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By Don Wrightman
The latest fake news on climate change suggests that scientists are copying as much US climate data as possible, because they fear the data might be wiped out under the Trump administration. The misleading article doesn’t account for the past three decades of corrupt climate data from politicized activist scientists, who may be getting the boot from the incoming administration. If anything, those scientists should be deleting the data to cover their behinds, not copying it.
The recent fake news headline, “Scientists are frantically copying US climate data fearing it might vanish under Trump,” would pose major problems for the scientists, if it were true. Government employees, who protect government data by transferring it into private servers, would be committing the same federal crime that plagued Hillary Clinton’s campaign efforts.
Among the shocking revelations from 2009’s Climategate emails was the destruction of raw temperature data, by scientists who were supposed to maintain it. At the admission Phil Jones, a Climatic Research Unit member at the University of East Anglia, original raw data had not been kept due to storage availability. That seems more inline with something corrupt scientists would be inclined to do, opposed to preserving data. The Competitive Enterprise Institute launched a lawsuit over climategate because the EPA’s climate policies rely on the data that had been destroyed.
It’s typical to see the climate alarmist establishment freaking out over a Trump presidency; they are now at risk of having their lies exposed. Donald Trump is in no mood to show mercy to those who have manipulated raw temperature data to exaggerate global warming. Climate alarmists are claiming that the Trump administration won’t look after the data.
A Trump advisor has called for NASA to return to its roots, and focus solely on space exploration, not climate research. NASA’s focus on climate research was a bureaucratic overreach for the aeronautic space administration.
Trump’s transition team has sent an inquiry to the Department of Energy asking for the names of employees who are associated with climate change. The incoming administration wants to know which members have been attending annual global climate talks hosted by the United Nations, which department workers have attended meetings regarding the social cost of carbon, which employees receive the highest salaries, and which websites were maintained, or contributed to, by lab staff during scheduled work hours.
The questioning of the Department of Energy shows that Trump administration is preparing to do good work. Since the left-wing considers climate change to be among the highest of government priorities and a threat to national security, they should be happy to see Trump’s team making those inquiries.
More lies meant to scare you from the fake news media like CNN, The Weather Channel, USA Today
By James Taylor
The news media recently published a barrage of stories claiming climate change is harming the global fish catch, but objective data show just the opposite. As the earth continues its modest warming, fishermen around the world continue to set new fish catch records nearly every year.
The lead article showing up in a Google News search for “global warming” on March 1 was an article published by Inside Climate News titled, “Climate Change Is Cutting Into the Global Fish Catch, and It’s on Pace to Get Worse.” Similar stories were published the same day by USA Today, CNN.com, The Weather Channel, and others.
The problem is, an examination of global fish data show there has been no reduction in the global fish catch. In reality, exactly the opposite is happening.
The World Bank hosts a webpage, “Total fisheries production,” that tracks the historical global fish catch. The World Bank data show a jaw-dropping increase in global production as the earth has warmed. Publishing data through 2015, the World Bank reports:
* 2015 was a record year for global fish production.
* The last year that did not set a new global fish production record 2001.
* From 2010 through 2015, global fish production increased by 19 percent.
* Since 2000, global fish production has increased by 46 percent.
* Since 1980, global fish production has more than doubled, up 165 percent.
* Since 1960, global fish production has more than quadrupled, up 440 percent.
By any measurement, over any time frame, global fish production is rising rapidly as the earth warms. And the pace of increase in the global fish catch is accelerating, especially since 2010. Yet climate alarmists and their compliant media allies spread the myth that “Climate Change Is Cutting Into the Global Fish Catch, and It’s on Pace to Get Worse.”
Sadly, the media’s misrepresentation of the global fish catch is similar to the media’s misrepresentation of virtually every topic regarding global warming. The environmental left and their media allies would have us believe global warming is causing an increase in crop failures, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, and just about everything else that has to do with weather and climate. The objective data show exactly the opposite. Global crop production sets new records virtually every year. There has been no increase in drought. There has been a modest long-term decline in global hurricane frequency. There has been no increase in tornado activity, with a substantial decline in the occurrence of the strongest tornadoes.
Ultimately, the question is which is more credible; speculative theories and models presented by global warming alarmists or objective real-world evidence presented by climate realists that directly contradict alarmist assertions?
The ridiculous claims of a declining and worsening global fish catch perfectly illustrate the credibility gap in the global warming debate. The media articles on global fish production were based on a newly published paper that, according to the paper, “used temperature specific models and hindcasting” to report “an overall reduction in yield has occurred over the past 80 years.” Yet objective data falsify the models and hindcasting and show fishermen are catching quadruple as many fish as they did a half century ago.
Which do you believe, a hindcasting model claiming global warming has reduced fish yields or the objective data showing a tremendous increase in global fish production? The answer to that question illustrates the differences between alarmists and skeptics in the overall global warming debate.
James Taylor (JTaylor@heartland.org) is senior fellow for environment and climate policy at The Heartland Institute.
Greenpeace co-founder and former president of Greenpeace Canada Patrick Moore described the cynical and corrupt machinations fueling the narrative of anthropocentric global warming and “climate change” in a Wednesday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.
Moore explained how fear and guilt are leveraged by proponents of climate change:
Fear has been used all through history to gain control of people’s minds and wallets and all else, and the climate catastrophe is strictly a fear campaign - well, fear and guilt - you’re afraid you’re killing your children because you’re driving them in your SUV and emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and you feel guilty for doing that. There’s no stronger motivation than those two.
Scientists are co-opted and corrupted by politicians and bureaucracies invested in advancing the narrative of “climate change” in order to further centralize political power and control, explained Moore.
Moore noted how “green” companies parasitize taxpayers via favorable regulations and subsidies ostensibly justified by the aforementioned narrative’s claimed threats, all while enjoying propagandistic protection across news media”
And so you’ve got the green movement creating stories that instill fear in the public. You’ve got the media echo chamber - fake news - repeating it over and over and over again to everybody that they’re killing their children, and then you’ve got the green politicians who are buying scientists with government money to produce fear for them in the form of scientific-looking materials, and then you’ve got the green businesses, the rent-seekers and the crony capitalists who are taking advantage of massive subsidies, huge tax write-offs, and government mandates requiring their technologies to make a fortune on this, and then of course you’ve got the scientists who are willingly, they’re basically hooked on government grants.
When they talk about the 99 percent consensus [among scientists] on climate change, that’s a completely ridiculous and false numbers, but most of the scientists - put it in quotes, scientists - who are pushing this catastrophic theory are getting paid by public money. They are not being paid by General Electric or Dupont or 3M to do this research, where private companies expect to get something useful from their research that might produce a better product and make them a profit in the end because people want it - build a better mousetrap type of idea - but most of what these so-called scientists are doing is simply producing more fear so that politicians can use it control people’s mind and get their votes because some of the people are convinced, ‘Oh, this politician can save my kid from certain doom.’
The narrative of anthropogenic global warming or “climate change” is an existential threat to reason, warned Moore:
It is the biggest lie since people thought the Earth was at the center of the universe. This is Galileo-type stuff. If you remember, Galileo discovered that the sun was at the center of the solar system and the Earth revolved around it. He was sentenced to death by the Catholic Church, and only because he recanted was he allowed to live in house arrest for the rest of his life.
So this was around the beginning of what we call the Enlightenment, when science became the way in which we gained knowledge instead of using superstition and instead of using invisible demons and whatever else, we started to understand that you have to have observation of actual events and then you have to repeat those observations over and over again, and that is basically the scientific method.
“But this abomination that is occurring today in the climate issue is the biggest threat to the Enlightenment that has occurred since Galileo,” declared Moore. “Nothing else comes close to it. This is as bad a thing that has happened o science in the history of science.”
Moore concluded, “It’s taking over science with superstition and a kind of toxic combination of religion and political ideology. There is no truth to this. It is a complete hoax and scam.”
By Norman Rogers, American Thinker
William Happer is one of the most important scientists in the United States. He is an emeritus professor of physics at Princeton and a long-serving adviser to the federal government. His scientific discoveries and inventions are extensive. Currently, he serves in the White House as a senior adviser to the National Security Council.
The Trump administration is thinking of forming a “Presidential Committee on Climate Security.” The press has been told to direct questions to Dr. Happer. That is enough to bring out the climate hyenas. They can’t stand the thought that Trump might have some solid scientific advice concerning climate change. The hyenas are running an all-out attack against Dr. Happer.
Following Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the camp followers of the global warming industry try to create polarization. In a Time magazine article, a former admiral says Happer is a fringe figure. A climate scientist at Georgia Tech says Happer has “false, unscientific notions.” We are reassured that the global warming scare is absolutely solid science, as everyone except climate deniers knows.
What everyone may not know is that climate science is an industry, and the product is the global warming scare. If the global warming scare is discredited, the huge industry will collapse. Climate scientists used to be unimportant academics in an unimportant academic field. The global warming scare made them into celebrities jetting around the world. They won’t give up the glory without a fight.
Climate computer models, the basis of the doomsday predictions, disagree with each other and disagree with the climate of the Earth. But according to the climate science mafia, anyone who brings up such embarrassing information is a tool of the fossil fuel industry. As far as the climate mafia is concerned, the business plan of the fossil fuel industry is to wreck the Earth and wreck the global warming industry. The reality is that the fossil fuel industry is wimpy and not inclined to take on the global warmers.
Climate science has gone off the rails. President Eisenhower nailed the problem in his 1961 farewell address. He expressed the fear that because science had become heavily dependent on federal financial support, scientists would color the science in order to increase the flow of federal money. Nothing works better for increasing the flow of federal scientific money than predicting a future disaster. If scientists predict a disaster, we have to give them more money to research methods of preventing the disaster.
Since Eisenhower’s address, we have been treated to a parade of scientific doomsday predictions, none of which measured up to the hype. There was global cooling that preceded global warming. There were acid rain, DDT, the ozone layer, overpopulation, and many others. It is not only scientists who use a parade of disaster predictions. Environmental organizations need doomsday predictions, too, in order to keep their members interested. The press has a bias for sensationalism, so it too promotes the latest doomsday predictions.
Many professions are supposed to adhere to high ethical standards. For example, lawyers are supposed to put the interests of their clients above their own interests. Doctors are supposed to put their patients’ welfare above their own pecuniary interests. Journalists are supposed to be objective and not color their work with their own political preferences. We know that not every professional adheres strictly to his ethical code. Scientists are not different. They are supposed to search for scientific truth and to exercise objectivity in their work. They are not supposed to hype weak theories in order to improve their professional standing. But these things happen.
Most scientists are not in a position to contradict global warming hype. Science is a profession characterized by ideological schools and groupthink. Groupthink is worst in sciences where the rules are not clear and the data are confusing - for example, climate science. Young scientists depend on older, more senior scientists for recognition and promotion. They are in no position to contradict groupthink. They have families to feed. The senior scientists may be running large scientific enterprises financed by federal money. To express doubts about the mission or the truth of the groupthink would be to threaten their money and the jobs of people in their organization.
The consequence of the groupthink atmosphere is that dissenters come from the ranks of scientists removed from the pressure to conform - for example, retired scientists, amateur scientists, and scientists so accomplished as to be immune to threats and group pressure. There are thousands of such scientists who are skeptical of the global warming hype. When they speak out, they are attacked, and the attacks are usually vicious. The members of the global warming establishment will almost never debate skeptics. When this was done years ago, the skeptics were too credible.
Science is great, and our modern world is a product of science. But scientists are humans, not gods. They play the same games that other beneficiaries of federal money play. We have been fooled over and over again by fake predictions of disasters or one sort or another. The fake predictions are never completely fake. There is usually some real science buried in all the hype. For example, it is reasonable to expect that some global warming might be caused by adding CO2 to the atmosphere. What is probably a modest effect has been twisted and exaggerated into a doomsday scenario that demands that we save the planet. The good effects of CO2 that are well known and that are solid science are ignored. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere makes plants grow better with less water. Greenhouse-operators use CO2-generators in their greenhouses. CO2 is greening deserts. How often to you hear about these benefits of CO2?
DDT was banned because it supposedly thinned birds’ eggs and perhaps because some people screamed cancer. But DDT is highly effective against mosquitos that cause malaria. The World Health Organization finally lifted the ban on DDT because thousands of children were dying in Africa. DDT will never be rehabilitated in the U.S. because the propaganda has been permanently imprinted in the minds of the populace.
Science has created institutions that serve to enhance the image of science. For example, peer review often degenerates into pal review. Scientific journals are often filled with papers of dubious value generated by a system that values quantity over quality. The National Academy of Science pretends to give objective advice to the government, but often the advice is to appropriate more money for science.
Typically, when science invents a new doomsday theory, the environmental organizations embellish it with unscientific flourishes. The scientist inventors of the theory don’t correct the environmental organizations because that would slow the momentum toward a new surge of federal money. That should be an ethical violation. Scientists should have a duty to set the record straight in such circumstances.
There is no simple solution to the parade of doomsday theories. It would help if the government understood better that throwing more money at an alleged problem may exaggerate rather than alleviate the problem. Massive spending may not solve difficult scientific problems, but massive spending always creates bureaucracies that exist to sustain the spending.
Norman Rogers is the author of the book Dumb Energy: A Critique of Wind and Solar Energy.
By Francis Menton, the Manhattan Contrarian
Since last October, this series has been sitting at the rather awkward number of 19 (or “XIX") posts. Time to round it off at an even XX.
For those new to this topic, the Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time is the systematic downward adjustment of early-year temperatures in order to create a fake enhanced warming trend, the better to bamboozle voters and politicians to go along with extreme measures to try to avert the impending “climate crisis.” Prior posts in this series have documented large and unexplained downward adjustments at hundreds of stations around the world that are used by official government organizations (in the US, primarily NOAA and NASA) to wipe out early-year high temperatures and thereby proclaim that the latest month or year is “the hottest ever!” To read all prior posts in this series, go to this link.
You might ask, with the extensive exposure of these unsupportable downward adjustments of early-year temperatures by official government organizations - accompanied by highly credible accusations of scientific fraud - haven’t the adjusters been cowed by now into a smidgeon of honesty? It sure doesn’t look that way.
The latest news comes out of Australia, via the website of Joanne Nova. Nova’s February 17 post is titled “History keeps getting colder - ACORN2 raises Australia’s warming rate by over 20%.” ACORN2” is a newly revised and updated temperature series for Australia, with temperatures going back to 1910 based on records from 112 weather stations on the continent, some 57 of which have records that go back all the way to the 1910 start date. “ACORN” stands for Australian Climate Observations Reference Network. The ACORN2 data compilation is so called to distinguish it from ACORN1, which was only released some 7 years ago in 2012. The people who put out these things are the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.
According to Nova, the latest temperature adjustments were released “oh-so-quietly.” I guess that the plan is just to start using the new figures as the historical comparisons and bet that journalists will be too stupid or ignorant to figure out that the earlier temperatures have been altered. That’s actually a pretty good bet. However, down in Australia they do have a hard-working group of independent researchers who are on top of this issue. One of them is Nova, and another is Chris Gillham. Gillham has done his own very detailed analysis of the adjustments in the ACORN2 report, and has also put up a post on same at Watts Up With That. So there is plenty of information out there for intelligent people to make an independent judgment.
A few excerpts from Nova:
Once again we find that the oldest thermometers were apparently reading artificially high, even though many were newish in 1910 and placed in approved Stevenson screens. This is also despite the additional urban warming effect of a population that grew 400% since then. What are the odds?! Fortunately..., sorry scientists have uncovered the true readings from the old biased thermometers which they explain carefully in a 67 page impenetrable document… The new ACORN version has nearly doubled the rate of warming in the minima of the longest running stations.
Nova has put together several charts to show the magnitude of the adjustments, not only from ACORN1 to ACORN2, but also from the prior AWAP compilation to ACORN1. To no one’s surprise, each round of adjustments makes the earlier years cooler, and thus enhances the apparent warming trend. Here is Nova’s chart showing the amount of warming from the beginning to the end of the series, for each of AWAP, ACORN1 and ACORN2, and for minimum, mean and maximum temperatures:
For example, the average minimum temperature had increased over the century covered by 0.84 deg C in the AWAP series. That increased to 1.02 deg C in the ACORN1 series, and to 1.22 deg C in the ACORN2 series.
You need to go over to Gillham’s work to see how these changes derive mostly from decreases in early-year temperatures. Here is a chart from Gillham on the changes to minimum temperatures at the 57 stations that go back all the way to the 1910 start:
As you can see, the “raw” and “v1” temperatures tend to be close - sometimes one higher, sometimes the other. But v2 is significantly lower across the board in the earlier years. Then, suddenly, in the recent years, it tracks the “raw” almost perfectly.
Do they offer a justification for these downward adjustments? Yes, but nothing remotely satisfactory. The one-word explanation is “homogenization.” OK, we understand what that is. For example, sometimes a station moves, and that causes a discontinuity, where, say, the new location is systematically 0.1 deg C lower than the old. An adjustment needs to be made. But these sorts of adjustments should cancel out. How is it possible that every time some official meteorological organization anywhere in the world makes some of these “homogenization” adjustments, the result is that earlier years get colder and the supposed “global warming” trend gets enhanced - always to support a narrative of “climate crisis.”
Well, fortunately, this time the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has put out a very long 57-page document explaining what they have done. Here it is. Is it any help?
As far as I am concerned, this is the definitive proof of the fraud. If this were even an attempt at real, credible science, the proponents would put out a document complete with the details of the adjustments - and all of their computer code - so that an independent researcher could replicate the work. Nothing like that is here. This is pure bafflegab. Nova calls it “impenetrable,” which is way too nice a word as far as I’m concerned. Let me give you a small taste:
3. HOMOGENISATION METHODS
3.1 Detection of inhomogeneities - use of multiple detection methods in parallel
In version 1 of ACORN-SAT, a single statistical method for detection of inhomogeneities was used (Trewin, 2012). This method was based closely on the Pairwise Homogenisation Algorithm (PHA) developed by Menne and Williams (2009), and involves pairwise comparison of data between the candidate station and all sufficiently well-correlated stations in the region, with the Standard Normal Homogeneity Test (SNHT) (Alexandersson, 1986) used to identify significant breakpoints in the difference series. The test was carried out separately on monthly mean anomalies (as a single time series with 12 data points per year), and seasonal mean anomalies, with a breakpoint flagged for further assessment if it was identified in either the monthly series, or (within a window of plus or minus 1 year) in at least two of the four seasons. Further details of the implementation of the PHA in the ACORN-SAT dataset are available in Trewin (2012).
A range of other detection methods have been developed in recent years, many of which were the subject of the COST-HOME intercomparison project (Venema et al., 2012). Three of these methods were selected for use in ACORN-SAT version 2, the selection primarily based on ease of implementation. These methods were:
* HOMER version 2.6, joint detection (Mestre et al., 2013)
* MASH version 3.03 (Szentimrey, 2008).
* RHTests version 4 (Wang et al., 2010).
All of these methods, which use different statistical approaches, have been successfully used across a range of networks since their development. Further details on their implementation are given in Appendix C.
My favorite part is that reference at the end to “Appendix C.” This document has no Appendix C. There are three appendices, numbered Appendix 1, Appendix 2 and Appendix 3. That’s about the intellectual level we are dealing with.
Anyway, try going to this document and see if you can figure out what they are doing. Believe me, you can’t.
And finally: over the years as I have accumulated posts on this topic, several commenters have suggested that I must be alleging some kind of conspiracy among government climate scientists in making these adjustments. I mean, without that, how does it come about that the Australians just happen to be making the exact same kinds of adjustments as NASA, NOAA, and for that matter, as the Brits at the Hadley Center in the UK?
If your brain is wondering how that could be, I would suggest that we have the same kind of phenomenon going on here as the hate crime hoax phenomenon. How does Jussie Smollett just happen to fake a hate crime playing right into the progressive narrative of the moment - just as did the Duke lacrosse team hoaxer, and the Virginia fraternity hoaxer, and the Harvard Law School black tape hoaxers, and many dozens of others? (Here is a compilation of some 15 recent hate crime hoaxes.) Did they all coordinate in one grand conspiracy? Or did they all just realize what was needed from them to support their “team” and its narrative?
Michael Shellenberger, Forbes
Ask almost any economist and she’ll tell you the same thing: if you want to save the planet from ‘runaway climate change’, you have to make energy expensive.
“Economics contains one fundamental truth about climate change policy,” wrote Yale University economist William Nordhaus in 2008, who won the 2018 Nobel Prize for his work. “For any policy to be effective in solving global warming, it must raise the market price of carbon, which will raise the market prices of fossil fuels and the products of fossil fuels.”
Various policies can be used to make electricity more expensive. For example, you can tax carbon emissions or put in place air pollution regulations.
However, the most popular way to make energy expensive is to do what Germany has done and that’s to subsidize solar and wind energies through a surcharge (or tax) on electricity
But such efforts beg the question: why, if making energy expensive is required to reduce emissions, does France generate less than one-tenth the carbon emissions of Germany at nearly half the cost?
Germany vs. France
Few nations have done more to make energy expensive in the name of saving the climate than has Germany.
A new study by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) shows how Germany, between 2006 and 2017, increased the cost of electricity for households by 50%.
Enlarged
The report, “The Costs of Decarbonization,” documents how the German government made electricity expensive by requiring consumers to subsidize solar, wind and other forms of renewable energy.
Lower costs of solar panels and wind turbines haven’t allowed Germans to spend less on renewable energy. In fact, they’ve had to spend more.OECD
This reality will surprise many journalists and other advocates of renewables who have noted how, over the exact same period, the cost of solar panels and wind turbines has declined dramatically.
It turns out that those lower costs haven’t allowed Germans to spend less on renewable energy. In fact, they’ve had to spend more.
Because solar and wind are inherently unreliable and energy-dilute, Germany has had to spend 27% more on things like transmission lines from distant solar and wind farms spread all throughout the country.
Has expensive German electricity lowered carbon emissions? It hasn’t. The country’s carbon emissions have been flat since 2009. A big part of the reason has been due to the country’s attempt to replace nuclear power plants with solar and wind energies.
In 2018, German carbon emissions declined modestly, but only because of unusually warm weather and - ironically - higher nuclear output (4.9%) which grew more than renewables did (3.1%).
Promoters of renewable energy subsidies claimed in 2015 that the cost of electricity would peak in 2023, but the new OECD report concludes that electricity prices will increase as long as Germany keeps deploying solar and wind - in other words, indefinitely.
French electricity costs are just 59% of German electricity prices. As such, according to the prevailing economic wisdom, French electricity should be far more carbon intensive than German’s. And yet the opposite is the case. France produces one-tenth the carbon pollution from electricity.
Why? Because France generates 72% of its electricity from nuclear, and just 6% from solar and wind.
For years, Germany has been pressuring France, which has a smaller economy, to follow its lead and shut down its nuclear plants and scale up solar and wind.EP
Will France Follow Germany?
For years, Germany has been pressuring France, which has a smaller economy, to follow its lead and shut down its nuclear plants and scale up solar and wind.
France has increasingly done what Germany wants. According to the Commision de Regulation de L’Energie, Euro29 billion (US$33) billion was used to purchase wind and solar electricity in mainland France between 2009 and 2018.
But the money spent on renewables did not lead to cleaner electricity, according to a new analysis by my Environmental Progress colleagues, Mark Nelson and Madison Czerwinski.
In fact, the carbon-intensity of French electricity has increased. After years of subsidies for solar and wind, France’s 2017 emissions of 68g/CO2 per kWh was higher than any year between 2012 and 2016.
The reason? Record-breaking wind and solar production did not make up for falling nuclear energy output and higher natural gas consumption. And now, the high cost of renewable electricity is showing up in French household electricity bills.
German electricity is nearly 10 times more carbon-intensive than France’s EP
According to Eurostat, although French households pay 41% less than German households, electricity in France has, over the past decade, been increasing in price much faster than electricity in Germany.
“French prices have increased 45% since 2009 as compared to 29% in Germany and 25% in the EU,” note Nelson and Czerwinski.
This is a problem, they note, because “Expensive electricity acts as a disincentive to electrify transportation, heating, and cooking, which together constitute a larger share of energy, and carbon emissions, than electricity.”
The two arrive at a shocking conclusion: “France could have completely decarbonized its electricity sector had it spent $32 billion on new nuclear plants rather than on renewables like solar and wind.”
And were France to keep operating Fessenheim, a nuclear plant scheduled to be closed in 2020, start-up a new nuclear plant called Flamanville, build three more reactors the same size, and operate each nuclear plant an average of 85 percent of the year instead of its current average of 70 percent, it could generate sufficient zero-carbon electricity to completely decarbonize its road transportation sector.
But France appears unwilling to do that. Instead, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, announced recently that he will stick with plans to reduce the nation’s usage of its nuclear plants, increase its output of renewables, and thus - necessarily - increase energy prices.
As such, Macron appears to have learned little from last year’s Yellow Vests protests, which were triggered after he did what economists and Germans alike have long insisted he must do in order to address climate change: raise gasoline and diesel prices by taxing carbon emissions.
Michael Shellenberger, President, Environmental Progress. Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment.”
Update see more here and as part of the 11 rebuttals here.
Global burned area dropped by about 25 percent over the previous 18 years, study shows
By Valerie Richardson - The Washington Times - Monday, July 30, 2018
Scenes of Californians fleeing their homes and Greeks swimming out to sea have fueled alarm about climate change fueling deadly wildfires, but recent studies show that such destructive blazes are on the decline worldwide.
A September 2017 report in the journal Science found that global burned area dropped by about 25 percent over the previous 18 years, a finding consistent with a May 2016 paper published by the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
“[G]lobal area burned appears to have overall declined over past decades, and there is increasing evidence that there is less fire in the global landscape today than centuries ago,” said the study by British researchers at Swansea University.
Even in California, which for years has wrestled with fire devastation, a study in the International Journal of Wildland Fire found that the number of wildfires burning more than 300 acres per year has been tailing off since a peak in 1980.
“The claim commonly made in research papers and the media that fire activity is increasing throughout the western USA is certainly an over-statement,” the authors, Jon E. Keeley and Alexandra D. Syphard, said in The Orange County Register.
Mr. Keeley is a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, and Ms. Syphard is with the Conservation Biology Institute.
Such findings appear to fly in the face of widespread reports that human-caused global warming is increasing the severity and frequency of wildfires by fueling drought and higher temperatures.
“Extreme heat and wildfires made worse by climate change, say scientists,” an Associated Press article proclaimed this week on NBC News.
“We now have very strong evidence that global warming has already put a thumb on the scales, upping the odds of extremes like severe heat and heavy rainfall,” Stanford University climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh told the AP.
Yale Environment 360 declared in an Oct. 2 article, “Stark Evidence: A Warmer World Is Sparking More and Bigger Wildfires,” and concluded that “the fires being seen today ... are man-made, or at least man-worsened.”
This year’s U.S. wildfire season was forecast to be worse than average, and so far it has kept with predictions, with 98 wildfires blackening 4.6 million acres as of Monday, more than the 10-year average of 3.7 million acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
California has been hit hardest, but firefighters made progress Monday. They lifted some evacuation orders on the Carr fire in Shasta County about 150 miles north of Sacramento, the deadliest and most destructive of the blazes, and reached 30 percent containment on the Ferguson fire near Yosemite National Park.
Six people have been killed so far in the California wildfires, including two firefighters, a great-grandmother and two of her great-grandchildren. About 410,000 acres have burned across the state amid unpredictable winds and high temperatures.
The death toll in Greece rose to 91 on Sunday as wildfires swept through seaside communities, at one point sending dozens of people out to sea to escape the flames engulfing the resort town of Mati, as shown on a dramatic video.
California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, cited global warming last week as a factor in his proposal to reduce the legal liability of Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the utility company whose equipment was found to have sparked 15 of the state’s 2017 wildfires.
Mr. Brown and legislative leaders announced amended legislation July 2 to heighten California’s wildfire response, saying the effort “will help prepare the state to deal with the increasingly extreme weather and natural disasters caused by climate change.”
In a May report, “Indicators of Climate Change in California,” state Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Matthew Rodriguez said extreme weather events like wildfires are “not isolated incidents.”
“They are suggestive of the significant and increasingly discernible impacts of climate change in California,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “The most dramatic impacts include wildfires that are larger and more frequent, and the most severe drought since recordkeeping began.”
Others have argued that news coverage of fire disasters has contributed to the perception that wildfires driven by increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are raging out of control, despite evidence to the contrary.
“[M]any consider wildfire an accelerating problem, with widely held perceptions both in the media and scientific papers of increasing fire occurrence, severity and resulting losses,” said the Royal Society paper. “However, important exceptions aside, the quantitative evidence available does not support these perceived trends.”
In the Western United States, the study found that the limited data on fire severity “indicate little change overall, and also that area burned at high severity has overall declined compared to pre-European settlement.”
What’s responsible for the drop-off? The Science article pointed to an expansion of agriculture production in savannas and grasslands, resulting in a roughly 25 percent decrease in global burned area “despite the influence of climate.”
The discrepancy was not lost on climate skeptics such as Australia’s JoNova, who concluded Monday, “Global warming means a global fall in wildfires.”
Anthony Watts, who runs the Watts Up With That website, added: “Remember when we were told that wildfires would increase due to global warming? Never mind.”
University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor Clifford Mass said a host of factors may have contributed to this year’s California wildfires, including a modest temperature increase over the past several decades.
Add to that the drought, an increase of non-native invasive species, a huge influx of homeowners in fire-prone areas and aggressive fire suppression in the first half of the 20th century that left some forests overgrown and ripe for ignition.
“So there is a lot of talk of climate change ‘supercharging’ fires, but really no proof of it,” Mr. Mass said in an email. “And some fires are clearly NOT associated with climate change, like the wine country fires of last October.”
His conclusion? “I suspect climate change is a minor element in the CA wildfires, while fire suppression and human population growth into the wildlands are the dominant elements.”
See more on the 11 major alarmist claims here. More detail with charts and data is provided in the clicks following each summary.
The global climate scare - and policies resulting from it - are based on models that do not work
Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris
For the past three decades, human-caused global warming alarmists have tried to frighten the public with stories of doom and gloom. They tell us the end of the world as we know it is nigh because of carbon dioxide emitted into the air by burning fossil fuels.
They are exercising precisely what journalist H. L. Mencken described early in the last century: “The whole point of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be lead to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
The dangerous human-caused climate change scare may well be the best hobgoblin ever conceived. It has half the world clamoring to be led to safety from a threat for which there is not a shred of meaningful physical evidence that climate fluctuations and weather events we are experiencing today are different from, or worse than, what our near and distant ancestors had to deal with or are human-caused.
Many of the statements issued to support these fear-mongering claims are presented in the U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment, a 1,656-page report released in late November. But none of their claims have any basis in real world observations. All that supports them are mathematical equations presented as accurate, reliable models of Earth’s climate.
It is important to properly understand these models, since they are the only basis for the climate scare.
Before we construct buildings or airplanes, we make physical, small-scale models and test them against stresses and performance that will be required of them when they are actually built. When dealing with systems that are largely (or entirely) beyond our control - such as climate - we try to describe them with mathematical equations. By altering the values of the variables in these equations, we can see how the outcomes are affected. This is called sensitivity testing, the very best use of mathematical models.
However, today’s climate models account for only a handful of the hundreds of variables that are known to affect Earth’s climate, and many of the values inserted for the variables they do use are little more than guesses. Dr. Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysics Laboratory lists the six most important variables in any climate model:
1) Sun-Earth orbital dynamics and their relative positions and motions with respect to other planets in the solar system;
2) Charged particles output from the Sun (solar wind) and modulation of the incoming cosmic rays from the galaxy at large;
3) How clouds influence climate, both blocking some incoming rays/heat and trapping some of the warmth;
4) Distribution of sunlight intercepted in the atmosphere and near the Earth’s surface;
5) The way in which the oceans and land masses store, affect and distribute incoming solar energy;
6) How the biosphere reacts to all these various climate drivers.
Soon concludes that, even if the equations to describe these interactive systems were known and properly included in computer models (they are not), it would still not be possible to compute future climate states in any meaningful way. This is because it would take longer for even the world’s most advanced super-computers to calculate future climate than it would take for the climate to unfold in the real world.
So we could compute the climate (or Earth’s multiple sub-climates) for 40 years from now, but it would take more than 40 years for the models to make that computation.
Although governments have funded more than one hundred efforts to model the climate for the better part of three decades, with the exception of one Russian model which was fully “tuned” to and accidentally matched observational data, not one accurately “predicted” (hindcasted) the known past. Their average prediction is now a full 1 degree F above what satellites and weather balloons actually measured.
In his February 2, 2016 testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space & Technology, University of Alabama-Huntsville climatologist Dr. John Christy compared the results of atmospheric temperatures as depicted by the average of 102 climate models with observations from satellites and balloon measurements. He concluded: “These models failed at the simple test of telling us ‘what’ has already happened, and thus would not be in a position to give us a confident answer to ‘what’ may happen in the future and ‘why.’ As such, they would be of highly questionable value in determining policy that should depend on a very confident understanding of how the climate system works.”
Similarly, when Christopher Monckton tested the IPCC approach in a paper published by the Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015, he convincingly demonstrated that official predictions of global warming had been overstated threefold. (Monckton holds several awards for his climate work.)
The paper has been downloaded 12 times more often than any other paper in the entire 60-year archive of that distinguished journal. Monckton’s team of eminent climate scientists is now putting the final touches on a paper proving definitively that - instead of the officially-predicted 3.3 degrees Celsius (5.5 F) warming for every doubling of CO2 levels - there will be only 1.1 degrees C of warming. At a vital point in their calculations, climatologists had neglected to take account of the fact that the Sun is shining!
All problems can be viewed as having five stages: observation, modeling, prediction, verification and validation. Apollo team meteorologist Tom Wysmuller explains: “Verification involves seeing if predictions actually happen, and validation checks to see if the prediction is something other than random correlation. Recent CO2 rise correlating with industrial age warming is an example on point that came to mind.”
As Science and Environmental Policy Project president Ken Haapala notes, “the global climate models relied upon by the IPCC [the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and the USGCRP [United States Global Change Research Program] have not been verified and validated.”
An important reason to discount climate models is their lack of testing against historical data. If one enters the correct data for a 1920 Model A, automotive modeling software used to develop a 2020 Ferrari should predict the performance of a 1920 Model A with reasonable accuracy. And it will.
But no climate models relied on by the IPCC (or any other model, for that matter) has applied the initial conditions of 1900 and forecast the Dust Bowl of the 1930s - never mind an accurate prediction of the climate in 2000 or 2015. Given the complete lack of testable results, we must conclude that these models have more in common with the “Magic 8 Ball” game than with any scientifically based process.
While one of the most active areas for mathematical modeling is the stock market, no one has ever predicted it accurately. For many years, the Wall Street Journal chose five eminent economic analysts to select a stock they were sure would rise in the following month. The Journal then had a chimpanzee throw five darts at a wall covered with that day’s stock market results. A month later, they determined who preformed better at choosing winners: the analysts or the chimpanzee. The chimp usually won.
For these and other reasons, until recently, most people were never foolish enough to make decisions based on predictions derived from equations that supposedly describe how nature or the economy works.
Yet today’s computer modelers claim they can model the climate - which involves far more variables than the economy or stock market - and do so decades or even a century into the future. They then tell governments to make trillion-dollar policy decisions that will impact every aspect of our lives, based on the outputs of their models. Incredibly, the United Nations and governments around the world are complying with this demand. We are crazy to continue letting them get away with it.
Dr. Jay Lehr is the Science Director of The Heartland Institute which is based in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition.
The Unofficial Abandonment of the Scientific Method by Climate Alarmists and Democratic Socialists
Alan Carlin | January 19, 2019
The far left of the Democratic Party is becoming increasingly enamored of socialism. Examples include Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other self-described democratic socialists. What has been missed is that they appear to be increasingly enamored of policies that in actuality involve junking the scientific method too. Their current favorite agendas, such as the Green New Deal, always include the climate alarmist agenda. As discussed last week, in the links from it, and previously on this blog, the scientific basis for climate alarmism is not just weak, it has been convincingly shown to be invalid. So in actuality, the left wing socialist agenda effectively includes ditching the scientific method despite their protestations to the contrary.
As many have pointed out, socialism does not have a good record as an organizing basis for societal economics (see Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and the Soviet Union) but abandoning the scientific method has never been shown to help anyone except charlatans. But the left wing has managed to get climate alarmism adopted as an official part of the party platform of the Democratic Party. But the scientific problems of climate alarmism are almost never described by the mainstream press or the democratic socialists. It is only blogs such as this that describe the problems. Socialism has a consistent record of making most people worse off economically compared to modern capitalism. But there are people who strongly support it. But I have yet to find serious arguments that abandoning the use of the scientific method promotes public welfare.
As pointed out last week, unofficial abandonment of the scientific method by the left wing of the Democratic Party is what is going on, and they have gotten the rest of the Party to endorse their positions in this regard. I believe that supporters of the scientific method should abandon at least the left wing of the Party and maybe the entire Party as long as long as they do not vigorously support the scientific method both directly and indirectly by insisting that public policies be based on the use of the method. Use of the scientific method and fossil fuels are two of the major reasons the US has had such spectacular success economically and scientifically in recent centuries. Neither are consistent with the current agenda of the far left of the Democratic Party.
Some socialist/Communist governments such as the Soviet Union have had similar problems both economically and scientifically. The results have been disastrous. Is that what we want? The climate alarmists and their “friends” in the far left of the Democratic Party do not dare to openly attack the scientific method, but support for junk climate science that does not satisfy the scientific method shows what their beliefs really are, and they should be judged by the policy ideas they advocate. Yet many academics, even those in scientific fields, reportedly support climate alarmism. They at least should know better.
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Saving The Earth At The Point Of A Bayonet
By George Rasley
One of the new Far Left Democratic Party’s proposals that has been rapidly gaining establishment media support (beside getting rid of President Trump by any means necessary) is the so-called “Green New Deal” proposed by Democratic Socialist Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) and her fellow travelers.
Here are the highlights according to our friend Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute:
First, keep it in the ground by halting all fossil fuel leasing on federal lands and offshore areas; halting all permitting of fossil-fuel power plants, pipelines, and other infrastructure projects; banning fossil-fuel exports; and ending “massive, irrational subsidies” for fossil fuels and nuclear energy, waste incineration, and biomass energy.
Second, “the United States must shift to 100% renewable power by 2035 or earlier.” Large-scale hydro-electric power, biomass, and waste-to-energy do not qualify.
Third, public transport using renewable power only must be vastly expanded; sales of vehicles powered by gas and diesel engines must be banned as quickly as possible; and all such vehicles must be off the roads by 2040 at the latest. Of course, “federal credits for electric vehicles must be expanded.”
Fourth, Congress should “harness the full power of the Clean Air Act.” I’m not sure what more can be done to turn the economy upside down, but I may be missing something.
Fifth, this must be a “just transition.” This will require “support for communities who (sic) have historically been harmed first and most by the dirty energy economy,” as well as “retrofitting millions of buildings to conserve energy” and “actively restoring natural ecosystems.”
Sixth, the rights of indigenous peoples must be fully protected, although it’s not clear whether Native Americans will be allowed to develop coal, oil, and natural gas resources on their lands. My guess is they’ll be able to apply for compensation.
Finally, the Green New Deal must not protect fossil fuel producers from legal liability and cannot include “market-based mechanisms and technology options such as carbon and emissions trading and offsets, [or] carbon capture and storage.”
As Ebell correctly observes, this Green New Deal should be called the Back to the Dark Ages Manifesto.
And as such one would normally conclude that no responsible environmental organization or mainstream Democratic Party politician would embrace it, but alas these are not normal times.
The summary above was embraced by six-hundred twenty-six organizations, some of them major environmental groups, that formed a coalition behind a letter sent to Members of the House of Representatives on January 10th detailing their demands for what must and must not be included in a Green New Deal.
Many conservative observers have focused on the Green New Deal’s massive estimated cost, such as the eye-popping PJ Media analysis based on a new report from Power the Future, the Green New Deal proposed by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez would cost more than 8,000 times as much as President Donald Trump’s border wall.
The Green New Deal will cost approximately $49.109 trillion in the first ten years, enough to fund Trump’s border wall 8,616 times over. The president is requesting $5.7 billion for the wall.
PJ Media calculated the cost of the Green New Deal by integrating each of the cost aspects involved in a Power the Future analysis and calculating their cost for the U.S. over about ten years.
The staggering cost is certainly one reason to oppose the Green New Deal, but there is also the staggering social dislocation that would be created by such a society-wide experiment in social engineering.
You can’t run a steel mill with a windmill, nor can you guarantee that the projected Green New Deal jobs would be created where the old fossil fuel-dependent jobs were located.
Think about it: If fossil fuels are outlawed, then the vast regions of the Appalachian coal belt, the oil fields of Texas and Louisiana, the oil fields of North Dakota and the western coal fields would lose their economic underpinnings.
The heavy industry-dependent areas of the Midwest and what’s left in the Rust Belt that stretches from the East Coast around the Great Lakes to Minnesota would likewise be devastated.
The only way such a massive project as the Green New Deal could be accomplished would be through the forced relocation of millions of workers and their families in a massive societal restructuring akin to the forced collectivization of Russian agriculture after the Soviet Revolution of 1917 or Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward economic restructuring of Communist China.
Both of those society-wide socialist restructurings were economic, cultural and humanitarian disasters that killed millions in the name of creating a more equitable society and were eventually abandoned when they didn’t work and left millions of their intended beneficiaries starving and without employment.
That the Green New Deal would be embraced by naive millennials should surprise no one, but that it is getting traction with mainstream Democratic Party leaders and established environmental groups shows just how quickly and shockingly far Leftward the Democratic Party has moved in the Age of Trump. Serious people can and should debate and strive to achieve a healthy environment for all Americans. However, embracing the errors of the Communist Russia and China in the name of a Green New Deal is not serious because the coercive measures necessary to make it work will never be accepted by the vast majority of Americans.
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Allan MacRae comments:
Farmer wrote:
“My rule of thumb is: if it is forced to cost more, it likely has a larger environmental footprint. (more labor, energy expended, natural resources used, regulatory oversight, etc.)”
This is a valid general assumption. I wrote something like this years ago re “green” energy.
Everything we manufacture in the modern world requires energy (incidentally, ~85% of global primary energy is fossil fuels, unchanged in decades, and the rest is nuclear and hydro, and green energy is less than 2%, despite many trillions in squandered subsidies).
When something costs more, it is generally because it requires more energy to produce and ship - it also generally produces more CO2 emissions.
When a product requires a lifetime subsidy, like wind power, solar power, corn ethanol and other biofuels, it probably consumes more energy that it produces and also increases CO2 emissions rather than reducing them. Green scams can hide their greater CO2 emissions with their standard misinformation, but they cannot hide their greater costs.
Most green schemes are so poorly conceived that they not only cost more, they also increase CO2 emissions (FAKE pollution). They also increase REAL pollution, especially solar power and battery power schemes, due to the waste products of manufacture and scrapping of solar power hardware and batteries.
So my general rule is:
GREATER COST = [MORE ENERGY INPUT] ...AND… [MORE CO2 EMISSIONS] ...AND… [MORE REAL POLLUTION] ...AND… [LESS EFFICIENT USE OF SCARCE GLOBAL RESOURCES].
Science and technology are complicated, and most politicians are too uneducated to understand even the basics. They have routinely imposed green energy schemes that are not green and produce little useful (dispatchable) energy. They have also banned products and replaced them with environmentally worse products. They are susceptible to bribes, especially to support their re-election - and many of these people would be unemployable outside of politics. All too often, we are governed by scoundrels and imbeciles.
COP24 is the latest UN nonsense conference with warnings echoed by socialists in this country.
The Heartland Institute, globally recognized as the leading think tank promoting skepticism of man-caused catastrophic global warming, will present the latest science on the climate in Katowice, Poland, host city of the United Nations’ 24th Conference of the Parties (COP24). Heartland’s event, featuring two scientists and three experts on climate and energy policy in the United States and Europe. See:
By James Taylor, Daily Caller
Obama-era deep-state bureaucrats have issued a dubious climate report that warns of imminent devastation from global warming. The report presents discredited assertions from environmental activist groups as “evidence” to support its findings, as well as predictions of temperature change and extreme weather events that have already been contradicted by real-world data.
In 1990, Congress required a consortium of 13 federal agencies - the U.S. Global Climate Research Program (USGCRP) - to publish a series of reports, at least once every four years, assessing climate change and offering guidance on the topic. On Friday, USGCRP issued Volume 2 of its fourth National Climate Assessment. The USGCRP’s steering committee and authors are composed almost entirely of Obama-era deep-state holdovers. The two lead authors for the report - prominent, controversial global warming activists Don Wuebbles and Katherine Hayhoe - were put in place by the Obama administration. Ignoring embarrassing mistakes made by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the USGCRP decided to rely on non-peer reviewed propaganda ‘grey papers’ published by leftist climate alarmists. The USGCRP explains its report is “complemented by other sources (such as gray literature) where appropriate.” The IPCC has a history of making sensational assertions - that it since had to explain, revise, and retract - based on grey papers.
The USGCRP has also followed the United Nations’ lead of relying on environmental activist groups and environmental activist group staffers to justify its outlandish assertions. Pointing out a preposterous claim in the report that global warming will increase global temperatures by 14 degrees Fahrenheit and reduce U.S. gross domestic product by 10 percent, climate scientist Roger Pielke observed, “Shouldn’t such an outlandish, outlier conclusion been caught in the review process? Not a good look that sole review editor for this chapter is an alum of the Center for American Progress...which is funded by Tom Steyer.”
“By presenting cherrypicked science, at odds w/ NCA Vol,1 & IPCC AR5, the authors of NCA Vol.2 have given a big fat gift to anyone who wants to dismiss climate science and policy,” Pielke added.
The report is saturated with discredited fake news assertions on climate science and economics. For example, the report’s summary claims, “More frequent and intense extreme weather and climate-related events, as well as changes in average climate conditions, are expected to continue to damage infrastructure, ecosystems, and social systems that provide essential benefits to communities.” One of the many problems with this assertion is there have yet to be “more frequent and intense” extreme weather events that :continue” to inflict damage on society. Objective data show hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, and wildfires all either show no increased frequency or severity trends in recent decades.
On economics, the report’s summary claims, “Without substantial and sustained global mitigation and regional adaptation efforts, climate change is expected to cause growing losses to American infrastructure and property and impede the rate of economic growth over this century.” Among the many problems with this assertion is affordable energy, provided by the very fossil fuels vilified in the report, continues to be a central factor in the economic growth and prosperity of the United States during the post-World War II era. There are no credible claims that modestly warming temperatures caused significant negative impacts on American infrastructure, property, and the economy. To the contrary, restricting the use of affordable fossil fuels will substantially reduce disposable household income and living standards.
The report’s summary contains a special section on asserted water impacts, alleging “Rising air and water temperatures and changes in precipitation are intensifying droughts, increasing heavy downpours, reducing snowpack, and causing declines in surface water quality, with varying impacts across regions. Future warming will add to the stress on water supplies and adversely impact the availability of water in parts of the United States. Rather than causing “stress on water supplies,” federal government data show most parts of the United States are experiencing moderate increases in precipitation and soil moisture and dramatic declines in drought frequency and intensity. For example, in 2017, the United States set a record for the smallest percentage of the country experiencing drought. In 2018, the United States extended its ongoing record for the longest time period on record (nearly 40 years and counting) without at least 40 percent of the country experiencing what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration defines as “very dry” conditions.
On health issues, a special section claims, “Impacts from climate change on extreme weather and climate-related events, air quality, and the transmission of disease through insects and pests, food, and water increasingly threaten the health and well-being of the American people, particularly populations that are already vulnerable.” However, federal mortality data show nearly 1,000 more Americans die every day during cold winter months than hot summer months. Furthermore, a landmark study in the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet reports that 95 percent of climate and temperature-related deaths worldwide are caused by cold temperatures rather than warm or hot temperatures.
On agriculture, another special section claims, “Rising temperatures, extreme heat, drought, wildfire on rangelands, and heavy downpours are expected to increasingly disrupt agricultural productivity in the United States. Expected increases in challenges to livestock health, declines in crop yields and quality, and changes in extreme events in the United States and abroad threaten rural livelihoods, sustainable food security, and price stability.” Yet U.S. and global crop production set new records nearly every year with warmer temperatures, longer growing seasons, and higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels creating ideal growing conditions.
The over-the-top, cover-to-cover climate fables in the USGCRP report by agenda-driven climate activists demonstrates the need for the Trump administration to clean out agenda-driven deep-state holdovers from the Obama administration. The false assertions in the climate report not only distort public understanding of scientific reality, they perniciously provide fodder for lawsuits and other actions taken by global warming extremists against government and private entities. For example, Michael Oppenheimer, a climate alarmist at Princeton University, told The New York Times, “This report will weaken the Trump administration’s legal case for undoing climate change regulations, and it strengthens the hands of those who go to court to fight them.”
James Taylor is senior fellow for environment and climate policy at The Heartland Institute, a nonprofit group advocating for limited-government policy.
Leonard Nimoy in 1978 the last scare
See this past post on the real Arctic and Antarctic story.
Also note, a paper from the NAS on CO2 and crops: NAS vs. science David Burton writes:
One of the most pernicious examples of disinformation promoted by the Climate Industry is the claim that manmade climate change from CO2 emissions threatens agriculture and “food security.” That’s the exact opposite of the truth. CO2 is “plant fertilizer,” and hundreds of agricultural studies have shown that higher CO2 levels are dramatically beneficial for agriculture, to levels far above what we can ever hope for outdoors.
Most plants grow best with daytime atmospheric CO2 of at least about 1500 ppmv. That’s about what CO2 levels are thought to have averaged during the Cretaceous. It’s 1090 ppmv higher than the current average outdoor level of about 410 ppmv.
In other words, most plants would grow best if CO2 levels were increased by more than eight times the measly 130 ppmv by which mankind has managed to increase CO2 levels since the “pre-industrial” Little Ice Age. (Levels even higher than that wouldn’t hurt plants, but they wouldn’t help much, either.)
The Fourth National Climate Assessment violates scientific integrity
By Edwin Berry, Ph.D., Physics
When the U.S. government began to support the global warming agenda
In 1988, the Environmental Protection Agency called a meeting of atmospheric scientists. I remember well the meeting in a theater-like lecture room in the San Francisco Bay Area. I knew the atmospheric scientists from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Stanford Research Institute, and local colleges.
A man in a suit walked up to the lectern. He told us:
Global warming is a new national problem. Human CO2 emissions cause dangerous global warming. Future research funding will focus on predicting climate disasters.
The room was silent. I raised my hand, “How can you support your global warming hypothesis when you omit cloud cover which affects heat balance more than carbon dioxide?”
He answered, “I know more about the atmosphere than you people do.”
I responded, “How do you know more than the atmospheric scientists in this room?”
He said, “oI know more about the climate because I am a lawyer for the EPA.”
Thus the U.S. government announced its support of the global warming fraud. Government agencies began giving absurd “research” contracts to ecologists, but not physicists and engineers, because ecologists would support the government’s global warming agenda.
The U.S. Global Change Research Program
In 1989, Presidential initiative established the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). In 1990, Congress mandated the Global Change Research Act (GCRA) to develop and coordinate
“a comprehensive and integrated United States research program which will assist the Nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change.”
USGCRP comprises 13 Federal agencies under the Subcommittee on Global Change Research of the National Science and Technology Council’s Committee on Environment, Natural Resources, and Sustainability.
The GCRA requires USGCRP to submit the National Climate Assessment (NCA) to the President and Congress every four years.
The 2018 Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA) is pseudoscience.
The NCA omits the scientific method. The NCA uses IPCC science. Tests of 102 IPCC “CMIP” climate models began in 1980. By 2015, no climate model agreed with another climate model, and their average global-temperature prediction is far higher than the data show. This alone proves climate models cannot predict climate. Therefore, according to the scientific method, the IPCC and NCA climate theories are wrong.
The U.S. Global Change Research Program and its NCA is the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the American people. The NCA is not science. It is the promotion of a government climate religion for political purposes. The NCA lacks scientific competence and scientific integrity. You can read comments on the NCA report by other scientists on Climate Depot.
How climate science should be done.
Properly done, human-caused climate science must progress through the following steps (1) to (3). The alarmists add step (4) as their political solution to (3):
Show human CO2, not nature, caused all CO2 increase above 280 ppm, or since 1750.
Show human-caused CO2 increase causes significant global warming.
Show human-caused global warming causes bad stuff to happen.
Stop bad stuff by reducing CO2 emissions and using wind and solar energy.
According to the scientific method and logic, if the climate alarmists cannot show that both (1) and (2) are true, then they lose their case.
Good science has proved the following:
The IPCC argument to support (1) fails logic. Physics proves human CO2 adds less than 5 percent to the natural level of CO2. So, human CO2 emissions do not cause climate change (Berry, 2018, and others). The NCA does not even argue that (1) is true.
The IPCC argument to support (2) fails because it uses an incorrect feedback calculation and it ignores convection which moves heat upward faster than radiation. Correction of the feedback proves human-caused CO2 heating is insignificant (Monckton, 2018, and others). The IPCC argument also The NCA4 Vol. I argument fails.
The IPCC argument that global warming causes bad stuff to happen fails because data and good science show the alarmist bad-stuff claims are wrong and that warming is beneficial. The NCA4 Vol. II argument fails because it uses unrealistic scenarios for future climate.
Alarmist arguments for large-scale wind and solar energy fail because these energy sources do not reduce human CO2 emissions, they kill wildlife, they increase the costs of electrical energy, and they reduce the benefits and availability of fossil-fuel energy.
Climate alarmists have not proved (1) and (2) are true. Yet, they move merrily on to claim (3) climate change causes bad stuff to happen. Isn’t the bad stuff all you hear and read in the news? You never hear about the science.
The alarmists think if they make the bad stuff is scary then (1) and (2) must be true. Not so. Events do not prove their cause.
Why is good science losing the climate war?
Good science is losing the climate war for three reasons:
It is not a scientific war. It is a political and PR war for the minds of the voters.
The alarmists have 97 percent of the climate money and government jobs.
The Trump administration has played neither defense or offense in the climate war.
Alarmists have the money.
The alarmists have a climate machine. Billionaires and major foundations support the green climate agenda.
Hedgefund billionaire Tom Styer funds the Center for American Progress and NextGen America, which promote the green agenda. A Center alumnus was the sole editor of the NCA’s bad stuff claims that use an unrealistic scenario. Who put that editor in charge?
Climate Solutions, an example non-profit climate alarmist group, advertises:
When you donate to Climate Solutions, you are working toward accelerating solutions to the climate crisis. Your partnership will help us:
Champion transformational policies and market-based innovations;
Catalyze powerful partnerships and a diverse movement for action and accountability; and
Communicate a bold vision for solutions at the scale required by climate science.
How do greens get away with using non-profit organizations for green political action?
Almost all media talking heads support the green climate agenda. Seth Borenstein, a climate alarmist, writes every climate-related statement for Associated Press. People believe the AP is unbiased and accurate. The greens own AP.
Alarmists dominate government jobs.
It is like having your enemy dominating the positions in your army. Since 1990, the insiders have been stacking government jobs with greens and climate alarmists. They now run the government bureaucracy. They use their government jobs to block President Trump’s agenda and to publish the NCA.
Alarmists own the NAS and dominate scientific societies.
In 2010, 289 members of the National Academy of Scientists (NAS) signed a public letter that claims (1), (2) and (3) are true. They claim to be scientists, but they did not act as scientists. They acted to support a political agenda, not science because these claims are clearly false.
The greens own most scientific societies and most professional scientific journals. That way, they get their climate science junk published and block good climate science from being published. Peer review has lost its meaning and respect. It has become political.
Good scientists are outgunned.
Frankly, the good scientists are overwhelmed. They are like an army trying to fight a modern war with bows and arrows.
Climate alarmists can throw out climate garbage faster than good scientists can respond. And when good scientists respond, the alarmists and the media ignore their response. No matter what they say, climate alarmists get the approval and promotion by the media.
This does not change the fact that the good scientists have proven the alarmist claims are wrong. It’s just that ultimately the climate battle is a PR battle. And it takes money and people in power to win a PR battle.
Climate alarmists are like the creationists. They promote bad science in the climate war.
The Trump administration must promote a climate offensive.
President Trump has made the right decisions on climate issues. However, his administration has not gone on the offense to back up his correct views of climate science. In fact, President Trump has not defended his climate decisions. He has let the alarmists dominate the science debate without rebuttal. That is why, so far, he has lost the climate war.
How can good climate science win the climate war?
Good scientists have already proved the IPCC and NCA are wrong. Here’s what else needs to happen:
The purpose of the NCA is to undermine President Trump and his climate agenda. Now, the 13 Federal agencies should reject the NCA. However, they need good science to back up their rejection. Good science is available. The government only needs to ask for it, support it, and fund it.
The government must hire good scientists to help change climate policy on the inside. Maybe some good scientists can convert some greens to good science.
Schools, colleges, universities must teach good climate science. This will require good scientists to be brought into the science teaching. We cannot rely on the present teachers to properly teach good science until they pass a training program.
Create training programs for science teachers to qualify to teach good climate science.
Most universities promote climate alarmism as an authoritarian religion. They require complete devotion by faculty and students, or else the faculty are dismissed, and the students are flunked.
The government pays universities millions of dollars to promote the climate religion. It’s time to turn off the climate money faucet or divert the money flow by giving grants and contracts to good scientists.
To stop the funding of bad climate science, it may be necessary to have good scientists review every government climate-related grant or contract before it can become final.
Remove all climate alarmism from government websites and publications.
Implement a national climate truth program to get climate truth to the public. It must exceed the influence of the bad science promoted by climate alarmists.
Change the education policies in each state individually to allow its schools to teach climate truth.
Urgency
President Trump may have only two more years to set climate science straight in the U.S. government. If a Democrat becomes president in 2020, it will take about ten minutes to move government climate policy back to where Obama left it.
Demographics show the climate-alarmist Next Generation will control U.S. politics. It is a national emergency to teach them the climate truth.
The Republican Party is the only party that supports good science. For a nation to be great, it must replace false climate ideas with climate truth. We must act in time to save the Republican Party. That time limit is two years
COMMENT FROM DR. GORDON FULKS
Excellent job, Ed!
You have very clearly laid out the present assault on science, such that everyone should be able to understand it. The underlying problem is that too many are too willing to put their entire faith in the scientific establishment, believing that they cannot possibly be wrong, when they have been frequently wrong. These people have no idea how science actually works and will not listen if we try to explain it to them. They only want to respond to emotional arguments, because most never learned how to think rationally in the first place.
They have no hope of understanding Richard Feynman’s comment that “Science is a belief in the ignorance of the experts.” And they will never understand the Royal Society’s motto “Take no ones word for it.”
Hence, it falls upon us to stop corrupt scientists from continuing to feed hysteria in order to keep getting their government grants. We have to continue to call them out for their very, very bad behavior.
But the problem of the nation being held hostage by a scientific-technological elite is a political problem that President Eisenhower first recognized. Politicians need to put a stop to this by pulling all funding for those scientists who purvey propaganda and feed hysteria. That is a sure sign that they are not doing good work and are not even real scientists.
Ending the Federal gravy train and making scientists justify their requests for funding on the basis of real science would be truly revolutionary. That would solve the problem of non-science masquerading as science almost overnight.
And let’s make sure that the nonsense does not reappear as another scare without merit in the future.
Gordon
Gordon J. Fulks, PhD (Physics)
Corbett, Oregon USA
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The federal government’s Fourth National Climate Assessment, released on Friday, has gained praise from leftists and left-wing environmental groups as a dire warning of the coming death and destruction in the United States if we don’t stop global warming.
But critics of the report, including scientists, have slammed it as “exaggeration,” bad science and even said its conclusions are “false.”
“This latest climate report is just more of the same - except for even greater exaggeration, worse science, and added interference in the political process by unelected, self-serving bureaucrats,” Tim Huelskamp, president of the Heartland Institute said in statements released by the free-market think tank following the report’s release.
“With a new volume out in December, The Heartland Institute has published 4,000 pages of the Climate Change Reconsidered series by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), Huelskamp said. “Those reports cite many hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers that show how every conclusion of this latest government report [is] false.”
“This report from the climate alarmist Deep State in our government is even more hysterical than some United Nations reports,” Huelskamp noted. “The idea that global temperatures could rise as much as 12 degrees in the next 80 years is absurd and not a shred of actual data and observation supports that.”
“This report is a scientific embarrassment,” Jay Lehr, science director at the Heartland Institute, said. “Not only does it rely on computer models to predict the climate through the end of the century, it relies on computer models from five years ago that have been laughably wrong, failing to get even close to reality since 2013.”
Lehr said the report is filled with “blatantly absurd conclusions” designed to put more money and power into the hands of the United Nations.
As Breitbart News reported, the assessment includes predictions of dire consequences from climate change, including people dying because of increased temperatures. (note heat has been steadily decreasing since the 1930s and 1950s).
“Higher temperatures will also kill more people, the report says,” CNN reported. “The Midwest alone, which is predicted to have the largest increase in extreme temperature, will see an additional 2,000 premature deaths per year by 2090.”
The report also said there would be more insect-borne diseases, including West Nile cases, which could more than double by 2050, according to the report.
The wattsupwiththat.com website pointed out that Chapter 6 of what it called an “alarmist” report on climate change contradicts some of its claims:
Temperature changes in the United States of the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s recently published Climate Science Special Report (2017) clearly shows and discusses, under the heading of “6.1.2 Temperature Extremes’, how temperature extremes for the contiguous United States have become more moderate over the last 118 years, with the coldest daily temperatures warming and the warmest daily temperatures cooling. In other words, temperature-extreme-related climate in the United States has improved.
Critics also have advice for President Donald Trump, who has said man-made climate change is not a concluded fact.
‘President Trump was required by law to release this report, but he is not required to take it seriously - and he surely will not,” Huelskamp said. “To do so would undermine his sensible, deregulatory agenda and restart the war on fossil fuels.”
“Happily, President Trump has on his advisory staff Dr. William Harper [of Princeton University], who knows how flawed these models are and will advise the president to not base a single aspect of U.S. policy upon them,” Lehr said.
“This is the Deep State run amok, James Taylor, a senior fellow on environment and energy policy at Heartland, said. “The Trump administration needs to root out the embedded leftists who are responsible for this one-sided propaganda report that is even less credible than Al Gore.”
“The left has already politicized the science, and President Trump has every right to populate the executive branch agencies that produced this report with climate realists,” Taylor said.
Lehr and 18 reputable scientists wrote a 54-page critique of the Global Change Research Program’s 2017 report, which was similarly alarmist, according to Heartland.
The critique can be found here.
See this post on Extreme Fraud in the NCA by Tony Heller.
“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.” H. L. Mencken
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.” H. L. Mencken
Here in their own words is how the indoctrination of the world on the alleged perils of global warming evolved. We have found no evidence here and here and even more here and here) that any of the claims are right.
See Stephen Moore’ right-on assessment here.
Changes observed are cyclical and we can explain them entirely with natural factors (outside of localized effects from changes to the local environment like urbanization). Recall that the idea that a degree or more of warming would be disastrous is ludicrous when a normal day sees a 30F change, the warmest month is 50F on average warmer than the coldest and the highest and lowest extreme record temperatures changes 120F or more in middle latitudes. It changes in our homes from room to room and within rooms sometimes several degrees at any moment.
Temperature trends compared for middle latitudes.
As Jonathan Gruber of MIT said, the elitists could depend on the ‘fact’ that people are stupid and would believe anything they were told by officials especially when the compliant media acts as an echo chamber. Hitler had shown that and his regime was green and used indoctrination of their youth and public effectively.
My philosophy when I taught college was to show my students how to think - not what to think. As Socrates said, “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” I told my students that data is king, and models are only useful tools. Any model’s output or any theory needed to be examined and validated using data, and must always used with caution.
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Well before this episode started, we were warned in 1961:
“… [In] the technological revolution during recent decades… research has become central ... complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government ... the solitary inventor ... has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields ... the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. 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.”
- President Eisenhower in his Farewell address
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ONE WORLD GOVERNANCE IDEAS BASED ON POPULATION AND RESOURCE WORRIES
”The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”
- The Club of Rome Premier environmental think-tank and consultants to the United Nations.
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“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.”
- Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation
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”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
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THE USE OF MODELS TO HYPE THREATS
“The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.”
- Prof. Chris Folland, Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research
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”The models are convenient fictions that provide something very useful.”
- Dr David Frame, climate modeler, Oxford University
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“I believe it is appropriate to have an ‘over-representation’ of the facts on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience.”
- Al Gore, Climate Change activist
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“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.”
- Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace
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“The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe.”
- Emeritus professor Daniel Botkin
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“We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis...”
- David Rockefeller, Club of Rome executive member
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‘The goal now is a socialist, redistributionist society, which is nature’s proper steward and society’s only hope.”
- David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth
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“If we don’t overthrow capitalism, we don’t have a chance of saving the world ecologically. I think it is possible to have an ecologically sound society under socialism. I don’t think it is possible under capitalism”
- Judi Bari, Principal organizer of Earth First!
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“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
- Maurice Strong, Founder of the UN Environment Programme
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“A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.”
- Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies
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“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”
- Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund, Princeton Professor
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“Global Sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty,reduced resource consumption and set levels of mortality control.”
- Professor Maurice King
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“We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of acres of presently settled land.”
- David Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!
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“Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.”
- Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute
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“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
- Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
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”The future is to be [One] World Government with central planning by the United Nations. Fear of environmental crises - whether real or not - is expected to lead to compliance.”
- Former Washington State Democratic governor Dixy Lee Ray
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“Urgent and unprecedented environmental and social changes challenge scientists to define a new social contract...a commitment on the part of all scientists to devote their energies and talents to the most pressing problems of the day, in proportion to their importance, in exchange for public funding.”
NOAA’s Administrator Jane Lubchenko, when she was president of AAAS in 1999
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“Our aim is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to change the global economic system… This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history.” In simpler terms, replace free enterprise, entrepreneurial capitalism with UN-controlled centralized, One World government and economic control.
- UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres
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“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. “It is not. It is actually about how “we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”
- IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer
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THE FACT THE MODELS AND ALARMIST CLAIMS ARE FAILING MISERABLY IS IGNORED VIOLATING THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD
The great Nobel Laureate Physicist Richard Feynman taught students: “If a theory disagrees with experiment (or data), it’s wrong… That simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, or what your name is… If [your hypothesis] disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong.”
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Einstein schooled his fellow scientists: “A model or a hypothesis cannot ‘prove’ anything. But data can invalidate a hypothesis or model. It takes only one experiment to prove me wrong.”
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“Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. (Galileo, Newton, Einstein, etc). There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
See Dr. Patrick Moore, ecologist, radical environmental activist and co-founder of Greenpeace talk about his journey to the truth and skepticism. He speaks about the benefits of the demonized gas CO2.
Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout - Dr Patrick Moore
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“The entire Apollo project to put a man on the moon cost less than $200 billion. We are spending twice that much every year on climate change. This tsunami of government money distorts science in hidden ways that even the scientists who are corrupted often don’t appreciate. If you are a young eager-beaver researcher who decides to devote your life to the study of global warming, you’re probably not going to do your career any good or get famous by publishing research that the crisis isn’t happening.”
- Stephen Moore, author of Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive Our Economy
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“Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic...on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections...proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.”
- MIT professor of atmospheric science Richard Lindzen
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-Nobel Laureate physicist Ivar Giaever changes his mind on global warming, recognizes it as a psuedoscience.
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Gruber was talking about health care promises about Obamacare but trust me they have used it in perpetuating the global warming hoax. Sadly, they have taken over our schools and our children have been indoctrinated into the liberal talking points and bad science. That includes young journalists. We truly have an uphill battle. They have billions to spend. That is how oil and gas pipelines and hydro power lines get voted down and wind farms get funded. I recall having lunch with university economists from Spain and Italy where the renewable mandates led to 3 to 4 jobs lost for every green job created and only 1 of 10 green job was permanent. What followed was soaring electricity costs and brownouts and blackouts. Now the democrats and Jeff Flake want to propose a carbon tax bill. They pay no attention to what is happening worldwide.
BREXIT happened in part because of EU green mandates. The French pay up to 70% in taxes and had enough when Macron tried to impose an additional $.25 cent/gallon tax on gasoline. The ‘yellow jackets’ have rioted and Macron had to back out with his approval rating down to around 19%. They feel the elites want to implement something that will make them ‘feel good’ at their expense. Brazil reacted to socialist programs that devalued their currency and increased costs by electing a conservative leader as did Italy, Australia. Austria, Belgium and other countries are pushing back. Eastern European nations remember the communist days and want no part of it (see this from Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic in 2012). The UN as we showed above is radical and wanting a global carbon tax that would if adopted raise gasoline prices to $49/gallon. It is saying give us your money and we will save you.
Icecap has worked pro-bono in teams of scientists, econometricians, lawyers and policymakers (here and here for example) trying to prevent an assault on our nation’s energy by radical environmental groups and politicians who benefit from pushing not ready for primetime energy sources. Where in the word these efforts have been tried on a large scale, electricity prices have skyrocketed and there were lengthy power blackouts, which in our latitudes would be dangerous in the coldest months. The wind doesn’t always blow nor the sunshine. Some of these countries have rushed to build coal plants. Even warmists like James Hansen and Kerry Emanuel have said wind and solar are foolish and nuclear would make far more sense as long as you don’t build them on volcanically active locations.
Meanwhile we are battling junk science, the latest example is the total disgrace called the CSSR 2017 where many agenda driven psuedoscientists joined with scientists riding the grant gravy train to produce a work of pure fiction. Even moderate scientists are shaking their heads about the propaganda presented as science. I guess it is not surprising when the Lead author is is Don Wuebbles.
We have prepared many briefs for influential people who can advise members of the administration of the real facts about natural climate change and the risks of enacting bad policies. After the election, the rich globalists and politicians promise to turn their attention and considerable funding to persuade congress and force the administration to move away from clean, affordable energy and trying the same failed policies now being abandoned by countries that tried it. This global effort was planned many years ago to make people world wide more dependent on big government and together with indoctrination in the schools at all levels, make them willing to accept the ceding of sovereignty to some centralized government (UN) which would make arbitrary decisions about how, where we live, how much we get to keep from what we make, even require a license to have children (the whole effort started with elitist concern about population and resources). The UN recommended tax on CO2 production would impose a new tax on a gallon of gasoline to $49. Filling your gas tank would cost $600!!! The money would fill UN coffers to be redistributed to fund a new huge incompetent bureaucracy and reward their friends in the NGOs and media that helped them get there.
Trump knows that because he was a democrat and attended many meetings where they discussed their their plans which as a business man and patriot he knew he needed to push back against. The intensity of the assault on them is because they fear that the public will turn against them. They had assumed like Jonathan Gruber of MIT admitted they though the public is basically stupid and would believe what they said with reinforcement from the like minded media echo chamber. He was talking about health care promises about Obamacare but trust me they have used it in perpetuating the global warming hoax. Sadly, they have taken over our schools and our children have been indoctrinated into the liberal talking points and bad science. That includes young journalists. We truly have an uphill battle. They have billions to spend. That is how oil and gas pipelines and hydro power lines get voted down and wind farms get funded. I recall having lunch with university economists from Spain and Italy where the renewable mandates led to 3 to 4 jobs lost for every green job created and only 1 of 10 green job was permanent. What followed was soaring electricity costs and brownouts and blackouts.
Please help us with even SMALL DONATIONS to fund our efforts that are likely to involve travel to meet with policymakers.
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Rolling blackouts, skyrocketing costs
By David Spigelmyer
While Americans across the country benefit from energy savings tied to greater domestic production, consumers in one of our nation’s most densely populated regions remain energy starved because of misguided, dangerous policies. Lacking modern infrastructure access to Marcellus Shale production, millions of New Englanders continue to face skyrocketing costs and the prospect of rolling blackouts.
Make no mistake, thanks to shale development, America’s energy outlook has positively changed - from a position of scarcity to one of abundance and security. The tip of the spear is close by in Pennsylvania, where companies produce a quarter of the nation’s natural gas demand, driving energy savings and significant air-quality improvements.
According to a recent University of Pennsylvania analysis, natural gas development has saved consumers a bundle, driving down home heating costs 40 percent compared with a decade ago. As clean-burning natural gas contributes a larger share of power generation, electricity prices have plummeted too.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, along with others closely aligned with the radical “Keep It in the Ground” movement, has blocked key energy infrastructure projects, ensuring consumers throughout New England will continue to be starved of the energy they need when they need it most.
Projects like the Millennium and Constitution pipelines, which are thoroughly vetted and would be built to the highest safety standards by skilled building trades union members, have been denied New York state permits, severely delaying and even blocking key pathways to more affordable and domestic natural gas.
Rather than turning to reliable resources just a few states away, New England’s demand, as a result, is largely met through importing natural gas from the Caribbean. With New England relying on natural gas to produce half of the region’s electricity, according to the Department of Energy, an overreliance on imported fuel results in shortages and severe price spikes during high-demand periods.
The impact of these politically motivated decisions came to bear during last winter’s “Bomb Cyclone.” The deep freeze triggered a 60-fold surge in the price for natural gas in the New England region, as families turned up the heat to stay warm during the arctic blast.
As natural gas prices topped $175 per million British thermal unit (MMBtu) in New York, setting a North American record, natural gas prices for Pennsylvania’s in-state utilities stayed less than $5 per MMBtu.
Concerns around energy security, reliability, and affordability for millions of Americans is a worrisome trend. ISO New England - an independent, nonprofit organization responsible for the reliable operation of the region’s power grid - warned in a new report that the region will face rolling blackouts and outages during peak times if gas infrastructure constraints are not addressed.
And it’s not just consumers who suffer from the lack of adequate energy infrastructure. America’s energy security is threatened as well. A cargo ship loaded with Russian liquefied natural gas - sent through France from a Russian company under U.S. sanctions - docked in Boston harbor recently, marking the first import of Russian natural gas to this country.
Forcing New Englanders to use imported Russian natural gas, when America is awash in energy abundance, sets a dangerous precedent that we should be working together to avoid.
Clean, abundant Marcellus Shale gas is the solution to New England’s energy woes. Without modern, efficient infrastructure, New Englanders will continue to suffer the consequences of radical, outside-the-mainstream policies pursued by fringe activists and allied politicians.
David Spigelmyer is president of the Pittsburgh-based Marcellus Shale Coalition, a natural gas trade association.
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New England’s needless energy crisis
By Karen Harbert, Providence Journal
A new study conducted by the independent grid operator in New England includes a stark warning for utilities, politicians and customers. While the United States has already become the world’s leading energy producer, ISO New England’s research shows that the region may have to rely on increasing amounts of imported liquefied natural gas (LNG) to meet its future power needs, even though it sits on the doorstep of one of the world’s largest natural gas fields.
The research is consistent with the region’s lack of natural gas infrastructure that was highlighted in our own report ‘What if Pipelines Aren’t Built into the Northeast’ released last year. This shortage means that the region could face a regular risk of rolling winter blackouts by 2024 and would have to rely on more expensive fuel and overseas LNG to meet peak demand.
Worse, the problem is so severe that emergency measures will likely be necessary almost every winter by the mid-2020s, with the grid operator estimating that rolling blackouts would be necessary in 19 out of the 23 scenarios they studied.
ISO New England’s study concluded with a blunt assessment of the problem: “while the use of natural gas for both heating and power generation is growing, the natural gas supply infrastructure is not expanding at the same pace, resulting in natural gas supply constraints in winter. Given the region’s current and growing reliance on natural gas, limitations on the region’s natural gas delivery infrastructure are the most significant component of New England’s fuel-security risk.”
None of this should come as a surprise to those who have been following the energy debate in New England over the past few years. The region has seen closures of many of its coal and nuclear plants, making it increasingly dependent on natural gas generation. A lack of infrastructure has already led to residential electricity prices that are 44 percent higher than the U.S. average, and 62 percent higher for industrial users. New Englanders are also paying 29 percent more, on average, for natural gas.
The impact of those high prices is significant. Our report found that if additional pipeline infrastructure isn’t built, it will cost New England more than 78,000 jobs and $7.6 billion in regional GDP by 2020.
Of course, the irony is that neighboring states like Ohio and Pennsylvania sit above the Marcellus and Utica Shales, two of the world’s richest gas reserves. Unfortunately, an aggressive and well-funded campaign by extreme activists has fought against and prevented new pipeline projects that proposed to deliver this energy resource to New England markets.
Projects like the Northeast Energy Direct, Access Northeast and Constitution pipelines could bring abundant and affordable Pennsylvania gas to New England, but activists have successfully lobbied regulators to deny key permits necessary for pipeline construction.
These misguided efforts have actually worked against regional environmental goals. While renewable sources of energy show great promise, they also require backup sources that must be quickly scaled up to meet peak demand and pick up the slack when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining. People still need fuel to heat their homes and power their businesses, schools, and hospitals.
But because of a lack of infrastructure, rather than using cheaper and cleaner domestic fuel from neighboring states, New Englanders are forced to pay more to burn fuel oil and import higher-priced natural gas from overseas to meet their energy needs. Neither of these scenarios makes economic or environmental sense.
New England needs modern infrastructure to compete. Energy infrastructure is no exception. We applaud the current administration’s focus on revamping our nation’s infrastructure, and hope New England is included. It’s time for state and local lawmakers to face reality and put consumers over extreme special interests to ensure affordable, reliable energy for all of their residents.
Karen Harbert is the president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute.
WHERE’S THE BEEF?
Icecap Note:
Michael Oppenheimer, 1990, The Environmental Defense Fund: “By 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots..."(By 1996) The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers...The Mexican police will round up illegal American migrants surging into Mexico seeking work as field hands.” (now a ‘professor’ at Princeton).
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IPCC ‘Knows’ Less About Future Climate Today Than It ‘Knew’ in 1998
By Dennis Avery
The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reveals their team knows even less about Earth’s global warming than it claimed to know almost 30 years ago.
The dominant thing the IPCC “knew” in 1998 was that we were already suffering a powerful, dangerous warming trend that would essentially shake humanity’s faith in its future. But that didn’t happen. Instead, we spent the last 20 years with no significant warming at all, while we wasted tens of billions of dollars fruitlessly re-analyzing the climate models that failed to forecast the non-warming.
Our recent “hottest years” headlines were essentially statistical gimmicks, citing temperatures that were “record-high” by thousandths of a degree C. The claims were possible only because lots more of our “official” thermometers are now located in bigger and more intense Urban Heat Islands than 30 years ago. The official thermometers are now surrounded by more cement and less greenery.
Simultaneously, the official thermometers at bigger and bigger airports have more and bigger planes burning more jet fuel as they await take-off.
Meanwhile, literally hundreds of “formerly official” rural thermometers have been decommissioned—perhaps because they showed so little warming? Dr. Edward Long took one pair of official thermometer sites from each of the 48 States, one rural, one urban, for the years 1900-2010. The raw data for the rural sites showed only one-fifth as much warming as the urban sites. But the officially “adjusted” data shows both rural and urban instruments closely matching the urban record! NOAA had adjusted the rural sites to match the polluted “Urban Heat Island” trend. (See post here)
Obviously, NOAA wanted to see “record warming,” and wasn’t above finagling the numbers to get it.
Now, about our 20-year warming “hiatus.” The climate modelers claim to be baffled by it, but they aren’t. It’s just a 60-year cycle in the Pacific Ocean that periodically warms that vast ocean by about 2 degrees Celsius for 25-30 years. Then the Pacific temperatures drop back to roughly their earlier level for the next 25-30 years. It’s called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. The record shows PDO warmings at 1860-1880, 1915-1940—and during the “Al Gore” years from 1976-98! Thus we can expect another ten years or so of “hiatus” while the climate models fruitlessly whiz out “new” forecasts.
In other words, there was nothing unusual about the Earth’s warming from 1976-1998. It wasn’t “unprecedented man-made warming,” it was just another PDO cycle.
It’s no coincidence that over the past 150 years our newspaper headlines show we’ve had climate scare headlines every 25-30 years—coinciding with the PDO shifts. When the trend was cooling, we scared ourselves about another Ice Age. When the trend was warming, we saw forecasts of an “ice-free Arctic” and a huge sea level rise.
The PDO cycle recurs, just like the longer Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle that brought us the Roman Warming (200 BC to 600 AD), the Medieval Warming (950 AD to 1300 AD). The Modern Warming dates from the end of the Dalton Minimum that dipped our temperatures from 1790-1830, and it’s not “unprecedented” either. We’re not yet as warm as the peaks of either the Medieval or Roman Warmings.
Nor will the alarmists get to claim runaway warming again after this PDO phase ends about 2030. NASA is now forecasting a deep solar sunspot minimum that could give us 60 years of even lower temperatures than we’ve had during the current 20-year “hiatus.” The temperatures are likely to drop again about 2040. Past solar sunspot minimums like the Maunder and Dalton were famous for causing big famines, but minimums during warmer periods were sometimes missed. Recent reanalysis shows these minimum come about every 200 years, and the Dalton ended in 1830.
What’s apparently cooling the upper atmosphere already is extra Galactic Cosmic Rays, which create extra cloud seeds as they shatter carbon and oxygen molecules. The extra cloud seeds mean more clouds, which are already cooling the outer layer of Earth’s air.
Earth will likely get more cloudy - and thus cooler - until the sunspot minimum is over. In complete defiance of the IPCC!
What else did we “know” in 1998 that has since proven untrue?
NOAA has recently told us there’s no link between the temperatures we’ve had recently and the extreme weather that we’ve always suffered.
There are more and healthier polar bears than the Inuit have ever seen in the past.
Land areas of 90 percent of the Pacific atolls are either stable or growing.
Greenland’s ice mass has added 150 billion tons of ice this year compared to the 1981-2010 average.
Our moderate warming, far from killing humans, is saving millions of human lives each year. Cold normally kills about 18 million people due to cold-induced heart attacks and other cold-weather events in an average current year.
A record of failures like the IPCC’s could get a football coach fired in mid-season.
’All observed climatic changes have natural causes completely outside of human control’
By Alex, WND
“Our analysis (paper) revealed a poor relationship between global mean annual temperature] and the amount of greenhouse gases in planetary atmospheres across a broad range of environments in the Solar System,” the paper explains.
“This is a surprising result from the standpoint of the current Greenhouse theory, which assumes that an atmosphere warms the surface of a planet (or moon) via trapping of radiant heat by certain gases controlling the atmospheric infrared optical depth,” the study continues.
The paper outlines four possible explanations for those observations, and concludes that the most plausible was that air pressure is responsible for the greenhouse effect on a celestial body.
In essence, what is commonly known as the atmospheric “greenhouse” effect is in fact a form of compression heating caused by total air pressure, the authors told WND in a series of e-mails and phone interviews, comparing the mechanics of it to the compression in a diesel engine that ignites the fuel.”
And that effect is completely independent of the so-called “greenhouse gases” and the chemical composition of the atmosphere, they added.
“Hence, there are no greenhouse gases in reality - as in, gases that can cause warming,” Nikolov said when asked to explain the paper in layman’s terms.
“Humans cannot in principle affect the global climate through industrial emissions of CO2, methane and other similar gases or via changes in land use,” he added. “All observed climatic changes have natural causes that are completely outside of human control.”
For the first time, Nikolov said, there is now empirical evidence from NASA data that the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere is not caused by the trapping of heat, but by the force of atmospheric pressure.
The pressure is the weight of the atmosphere, he added.
And the combination of gravity and the mass of the atmosphere explains why the Earth, for example, is warmer than the moon.
“The moon receives about the same amount of heat from the sun as Earth, yet it is 90 degrees [Celsius] colder than the Earth, because it has no atmosphere,” Nikolov explained.
Polar bear climate change global warming
What it all means for science and the climate debate
This is not the first paper to reject the greenhouse’gas theory entirely.
In 2009, for example, Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf Tscheuschner published a paper titled “Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics” in the International Journal of Modern Physics.
They wrote that the “atmospheric greenhouse effect” that “is still supported in global climatology” basically “describes a fictitious mechanism.” The second law of thermodynamics, they said, shows that “can never exist.”
However, their paper did not propose a mechanism to explain the higher temperature of Earth relative to the moon.
The new paper by Nikolov and Zeller does propose such a mechanism - atmospheric pressure.
If correct, the implications of the discovery would be enormous, multiple scientists told WND.
For one, it means the climate projections used to forecast warming doom and justify a wide range of policies are completely wrong.
That is because they were produced by computer models built around a “physically deeply flawed concept, the radiative greenhouse theory,” said Nikolov, who works as a federal scientist but did the new study completely on his own time.
“One major implication of our recently published study is that there is indeed a fundamental problem with the physics of current radiative greenhouse concept,” he told WND, highlighting the origin of the “inaccurate” theory in two 19th century papers.
“The foundation of the greenhouse theory was born of an assumption, it was never shown experimentally, and our results show this is completely wrong,” Nikolov said. “Our study blows the greenhouse theory completely out of the water. There is nothing left.”
“Hence, the public debate on climate needs now to shift focus to the fact that the basic science concept underlying current climate projections by the UN [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] IPCC and other international bodies is physically flawed,” Nikolov added, saying the new findings require a “fundamental overhaul of climate science” and that Earth may be heading for a cooling period.
“This is what the data shows,” he said. “We didn’t start with a theory, we started with the data, which is the opposite of how the greenhouse theory came about.”
The greenhouse theory, Nikolov explained, is based on the assumption that a free convective atmosphere - an atmosphere with no “lid” on it - can trap heat.
“This was an assumption born out of a misinterpretation of experiments involving glass boxes in the early 19th century by Joseph Fourier, a French mathematician,” he said.
“Glass boxes get warmer inside when exposed to the sun not because they trap long-wave radiation, as thought by Fourier, but because they hamper the exchange of air between the inside of a box and the outside environment,” he added.
Next came Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist, who assumed Fourier was correct and in 1896 created an equation to calculate the Earth’s temperature based on CO2 in the atmosphere.
“This equation is both mathematically and physically wrong,” argued Nikolov. “Yet, this paper is still cited as ‘evidence’ that the physics of the greenhouse effect have been well-known for over 100 years.”
The atmosphere does, indeed, increase heat near the surface of celestial bodies.
“But until our paper, the mechanism to explain this - pressure - was not known,” Nikolov continued. “All of the climate science has been based on these false assumptions, all the computer models were based on the assumption, but it’s incorrect.”
Zeller, a retired U.S. Air Force reserve colonel and a retired research meteorologist who worked for the U.S. Forest Service and NOAA, also said that the monumental implications of the findings would extend even beyond the climate debate.
“The implications, beyond the scientific ones, of this study, are that once understood, it may be an opportunity for healing by looking back and seeing that even in this day and age science can be wrong,” he told WND.
he added.“Possibly this will demonstrate that the world’s peer-review system needs to be rethought so that it doesn’t continue retarding the advancement of human evolution: Medicine, pharmaceuticals, cancer cures, proper dietary guidance, etc. are all hampered by combinations of greed and strongly held beliefs”,
In terms of advancing scientific inquiry, “our formula, if we can get it out there to the world, is going to open up all sorts of new lines of research,” Zeller continued.
Among other examples, he noted that if the formula is applied to the earth’s temperature record stretching back to previous warm and cold periods, it would explain everything from the observed reduced differences in temperature between the earth’s poles and the equator, to how pterodactyls could fly despite the physics of flight not working based on today’s atmospheric density.
While describing himself as a “flaming, bleeding heart liberal,” Zeller noted that this should all be about science, not politics.
“This climate controversy is costing billions, making the wrong folks rich, and keep us from solving real environmental problems,” he explained.
