewhere deserve the abundant, affordable, scalable, reliable, flexible, and energy-dense life-giving qualities that coal brings globally.
Coal can lay the foundation for prosperity that historically leads to clean landscapes, fresher air, and all-around better earth for all.
SOURCE
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Jim Hansen and his twin
