The Global Wind Energy Council recently released its latest report, excitedly boasting that ‘the proliferation of wind energy into the global power market continues at a furious pace, after it was revealed that more than 54 gigawatts of clean renewable wind power was installed across the global market last year’.
You may have got the impression from announcements like that, and from the obligatory pictures of wind turbines in any BBC story or airport advert about energy, that wind power is making a big contribution to world energy today. You would be wrong. Its contribution is still, after decades - nay centuries - of development, trivial to the point of irrelevance.
Here’s a quiz; no conferring. To the nearest whole number, what percentage of the world’s energy consumption was supplied by wind power in 2014, the last year for which there are reliable figures? Was it 20 per cent, 10 per cent or 5 per cent? None of the above: it was 0 per cent. That is to say, to the nearest whole number, there is still no wind power on Earth.
Even put together, wind and photovoltaic solar are supplying less than 1 per cent of global energy demand. From the International Energy Agency’s 2016 Key Renewables Trends, we can see that wind provided 0.46 per cent of global energy consumption in 2014, and solar and tide combined provided 0.35 per cent. Remember this is total energy, not just electricity, which is less than a fifth of all final energy, the rest being the solid, gaseous, and liquid fuels that do the heavy lifting for heat, transport and industry.
Such numbers are not hard to find, but they don’t figure prominently in reports on energy derived from the unreliables lobby (solar and wind). Their trick is to hide behind the statement that close to 14 per cent of the world’s energy is renewable, with the implication that this is wind and solar. In fact the vast majority - three quarters - is biomass (mainly wood), and a very large part of that is ‘traditional biomass’; sticks and logs and dung burned by the poor in their homes to cook with. Those people need that energy, but they pay a big price in health problems caused by smoke inhalation.?
Even in rich countries playing with subsidized wind and solar, a huge slug of their renewable energy comes from wood and hydro, the reliable renewables. Meanwhile, world energy demand has been growing at about 2 per cent a year for nearly 40 years. Between 2013 and 2014, again using International Energy Agency data, it grew by just under 2,000 terawatt-hours.
If wind turbines were to supply all of that growth but no more, how many would need to be built each year? The answer is nearly 350,000, since a two-megawatt turbine can produce about 0.005 terawatt-hours per annum. That’s one-and-a-half times as many as have been built in the world since governments started pouring consumer funds into this so-called industry in the early 2000s.
At a density of, very roughly, 50 acres per megawatt, typical for wind farms, that many turbines would require a land area greater than the British Isles, including Ireland. Every year. If we kept this up for 50 years, we would have covered every square mile of a land area the size of Russia with wind farms. Remember, this would be just to fulfill the new demand for energy, not to displace the vast existing supply of energy from fossil fuels, which currently supply 80 per cent of global energy needs.
Do not take refuge in the idea that wind turbines could become more efficient. There is a limit to how much energy you can extract from a moving fluid, the Betz limit, and wind turbines are already close to it. Their effectiveness (the load factor, to use the engineering term) is determined by the wind that is available, and that varies at its own sweet will from second to second, day to day, year to year.
As machines, wind turbines are pretty good already; the problem is the wind resource itself, and we cannot change that. It’s a fluctuating stream of low-density energy. Mankind stopped using it for mission-critical transport and mechanical power long ago, for sound reasons. It’s just not very good.
As for resource consumption and environmental impacts, the direct effects of wind turbines - killing birds and bats, sinking concrete foundations deep into wild lands - is bad enough. But out of sight and out of mind is the dirty pollution generated in Inner Mongolia by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets in the turbines. This generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale, which is why the phrase ‘clean energy’ is such a sick joke and ministers should be ashamed every time it passes their lips.
It gets worse. Wind turbines, apart from the fiberglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. They need about 200 times as much material per unit of capacity as a modern combined cycle gas turbine. Steel is made with coal, not just to provide the heat for smelting ore, but to supply the carbon in the alloy. Cement is also often made using coal. The machinery of ‘clean’ renewables is the output of the fossil fuel economy, and largely the coal economy.
A two-megawatt wind turbine weighs about 250 tonnes, including the tower, nacelle, rotor and blades. Globally, it takes about half a tonne of coal to make a tonne of steel. Add another 25 tonnes of coal for making the cement and you’re talking 150 tonnes of coal per turbine. Now if we are to build 350,000 wind turbines a year (or a smaller number of bigger ones), just to keep up with increasing energy demand, that will require 50 million tonnes of coal a year. That’s about half the EU’s hard coal-mining output.
Forgive me if you have heard this before, but I have a commercial interest in coal. Now it appears that the black stuff also gives me a commercial interest in ‘clean’, green wind power.
The point of running through these numbers is to demonstrate that it is utterly futile, on a priori grounds, even to think that wind power can make any significant contribution to world energy supply, let alone to emissions reductions, without ruining the planet. As the late David MacKay pointed out years back, the arithmetic is against such unreliable renewables.
The truth is, if you want to power civilization with fewer greenhouse gas emissions, then you should focus on shifting power generation, heat and transport to natural gas, the economically recoverable reserves of which - thanks to horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing - are much more abundant than we dreamed they ever could be. It is also the lowest-emitting of the fossil fuels, so the emissions intensity of our wealth creation can actually fall while our wealth continues to increase. Good.
And let’s put some of that burgeoning wealth in nuclear, fission and fusion, so that it can take over from gas in the second half of this century. That is an engineerable, clean future. Everything else is a political displacement activity, one that is actually counterproductive as a climate policy and, worst of all, shamefully robs the poor to make the rich even richer.
Spectator.co.uk/podcast
Matt Ridley discusses wind power
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How Soon Will Media Report Record Crop Production in our Warming World?
By James Taylor
Global warming alarmists and their media allies launched a new scare this week claiming global warming is causing crop failures and food shortages around the globe. In one of their biggest whoppers ever, the media are claiming global warming has displaced “millions” of farmers in India and is causing - or will soon cause - similar devastation to farmers and crops in Bangladesh, Syria, and Honduras. Objective evidence, however, decimates the assertion and shows crop yields continue to set annual records as growing seasons lengthen, frost events become less frequent, soil moisture improves, and more atmospheric carbon dioxide fertilizes crops and plant life.
A January 10 Google News search for “global warming” listed near the very top of its search results an article titled, “How soon will climate change force you to move?” by an outlet called Fast Company. Among other sensationalist climate claims, the article made the claims listed above about global warming, crop failures, and resulting forced migration. Fast Company, as it turns out, is trying to pull a fast one on you.
It is true that waxing and waning food production has been one of the most powerful components in the rise and fall of civilizations. At Katowice, Poland, during the United Nations COP24 climate meetings in November 2018, Heartland Institute senior fellow Dennis Avery powerfully showed that throughout history periods of increased crop yields have led to rising civilizations and expanding human populations. Conversely, periods of declining crop yields triggered the fall of civilizations and led to famine, death, and contracting human populations.
Importantly, Avery showed that periods of global warmth simulated the increased crop yields that led to expanding human populations. Periods of global cooling repressed crop yields and led to misery, death, and contracting human populations. The question is, has anything changed such that our modest present warming is causing declining crop production and resulting catastrophes?
Let’s first examine the claims regarding India. Fast Company claims “drought in some areas has forced millions of farmers to move.” For support, the article cites a Reuters article from July 2018 that interviews a failed farmer from India’s Madhya Pradesh state claiming global warming and poor rainfall caused his failure as a farmer and his relocation to metropolitan New Delhi. Poor rainfall “has caused repeated and widespread crop failures” Reuters claimed. In summary, Fast Company cites another news organization’s profile of a failed farmer to support its alarmist climate assertions.
However, crop data from India eviscerates the claim that global warming, through drought or any other mechanism, is causing rampant crop failure in India. The Indian government reports that Indian farmers produced a record amount of food grains in 2017-2018, topping the previous record that was set in 2016-2017. “The year 2017-18 had, in fact, witnessed record production of all major crops like Rice (112.91 MT), wheat (99.70 MT), coarse cereals (46.99 MT) and pulses (25.23 MT),” the Times of India reported, citing official government data.
Notably, favorable climate conditions - and most importantly, abundant rainfall - spurred the record crop production. “Backed by good monsoon rainfall last year, India had produced record 284.83 million tonnes of food grains in 2017-18 crop year,” Times of India observed.
The 2017-18 Indian crop year merely continued a longstanding trend of record crop production as our planet modestly warms. The international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports Indian farmers have successively set new records almost every year this decade.
The Fast Company and Reuters articles are not outliers. Global warming activists in the establishment media are always looking to find and interview somebody who blames their own personal shortcomings and misfortune on global warming. Scapegoating global warming is a convenient way for failed farmers and others to pass along the blame for their own personal failures. But if you are a farmer in India and you are a failure at your craft, you are the exception rather than the rule. The objective data show, without any room for debate, that crop production continues to improve and set records nearly every year as our modest global warming continues.
Perhaps Fast Company’s discredited claims about global warming, drought, and crop failures in India are an isolated error and the article was correct about its claims regarding other countries and regions. Actually, er, no.
According to agricultural economists at World Bank, as reported by CEIC Data, Bangladesh enjoyed record crop production in 2016, the last year for which data is available. The 2016 record beat out the previous record year - 2014 - and was preceded by the third highest production year - 2015. Do you see a pattern here? Crop production in Bangladesh is 33 percent higher than it was merely a decade ago. According to a World Bank report accompanying the 2016 data, “Bangladesh’s rural economy, and specifically agriculture, have been powerful drivers of poverty reduction in Bangladesh since 2000.”
How about Honduras? The International Food Policy Research Institute, citing official government data, documents that in 2016 - the most recent year for which there is data - Honduras achieved record production for each of its three staple food crops. Honduran farmers produce record amounts of rice, wheat, and maize. The 2016 record beat the previous record, set in 2015. The next most productive crop year was 2014, followed by 2013. Moreover, Coffee Bureau Intelligence reports that coffee drinkers and coffee farmers also have reason to rejoice - as Honduran coffee production is believed to have set new records in 2018. “Since 2014-2015, Honduras coffee production has increased by more than 12% per year,” Coffee Bureau Intelligence reports.
Syrian crop production also defies alarmist claims. United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization data show an approximately 50 percent increase in Syrian crop production since 1995. Moreover, the Arab Spring democracy uprisings in Syria and elsewhere, which climate alarmists ‘blame’ on global warming, occurred in 2011, a year in which Syria produced its eighth highest crop yields in history.
Fast Company cited four specific nations in support of its narrative that global warming is causing rampant crop failures, which in turn is causing mass migration. Objective data show, beyond dispute, that Fast Company’s claims are flat-out wrong. But in today’s agenda-driven media climate, don’t expect Fast Company, other media outlets, or Google News to post any corrections to the false reporting.
James Taylor (JTaylor@heartland.org) is senior fellow for environment and climate policy at The Heartland Institute.
Multiple federal agencies are pushing agenda-driven climate science on their websites, according to The Heartland Institute.
The Trump administration has taken a public stance supporting fossil fuels and questioning the scientific “consensus” of climate change research.
Parts of federal websites should be overhauled or taken down completely to conform to the administration’s stance on climate change and fossil fuel energy production, Heartland says.
Trump administration agencies continue to push “climate alarmism” and publish “propaganda” on their websites despite President Donald Trump’s position on climate change and the use of fossil fuels, according to The Heartland Institute.
Heartland researchers audited the websites of federal agencies for information that seemed to contradict the public stance of President Donald Trump and his administration’s agenda to expand American energy production, including fossil fuel production. Heartland researchers found numerous examples of federal agencies pushing an anti-fossil fuel narrative, according to sections of a draft report obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Federal executive branch websites are littered with political propaganda instead of objective science,” Heartland senior environment and energy policy fellow James Taylor said in a statement to TheDCNF. “To the extent scientific issues are discussed, they are presented in a biased and agenda-driven manner. This is wholly unacceptable and an insult to the American people.”
The agencies audited include NASA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Department of Energy (DOE). While many parts of the agencies’ websites have endorsed Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda and plans to expand fossil fuel productions, other places have remained largely out of touch with the current administration.
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
NASA’s website “favorably cites thoroughly debunked claims by radical global warming activists John Cook and Naomi Oreskes” and the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group committed to combatting global warming, according to Heartland’s draft report.
NASA website on the “consensus” of human-driven climate change. (NASA/Screenshot)
For example, the website for space agency NASA pushes the misleading claim that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that “climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities,” Heartland found. (RELATED: Let’s Talk About The ‘97% Consensus’ On Global Warming)
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The claim is based on flawed research done by Cook, an Australian researcher, in 2013. A review of his work and methods found that the “consensus” of climate scientists who agree that human activity contributes to global warming is actually 32.6 percent. Roughly 66 percent of academic papers reviewed by Cook to make his claim took no stance on the issue.
NASA’s website section for children includes a story of the “The king who banned coal,” which tells of an attempt by King Edward I of England to ban coal in 1306, possibly enacting the “First environmental law ever.”
“Why is NASA, a science administration, teaching children radical left-wing political propaganda that the invention of the steam engine was a horrible development and the Industrial Revolution made people’s lives worse?” the Heartland draft report says.
NASA “should be focused on space-related science issues, not producing children’s stories attacking coal power and presenting ridiculous historical revisionism designed to brainwash children into believing that the Industrial Revolution was bad for human health and welfare,” Taylor told TheDCNF.
Fighting back is not easy. 1.5 trillion has funded this hoax (including many millions from Exxon and BP), while at the same time they accuse our side of being shills for big oil.
Some are brave to speak out including my friend and superstar Willie Soon, Harvard Astrophysics scientist.
Willie and his former Harvard colleague Sallie Baliunas did some great work early on refuting the hoax. The target was put on their backs and they were viciously attacked. Sallie was the consultant for the TV series Star Trek. She published with colleagues some excellent papers rebutting the idea it had to be CO2 driving climate. They called her work on climate the worst ever published but time has shown it proven to be right. The continuous attacks and an episode when Sallie’s dog was found suspiciously dead in her yard pushed her to an early retirement. Willie stayed engaged and remains prolific and vocal. His office was invaded by Greenpeace who took his computer and they claim it showed he had made $1.2 M in grants over 20 years. Of course this was grant money given to Harvard - of which Willie gets maybe half. You can be sure if Willie sold out and became a ‘player’, he would be getting maybe 50 to 100 times that $60k/year.
I worked for Friends of Science on a project over a decade ago ISPM, where we were to review the latest IPCC report and extract information from the science sections (not the Summary for Policymakers which was written by statesmen and and lead authors on a mission). Some very good scientists were part of the large group of researchers that along with statesman, environmentalists, and even college students, wrote the sections. We spent 6 months on our extraction process intending to show the story was far less certain and far more complicated than the summary implied. We were paid a small amount (maybe $1200) for our efforts. The immediate claim was that the ‘denialist report’ was paid for by big oil. That was not the case. It came from donations to the organization and was a drop in the bucket compared to the millions warmists get from an NSF and NGOs and Foundation funds all run amuck.
Personally I had a few experiences. While at WSI, I was invited to a Museum in Vermont where two of my former students worked to give a talk on Climate Change. A researcher who had a strong warmist opinion objected to my appearance and tried to get me cancelled and even threatened a boycott. The talk went well. He commented in a post afterwards, he could not understand how I could challenge the science and said I must be dirty with coal money.
Later, I was invited by Vermont Public Radio to debate him but he threatened to not show if I was invited and they replaced me with someone who wrote a book on carbon - the element not the gas CO2. I listened on the internet and my nemesis spent his time bashing skeptics most notably Fred Singer.
I was invited to speak at the college I taught at a few years later and was harassed during my talk by an attendee who said ‘that can’t be true’ again and again to what I showed. Finally the Head of the Department told him to hold off on questions to the end where he tried to dominate the Q&A.
Later I received a request from the museum to be part of a ‘lively debate’ on climate change that a women’s group had requested in the area. I could not attend so I arranged for two scientists (a college professor and a NASA scientist who gives talks and chairs conferences worldwide) to be invited. They agreed but the warmist scientist refused to debate them and the museum uninvited our two scientists. The left likes to proclaim diversity of opinion but that is only if your opinion agrees with theirs. That same warmist scientist who blocked the two debates was part to the RICO 20 that signed a petition to take skeptic scientists to court and charge them with RICO violations. They suddenly backed off as someone advised them - most were sitting on tens of millions in grant money - that it could actually be turned on them. That same warmist scientist had a web site with a page proudly listing the tens of millions in grant money he had made in his career in Vermont. That page disappeared from his site.
I did have one successful debate in MA. The NWS Winter Workshop tried to organize a debate and called college professors across the state and they said the time to debate was over - the science was settled. They would come if the topic was what major steps must be taken to combat warming and its results. NWS did find a new professor who had just complete Al Gore’s course. At the start of the debate a hand survey of the attendees showed 75% believed in AGW and 25% were skeptical. After the debate, the numbers flipped roughly to 75% who had become skeptical and 25% who still believed. The flip were similar to the Intelligence Squared debate with Lindzen and Chrichton and Stott versus Ekwurzel, Schmidt and Somerville around 2007.
I given talks at MENSA meetings, at EMA, Rotary Clubs, at other colleges and at professional society meetings which went well.
I debated a UCS environmentalist at the NH Science, Technology and Energy Committee a few years back. He started by saying he was not a modeler but a data guy and went on to spend his hour talking about data from the models!! I was invited to speak in CT at a similar committee and after a member gave a talk on the great things that had done (tyaxes and regulations) to fend off the 12-14F warming and 10 foot sea level rises coming> After they finished, I was supposed to talk. The chair of the committee (DEM) announced an ad hoc press briefing in the hall and asked all the media and other DEMS to join her. I spoke to a smaller receptive group. I got no media coverage.
I am working on potential briefings and seminars. I will let you know. All of these efforts are pro bono and have to be worked into a week where I work 7 days. I do it because frankly i am worried.
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UN Boss: Use “Climate Action” to “Transform the World”
By Alex Newman
KATOWICE, Poland - As the most important United Nations “global warming” summit since the 2015 confab in Paris kicked off in Katowice last week, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (shown) declared that so-called “climate action” offers a “compelling path to transform our world.” Even your “mind” must be transformed, he said. Many other proud socialists, communists, and globalists have also called for using the man-made global-warming hypothesis to transform the world. And they are not kidding.
Photo of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres: Copyright cop24.gov.pl
In fact, the man-made global-warming theorists in attendance at the UN summit here are working to exploit alarmism over the “climate” to restructure every aspect of human life. This includes the economy, industry, governance, and even your thinking, Guterres declared. The sought-after global transformation will also involve more government promotion of feminism, planetary taxes on emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), a total transformation of governance, and so much more, explained Guterres, a longtime socialist leader who led the Socialist International before becoming UN boss.
But as the wheels come off the bandwagon with top world leaders such as President Donald Trump rejecting the UN alarmism, UN leaders are becoming even more alarmist. One UN chief, UN General Assembly president Maria Espinosa, even claimed mankind was “in danger of disappearing” if humanity refuses to submit to the UN agenda. “We need to act urgently, and with audacity,” she exclaimed. “Be ambitious, but also responsible for the future generations.”
The World Wildlife Fund, a radical group promoting tyranny and globalism under the guise of “environmentalism,” has billboards and fliers here claiming humans are an “endangered species.” Asked whether this was due to abortion and population control, a WWF representative at the booth in the COP24 venue responded that no, it was because of “climate change.”
Guterres, a fervent globalist, ludicrously claimed hurricanes that struck the Caribbean last year were “emergencies” that “are preventable,” as if hurricanes were caused by refusal to submit to carbon taxes quickly enough. Speaking some days afterwards at the COP24 summit, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore made similarly dishonest claims, pointing to everything from snow fall to bad weather to argue that human activity and choice needed to be further curtailed.
“It is hard to overstate the urgency of our situation,” Guterres continued in his fear-mongering speech. “Even as we witness devastating climate impacts causing havoc across the world, we are still not doing enough, nor moving fast enough, to prevent irreversible and catastrophic climate disruption. Nor are we doing enough to capitalize on the enormous social, economic and environmental opportunities of climate action.”
In America, socialists are using virtually the exact same rhetoric. Speaking last week alongside self-described Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, self-styled “democratic” socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for using the “climate” agenda to implement her fringe vision for America. “[We] can use the transition to 100 percent renewable energy as the vehicle to truly deliver and establish economic, social and racial justice in the United State of America,” she exclaimed.
Indeed, globalists and socialists have made clear on repeated occasions that they view the phony “climate crisis” as an “opportunity” to achieve their “social” and “economic” goals - namely, wealth redistribution, government controls over ever-larger swaths of human activity, social engineering, and more. And throughout the conference, that was clearly on display as every globalist special interest group came to link its totalitarian agenda to the “climate” bandwagon.
“Climate action offers a compelling path to transform our world for the better,” Guterres continued. “In short, we need a complete transformation of our global energy economy, as well as how we manage land and forest resources. We need to embrace low-carbon, climate-resilient sustainable development.” For those who are unfamiliar with UN-speak, “sustainable development” is code for government-directed development and global technocratic rule.
All of this can be accomplished through the mechanisms agreed to by Obama and other “leaders” in 2015 at the UN “climate” summit in France. “The Paris Agreement provides a framework for the transformation we need,” Guterres said, calling for “concerted resource mobilization” and “transformative climate action in five key economic areas - energy, cities, land use, water and industry.”
According to the UN boss, all of this transformative action must be geared toward shackling humanity to what is euphemistically dubbed the “green economy.” Reading the descriptions given of this “green” economy, it becomes immediately apparent that it is a lot like the “red economy” of yesteryear. The difference: the justification is primarily “environmental” in nature, rather than relying on the discredited communist “ideology” so tainted in the public mind following the institutionalized mass murder of over 100 million people just in the last century.
The “green” economy “means embracing carbon pricing,” Guterres continued, arguing that the gas exhaled by every human being is “pollution"that must be taxed and regulated. This “green” economy also means vastly increasing the scope of the welfare state and the level of dependence on government among individuals. Those workers whose “sectors” face “disruption” must have “retraining” from government, as well as a “social safety net.” In other words, when you lose your job due to the “green” economy, the government will take care of you and your family - maybe.
Spending some $100 billion per year will provide a “positive political signal.” This money is supposed to go into the UN Green Climate [Slush] Fund to help bribe Third World governments into cooperating with the scheme. More will be required later, naturally. At the moment, the U.S. government is prohibited by law from providing money to this fund, but Obama did it anyway, and the next president may try to do it as well.
“Decisive climate action today is our chance to right our ship and set a course for a better future for all,” Guterres continued. “The transition to a low-carbon economy needs political impetus from the highest levels...We need a full-scale mobilization of young people. And we need a global commitment to gender equality, because women’s leadership is central to durable climate solutions.” Gender policy, feminism, and the indoctrination of children are all key, as countless other UN leaders have also made clear.
Shortly after his initial speech, Guterres gave another, focusing on similar themes, including the “transformation of the real economy” that the UN and its member governments must oversee in energy, industry, nature, cities, and much more. “I count on multiple new transformational commitments from governments, business, finance and civil society in each of these areas,” he added. “To achieve genuine transformation in the real economy, we need national governments to play a crucial role in each of the robust coalitions which will deliver concrete transformative outcomes.”
Finally, the UN Secretary-General made clear that even your mind was in the UN’s cross-hairs. “The Paris Agreement is not a piece of paper. It is a historic compact among nations, a compact to ensure our survival” he said, as if mass murderers who enslaved nations - Kim Jong Un, the Castro regime, Islamic dictatorships, and others like them - were actually nations. “This coming year we must put it to use to transform our economies, our minds, and our future.” This has been a recurring theme with the UN.
All sorts of companies, non-profit groups, “religious” leaders, “civil society” organizations, Big Oil, and others were tripping over themselves to sign on. At an event featuring Guterres and other top UN bosses, for example, a number of globalist mega-banks with trillions of dollars in combined lending vowed to “put their balance sheets to work” in advancing the warmist agenda. “It shows that banks are becoming increasingly ready to take the bold steps needed to play our part in achieving a low-carbon economy,” said ING CEO Ralph Hamers, one of many cronies jumping on the bandwagon.
Critics and scientists, though, were outraged at all the talk of transformation, citing the pseudo-science underpinning the whole effort. “Why do all the scientists and politicians and rent-seekers continue to play the games of the urgent need to stop CO2 from rising by changing to ‘renewable’ energies while Paris is literally burning because people cannot afford to pay more taxes for nothing in return?” wondered astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon of the Solar and Stellar Physics (SSP) Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
In a statement to The New American, Dr. Soon slammed the anti-energy movement for attacking reliable, cheap and abundant energy while people are in dire need. “How about the energy needs of Africa, India, China and South America: can they all really live purely from the ‘clean’ energy of the Sun and Wind?” he asked. “This is truly a sad tale of third rate scientific studies and fake evidence dressing up to rob the world of cheap and abundant energy.”
Even President Trump slammed the effort to fundamentally transform the world under the guise of climate, too. “The Paris Agreement isn’t working out so well for Paris. Protests and riots all over France,” said Trump on December 8, trolling the UN summit and embattled French President Emmanuel Macron. “People do not want to pay large sums of money, much to third world countries (that are questionably run), in order to maybe protect the environment. Chanting ‘We Want Trump!’ Love France.”
As the UN global-warming alarmists finalize their “rule book” for implementing the UN Paris Agreement and restructuring the world, opposition is growing in tandem worldwide. Trump, incoming Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, the anti-warmist tax revolt in France, and other developments hung like a cloud over the COP24 in Katowice. But as has become clear, a wide range of totalitarians from all over the world - socialists, globalists, communists, Islamists, and others - are all hoping to weaponize the “climate” alarm they cooked up to advance their dangerous agenda.
It is not too late to stop them. But Americans must act now.
See how the energy activists has hurt our country in this report CHAMBER BLASTS ANTI-FOSSIL FUEL ACTIVISTS FOR COSTING ECONOMY OVER $91 BILLION IN LOSSES: The Chamber of Commerce and trade unions took aim at anti-fossil fuel activists in a scathing report that concluded that the form of environmentalism slowed economic activity by over $91 billion in the U.S. in 2018.
“Taken together, anti-energy activism has helped prevent at least $91.9 billion of economic activity in the United States, which is larger than the entire economies of 12 states,” according to the report, “Infrastructure Lost: Why America Cannot Afford To ‘Keep It In the Ground’”
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Watch Dr. Don Easterbrook address the Washington State Senate committee on Climate Change in 2013.
Update: Please see this email by Federico Pecchini that draws on Tony Heller’s work captures a lot of what has been done and the reasons to ‘Gruber’ (MIT’s Jonathan Gruber who advised Obama on health care and how to sell it with the complicit media’s help to the public who are ‘stupid’ ) the world and industry on the issue the elitists have invented to control the masses Should_Global_Warming_be_our.pdf.
This is something Eisenhower warned about in his Farewell address:
“The prospect of domination of the nations scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
The story that follows is what happens when they attempt to enforce it and people feel the pain.
Call for more NHS resources as elderly people and women among most vulnerable
By Denis Campbell Health policy editor
Snow in Derbyshire last December. The temperatures last winter are thought to have been partly to blame for the excess deaths. Photograph: Joe Giddens/PA
There were 50,100 excess deaths in England and Wales last winter, when there was a prolonged spell of extreme cold, making it the highest number since 1976, figures have shown.
The Office for National Statistics said flu and the ineffectiveness of the flu vaccine were key reasons for the rise of excess winter deaths in 2017-18.
The deaths occurred during the NHS’s most serious “winter crisis” for many years. A lack of staff and beds meant all types of health services, particularly hospitals, were unable to cope with both the number of patients needing treatment and the severity of many of their conditions.
Women and people aged over 85 were among those most likely to die last winter, although the rate of winter deaths among males aged up to 64 doubled in just a year, the ONS found. A third of the deaths were due to serious breathing difficulties, including flu, asthma and bronchitis.
The 50,100 excess deaths were about 15,000 (45.1%) more than those that occurred in 2016-17 and double the total in 2015-16.
Nick Stripe, a specialist in health analysis and life events at the ONS, said: “It is likely that last winter’s increase was due to the predominant strain of flu, the effectiveness of the influenza vaccine and below-average winter temperatures.”
Doctors and groups representing older people said too little was being done to keep older people warm and safe, and to give the NHS the resources it needs.
Caroline Abrahams, Age UK’s charity director, said: “A toxic cocktail of poor housing, high energy prices and ill-health can make winter a dangerous time for many older people, and tragically it is the oldest and those who are the most vulnerable who particularly suffer the consequences.
“Last winter, there were nearly 46,000 excess winter deaths among people aged 65 and over - a shocking 92% of all excess deaths - equating to 379 older people a day. These distressing figures are now the highest we’ve seen in over 40 years.”
Dr Nick Scriven, the president of the Society for Acute Medicine, said the figures raised concerns about the persistent winter problems being encountered across the NHS every year.
The NHS was operating year-round under such pressure that it was in a state of “eternal winter”, he said. As a result, “by the time winter actually hits, it leaves hospitals struggling to cope, having been maxed out all year round”.
He said the NHS was not well-equipped to deal with its many challenges, which included “an older, frailer population with increasingly complex medical problems, a lack of funding across health and social care to meet demand, a recruitment crisis and persistently poor performance.
“Ultimately, despite reassurances from the government and NHS leaders that enough funding has been made available and the service is coping with the additional demands placed on it, the reality is clearly different given these statistics.”
See this on how cold kills far more than heat from last year.
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French PM suspends fuel tax hike
After weeks of mass protests, government backs down.
By ZOYA SHEFTALOVICH 12/4/18
French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe on Tuesday announced a six-month suspension of a controversial fuel tax rise.
The climbdown comes after three weeks of mass demonstrations by the Yellow Jackets movement against the planned tax increase.
An earlier government concession in the form of a tax tweak - suspending carbon taxes during periods of high petrol prices - failed to get Yellow Jackets off the streets.
Macron decided to suspend the fuel tax hikes late Monday, AFP reported, after his government spent the day meeting leaders from all of France’s political parties.
Seventy-two percent of the French back the Yellow Jackets, according to a weekend survey, while Macron’s approval rating has dropped to 23 percent and Philippe’s to 26, according to a new IFOP poll.
Videos from Tony Heller and Dr. Richard Keen as an Intro:
Anthony Watts:
From But Now You Know. There is most certainly a pattern to climate change...but it’s not what you may think:
For at least 114 120 years, climate “scientists” have been claiming that the climate was going to kill us...but they have kept switching whether it was a coming ice age, or global warming.
(A timeline of claims follows, updated to 2014)
1895 - Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again - New York Times, February 1895
1902 - “Disappearing Glaciers...deteriorating slowly, with a persistency that means their final annihilation...scientific fact...surely disappearing.” - Los Angeles Times
1912 - Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age - New York Times, October 1912
1923 - “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada: - Professor Gregory of Yale University, American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress, - Chicago Tribune
1923 - “The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age"- Washington Post
1924 - MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age - New York Times, Sept 18, 1924
1929 - “Most geologists think the world is growing warmer, and that it will continue to get warmer” - Los Angeles Times, in Is another ice age coming?
1932 - “If these things be true, it is evident, therefore that we must be just teetering on an ice age” - The Atlantic magazine, This Cold, Cold World
1933 - America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise - New York Times, March 27th, 1933
1933 - “...wide-spread and persistent tendency toward warmer weather...Is our climate changing?” - Federal Weather Bureau “Monthly Weather Review.”
1938 - Global warming, caused by man heating the planet with carbon dioxide, “is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power.” - Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
1938 - “Experts puzzle over 20 year mercury rise...Chicago is in the front rank of thousands of cities throughout the world which have been affected by a mysterious trend toward warmer climate in the last two decades” - Chicago Tribune
1939 - “Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right...weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer” - Washington Post
1952 - “...we have learned that the world has been getting warmer in the last half century” - New York Times, August 10th, 1962
1954 - “winters are getting milder, summers drier. Glaciers are receding, deserts growing” - U.S. News and World Report
1954 - Climate - the Heat May Be Off - Fortune Magazine
1959 - “Arctic Findings in Particular Support Theory of Rising Global Temperatures” - New York Times
1969 - “...the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two” - New York Times, February 20th, 1969
1969 - “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000” - Paul Ehrlich (while he now predicts doom from global warming, this quote only gets honorable mention, as he was talking about his crazy fear of overpopulation)
1970 - “...get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters - the worst may be yet to come...there’s no relief in sigh” - Washington Post
1974 - Global cooling for the past forty years - Time Magazine
1974 - “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age” - Washington Post
1974 - “As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed” - Fortune magazine, who won a Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics for its analysis of the danger
1974 - “...the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure...mass deaths by starvation, and probably anarchy and violence” - New York Times
Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age
1975 - Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable - New York Times, May 21st, 1975
1975 - “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind” Nigel Calder, editor, New Scientist magazine, in an article in International Wildlife Magazine
1976 - “Even U.S. farms may be hit by cooling trend” - U.S. News and World Report
1981 - Global Warming - “of an almost unprecedented magnitude” - New York Times
1988 - I would like to draw three main conclusions. Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that the greenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves. - Jim Hansen, June 1988 testimony before Congress, see His later quote and His superior’s objection for context
1989 - “On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” - Stephen Schneider, lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Discover magazine, October 1989
1990 - “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing - in terms of economic policy and environmental policy” - Senator Timothy Wirth
1993 - “Global climate change may alter temperature and rainfall patterns, many scientists fear, with uncertain consequences for agriculture.” - U.S. News and World Report
1998 - 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, Canadian Minister of the Environment, Calgary Herald, 1998
2001 - “Scientists no longer doubt that global warming is happening, and almost nobody questions the fact that humans are at least partly responsible.” - Time Magazine, Monday, Apr. 09, 2001
2003 - Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue, and energy sources such as “synfuels,” shale oil and tar sands were receiving strong consideration” - Jim Hansen, NASA Global Warming activist, Can we defuse The Global Warming Time Bomb?, 2003
2006 - “I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.” - Al Gore, Grist magazine, May 2006
2006 - “It is not a debate over whether the earth has been warming over the past century. The earth is always warming or cooling, at least a few tenths of a degree...” - Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT
2006 - “What we have fundamentally forgotten is simple primary school science. Climate always changes. It is always...warming or cooling, it’s never stable. And if it were stable, it would actually be interesting scientifically because it would be the first time for four and a half billion years.” -Philip Stott, emeritus professor of bio-geography at the University of London
2006 - “Since 1895, the media has alternated between global cooling and warming scares during four separate and sometimes overlapping time periods. From 1895 until the 1930’s the media peddled a coming ice age. From the late 1920’s until the 1960’s they warned of global warming. From the 1950’s until the 1970’s they warned us again of a coming ice age. This makes modern global warming the fourth estate’s fourth attempt to promote opposing climate change fears during the last 100 years.” - Senator James Inhofe, Monday, September 25, 2006
2007 - “I gave a talk recently (on fallacies of global warming) and three members of the Canadian government, the environmental cabinet, came up afterwards and said, ‘We agree with you, but it’s not worth our jobs to say anything.’ So what’s being created is a huge industry with billions of dollars of government money and people’s jobs dependent on it.” - Dr. Tim Ball, Coast-to-Coast, Feb 6, 2007
2008 - “Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress” - Dr. John S. Theon, retired Chief of the Climate Processes Research Program at NASA, see above for Hansen quotes
Section updated by Anthony Watts:
2009 - Climate change: melting ice will trigger wave of natural disasters. Scientists at a London conference next week will warn of earthquakes, avalanches and volcanic eruptions as the atmosphere heats up and geology is altered. Even Britain could face being struck by tsunamis - “Not only are the oceans and atmosphere conspiring against us, bringing baking temperatures, more powerful storms and floods, but the crust beneath our feet seems likely to join in too,” - Professor Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre, at University College London, - The Guardian, Sep 2009.
2010 - What Global Warming Looks Like. It was more than 5C (about 10F) warmer than climatology in the eastern European region including Moscow. There was an area in eastern Asia that was similarly unusually hot. The eastern part of the United States was unusually warm, although not to the degree of the hot spots in Eurasia. James Hansen - NASA GISS, August 11, 2010.
2011 - Where Did Global Warming Go? “In Washington, ‘climate change’ has become a lightning rod, it’s a four-letter word,” said Andrew J. Hoffman, director of the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute for Sustainable Development. - New York Times, Oct 15, 2011.
2012 - Global warming close to becoming irreversible-scientists. “This is the critical decade. If we don’t get the curves turned around this decade we will cross those lines,” said Will Steffen, executive director of the Australian National University’s climate change institute, speaking at a conference in London. Reuters, Mar 26, 2012
2013 - Global-warming ‘proof’ is evaporating. The 2013 hurricane season just ended as one of the five quietest years since 1960. But don’t expect anyone who pointed to last year’s hurricanes as “proof” of the need to act against global warming to apologize; the warmists don’t work that way. New York Post, Dec 5, 2013
2014 - Climate change: It’s even worse than we thought. Five years ago, the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change painted a gloomy picture of our planet’s future. As climate scientists gather evidence for the next report, due in 2014, Michael Le Page gives seven reasons why things are looking even grimmer. - New Scientist (undated in 2014)
The actual Global Warming Advocates’ chart, overlaid on the “climate change” hysterics of the past 120 years. Not only is it clear that they take any change and claim it’s going to go on forever and kill everyone, but notice that they even sometimes get the short-term trend wrong…
Worse still, notice that in 1933 they claim global warming has been going on for 25 years...the entire 25 years they were saying we were entering an ice age. And in 1974, they say there has been global cooling for 40 years...the entire time of which they’d been claiming the earth was getting hotter! Of course NOW they are talking about the earth “warming for the past century”, again ignoring that they spent much of that century claiming we were entering an ice age.
The fact is that the mean temperature of the planet is, and should be, always wavering up or down, a bit, because this is a natural world, not a climate-controlled office.
See also:
150 Years of Global Warming and Cooling at the New York Times
