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Complexity of thousands of weather variables bedevils policy
See Tony Heller’s killer video here.
BOULDER, Colo. - For almost five years, an international consortium of scientists was chasing clouds, determined to solve a problem that bedeviled climate-change forecasts for a generation: How do these wisps of water vapor affect global warming?
They reworked 2.1 million lines of supercomputer code used to explore the future of climate change, adding more-intricate equations for clouds and hundreds of other improvements. They tested the equations, de- bugged them and tested again.
The scientists would find that even the best tools at hand can’t model climates with the sureness the world needs as rising temperatures impact almost every region.
When they ran the updated simulation in 2018, the conclusion jolted them: Earth’s atmosphere was much more sensitive to greenhouse gases than decades of previous models had predicted, and future temperatures could be much higher than feared- perhaps even beyond hope of practical remedy.
“We thought this was really strange,” said Gokhan Danabasoglu, chief scientist for the climate-model project at the Mesa Laboratory in Boulder at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR. “If that number was correct, that was really bad news.”
At least 20 older climate models disagreed with the new one at NCAR, an open-source model called the Community Earth System Model 2, or CESM2, funded mainly by the U.S. National Science Foundation and arguably the world’s most influential. Then, one by one, a dozen climate-modeling groups around the world produced similar forecasts.
The scientists soon concluded their new calculations had been thrown off kilter by the physics of clouds in a warming world, which may amplify or damp climate change. “The old way is just wrong, we know that,” said Andrew Gettelman, a physicist at NCAR who specializes in clouds and helped develop the CESM2 model. “I think our higher sensitivity is wrong too. It’s probably a consequence of other things we did by making clouds better and more realistic. You solve one problem and create another.”
Since then the CESM2 scientists have been reworking their algorithms using a deluge of new information about the effects of rising temperatures to better understand the physics at work. They have abandoned their most extreme calculations of climate sensitivity, but their more recent projections of future global warming are still dire- and still in flux.
As world leaders consider how to limit greenhouse gases, they depend on what computer climate models predict. But as algorithms and the computer they run on become more powerful - able to crunch far more data and do better simulations - that very complexity has left climate scientists grappling with mismatches among competing computer models.
While vital to calculating ways to survive a warming world, climate models are hitting a wall. They are running up against the complexity of the physics involved; the limits of scientific computing; uncertainties around the nuances of climate behavior; and the challenge of keeping pace with rising levels of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases. Despite significant improvements, the new models are still too imprecise to be taken at face value, which means climate- change projections still require judgment calls.
‘We have a situation where the models are behaving strangely,’ said Gavin Schmidt, director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences, a leading center for climate modeling. “We have a conundrum.’
Policy tools
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change collates the latest climate data drawn from thousands of scientific papers and dozens of climate models, including the CESM2 model, to set an international standard for evaluating the impacts of climate change. That provides policy makers in 195 countries with the most up-to-date scientific consensus related to global warming. Its next major advisory report, which will serve as a basis for international negotiations, is expected this year.
For climate modelers, the difference in projections amounts to a few degrees of average temperature change in response to levels of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere in years ahead. A few degrees will be more than enough, most scientists say, to worsen storms, intensify rainfall, boost sea-level rise -and cause more-extreme heat waves, droughts and other temperature-related consequences such as crop failures and the spread of infectious diseases.
When world leaders in 1992 met in Rio de Janeiro to negotiate the first comprehensive global climate treaty, there were only four rudimentary models that could generate global-warming projections for treaty negotiators.
In November 2021, as leaders met in Glasgow to negotiate limits on greenhouse gases under the auspices of the 2015 Paris Accords, there were more than 100 major global climate-change models produced by 49 different research groups, reflecting an influx of people into the field. During the treaty meeting, U.N. experts presented climate-model projections of future global-warming scenarios, including data from the CESM2 model. “We’ve made these models into a tool to indicate what could happen to the world,” said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the NCAR Mesa Laboratory. “This is information that policy makers can’t get any other way.”
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in October awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to scientists whose work laid the foundation for computer simulations of global climate change.
Skeptics have scoffed at climate models for decades, saying they overstate hazards. But a growing body of research shows many climate models have been uncannily accurate. For one recent study, scientists at NASA, the Breakthrough Institute in Berkeley, Calif., and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology evaluated 17 models used be-much tween 1970 and 2007 and found most predicted climate shifts were “indistinguishable from what actually occurred.”
Still, models remain prone to technical glitches and are hampered by an incomplete understanding of the variables that control how our planet responds to heat-trapping gases.
In its guidance to governments last year, the U.N. climate- change panel for the first time played down the most extreme forecasts. Before making new climate predictions for policy makers, an independent group of scientists used a technique called “hind-casting,” testing how well the models reproduced changes that occurred during the 20th century and earlier. Only models that re-created past climate behavior accurately were deemed acceptable.
In the process, the NCARconsortium scientists checked whether the advanced models could reproduce the climate during the last Ice Age, 21,000 years ago, when carbon-dioxide levels and temperatures were lower than today. CESM2 and other new models projected temperatures much colder than the geologic evidence indicated. University of Michigan scientists then tested the new models against the climate 50 million years ago when greenhouse-gas levels and temperatures were much higher than today. The new models projected higher temperatures than evidence suggested.
While accurate across almost all other climate factors, the new models seemed overly sensitive to changing carbon-dioxide levels and, for the past several years, scientists have been meticulously fine-tuning them to narrow the uncertainties.
Then there is the cloud conundrum. Because clouds can both reflect solar radiation into space and trap heat from Earth’s surface, they are among the biggest challenges for scientists honing climate models.
At any given time, clouds cover more than two-thirds of the planet. Their impact on climate depends on how reflective they are, how high they rise and whether it is day or night. They can accelerate warming or cool it down. They operate at a scale as broad as the ocean, as small as a hair’s width. Their behavior can be affected, studies show, by factors ranging from cosmic rays to ocean microbes, which emit sulfur particles that become the nuclei of water droplets or ice crystals.
“If you don’t get clouds right, everything is out of whack.” said Tapio Schneider, an atmospheric scientist at the California Institute of Technology and the Climate Modeling Alliance, which is developing an experimental model. ‘Clouds are crucially important for regulating Earth’s energy balance.”
Comparing models
Older models, which rely on simpler methods to model clouds’ effects, for decades asserted that doubling the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide over preindustrial levels would warm the world between 2.7 and 8 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius).
New models account for clouds’ physics in greater detail. CESM2 predicted that a doubling of carbon dioxide would cause warming of 9.5 degrees Fahrenheit (5.3 degrees Celsius) - almost a third higher than the previous version of their model, the consortium scientists said. In an independent assessment of 39 global-climate models last year, scientists found that 13 of the new models produced significantly higher estimates of the global temperatures caused by rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide than the older computer models - scientists called them the “wolf pack.” Weighed against historical evidence of temperature changes, those estimates were deemed unrealistic.
By adding far-more-detailed equations to simulate clouds, the scientists might have introduced small errors that could make their models less accurate than the cloud assumptions of older models, according to a study by NCAR scientists published in January 2021. Taking the uncertainties into account, the U.N.’s climate-change panel narrowed its estimate of climate sensitivity to a range between 4.5 and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (2.5 to 4 degrees Celsius) in its most recent report for policy makers last August.
Dr. Gettelman, who helped develop CESM2, and his colleagues in their initial upgrade added better ways to model polar ice caps and how carbon and nitrogen cycle through the environment. To make the ocean more realistic, they added wind-driven waves. Since releasing the open-source software in 2018, the NCAR scientists have updated the CESM2 model five times, with more improvements in development. “We are still digging,” said Jean-Francois Lamarque, director of NCAR’s climate and global dynamics laboratory, who was the project’s former chief scientist. “It is going to take quite a few years.”
The NCAR scientists in Boulder would like to delve more deeply into the behavior of clouds, ice sheets and aerosols, but they already are straining their five-year-old Cheyenne supercomputer, according to NCAR officials. A climate model able to capture the subtle effects of individual cloud systems, storms, regional wildfires and ocean currents at a more detailed scale would require a thousand times more computer power, they said.
“There is this balance between building in all the complexity we know and being able to run the model for hundreds of years multiple times,” said Andrew Wood, an NCAR scientist who works on the CESM2 model. “The more complex a model is, the slower it runs.”
Researchers now are under pressure to make reliable local forecasts of future climate changes so that municipal managers and regional planners can protect heavily populated locales from more extreme flooding, drought or wildfires. That means the next generation of climate models need to link rising temperatures on a global scale to changing conditions in a local forest, watershed, grassland or agricultural zone, said Jacquelyn Shuman, a forest ecologist at NCAR who is researching how to model the impact of climate change on regional wildfires. “Computer models that contain both large-scale and small-scale models allow you to really do experiments that you can’t do in the real world,” she said. “You can really ramp up the temperature, dial down the precipitation or completely change the amount of fire or lightning strikes that an area is seeing, so you can really diagnose how it all works together. That’s the next step. It would be very computationally expensive.”
The NCAR scientists are installing a new $40 million supercomputer named Derecho, built by Hewlett Packard Enter-prise designed to run climate-change calculations at three times the speed of their current machine. Once it becomes operational this year, it is expected to rank among the world’s top 25 or so fastest supercomputers, NCAR officials said.
Even the best tools can’t model climates with the sureness the world needs.
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With this in mind may I suggest “Looking out the Window: Are Humans Really Responsible for Changing Climate, The Trial of Carbon Dioxide in the Court of Public Opinion” by Bob Webster available on Amazon as a book and e-book.
It is well researched and written and presents data and details that should cause believers with an open mind to question the official version of the “science”.
From the Back Cover
“The hot dry seasons of the past few years have caused rapid disintegration of glaciers in Glacier National Park, Montana...Sperry Glacier...has lost one-quarter or perhaps one-third of its ice in the past 18 years...If this rapid rate should continue...the glacier would almost disappear in another 25 years...”
“Born about 4,000 years ago, the glaciers that are the chief attraction in Glacier National Park are shrinking so rapidly that a person who visited them ten or fifteen years ago would hardly recognize them today as the same ice masses.”
Do these reports sound familiar? Typical of frequent warnings of the dire consequences to be expected from global warming, such reports often claim modern civilization’s use of fossil fuels as being the dominant cause of recent climate warming.
You might be surprised to learn the reports above were made nearly thirty years apart! The first in 1923 prior to the record heat of the Dust Bowl years during the 1930s. The second in 1952 during the second decade of a four-decade cooling trend that had some scientists concerned that a new ice age might be on the horizon!
Did the remnants of Sperry Glacier disappear during global warming of the late 20th century?
According to the US Geological Survey (USGS), today Sperry Glacier “ranks as a moderately sized glacier” in Glacier National Park.
What caused the warmer global climate prior to “4,000 years ago” before Glacier National Park’s glaciers first appeared?
Are you aware that during 2019 the National Park Service quietly began removing its “Gone by 2020” signs from Glacier National Park as its most famous glaciers continued their renewed growth that began in 2010?
Was late 20th-century global warming caused by fossil fuel emissions? Was it really more pronounced than early 20th-century warming? Or was late 20th-century warming perfectly natural, in part a response to the concurrent peak strength of one of the strongest solar grand maxima in contemporary history?
These and other questions are addressed by “Looking Out the Window.”
Be a juror in the trial of carbon dioxide in the court of public opinion and let the evidence inform your verdict.”
That little yellow thing is a bulldozer. It is burying windmill blades used for green energy. Why? Because these blades need to be disposed of and there is presently no way to recycle them. That’s how green energy works!
Who knew? Maybe the people that make them knew. Why would they let that cat out of the bag, after all they are government subsidized with tax payer money. After all It’s all about the money every time! Just like the oil industry powers every electric car.
Also politicians do not want those huge eye sores in their backyard.
Right now the average wind farm is about 150 turbines. Each wind turbine needs 80 gallons of oil as lubricant and we’re not talking about vegetable oil, this is a PAO synthetic oil based on crude… 12,000 gallons of it. That oil needs to be replaced once a year.
It is estimated that a little over 3,800 turbines would be needed to power a city the size of New York… That’s 304,000 gallons of refined oil for just one city.
Now you have to calculate every city across the nation, large and small, to find the grand total of yearly oil consumption from “clean” energy.
Where do you think all that oil is going to come from, the oil fairies? Well thanks to Biden it now comes from our enemies in the Mideast.
Not to mention the fact that the large equipment needed to build these wind farms run on petroleum. As well as the equipment required for installation, service, maintenance, and eventual removal.
And just exactly how eco-friendly is wind energy anyway?
Each turbine requires a footprint of 1.5 acres, so a wind farm of 150 turbines needs 225 acres; In order to power a city the size of NYC you’d need 57,000 acres; and who knows the astronomical amount of land you would need to power the entire US. All of which would have to be clear-cut land because trees create a barrier & turbulence that interferes with the 20mph sustained wind velocity necessary for the turbine to work properly (also keep in mind that not all states are suitable for such sustained winds). Boy, cutting down all those trees is gonna anger a lot of green-loving tree-huggers.
Let’s talk about disposal now.
The lifespan of a modern, top quality, highly efficient wind turbine is 20 years. After that, then what? What happens to those gigantic fiber composite blades?
They cannot economically be reused, refurbished, reduced, repurposed, or recycled so guess what...? It’s off to special landfills they go.
And guess what else..? They’re already running out of these special landfill spaces for the blades that have already exceeded their usefulness. Seriously! Those blades are anywhere from 120 ft. to over 200 ft. long and there are 3 per turbine. And that’s with only 7% of the nation currently being supplied with wind energy. Just imagine if we had the other 93% of the nation on the wind grid...20 years from now you’d have all those unusable blades with no place to put them… Then 20 years after that, and 20 years after that, and so on.
Hello there, how green is that?
Oops, I almost forgot about the 500,000 birds that are killed each year from wind turbine blade collisions; most of which are endangered hawks, falcons, owls, geese, ducks, and eagles.
Apparently smaller birds are more agile and able to dart and dodge out of the way of the spinning blades, whereas the larger soaring birds aren’t so lucky.
I’m sure the wildlife conservationist folks are just ecstatic about that.
I’m so glad the wind energy people are looking out for the world.
Here’s another little problem with windmills-
The generator and switching equipment operate at high power and voltage. Everything in the windmill nacelle is compact due to limited space, so there’s danger of arcs and electrical fires. This is prevented by putting all the electrical equipment in a pressure vessel filled with sulfur hexafluoride, a synthetic gas that has dielectric properties that suppress arcs and fires.
Problem is, windmills leak this gas, something around a pound each per year. SF6 has an atmospheric lifetime of 3,200 years and is 22,800 times more effective as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
WANT MORE
The wind doesn’t always blow, often on the coldest nights or hottest days. And when ice storms occur as we saw last February in Texas, they freeze and the users are in the dark. Over 100 died last year when temperatures after the snows dropped as cold as 16 below zero in the southern plains.
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By Anthony Watts
A recent paper published by Cambridge University Press titled “Political Legitimacy, Authoritarianism, and Climate Change” is raising serious and worrisome questions about the role of academia in our national political debate on climate change.
The paper was written by Ross Mittiga, who self-describes as an “assistant professor of political theory at Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, specializing in climate ethics.” He also labels himself an “environmentalist, vegan, and occasional gadfly.”
Mittiga’s paper explicitly argues society must prioritize climate action over democratic principles and adopt an authoritarian government if society fails to politically act on climate change. Or, in the words of the political left: “my way or the highway.”
This is disturbing because it completely ignores the will of the people to self-govern, favoring a totalitarian approach in order to tackle what Mittiag deems a “climate crisis.”
Key points of the paper in the abstract:
Two brilliant doctors explain what’s really going on with COVID
Is authoritarian power ever legitimate? The contemporary political theory literature—which largely conceptualizes legitimacy in terms of democracy or basic rights—would seem to suggest not. I argue, however, that there exists another, overlooked aspect of legitimacy concerning a government’s ability to ensure safety and security. While, under normal conditions, maintaining democracy and rights is typically compatible with guaranteeing safety, in emergency situations, conflicts between these two aspects of legitimacy can and often do arise. A salient example of this is the COVID-19 pandemic, during which severe limitations on free movement and association have become legitimate techniques of government. Climate change poses an even graver threat to public safety. Consequently, I argue, legitimacy may require a similarly authoritarian approach. While unsettling, this suggests the political importance of climate action. For if we wish to avoid legitimating authoritarian power, we must act to prevent crises from arising that can only be resolved by such means.
The problem with Mittiga’s paper is that he doesn’t offer up a single reference or shred of evidence that a “climate crisis” actually exists. It appears he simply assumes it to be fact-based on the frequency of political discussions that have embraced the term for several years.
If a “climate crisis” actually existed, there would be human impact data to support the claim. Yet, Mittiga cites no such evidence.
However, this lack of evidence did not stop him from making this bold claim: “A salient example of this is the COVID-19 pandemic, during which severe limitations on free movement and association have become legitimate techniques of government. Climate change poses an even graver threat to public safety.” We should be able to test the “graver threat to public safety” that the “climate crisis” supposedly creates.
If the global “climate crisis” was causing public safety to suffer, we’d surely see an increase in global deaths related to supposed climate-driven events. To determine if this is true, we turn to data collected by the most trusted global database on events that create mortality, the International Disaster Database.
This database covers all types of natural disasters, including meteorological, hydrological, geologic, and volcanic.
Dr. Bjorn Lomborg has been tracking climate-related disasters from the database since 1920. This includes floods, droughts, storms, wildfires, and extreme temperatures. His conclusion from the data is clear and simple: fewer and fewer people are dying today from supposedly climate-related natural disasters. As seen in the figure in this peer-reviewed article, the trend is clear.
Lomborg writes:
Over the past hundred years, annual climate-related deaths have declined by more than 96%. In the 1920s, the death count from climate-related disasters was 485,000 on average every year. In the last full decade, 2010-2019, the average was 18,362 dead per year, or 96.2% lower.
This is even true of 2021—despite breathless climate reporting, almost 99% fewer people died that year than a hundred years ago.
Why is this consistently not reported?
In the first year of the new decade, 2020, the number of dead was even lower at 14,885—97% lower than the 1920s average.
For 2021, which is now complete, we see an even lower total of 6,134 dead or a reduction since the 1920s of 98.7%.
The media reported on many deadly weather- and climate-related catastrophes in 2021—the deadly U.S./Canadian heat dome and heatwave, huge wildfires in the Western United States, the December 2021 tornado outbreak in the United States, large-scale flooding in Europe, and the Valentine’s Day winter storm. All of these events and related deaths are included in the disaster database and the graph.
And there are other disasters. Many people in the West never saw media reports of the disastrous floods in India during the monsoon, which killed more than a thousand people, or the flash floods in Afghanistan, which killed dozens, or the typhoons that hit China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and India, killing a total of 776 people. The database also has more than 200 other catastrophes in 2021.
There is a known bias in the database where there is much more reporting on heat deaths, but recent science from the prestigious medical journal The Lancet reports that globally, cold deaths outweigh heat deaths 9:1, suggesting that “global warming” isn’t as big a problem for human mortality as we’ve been told.
The number of reported weather disaster events is increasing, but that is mainly due to better reporting, and better accessibility, i.e., the 24/7/365 CNN effect. Just because such events are reported more today doesn’t translate directly to more events resulting in more deaths. In fact, the opposite is observed in the data.
Illustrated by the mortality data portrayed in the figure, it is simply incontrovertible that disaster-related deaths have declined, and have done so dramatically. This is because our wealthier, technologically advanced, and more resilient societies are much better able to warn for such events, protect their citizens, and mitigate damage and deaths. In fact, recent peer-reviewed science demonstrates a “decreasing trend in both human and economic vulnerability is evident.”
So, I ask, where is the so-called “climate crisis” that is portrayed as a certainty by Mittiga in the Cambridge University Press?
According to the disaster database, there isn’t any “climate crisis” at all. In fact, during the 40-plus years of modest warming during which we have been told that global warming aka “climate change” will worsen the human condition, mortality has improved dramatically.
Sadly, and frighteningly, as illustrated by Mittiga in the Cambridge University Press, the green socialist left is increasingly embracing tyranny in the form of authoritarian power to act on their viewpoint on climate change. But clearly, real-world data don’t support their viewpoint let alone their call to action.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute.
See this post by Larry Hamlin on how temperatures are declining post the 2015/16 El Nino in all data sets and some of the usual characters are claiming they are comparing the late 1800s to the current time to prove warming - although the late 1800s was a cold period ahead of the 1920s to 1950s warm period.
While many in government, the universities and media want to focus on the small (mostly very local) influence we have on climates (one of my favorite course when a college professor was Microclimatology where we studied in the field and literature the local factors, natural and man-made). That spurred focus on urbanization in climate data as most stations became increasingly urbanized and warmer at night. However I spent much of my career in 5 major enterprises studying the larger scale natural factors that influence global climate regimes and have been able to explain not only the observed cycles in properly measured temperatures but changes in extremes of weather. I found the most significant drivers included ocean cycles, solar cycles and volcanism. Man’s contributions were primarily local and related to land use changes including as I noted most importantly urbanization.
I had the good fortune to meet at an AMS Annual Meeting Jerome Namias, NWS first Director for Weather Bureau’s (now NWS) Long Range Forecasting (started being 5 days) Branch (now CPC or the Climate Prediction Center) who showed ocean warm and cold pools explained the flip to the cold winter of the late 1970s. After the super El Nino of 1982/83 just after the birth of The Weather Channel, as the first Director of Meteorology, we did the first features on the phenomenon. We began seasonal outlooks often consulting with Namias who had moved to Scripps). When CPC found in the late 1980s, that El Nino and La Nina had global implications, first observed by Sir Gilbert Walker more than 60 years before (an idea rejected by scientists at the time), we knew we had another tool to forecast seasonal weather. In the 1990s, ocean fisheries scientists at University of Washington discovered the PDO - a longer term Pacific cycle that helped explains shifts in salmon fish populations on the west coast. It also explained tendencies for strength and frequency of El Nino and La Nina. The warm mode favored longer and stronger El Ninos and the cold more frequent and stronger La Ninas. You can see the cold PDO mode has dominated since the Super Nino of 1997/98,
The behavior mimics the cold PDO from the 1940s to the middle 1970s. Both had a significant El Nino a few decades in (1957/58 and 2015/16).
See the behavior described below.
The Atlantic too has a multidecadal cycle called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (also first published in the 1990s) which affects high latitude blocking events. It has been in the warm mode and stays there for now.
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The two oscillations in their positive mode favors global scale warmth, the negative mode cold. See much more here
The cycles are now out of phase but when the both are positive, the world is at the warmest level, both negative, cold. See the strong correlation.
Individual El Ninos always brings a spike in temperatures globally, La Ninas a cooling.
The effect is modulated by major volcanism. See how El Ninos in the 1980s and 1990s were suppressed by the sulfate aerosols thrown into the high atmosphere from the eruptions of Mt. St. Helens, El Chichon and Pinatubo.
The sun is important - much more than they want you to believe (see). The number of sunspots correlates with other solar factors to drive global temperatures. It is in a century-scale decline period that should, with some delay, enhance a cooling trend. We are coming off the short cycle minima but still are having spotless days.
Solar activity is most similar now to the cold early 1900s or even the early 1800s, the Dalton Minimum, a very cold period aided by the cooling after Mt. Tambora 1815 eruption
Though at the moment the Pacific and solar favor cold developing, volcanism is at the moment not significant and thus not an enhancing factor and the Atlantic Basin is in the warm phase though declining.
That does not mean we won’t get extreme cold at times in places this year as they found in both polar regions (a record cold winter at the South Pole (since record began in 1957), a brutal November in Alaska and the very early freeze off the Russia Arctic coast trapping ships and in much of the southern hemisphere in their entire winter and spring. There is in most years where the ENSO state is modest to weak have variability in season as waves propagate through the topics and affect the locations of the troughs and ridges in the jet stream that influence where the cold and warm, and storms travel. Such a wave turned off the cold here in the US in December for a time but it will soon move to locations that open up the floodgates from the arctic.
We are especially vigilant and concerned at Weatherbell as the energy grid operators and suppliers are warning that an extended period of strong cold would mean rolling blackouts and energy supply issues as we saw last winter in Texas when over 100 died as temperatures dropped to well below zero with the power out. That is something the factors at play have been suggesting would happen this winter. After that upcoming global weather pattern reorganization, we see the arctic cold beginning later this upcoming week.
Below is a Christmas present you may consider for family and friends that have wood stoves or fireplaces, they are not expecting to use. 5 packages could keep the family warm for several days. Local firewood companies still have dry firewood. It is always best to have the chimney checked out - a small investment that could save problems.
Stay warm and safe… and open minded.
Joseph S. D’Aleo, Jr., CCM, AMS Fellow
My whole career has focused on weather and climate attribution - my Master’s thesis was on the role of diabatic heating in explosive development (bombogenesis) in east coast storms. I taught my students how to think not what to think. We focused on the natural factors that causes the patterns, changes and extremes we see. 200 young men and women went on to make a significant contribution to weather forecasting, broadcasting and other related careers. Over 20 worked with me at The Weather Channel.
Decades later, after giving major addresses at AMS broadcast conferences (and chairing one), at NWS/BHO meetings, I was made chair of the AMS Weather Analysis and Forecasting committee and the first private sector meteorologist chosen by their peers to be on the AMS council. In my first council meeting in Boston, in the cocktail hour, I was attacked in a conversation stopping shouting match by a biologist Paul Higgins, now Director of the American Meteorological Society’s Policy Program for not bowing down to ‘the accepted science’.
On the committee where I hoped push ideas to increase the value of the society to meteorologists but had instead to push back on the AMS increasingly one-sided position on climate change and top 4 goal of climate policy advocacy. Early on, we discussed a statement on Climate change which was written in part by Lawrence Livermore Lab that ignored natural factors. The AMS posted the statements on the back pages of AMS site for feedback and usually got by with little blowback. I brought attention to it and encouraged comments back in the community and submitted my own 44 page comment challenging it point by point. Despite this, no changes were made though they went forced to go through the motions much as the IPCC did for the Summary for Policymakers which wrote the summary before the scientist combined their findings and conclusions - dismissing any scientist challenges base on their favorite paper, predominance of papers or the latest paper.
My challenges pushed me to establish Icecap which we launched with a booth at the AMS Annual meeting. Kevin Trenbeth pointed me out to the late Pete Leavitt (well known meteorologist and closet skeptic and a good friend) who was leaving our booth and complained “do you believe the AMS voted in a skeptic on the council - how do we let that happen?”
When Lou Dobbs had a show on CNN, I was asked to answer 7 questions on climate on videotape. A cameraman and crew came to my home and asked the questions to which I responded in crisp sound bites with pertinent facts. The producer on their end was not pleased and as my mic was being removed told them to put it back on and asked me a question that made no sense. My answer was less crisp and the producer ensured that is what was used. The morning and daytime meteorologists on CNN played my other questions and answers the next morning and it appears some actually lost their jobs as management were angered.
I gave a talk at the St. Johnsbury Museum in Vermont with a large crowd including some coming to challenge a doubter. I actually turned the crowd around and some became skeptics and one even started a skeptic organization in Vermont. There were attacks on me in the media claiming I must be dirty with coal.
Years later a women’s group in the area wanted a lively debate at that Museum but I was not available and I asked two of my colleagues to attend but their warmist choice refused to come if skeptics were to be included. The museum gave way and they had a lively one sided debate.
I was invited similarly to debate by Vermont Public Radio, but again their warmist choice, a cloud physicist who considered himself state climatologist and bragged about the tens of millions of dollars he has made from grants after coming to the US, refused to participate if I was included and my invite was withdrawn. I listened to the show and his presentation was full of attacks on Fred Singer and others claiming bad science and questionable funding.
I was always very impressed by the state climatologists and many became friends - over 75% were skeptics. I watched as the universities who appoint the scientist to that role, removed 50% of them and in many cases, where they could removing them from their role at the universities or limiting what they can teach. I could detail many examples. I also have stories that would curl your hair about how honest scientists were treated for daring to voice a different science data based opinion.
20 Climate Alarmists, most sitting on tens of millions of dollars in funding threatened to use RICO against skeptics who they claimed were doing so because they are getting major funding from big oil. Fortunately they were beaten in court.
I used to do stories in the local weekly here in southern NH. I got many thumbs up but an occasional complaint about why anyone would doubt the science and politicians. A few years ago, a hard hitting story got a nasty editorial from a California transplant claiming I was lying because it was well known I was enriched by big oil. I responded back strongly, and got a second supportive editorial from a former student who lived in the area. But he came back again with more false claims, but before I could respond back, the newspaper shut down. Cancel culture in action.
Please help us fight back. The site has 9000 posts and 162 million page views and the search capability that finds past information on most any climate topic. For the posts, I am most of the time now a one man band. The site requires a secure hosting which costs almost $500/year. A donation (secure PAYPAL button on the left column or here) would help me keep it going. Thanks.
happy New Year - See Unsung Zeroes: The Top 10 Under-Reported Climate Flops of 2021 by Steve Milloy here.
The year 2021 may go down in history as the year that foretold the end of the climate idiocy movement - although the movement is unlikely to take the hint. This year witnessed the follies, failures and lies of climate idiocy laid bare for all to see - that is, if the media had actually reported them.
So here are the 10 biggest failures of the climate movement in 2021. The only reason the climate movement survives past these flops is because the mainstream media keeps it afloat by failing to honestly report the news.
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The Polar Bear Hype
Environmental NGO WWF Finland has apologized for using a retouched photo of a polar bear and cub standing on a tiny ice floe, apparently adrift in an ocean.
The organization’s communications head, Anne Brax, also defended the use of the image as an advertising tool commonly used as shorthand for climate change and its impact on arctic regions, rather than as a news item.
Polar bear ads during Gore’s campaign made them a symbol of climate change and a great fund raiser. The WWF has a new campaign claiming they are disappearing, a victim of man’s use of fossil fuel and the disappearance of their icy homes.
The photo was used as part of an anti-climate change fundraising campaign aimed at students participating in Finland’s annual “taksvarkki” or “day’s work” program, where middle schoolers work for a day to collect money for worthy causes.
As FEE reported in their fact check
New estimates from the International Union for Conservation of Nature show a mid-point estimate of 26,500 (range: 22,000 to 31,000) in 2015. In The State of the Polar Report 2018, zoologist Susan J. Crockford says updates to IUCN data put the new global mid-point estimate at more than 30,000.
Even accepting the lower figure, the estimate is the highest since the polar bear became internationally protected in 1973.
The whole arctic and antarctic and Greenland attention has been a lucrative job for university environmental groups. The media has run with the scary tales and their fact checks are merely relying on the reports bought and paid for and written by indoctrinated so-called journalists ad media groups. Many honest fact checks are cancelled and blocked.
The thickness of the arctic ice and how much it shrinks in the warmer season depends on the multidecadal warm and cold ocean cycles in both oceans. When the oceans are warm, the currents carry under the floating ice and thin it from beneath. Arctic temperatures vary with the ice cover.
See how they both vary with the ATlantic basin which is the greatest contributor as the Pacific has only the Bering Strait as a channel for the warm water to enter.
See how the ice cycle the last decade has been slowly recovering from the warmest ocean phases.
2021 like 2020 has been a dark period and the holiday is still not the same. When politics gets involved, it never is.
We can look back to past happier memories in more normal times. One holiday favorite was the old movie from 1946, It’s a Wonderful Life, a story of the ups and downs in a man and families life.
It’s a Wonderful Life and story
Like many of you, one of the films I like to watch seasonally is Its a Wonderful Life, from Frank Capra who produced many classic movies. The snow scenes look like upstate New York or New England in winter.
It may surprise you that the Bedford Falls set, according to Life.com: “It covered four acres of the RKO ranch [in Encino, Calif.] and included 75 stores and buildings, a tree-lined center parkway with 20 fully grown oak trees, a factory district and residential areas. Main Street was 300 yards long, or three full-length city blocks.”
The snow was fake snow. Frank Capra - who trained as an engineer - and special effects supervisor Russell Shearman engineered a new type of artificial snow for the film. At the time, painted cornflakes were the most common form of fake snow, but they posed a bit of an audio problem for Capra. So he and Shearman opted to mix foamite (the stuff you find in fire extinguishers) with sugar and water to create a less noisy option.
Here were the fans that blew the snow over the set.
The film was done in the the summer I was born and filming at times occurred during a heat wave, which forced them to shut down for days. Though they were romping in what looked like snow, they were perspiring.
Though not popular in its day, the movie became a holiday favorite on TV and ranked number one on its list of the most inspirational American films of all time.
One more note: when I was watching It’s a Wonderful Life and saw someone playing the rent collector for Potter (Lionel Barrymore) who looked very familiar.
It was Charles Lane - here was a photo of him.
Charles Lane was an amazing man who appeared in 250 movies for over 80 years and lived to 102 years of age!!!! He is very much the actor extraordinaire. See the incredible list here.
He looked familiar. It occurred to me, he was the spitting image of John Podesta, Clinton and Obama advisor.
By Robert Bryce
Forbes Energy
About 115 people were burned alive after a fuel tanker caught fire in Sierra Leone.
The defining inequality in the world today is the staggering disparity between the energy rich and the energy poor. That disparity came into gruesome focus yet again last week in Sierra Leone.
On November 5, while several thousand policymakers, researchers, and climate activists at the COP 26 meeting in Glasgow were trying to forge agreements on how to slash consumption of hydrocarbons, about 115 people were burned alive while trying to collect gasoline from a damaged fuel tanker truck near Sierra Leone’s capital city of Freetown.
According to the Washington Post, “People had crowded around the crash to collect leaking fuel when the tanker blew up, witnesses said. Anything spilled was viewed as wasteful in a community where many struggled to afford gas.” One witness described the scene, “dead bodies all around...There are people screaming, people burning alive.”
One witness said, “The firefighters came, but there was nothing they could do...The blaze was so much. There was nothing they could do to contain the inferno.”
Accidents like the one in Freetown are chillingly common. Since 2019, more than 400 people have died in accidents similar to the one in Freetown. The circumstances are almost always the same: a fuel tanker truck gets involved in an accident. Large crowds of desperate people assemble, excited about the prospect of free fuel. Then, due to an errant spark or a careless cigarette, the fuel is ignited and dozens of people are immolated.
These deaths - all of them - are deaths of extreme energy poverty. While energy elites insist we need to drastically reduce our use of coal, oil and natural gas, hundreds of millions of people are living in grinding energy poverty and they will do whatever they have to do to get the energy they need.
The disparities in global energy consumption are gobsmacking. Today, about 3.3 billion people are living in places where per-capita electricity use is less than what’s used by an average American kitchen refrigerator. All over the developing world, people die premature deaths due to indoor air pollution caused by the use of poor-quality cooking fuels.
The average African consumes about 15 times less energy than the average resident of North America. The situation in Sierra Leone, a small country on Africa’s west coast, is even more dire. Electricity use in Sierra Leone is so low that the World Bank doesn’t publish data for it. By my calculations, based on the country’s population of about 8 million, the average resident of the country uses less than 40 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. That is not a misprint. For comparison, the average resident of the U.S. consumes about 13,000 kilowatt-hours of juice per year, or about 300 times as much.
I’ve been collecting stories about death-by-immolation among the energy destitute. Here are a few of them.
In January 2019, in Hidalgo, Mexico, about 85 people were burned alive while trying to collect gasoline from a pipeline that had been illegally tapped. The Associated Press report on the accident was somber and elegiac. “The lure of free fuel was irresistible for many: They came like moths to a flame, parking vehicles on a nearby road.”
The report continued, “This particular section of pipeline had come back into service after being offline for nearly four weeks when somebody punctured the line again....Hundreds showed up at the spigot, carrying plastic jugs and covering their faces with bandanas. A few threw rocks and swung sticks at soldiers who tried to shoo them away. Some fuel collectors brought their children along...What ignited the gasoline, no one seems to know. After the explosion, soldiers formed a perimeter around an area the size of a soccer field where townspeople were incinerated by the fireball, reduced to clumps of ash and bones.”
In May 2019, in Niger, 76 people died after an overturned tanker truck exploded as crowds tried to collect spilled fuel.
In July 2019, in Nigeria, a similar accident killed at least 45. As reported by the BBC: “People had gathered around the crashed tanker after the crash, with some attempting to salvage fuel.”
In August 2019, about 64 people were killed in a similar accident in Tanzania. Per a news report, “People were trying to recover fuel from the vehicle, which had overturned on a major road, when it exploded.”
In July of this year, in Kenya, at least 13 people were killed in yet another accident. “People had rushed to the scene with jerrycans to siphon off fuel from the overturned tanker before it exploded.”
About a month later, in Lebanon, which is in the midst of an ongoing energy crisis, at least 28 people died when a fuel tank exploded. According to Reuters, the Lebanese army “had seized a fuel storage tank hidden by black marketeers and was handing out gasoline to residents when the explosion occurred.”
On Wednesday, at the COP 26 confab in Glasgow, a draft agreement was being circulated that called for “just transitions to net-zero emissions.” But the rhetoric doesn’t match the reality. Amid the never-ending talk about net-zero and bans on hydrocarbons, it’s essential to remember those 400 dead, those mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters in Sierra Leone, in Lebanon, Tanzania, Kenya, and elsewhere who were burned alive.
Those people didn’t die because of climate change. They died trying to get the fuel they need to live.
Robert Bryce is an author, journalist, filmmaker, and the host of the Power Hungry Podcast. He has been writing about energy, power, innovation, and politics for more than three decades. Bryce has authored six books in which he has covered Enron’s bankruptcy, corn ethanol, digital drilling rigs, renewables, batteries, nuclear energy, and the future of the electric grid. His latest book, A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations, was published in 2020. His articles have appeared in numerous publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New York Post, and Sydney Morning Herald. His feature-length documentary, Juice: How Electricity Explains the World, is available on iTunes, Amazon Prime, and myriad other streaming services. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Lorin, who is an art teacher, photographer, and master potter. Follow Bryce on Twitter: @pwrhungry.
Energy prices are rising rapidly as the administration is pushing a green agenda with a ban on pipelines and drilling. Energy prices have doubled the last year.
This has caused inflation to explode. Energy is the lifeblood for the economy. You can’t move to renewables by just blocking fossil fuel to appease the climate activists. The effects as we have seen in Europe and Australia, is soaring energy prices which increases the cost of manufacturing and transportation and the costs of all goods and services.
White House chief of staff Ron Klain endorsed former Obama administration economist Jason Furman’s claim that the country’s inflation, supply chain, and other economic problems only affect a small part of the U.S. population. Furman, the chairman of former President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and an economics professor at Harvard University, tweeted Wednesday night that “most of the economic problems we’re facing .... are high class problems.”
But after we had achieved energy independence and low energy prices, going down the path that the early adopters of the extreme green agenda followed, would lead to lower income families and retirees spending over 40% of their income on energy.
They are seriously suffering now as energy prices have doubled and the costs of all goods and services are skyrocketing. And the worst is yet to come if the congress succeeds with a program the start of decarbonization efforts. It is so misguided and so 2021. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm laughed at a question about boosting America’s domestic oil production, calling it “hilarious.” Bloomberg host Tom Keene noted America’s rising gas prices and asked the energy secretary, “What is the Granholm plan to increase oil production in America?” Granholm immediately began laughing. “That is hilarious,” she said. “Would that I had the magic wand on this. Secretary Granholm appeared in 2018 video singing about end of gasoline, fossil fuels. But it is not a laughing matter,
CBN News reported October 21, “Experts are forecasting that the cost for heating oil could rise more than 40%, natural gas could shoot up 30%, propane, 54% and electricity, 6%. If it’s a bad winter, prices could go even higher, with propane costs doubling.”
And our forecasts for December and the winter for the U.S. and Eurasia is for bitter cold periods, which means blackouts and brownouts and like Texas found last February, would lead to many deaths and pain.
Cornwall Alliance Board Member Dr. David Black, Director of 2nd Vote Advisers, an investment firm, and Founder of 2ndVote.com, which rates corporations on the morality of their charitable giving, said in response to the news:
The attack on fossil fuels will lead to increased costs for all consumer items, since products must be transported to brick-and-mortar stores or delivered via FedEx, Amazon, et al., and because petroleum extracts are used as an ingredient in so many commercial products. Sadly, the lowest on the economic ladder will be harmed the most.
Historically high home heating costs have resulted in the poor trying to use kerosene space heaters, home gas ovens, or other devices to heat their homes, often with the tragedy of house fires or carbon monoxide related deaths.
And all for naught. CO2 is a beneficial gas - the gas of life - ask your plants.
Any apparent correlation with the rising phase of the 60 year cycle is coincidental. Many such false correlations can be found in real life.
Chamber of Commerce Global Energy Institute Energy Accountability Report. “...elected official have pledged to ban the very technology that has enabled this boom-hydraulic fracturing (HF), or fracking. This raises an important question: what would happen to American jobs and the economy if hydraulic fracturing was banned? In this report, the Global Energy Institute has undertaken the modeling and analysis to answer that question. Our analysis shows that if such a ban were imposed in 2021, by 2025 it would eliminate 19 million jobs and reduce U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by $7.1 trillion. Job losses in major energy producing states would be immediate and severe; in Texas alone, more than three million jobs would be lost. Tax revenue at the local, state, and federal levels would decline by nearly a combined $1.9 trillion, as the ban cuts off a critical source of funding for schools, first responders, infrastructure, and other critical public services.
Energy prices would also skyrocket under a fracking ban. Natural gas prices would leap by 324 percent, causing household energy bills to more than quadruple. By 2025, motorists would pay twice as much at the pump for gasoline as oil prices spike to $130 per barrel. The report also details the impacts that a ban would have on seven states, including five that are major energy producers - Colorado, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Not surprisingly, the results would devastate each of those energy states’ economies. But a fracking ban’s impacts would be felt well beyond energy producing regions, so the report also examines the impacts of a ban on the economies of Michigan and Wisconsin, which are large manufacturing states. There, too, the results are significant. For example, cost-of-living impacts to residential consumers in Wisconsin and Michigan would grow by approximately $4,700 and $5,100 respectively between 2021 and 2025.
Should the radical green agenda be approved, these numbers would more than likely double. Now if you factor in the risk if extreme cold outbreaks in the North America and Europe, which means blackouts and brownouts and as was previewed in Texas last February when sub zero cold and heavy snow invaded and the wind turbines froze in place throwing millions into the dark. 210 died. Deaths on the U.S. could be in the thousands this winter when energy sources are being blocked.
How did we get to the point when our government get to the point where energy independence and record low unemployment in a booming economy is rejected. This was predicted over half a century ago and repeated over the years - it is all about power (political not electrical) and control.
In his Farewell address to the nation Dwight Eisenhower in the speech remembered for comments on the military industrial complex also had a lot to say about politically driven science: “Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present - and is gravely to be regarded. Yet in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Maurice Strong , UN Executive Director in 1970s saw CO2 as a tool to Proselytize for One World Government. “...Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrial civilization collapse...isn’t it our job to bring that about”
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming...would fit the bill...It does not matter if this common enemy is “a real one or...one invented for the purpose.” Club of Rome advisor to the UN “First Global Revolution” 1991
“We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” Timothy Wirth, U.S. Senator, president of the United Nation’s Foundation
Dixie Lee Ray, Washington State Governor wrote: “The objective, clearly enunciated by the leaders of UN, is to bring about a change in the present system of independent nations. The future is to be World Government with central planning by the United Nations. Fear of environmental crises- whether real or not - is expected to lead to - compliance.”
“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony ... climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” - Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment
UN Climate Chief Christine Figueres said “Our aim is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to change the global economic system (destroy capitalism).”
UN IPCC Lead Author Ottmar Edenhofer in November 2010. “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.” Instead, climate change policy is about how “we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s chief of staff recently admitted that the Green New Deal was not conceived as an effort to deal with climate change but instead a “how-do-you-change-the-entire economy thing”...nothing more than a thinly veiled socialist takeover of the U.S. economy. “ “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at al,” Saikat Chakrabarti said in May.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary” and “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.” H.L. Mencken
Please help us spread the word. The markets love the idea of government money but history has shown this path has always led to misery and poverty except for the elitists and an economic freefall. Europe and Asia are fearing a cold winter with given the state of the energy systems - renewable energy has proven unreliable for base load with blackouts and brownouts. Remember 210 deaths in Texas occurred with the subzero cold and snow last February. Devastating freezes - worst in decades occurred in Brazil this past winter.
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Climate NEXUS fact checks the 2000 National Climate Assessment
And see the miserable model failures that are being used to impoverish hard working Americans to keep the warmists money coming in and the politicians in control.
For decades there has been intermittent attention paid to the claim that the Urban Heat Island creates a warming trend as formerly rural spots are paved over, trapping heat, which then boosts the warming that inevitably gets blamed on greenhouse gases. Including in the claims we discussed last week that the U.S. just had its hottest summer ever. A particular indicator that the UHI is behind claims of unprecedented heat is if nighttime lows are rising faster than daytime highs, incidentally decreasing rather than increasing the swing in temperature, which is very much what you’d expect if human structures including roads were trapping the sun’s heat during the day then releasing it at night.
A July news story out of San Diego noted this effect, saying “Last month was the hottest June ever recorded in North America, but climate scientists say the most dramatic temperature trend isn’t happening during the day; It’s happening at night. June saw three times as many nighttime records as any June on record, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.” And NOAA said, of August at least, that “Much of the above-average warmth can be attributed to warm overnight temperatures.” But what they didn’t point out is that’s evidence of data contamination not climate change.
Another indication that the Urban Heat Island is creating the illusion of unprecedented warming is that the US Climate Reference Network (USCRN), a network of U.S. stations specifically created to exclude measuring points vulnerable to UHI, shows no warming from 2005-2019. In which case we’re not seeing the fever peaking and killing the patient. A classic effort to debunk this finding not only used the adjusted NOAA/NASA data, but said “Even if the US experienced a flat temperature change for 14 years, this would not prove that global warming isn’t occurring. The US only covers a small portion of the planet, and a 14-year period is too short to reliably indicate long-term trends over short-term variability.” But that never stopped them from pointing to US heat records, when they happen, as proof of impending global destruction. And the dodge raises the ever-pertinent question: If this evidence does not persuade you that the theory is open to debate, what if anything might do so? The fact that Scandinavia seems to show no warming in July in the 21st century? Or that USCRN showed this February the coldest in the US in 30 years? But cold is just weather.
Or is it? Back in April Willis Eschenbach did some work on data from Berkeley Earth and CERES satellites and found that the contiguous U.S. showed a cooling trend from March 2000 through February 2020. And then he made a very relevant point about the scale of the change: “Now, before anyone starts yelling ‘But that’s just the contiguous US, not the globe!’, yes, I know that. I’m just saying that if you think the US temperature has gone up over the 21st century, you’re wrong. The US has cooled over that time. And this reveals a deep truth, which is that if it were not for accurate thermometers, hundreds and hundreds of US surface temperature station sites, and satellites, we’d never know if the US had warmed or cooled over the last two decades… the changes are far too small and too widespread for our human senses to register.”
This observation recalls a remark we quoted in our 2020 “Catastrophe Question” video from Swedish climatologist Lennart Bengtsson, who observed a few years ago that “The warming we have had over the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.” And Judith Curry recently made a very pertinent observation on this score, quoting a story from Yahoo! News that “Parts of the US are getting dangerously hot. Yet Americans are moving the wrong way” then adding “Hmmm… somebody’s drawing the wrong conclusions?”
The general IPCC line is that temperatures have gone up 1.07C since pre-industrial times, and if they rise by more than another 0.43C, the Paris target, we’re all going to be in trouble. Not that we already are, as newspapers claim. That we will be. But frankly less than half a degree C, three-quarters of a degree F, is nothing. Nothing you could notice, nothing your crops could notice, nothing the planet could notice. And nothing we could measure. (Oddly the latest IPCC report claims a total of 1.07C from 1850-1900 to 2010-2019 on p. 38 of the Summary for Policymakers, after on p. 6 calling it the best estimate of “total human-caused global surface temperature increase from 1850-1900 to 2010-2019” so they don’t seem very clear on whether there has been any net natural warming at all since the Crimean War.)
Despite even the IPCC’s caution about extreme weather, NBC roars ahead: “Global warming is making heat waves and other extreme weather events both more likely and more severe, and climate scientists have said conditions this summer offer a glimpse of what could become more common in the future.” But there’s a big difference between becoming more common in the future and having become more common in the present. And as we have pointed out before, NBC’s main science reporter has an MA in Journalism and a BA in Criminology. Who these “climate scientists” are and what they said and why is not included in her stories as news with specific citations. It is just ominous background music.
See the Climate Reference Network plot of Monthly Average US temperatures since inception in 2005 and the constructed data from the US climate divisions back to 1998’s super El Nino.
And the average monthly maximum temperatures for the US climate divisions.
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Addendum from Joseph D’Aleo
The warming as many have show in mostly in the elevated nighttime lows in urban areas ad airports which hold their heat. Record highs have not been increasing despite the best efforts of the zealot Tom Peterson who left NCDC to help lead the WMO team on trying to find evidence of increasing record heat. In Antarctica they found a station on the tip of the Antarctic Peninsular (an active volcanic region surface and deep sea) and subject to the foehn wind when the wind blows downslope. But the peninsular is not warming nor the ice diminishing. In fact the South pole had its coldest winter on record back to 1957 (see here). See images from Klaus-Eckhart Puls (prominent German met, who runs “EIKE” (European Info Center for Climate & Economics) - HT Hans
Climate Change Committee misled Parliament about the cost of Net Zero
Date: 26/09/21Press Release, Global Warming Policy Forum
Claims of low cost were based on “grossly misleading” assumptions
* Highly optimistic assumptions about EV costs have been called into question by the actual development of EV costs since the CCC advised Parliament
* Committee on Climate Change spreadsheets only revealed after 2 year freedom of information campaign
* Costs could be 60,000 per household higher than the CCC estimates that MPs used when they were considering Net Zero legislation
London, 26 September - The Sunday Telegraph reports today that Parliament was misled into supporting Net Zero plans to decarbonise the economy.
The Climate Change Committee (CCC) told MPs that British households and businesses would face only a modest cost for reaching Net Zero emissions in 2050, but analysis of their financial models by the Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) shows that key assumptions were not credible even at the time the report was published.
The revelations come after the CCC spent two years and tens of thousands of pounds resisting attempts to have the Net Zero model spreadsheets released under Freedom of Information legislation. The Information Tribunal finally forced their disclosure in August this year.
The first results of the GWPF’s analysis focus on the Transport sector costings. The work reveals that the CCC’s claims that decarbonisation could be achieved at no net cost was based on wildly optimistic and sometimes bizarre assumptions.
According to GWPF Deputy Director Andrew Montford:
When they published their report in 2019, the CCC said that small electric car prices would have fallen to around 13,000 pounds by 2021. However, the CCC’s figures for 2019 EV prices were wildly wrong at the time they published their report, so its’ unsuprising tht the current cost of a small electric car is double, or even triple their estimate.”
If instead of the CCC’s optimistic assumptions, we project a realistic decline in EV costs, this adds a staggering 1.8 trillion pounds to the cost of Net Zero, or 60,000 pounds ($82,000) per household, and altogether wipes out the claimed net benefit of decarbonising the transport sector.
Dr Benny Peiser, GWPF director said:
“Lord Deben, chairman of the Climate Change Committee, told Parliament the Net Zero report was ‘the most seriously presented, costed effort’ - but it is now clear that the costings were incomplete, biased, and grossly misleading.
Parliament was, in essence, misled and Net Zero was badly mis-sold. The public is now facing the price for that deception.”
In a striking new development, the Sunday Telegraph is also reporting that they were initially given misleading information by the CCC, in an attempt to cover up the error and prevent publication. Only repeated requests for clarification revealed the truth.
Dr Peiser said that the CCC’s attempts to whitewash the matter meant that this supposedly independent advisor to government could no longer be seen as a credible source:
The CCC spent years trying to hide their absurd assumptions, and even after the Information Tribunal compelled them to release their spreadsheets, they tried to throw the Sunday Telegraph off the scent. I don’t think Parliament or the public can ever trust them again.”
Craig Mackinlay MP, chairman of the parliamentary Net Zero Scrutiny Group, told the Sunday Telegraph that the findings were “scandalous” and that Parliament had been “misled”.
The GWPF’s analysis of the CCC’s costings is ongoing, and further announcements are expected in the coming weeks.
Detailed findings
Cost of electric vehicles
The CCC’s model assumes that EV costs will fall by 36-59% between 2010 and 2050, depending on category. The price of small EVs is assumed to fall from 26,000 to 11,000 pounds. Actual 2021 small EV prices (see graph below) are typically around double the figures used by the CCC in the Net Zero Report.
It must have been obvious to the CCC that their assumed trajectory was wrong at the time the Net Zero report was published. The CCC’s 2019 figure was 14,666, around half the level seen in the marketplace at that time [1].
This can be illustrated by the history of the Nissan Leaf, the archetypal small EV.
The extremely optimistic assumptions made by the CCC about Electric Vehicles are crucially important to their overall cost estimates. Simply changing the shape of the curve to a straight line decline between 2019 and 2050, for all categories of EV, adds 0.7 trillion to the cost of Net Zero.
With batteries now representing only around 25% of the consumer cost of an EV, future cost declines - if any - are likely to be incremental rather than revolutionary. Indeed, there is a significant upward cost pressures on EV prices due to increasing costs for energy and critical minerals.
Reducing the rate of decline to 3% per decade more than doubles the cost of Net Zero, amounting to a bill of 60,000 pounds per household. Holding EV prices steady would increase the bill by 2.1 trillion, or 75,000 pounds (over $200,000) per household.
[1] All costs are in 2018 pounds, ex-VAT and before deduction of any grants.
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this is UK, The GND of AOC/Sanders and Kerry has a goal or following the UK. They may be able to afford this - but can you.
Joseph DAleo, CCM
Link
Ida came ashore in Louisiana as a strong CAT4 hurricane.
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It produced major flooding and wind damage and widespread lengthy power outages in Louisiana where at least 6 died. Ida then turned northeast and then east. After coming ashore and moved north it triggered 3 tornadoes in Alabama and 1 in Virginia. On the way out to sea, the storm spun up 8 more tornadoes in PA and NJ to MD late Wednesday as many hurricane landfalls often do. Beulah in 1967 produced 115 tornadoes over a large area, ranging from the Texas coastal communities to South Central and Southeast Texas.
The storm brought torrential rains to the northeast centered on areas from southeastern Pennsylvania across northern New Jersey, the New York City Metro areas into southern Connecticut. Coming just days after record rains from Henri, 7 to 10 inches fell in a short period, producing catastrophic urban flooding.
7.13 inches fell in Central Park (including 3.1 inches within one hour which shattered the record set only last week, when 1.94 inches of rain fell in one hour during Tropical Storm Henri). The National Weather Service issued a flash flood emergency in New York City for the first time ever and at least 9 fatalities have been recorded in the northeast. Most of these fatalities resulted from people caught in illegal basement apartments that flooded. More fatalities may have occurred as Ida exited than where and when it came ashore.
This moved 2021 into second place behind only 2011 (Irene) for July to September rainfall with a total of 28.54 inches...with 4 weeks to go.
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More fatalities may have occurred as Ida exited than where and when it came ashore. Coming after a record wet July in places and a wet August with the help of Henri, the soil moisture contributed to the rainfall.
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CAMILLE 1969
In August 1969, Camille, a CAT5 storm came ashore a little further east In MS and had a one-two punch. Camille was the second of three Category 5 hurricanes to make landfall during the 20th Century, which it did near the mouth of the Mississippi on the night of August 19th, resulting in catastrophic damage. Camille made landfall with a pressure of 900 mb, estimated sustained winds of 200 mph, and a peak storm surge of 24 feet.
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Camille was the strongest landfalling tropical cyclone recorded worldwide, and one of only four tropical cyclones worldwide ever to achieve wind speeds of 190 mph. The hurricane flattened nearly everything along the coast of the Mississippi, and caused additional flooding and deaths inland before exiting in Virginia. In total, Camille killed 259 people and caused $1.42 billion (1969 USD) in damages.
Is 2021 going to be a record year for hurricanes? No, in fact, despite an active Atlantic in 2020 for storms and Ida this season, for the hemisphere, we are for the second year is a row, well below the normal.
The ACE (Accumulated Cyclone Energy) Index is a metric used to assess seasonal and regional trends. Though we are running above normal for the number of named storms in the Atlantic, the east Pacific is near normal and the western Pacific, usually the busiest tropical season region is running half the normal pace. 2020 was similar with a record number of Atlantic storms but the average ACE per storms was reportedly the lowest on record again with a quiet Pacific.
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The long-term linear trend in the number and intensity of global hurricane activity has remained flat or even declined.
The late, great Dr. Bill Gray from Colorado State taught us hurricane activity does vary year-to-year and over longer periods as short-term ocean cycles like El Nino/La Nina and multi-decadal cycles in the Pacific (PDO) and Atlantic (AMO) ocean temperature regimes which favored changes in activity levels and some basins (West Pacific, East/Central Pacific or Atlantic) over others.
Credible data show this trend pattern is true despite much better open ocean detection than before the 1960s when many short-lived storms at sea would have been missed as there were no satellites, no aircraft reconnaissance, no radar, no buoys and no automated weather stations back then. See NOAA June Study here.
Landfall counts are more reliable. This data actually shows that the number of U.S. landfalling hurricanes and major hurricanes has been on the decline since the late 1800s. This past decade was the quietest one for landfalling hurricanes (behind the 1970s) and major hurricanes (behind only the 1860s).
However, the impacts on the United States has varied considerably with time, with very active seasons giving way to long lulls during which the public forgets the lessons from past storms and the risks of settling in vulnerable areas. The regions targeted vary too.
Great Colonial hurricanes in the northeast with storm surges up to 20 feet occurred in 1635 and 1675. A Katrina like storm made landfall in Louisiana in 1722 with major flooding and damage in Louisiana. The Great Chesapeake storm in 1769 like Isabel in 2003 brought major flooding to North Carolina and Virginia.
In the Caribbean, the Great Hurricane of 1780 killed an estimated 27,500 people while ravaging the islands of the eastern Caribbean with winds estimated to top 200 mph. It was one of three hurricanes that year with death tolls greater than 1000.
The period from the 1850s to 1910 was very active in the Gulf area.
1886 had least 10 hurricanes, 7 making landfall (3 in Texas). 4 of the 1886 hurricanes were major hurricanes.
Dr. Neil Frank, longest serving Hurricane Center Director adds:
“Without question the most reliable indicator of a trend in hurricane activity in the Atlantic is to focus on land falling major hurricanes (3-5) in the mainline U.S. I doubt if a major hurricane could have hit the U.S. in the 1800s without being noticed, while a minor hurricane in a remote area could have been undetected so it is important to concentrate on major hurricanes. It is important to emphasize that the rainfall in a tropical system is not related to the intensity but depends on the forward speed of motion. In the case of Harvey, the weakening hurricane stalled over southeast Texas for three days.
Finally, as you know the most active hurricane season in the U.S. was 1886 when 7 hurricanes hit the Gulf coast. One of the major hurricanes in Texas destroyed Indianola on the south shore of Matagorda Bay. At one time there were around 20,000 people in the city before a prior major hurricane in 1875 did major damage. The only thing in Indianola today is a cemetery with numerous headstones with dates 1875 or 1886.”
1893 had at least 10 hurricanes. Of those, 5 became major hurricanes. Two of the hurricanes caused over two thousand (2000) deaths in the United States; at the time, the season was the deadliest in U.S. history.
The Galveston Hurricane in 1900 killed at least 8,000 people with some estimates as high as 12,000, making it the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history.Just 7 years later, the Galveston Hurricane in 1900 killed at least 8,000 people with some estimates as high as 12,000, making it the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. Most of these deaths occurred after a storm surge inundated the coastline with 8 to 12 feet of water. Every building and dwelling suffered some degree of damage and 3,636 homes were demolished.
The disaster ended the Golden Era of Galveston, as the hurricane alarmed potential investors, who turned to Houston instead. In response to the storm, three engineers designed and oversaw plans to raise the Gulf of Mexico shoreline of Galveston Island by 17 feet and erect a 10 mile seawall.
Though the Gulf and Caribbean waters are always warm enough to trigger storms every year, the areas further north do see quieter periods. After decades of no impact storms, there were 8 major devastating storms on the east coast from 1938 to 1960 then a 28-year lull until Hugo in 1989 began another active era of increased activity. We will soon as the earth goes into the next cool period driven by the sun and sun’s impacts on the ocean temperature regimes, see another relative quiet period further north.
Already the tropical atmosphere is showing no warming.
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And the most skillful statistical model that with high accuracy explained the temperature changes (short term and long) since 1979 using solar and ocean factors, suggested in 2016 a cooling that would show up about now.
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And more evidence about the arctic, fires, hurricanes and tornadoes.
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By Kevin Mooney
September 23, 2021
Members of the Biden administration from the president on down who peddled unsubstantiated allegations about Russian collusion with Donald Trump have some explaining to do.
That’s because Mother Russia is now benefitting from President Biden’s anti-energy policies in general, and from his hostility toward U.S. oil and gas, in particular.
Suddenly, Russia is the number two oil importer to the U.S. behind only Canada. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that U.S. imports of oil and refined petroleum products from Russia increased by 23% in May to 844,000 barrels a day from the prior month.
There is no natural process of osmosis at work here. America is more reliant on Russian oil than it was just a few months ago under Trump because of deliberate public decisions made under Biden that put America last. In January, Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have pumped vital oil resources from Canada into the U.S. He then proceeded to withdraw the sanctions the Trump administration put in place enabling Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline to transfer natural gas to Germany without navigating its way through Ukraine.
Recall that it was just a few years ago that Biden favored the creation of a select committee to investigate allegations of collusion between Russia and Trump campaign officials.
The Institute for Energy Research, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit that favors free market energy policies, carefully unpackages the geopolitical fallout from Biden’s decision to oppose pipeline construction in the U.S. while removing obstacles for Russian pipelines.
“Instead of benefiting Russia, Keystone XL would have benefited the United States and our closest ally, IER explains in a press release. “Keystone XL would have not only supplied Gulf refineries with 830,000 barrels per day (730,000 Canada, 100,000 North Dakota Bakken) but also would have lifted prices paid to Canadian producers, encouraging new investments (and further pipelines) to tap Canada’s second-largest in the world proven reserves.”
The Biden administration waived sanctions on the corporation standing behind Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and by extension the company CEO , who is a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Once again, recall it was Biden, and others now serving in his administration, who suggested that Trump would be favorably disposed toward Russia. But it was under Trump that America became energy independent for the first time in decades. As a further insult, the Biden administration has called on the Organization of the Oil Producing Countries (OPEC) to accelerate its oil production in response to rising energy prices.
Biden, for whatever reason, has a more congenial view of Russian energy initiatives than he does toward the infrastructure that makes it possible for energy supplies to flow across North America. Unfortunately, Biden’s America Last pipeline policies are just one small part of a larger picture.
The infrastructure bill and the reconciliation package now moving through Congress will devastate the American energy sector along with U.S. households that benefit the most from robust domestic development of oil and gas resources. The American Energy Alliance (AEA), a nonprofit consumer advocacy group, asks why federal taxpayers are being asked to foot the bill for electric vehicle subsidies to the tune of $7.5 billion instead of having the electric vehicle owners pay for electric car charging facilities themselves.
While the details about the reconciliation package remain vague, news reports anticipate the bill will include a tax on methane emissions, a border carbon tax and other anti-energy mandates.
The proposed tax on methane emissions will raise the cost of natural gas and consequently everything that natural gas is used for such as home heating while the border carbon tax will increase the costs of all goods coming into the U.S., according to an analysis from the American Energy Alliance.
The carbon border tax would impact everyday items like food, clothing, and construction materials used in cars and electronics. While the tax would be absorbed by all consumers, they would most directly impact individuals on fixed incomes.
But it’s not just Russia that’s scoring geopolitical points under Biden. The president’s pledge to mandate a carbon-free generation sector by 2035 means the U.S. will be forced to rely on inefficient, unreliable solar and wind technology. That’s a problem because China now dominates the market for lithium supplies used to manufacture batteries that can power so called renewable energy.
Bonner Cohen, a senior fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research, delves into detail about Biden’s legislative agenda and his assault on American energy.
“The two pieces of legislation that would guide the U.S. into a green energy future come at a time when President Biden is asking the Organization of the Oil Producing Countries (OPEC) and its allies, including Russia, to boost oil production to counter rising gas prices at the pump,” Cohen said in an interview. “He notably did not turn to domestic producers to pump more oil. He is continuing his administration’s war on U.S. oil and gas producers, claiming their emissions pose a threat to the climate. But somehow OPEC’s emissions are just fine. His plea to OPEC is an acknowledgement that windmills and solar panels—no matter how generous the subsidies—cannot supply the nation with the energy it needs.
The Nord Stream 2 pipeline that brings Russian natural gas to Germany and beyond meets with Biden’s approval, but the Keystone XL pipeline that transports Canadian oil to U.S. refiners is killed. His policies destroy American jobs, reduce the disposable incomes of consumers, and enrich OPEC, China, and Silicon Valley and Wall Street investors in green energy.”
By Joe D’Aleo
The administration is working to push a budget that includes the Green New Deal which will have huge negative effects on our lives and will destroy out economy possibly beyond repair.
Here is a two part series I produced for the local cable system that fact checks the claims made about the theory of unprecedented global warming and extremes of weather. We show the model failures and examples of the Law of Unintended Consequences that applied in every country that has gone down the green path (the modern day yellow brick road to Oz).
Part 1: Link
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The failures in Afghanistan are being linked to pressures on the people in the region from climate change. Also extremes of drought in the west and north central US and Canada and parts of Russia and South America, flooding rains in China, Europe and the southern US and record cold in Brazil are all claimed by some to be man’s fault.
Just over 40 years ago, the idea an ice age was developing thanks to the human volcano. See Leonard Nino talk about the last cold cycle 1950 to 1979 when the worry by many scientists was we may be heading into another ice age and cold is always worse than warm.
Then as the next warm cycle began, they jumped on the warm bandwagon. See the cycle tracks with cycles of the PDO and AMO ocean 60 year cycles and a 60 year trend in TSI (solar). The temperatures track with these factors 100% of the time. CO2 changes with temperatures 40% of the time.
Journalist H.L. Mencken observed:
and“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”
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United Nations and Google Blame Global Warming for African Dictatorships’ Failures!
Dr. Patrick Moore (Greenpeace Co-Founder), author of “Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom” Paperback Comments on the CBS story:
This CBS article reads, “Rural Afghanistan has been rocked by climate change. The past three decades have brought floods and drought that have destroyed crops and left people hungry. And the Taliban likely without knowing climate change was the cause - has taken advantage of that pain.”
Here is the objective data on Afghan crop production, in kilograms per hectare:
Hmmm, I wonder who is telling the truth here. Is it failing crops or political incompetency?
See the real story thanks to James Taylor.
United Nations and Google Blame Global Warming for African Dictatorships’ Failures
By James Taylor - August 20, 20210
The United Nations has just published, and Google News is heavily promoting, an online publication titled, “Five things you need to know about the climate emergency in West and Central Africa.” The publication highlights countries with some of the most repressive governments in the world and then invents alleged global warming impacts to explain those countries’ failures. Yet, the truth is entirely different. Here are the five assertions by the United Nations, with the five things you really need to know about how the U.N. is falsely blaming global warming for African dictators’ failures:
“1. The Sahel, Land of Extremes” - The U.N. publication claims, “In the Sahel, temperatures are increasing 1.5 times faster than in the rest of the world, and the number of floods almost doubled between 2015 and 2020. These effects exacerbate a context where 29 million people rely on life-saving assistance this year.”
In 2013, the U.N. published an article, “The Sahel: One region, many crises.” The article claimed, “Even in normal years, millions are in a permanent state of food insecurity. Over the past five decades, persistent droughts have contributed to famine episodes. There is now a need to break the cycle of recurrent food crises in the region, many humanitarian actors say.”
Great news, the cycle has been broken and more rainfall is greening the region. As the Guardian reported just three years later, “Thankfully the region has become wetter again, and now new research indicates that the return of the rains is most likely a beneficial side-effect of global warming.”
So, what does the United Nations claim now that global warming has brought long-desired rains to the Sahel? The U.N. now claims, “the number of floods almost doubled between 2015 and 2020.” Well, yeah, if the region was bone-dry before, people couldn’t even grow food, they prayed for rain, and now global warming brings those welcome rains, it stands to reason that a small negative side-effect of the return of rain will be more of the infrequent floods that occur. Only climate alarmists that are desperately seeking to create climate crises would report the welcome arrival of much-needed rains as a climate crisis.
“2. Women Pay a Heavy Price” - The U.N. publication claims, “Climate hazards especially affect women and girls, who often bear a disproportionate burden to provide for their families. These hazards act as a ‘threat multiplier,’ increasing the levels of intimate partner violence, sexual violence and child marriage.”
The U.N. publication never claims how or why global warming causes more wife-beatings, abuse, and the cultural institution of parents arranging marriages for their pre-adult children. The U.N. publication just makes the conclusory statement as if it is a self-evident fact.
The only justification we can think of is the often-asserted claim that global warming is harming crop production, which drives people into poverty, which then stresses people out and forces them to beat their wives. The crop data throughout Africa, however, tell a different story. If anything, global warming is reducing the pressures that allegedly drive people to beat their wives and force their children into premature marriage.
Crop production throughout Africa is enjoying substantial long-term gains as the Earth modestly warms. Here are a few examples, provided by the information website The Global Economy, presenting United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization data reporting cereal (rice, wheat, corn) yields on the left axis in kilograms per hectare for Chad, Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Egypt(in the link here).
And the list goes on and on and on....
Clearly, if economic factors influence African wife-beatings and child marriages, and global warming impacts economic factors, then global warming is reducing wife-beatings and child marriages, not making them more prevalent.
“3. Climate Negatively Effects Food Production” - The U.N. publication claims, “Climate hazards have led to the degradation of 80 per cent of the Sahel’s farmlands and drastically reduced food sources. Food insecurity continues to increase, reaching record peaks every year; 14 million people are struggling with crisis or emergency levels of food insecurity. People living in major hotspots of compounded crises, such as the Central Sahel and the Lake Chad basin, pay a heavy price. This year, 5.2 million people in the Central Sahel and 5.1 million in the Lake Chad basin face hunger.”
That is a nifty narrative, but the objective facts tell a different story and don’t lie. Chad, Nigeria, Mali, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso are all Sahelian nations. The crop data objectively measured and presented above tells a completely different story than what the U.N. publication asserts.
We can also show the U.N. publication’s dishonesty by looking at NASA satellite images showing how vegetation and greenery are increasing and decreasing around the globe. The NASA image below shows that in the Sahel region at the southern edge of the Sahara desert, vegetation and greenery have been increasing in more areas and to a greater degree than in the small regions of the Sahel where vegetation is retreating. Increasing greenery reflects better crop conditions.
“4. Herders and Farmers Fight Over Resources” - The U.N. publication claims, “Farmer-herder violence in West and Central Africa has increased over the past 10 years, with concentrations in northern Burkina Faso, central Mali, and Nigeria. Extreme stress, property and communal loss, changes in land use, and a scarcity of food and water contribute to community conflict over resources and lead to an increasing number of incidents. In Mali, the cycles of farmer-herder violence and reprisals have become increasingly lethal since 2015 and resulted in nearly 700 fatalities in 2020.”
Much like its section on women, the U.N. report references cultural violence and then states, without supporting evidence, that global warming is to blame and making it worse.
The whole notion of global warming causing herders to beat, rob, and kill each other is based on the assertion that global warming is stifling the vegetation growth and crop production that supports animal herding. Yet, as shown above, the objective data don’t lie. Sahelian and African vegetation and crop production are substantially improving, not declining, as the Earth modestly warms.
“5. Heavy Rains Hinder Humanitarian Access” - The U.N. publication claims, “A record 54.3 million people need humanitarian assistance across West and Central Africa, but extreme weather patterns are affecting the capacity of humanitarian personnel to quickly reach the most vulnerable people. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, only 1.3 per cent of roads are paved, and the remaining road system is prone to floods during the rainy season. This leads to landslides and roads being inaccessible, delaying humanitarian assistance for days.”
The U.N. presents a heartbreaking tale of flooding and resulting humanitarian crises in Congo, but the objective data destroy the false assertion that global warming is to blame. A study of rainfall data in central Africa, presented last year in the peer-reviewed journal Atmospheric and Climate Sciences, shows no trend-change in precipitation during the past 100 years in the Democratic Republic of Congo. How can global warming be making flooding in Congo worse when there is no change in the amount of rainfall?
Shilling for Dictators - In summary, the objective data show that the United Nations is more concerned with making excuses for the failures of African dictators than presenting accurate information about global warming. As shown in the World Population Review ranking of Freest Countries, the nations featured in the U.N. publication are among the least free in the world. Only 1.3 percent of roads in Congo are paved because the country is run by repressive dictators, not because of global warming. Food insecurity continues to increase in the Sahel, despite a greening of the region and increasing crop production, because the region is governed by repressive dictators.
Global warming is the convenient excuse presented by dictators and big-government apologists throughout the world. The fact is that global warming is creating more beneficial conditions in Africa and throughout the world, but global warming is the convenient scapegoat on which to hang fictitious crisis and real crises that are created by government, not climate.
A study just published in the prominent health journal, The Lancet, reports deaths associated with extreme temperatures are declining. The report also demonstrates cold temperatures contribute to far more deaths each year than warmer temperatures.
In reporting on a pre-release version of the story in early July, the mainstream media misrepresented the study’s findings. The headline of Bloomberg News’ story discussing the study, “Climate Change Linked to 5 Million Deaths a Year, New Study Shows,” was typical misleading way the mainstream media covered the report before it was published. Rather than showing climate change was causing 5 million excess deaths, the research actually shows the recent modest warming has resulted in a decline in deaths associated with “non-optimal temperatures since 2000.
Since The Lancet officially published the study, titled “Global, regional, and national burden of mortality associated with non-optimal ambient temperatures from 2000 to 2019: a three-stage modeling study,” and people could examine the data themselves, there has largely been media silence.
The Lancet study, arguably the largest ever to examine excess mortality associated with temperature, was co-authored by 68 scientists representing universities and research institutes in 33 countries spanning all regions of the world.
According to the authors, there has been a small, possibly statistically insignificant, 0.21 percent increase in heat related deaths since 2000. Over the same time period deaths tied to cold temperatures declined by 0.51 percent. Because cold related deaths outnumber heat related deaths 10 to one, since 2000, the number of deaths associated with temperatures declined significantly, by tens of thousands.
As the figure below demonstrates, the study found cold related deaths greatly outnumber heat related deaths in every region of the world.
Figure 1. Global heat and cold related deaths graphed by region, from 2000-2019. Graph created by Willis Eschenbach from Lancet study data. Enlarged
The Lancet confirms what research previously published in The Lancet, the Southern Medical Journal, and other outlets, has consistently shown: Cold is the biggest temperature related killer, not heat. One is left wondering when the mainstream media will accurately report this fact.
The science is clear that cold temperatures pose a far greater risk to human health than hot temperatures, and deaths associated with temperatures are declining as the earth modestly warms. Climate alarmists may not want to hear it, but that’s what science shows and they should, in their own oft-shouted phrase, “Follow the Science!”
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. is managing editor of Environment & Climate News and a research fellow for environment and energy policy at The Heartland Institute. Burnett worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis for 18 years, most recently as a senior fellow in charge of NCPA’s environmental policy program. He has held various positions in professional and public policy organizations, including serving as a member of the Environment and Natural Resources Task Force in the Texas Comptroller-s e-Texas commission.
