“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 fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.” – Bertrand Russel
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DAY by day, all around the globe, Global Warming Climate Change is being exposed as simply a moral issue for the wealthy urban elite.
BLUE collar workers and the silent majority are not buying into the relentless fear-mongering and warming hysteria driven by climate theory-obsessed politicians, propped up by a compliant mainstream media.
THE incessant propaganda and orchestrated alarmism has lead to the mad rush into costly UNreliables – wind and solar ‘energy’ – that are sending energy prices through the roof and jobs and industry to China or other countries who have not been driven to ‘green’ energy poverty by climate theory-obsessed politicians pushing draconian “Save The Planet” policies.
CAMPAIGNING on climate guarantees political death. Its latest victim, Bill Shorten, The Australian Labor Party and the Greens, who, last night, lost the “unlosable” election to incumbent conservative PM Scott Morrison.
CLIMATE CHANGE, CENTRAL TO THE ELECTION
THE mainstream media flagged “Climate change to be decisive issue in Australian election.” :
GLOBAL REJECTION OF DRACONIAN CLIMATE CHANGE POLICY & ‘GREEN’ ENERGY POVERTY
ALL around the globe, voters are increasingly showing their displeasure with costly unreliable-energy policies imposed by politicians in an inane effort to fight the purported “climate catastrophe”.
IN France in late 2018, protesters donning yellow vests took to the streets—and have stayed there ever since—in large part to protest scheduled increases in fuel taxes, electricity prices, and stricter vehicle emissions controls, which French President Emmanuel Macron claimed were necessary to meet the country’s greenhouse gas reduction commitments under the Paris climate agreement. After the first four weeks of protest, Macron’s government cancelled his climate action plan.
Ford Nation – Scrap The Carbon Tax Scam – Election Victory
IN 2018, in part as a backlash against Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s climate policies, global warming skeptic Doug Ford was elected as premier of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province. Ford announced he would end energy taxes imposed by Ontario’s previous premier and would join Saskatchewan’s premier in a legal fight against Trudeau’s federal carbon dioxide tax.
IN Alberta, Canada, where the economy declined after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s climate policies took hold, voters on April 16 replaced Premier Rachel Notley and her New Democratic Party (NDP), which supports the federal climate policies, with the United Conservative Party, headed by newly elected Premier Jason Kenney, who vowed to scrap the province’s carbon tax and every other policy in NDP’s climate action plan. Among the other climate policies Kenny said he will reverse in an effort to revive the economy are NDP’s plans to accelerate the closure of the province’s coal power plants, and its plan to cap greenhouse gas emissions from the region’s oil sands. In addition, Kenny says he will challenge the federal government’s climate impositions in court and streamline regulations hampering Alberta’s critical oil and gas industry, including restrictions preventing pipeline construction imposed by NDP.
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NETHERLANDS – Forum for Democracy (FvD)
Thierry Baudet, FvD’s leader, said the government should stop funding programs to meet the country’s commitments to international climate change agreements, saying such efforts are driven by “climate-change hysteria.”
In mid-March, the Forum for Democracy (FvD), a fledgling political party just three years old, tied for the largest number of seats, 12, in the divided Dutch Senate in the 2019 elections. FvD takes a decidedly skeptical stance on climate change. On the campaign trail, Thierry Baudet, FvD’s leader, said the government should stop funding programs to meet the country’s commitments to international climate change agreements, saying such efforts are driven by “climate-change hysteria.”
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FINLAND – Finns Party
FINLAND : Finns Party
On April 14 in Finland, where climate change policies became the dominant issue in the election, support for climate skepticism surged. Whereas all the other parties proposed plans to raise energy prices and limit people’s energy use, the Finns Party, which made the fight against expensive climate policies the central part of its platform, gained the second-highest number of seats in the Parliament, just one seat behind the Social Democratic Party’s 40. The second-place finish was a big win for the Finns Party and its skeptical stance: just two months before the election, polls showed its support was below 10 percent.After the Finns Party made battling alarmist climate policies its main goal, its popularity soared. The New York Times credited the Finns Party’s electoral surge, in large part, to its expressed climate skepticism.
EVEN as daily headlines in the fake news / lamestream media become ever shriller, hyping climate fears based on projections made by unverified climate models, the public, especially the voting public, is becoming increasingly weary of the Chicken Little claims of impending climate doom. Voters in developed countries are saying “enough is enough” to high energy prices which punish the most vulnerable people in society and do nothing to regulate climate change.
TAKE NOTE, politicians and business groups – climate change alarmism, political correctness, class warfare and identity politics are the politics of division and are electoral and commercial poison.
Greens dream of a zero-emissions world without coal, oil and natural gas. They need to think what they wish for.
First there would be no mass production of steel without coke from coking coal to remove oxygen from iron ore. People could cut trees in forests for charcoal to produce pig iron and crude steels, but forests would soon be exhausted. Coal saved the forests from this fate.
We could produce gold and silver without using mineral hydro-carbons and with ingenuity we could probably produce unrefined copper, lead and tin and alloys like brass and bronze. But making large quantities of nuclear fuels, cement, aluminium, refined metals, plastics, nylons, synthetics, petro-chemicals and poly pipes would be impossible.
Making wind turbines and solar panels would also be impossible without fossil fuels.A wind turbine needs lots of steel plus concrete, carbon fibre and glass polymers as well as many other refined metals – copper, aluminium, rare earths, zinc and molybdenum. Solar panels and batteries need high-purity ingredients – silicon, lead, lithium, nickel, cadmium, zinc, silver, manganese and graphite – all hard to make in backyard charcoal-fired furnaces. Transporting, erecting and maintaining wind and solar farms plus their roads and transmission lines needs many pieces of diesel-powered machinery.
Every machine on earth needs hydro-carbons for engine oil, gear oil, transmission oil, brake fluid, hydraulic oil and grease. We could of course use oils from, seals, beeswax and whales for lubrication – the discovery of petroleum saved the whales from this fate.
Roads would be a challenge without oil-based bitumen. The Romans made pretty good roads out of cobble-stones (this would ease unemployment). But hard labour would not sit well with aging baby-boomers or electronic-era Millenniums.
Cars, railways, motor launches, aeroplanes, I-Phones, TV and cat-scans would be out. Horses, oxen, sulkies, wooden rowing boats, sailing ships, herbal medicine and semaphore would have a huge revival. Some wood-burning steam tractors may still work and wood-gas generators may replace petrol in some old cars.
This is the return to the “zero-emissions” world that Green extremists have planned for us.
But modern life cannot not be supported by a pre-coal/oil economy. Without reliable electricity and diesel-powered farm machinery and transport trucks, cities are un-sustainable. In Green-topia 90% of us people will need to go.
“REMEMBER when we paved the world with electronic waste
that chopped eagles and condors and made bats extinct because we thought wind was natural and uranium evil? – man that was a dark age!” – Michael Shellenberger
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ONE of the great falsehoods and dangerous myths pushed by reckless global warming climate change zealots and the mainstream media is that ‘renewable energy’ – wind and solar – is “clean, green and renewable”.
‘RENEWABLES’ are neither “clean, green, or renewable”. In fact, they are pure embodiments of fossil fuel technology, with oil and “dirty” coal derivatives required for :
Wind turbines in Penonome, Panama. (Credit: Associated Press)
Solar panels and wind turbines are making electricity significantly more expensive, a major new study by a team of economists from the University of Chicago finds.
Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) “significantly increase average retail electricity prices, with prices increasing by 11% (1.3 cents per kWh) seven years after the policy’s passage into law and 17% (2 cents per kWh) twelve years afterward,” the economists write.
The study, which has yet to go through peer-review, was done by Michael Greenstone, Richard McDowell, and Ishan Nath. It compared states with and without an RPS. It did so using what the economists say is “the most comprehensive state-level dataset ever compiled” which covered 1990 to 2015.
The cost to consumers has been staggeringly high: “All in all, seven years after passage, consumers in the 29 states had paid $125.2 billion more for electricity than they would have in the absence of the policy,” they write.
Solar and wind require that natural gas plants, hydro-electric dams, batteries or some other form of reliable power be ready at a moment’s notice to start churning out electricity when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining, I noted.
And unreliability requires solar- and/or wind-heavy places like Germany, California, and Denmark to pay neighboring nations or states to take their solar and wind energy when they are producing too much of it.
My reporting was criticized — sort of — by those who claimed I hadn’t separated correlation from causation, but the new study by a top-notch team of economists, including an advisor to Barack Obama, proves I was right.
Previous studies were misleading, the economists note, because they didn’t “incorporate three key costs,” which are the unreliability of renewables, the large amounts of land they require, and the displacement of cheaper “baseload” energy sources like nuclear plants.
The higher cost of electricity reflects “the costs that renewables impose on the generation system,” the economists note, “including those associated with their intermittency, higher transmission costs, and any stranded asset costs assigned to ratepayers.”
But are renewables cost-effective climate policy? They are not. The economists write that “the cost per metric ton of CO2 abated exceeds $130 in all specifications and ranges up to $460, making it at least several times larger than conventional estimates of the social cost of carbon.”
The economists note that the Obama Administration’s core estimate of the social cost of carbon was $50 per ton in 2019 dollars, while the price of carbon is just $5 in the US northeast’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), and $15 in California’s cap-and-trade system.
I am a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” Green Book Award Winner, and President of Environmental Progress, a research and policy organization. My writings have ap…
“The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.” – Bertrand Russel
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DON’T expect to see this ‘good’ environmental news on the mainstream media anytime soon.
WHEN you’re in the business of demonising carbon dioxide and frightening the Thunberg’s kiddies for political and ideological ends, such good news comes as a rather unwelcome message!
The world is literally a greener place than it was twenty years ago, and data from NASA satellites has revealed a counterintuitive source for much of this new foliage. A new study shows that China and India—the world’s most populous countries—are leading the increase in greening on land. The effect comes mostly from ambitious tree-planting programs in China and intensive agriculture in both countries.
Ranga Myneni of Boston University and colleagues first detected the greening phenomenon in satellite data from the mid-1990s, but they did not know whether human activity was a chief cause. They then set out to track the total amount of Earth’s land area covered by vegetation and how it changed over time.
The research team found that global green leaf area has increased by 5 percent since the early 2000s, an area equivalent to all of the Amazon rainforests. At least 25 percent of that gain came in China. Overall, one-third of Earth’s vegetated lands are greening, while 5 percent are growing browner. The study was published on February 11, 2019, in the journal Nature Sustainability.
The maps on this page show the increase or decrease in green vegetation—measured in average leaf area per year—in different regions of the world between 2000 and 2017. Note that the maps are not measuring the overall greenness, which explains why the Amazon and eastern North America do not stand out, among other forested areas.
“China and India account for one-third of the greening, but contain only 9 percent of the planet’s land area covered in vegetation,” said lead author Chi Chen of Boston University. “That is a surprising finding, considering the general notion of land degradation in populous countries from overexploitation.”
globalgreening_tamo_2017
This study was made possible thanks to a two-decade-long data record from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. An advantage of MODIS is the intensive coverage they provide in space and time: the sensors have captured up to four shots of nearly every place on Earth, every day, for the past 20 years.
“This long-term data lets us dig deeper,” said Rama Nemani, a research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center and a co-author of the study. “When the greening of the Earth was first observed, we thought it was due to a warmer, wetter climate and fertilization from the added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now with the MODIS data, we see that humans are also contributing.”
China’s outsized contribution to the global greening trend comes in large part from its programs to conserve and expand forests (about 42 percent of the greening contribution). These programs were developed in an effort to reduce the effects of soil erosion, air pollution, and climate change.
Another 32 percent of the greening change in China, and 82 percent in India, comes from intensive cultivation of food crops. The land area used to grow crops in China and India has not changed much since the early 2000s. Yet both countries have greatly increased both their annual total green leaf area and their food production in order to feed their large populations. The agricultural greening was achieved through multiple cropping practices, whereby a field is replanted to produce another harvest several times a year. Production of grains, vegetables, fruits and more have increased by 35 to 40 percent since 2000.
countrieschart_tamo_2017
How the greening trend may change in the future depends on numerous factors. For example, increased food production in India is facilitated by groundwater irrigation. If the groundwater is depleted, this trend may change. The researchers also pointed out that the gain in greenness around the world does not necessarily offset the loss of natural vegetation in tropical regions such as Brazil and Indonesia. There are consequences for sustainability and biodiversity in those ecosystems beyond the simple greenness of the landscape.
Nemani sees a positive message in the new findings. “Once people realize there is a problem, they tend to fix it,” he said. “In the 1970s and 80s in India and China, the situation around vegetation loss was not good. In the 1990s, people realized it, and today things have improved. Humans are incredibly resilient. That’s what we see in the satellite data.”
NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using data courtesy of Chen et al.,(2019). Story by Abby Tabor, NASA Ames Research Center, with Mike Carlowicz, Earth Observatory.
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GLOBAL GREENING…
“A quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25.” – NASA
NASA previously reported on the ‘greening of the earth’ thanks to the CO2 ‘fertilisation’ effect.
HOWEVER, such good news was again carefully omitted by the mainstream media and environmental activists keen to preserve their ‘catastrophic’ global warming climate change narrative and continue their demonisation of life-giving gas carbon dioxide, deceptively referring to it as “carbon pollution” :
“A quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25.” – NASA
IN 2013, the CSIRO commissioned a study that found “Deserts ‘greening’ from rising carbon dioxide: Green foliage boosted across the world’s arid regions.”
THE ‘greening’ of deserts, thanks to rising CO2, happens to be a very unwelcome message for the environmental movement and apparently for the CSIRO, too! So, they simply removed the study from their website!
“BLIND trust in authority is the greatest enemy of the truth.”
– Albert Einstein
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A BIG WIN for freedom of speech and academic freedom as former JCU Great Barrier Reef expert, Peter Ridd, wins wrongful dismissal case against James Cook ‘University’.
ALSO, a massive win for climate scepticism and the fight against sloppy, pseudoscientific ‘science’ driven by Leftist dominated academia driving the $2,000,000,000,000 US per year (2 Trillion) man-made global warming climate change agenda.
A Federal Court judge has ruled that James Cook University acted unlawfully when it sacked professor Peter Ridd after he publicly criticised the institution and one of its star scientists over claims about the impact global warming had on the Great Barrier Reef.
Professor Ridd, who worked at the university for 40 years, challenged the dismissal in the Federal Circuit Court, saying the university breached its own enterprise agreement which allowed all staff to express controversial or unpopular views.
The physics professor argued that the Townsville-based university, which is renowned for its marine science expertise, dismissed him for breaching the university’s code of conduct.
Handing down his decision today, judge Salvatore Vasta said that the 17 findings used by the university to justify the sacking were unlawful.
“The Court rules that the 17 findings made by the University, the two speech directions, the five confidentiality directions, the no satire direction, the censure and the final censure given by the University and the termination of employment of Professor Ridd by the University were all unlawful,” Judge Vasta said.
A penalty hearing will be set for a later date.
At a hearing last month, Professor Ridd’s barrister Stuart Wood argued his client was entitled to criticise his colleagues and the university’s perceived lack of quality assurance processes.
In 2016, Professor Ridd emailed a journalist to allege that images given to the media by the Australian Institute of Marine Science and Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority were misleading because they showed poorly affected corals, which were selected over nearby healthy coral and used to show “broad scale decline” of reef health.
Professor Ridd claimed the use of the images was “a dramatic example of how scientific organisations are happy to spin a story for their own purposes”.
He also said his colleague Professor Terry Hughes, the head of JCU’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, would “wriggle and squirm” when asked to explain the discrepancies in the images.
Professor Ridd was censured again when he repeated the claims on Sky News.
After a third alleged violation of the code of conduct, Professor Ridd was sacked in April 2018.
THE Global Warming Policy Foundation has since released an excellent short video showing why the polar bear no longer serves as the icon of the climate change movement :
DIRE predictions of an “ice-free” Arctic have remained popular on the climate change fear-mongering circuit, owing to the psychological and political currency of all things melting and not least the emotional relevance applicable to the fate of the Arctic’s most famous resident and ‘global warming’ mascot – the polar bear.
SOME of the failed Arctic sea-ice predictions by alarmists ‘scientists’ and the fake news media over the years :
“Arctic summers ice-free by 2013” (BBC 2007)
“Could all Arctic ice be gone by 2012?” (AP 2007)
“Arctic Sea Ice Gone in Summer Within Five Years?”(National Geographic 2007)
“Imagine yourself in a world five years from now, where there is no more ice over the Arctic” – Tim Flannery (2008)
“North Pole could be ice-free in 2008” – Mark Serreze (New Scientist 2008)
“Gore: Polar ice cap may disappear by summer 2014” (USA Today 2009)
“Arctic expert predicts final collapse of sea ice within 4 years” (Guardian 2012)
“Say Goodbye to Arctic Summer Ice” (Live Science 2013)
“Ice-free Arctic in two years heralds methane catastrophe – scientist” (The Guardian 2013)
“Why Arctic sea ice will vanish in 2013” (Sierra Club 2013)
“Next year or the year after, the Arctic will be free of ice’” – Peter Wadhams (The Guardian 2016)
MINIMUM sea-ice extent has been trending up over the past twelve years. The EXACT opposite of what the mainstream media and ‘97% experts’ have been telling you :
ARCTIC temperatures and melt cycles correlate almost perfectly with ocean circulation cycles (AMO), and show no correlation with atmospheric CO2 levels :
Reykjavik, Iceland Temperatures Vs. The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation
NO other icon of ‘Global Warming’ epitomises its very own false narrative like the polar bear does for ‘Climate Change’.
WITH deadly irony, polar bear numbers have grown dramatically as carbon dioxide emissions have risen in lock-step. A CO2 correlation, at last!
INDIGENOUS Inuit’s of Northern Canada are now facing the very real task of having to cull the population as “the polar bear may have exceeded the co-existence threshold.”
“Inuit believe there are now so many bears that public safety has become a major concern,”
“Public safety concerns, combined with the effects of polar bears on other species, suggest that in many Nunavut communities, the polar bear may have exceeded the co-existence threshold.”
Susan Crockford is zoologist with more than 35 years experience, including published work on the Holocene history of Arctic animals. She is currently an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria, British Columbia.
It’s long past time for polar bear specialists to stop holding out for a scientifically accurate global estimate that will never be achieved and determine a reasonable and credible ‘best guess’. Since they have so far refused to do this, I have done it for them. My extrapolated estimate of 39,000 (range 26,000-58,000) at 2018 is not only plausible but scientifically defensible.
In 2014, the chairman of the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) emailed me to say that their global population size number ‘has never been an estimate of total abundance in a scientific sense, but simply a qualified guess given to satisfy public demand.’
In my new book, The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened, I contend that this situation will probably never change, so it’s time to stop holding out for a scientifically accurate global estimate and generate a reasonable and credible ‘best guess’. Recent surveys from several critical polar bear subpopulations have given us the information necessary to do this.
These new numbers make it possible to extrapolate from ‘known’ to ‘unknown’ subpopulations within so-called ‘sea ice ecoregions’ (defined in 2007 by polar bear scientists at the US Geological Survey, see Amstrup et al. 2007), as shown below, to update old estimates and generate new ones for never-studied areas.
USGS – Polar Bear Ecoregions
Since the PBSG has so far refused to take this step, I took on the challenge. I contend that an estimate of about 39,000 (range 26,000-58,000) at 2018 is not only plausible but scientifically defensible. See the graph below from my new book:
Global polar bear population size estimates to 2018. From Chapter 10 of The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened (Crockford 2019).
This new estimate for 2018 is a modest 4-6 fold increase over the 10,000 or so bears that existed in the 1960s and after 25 years, a credible increase over the estimate of 25,000 that the PBSG offered in 1993 (Wiig et al. 1995).
However, my new estimate is much larger than the improbable figure of about 26,000 (range 22,000-31,000) offered by PGSG biologists in 2015 (Regehr et al. 2016; Wiig et al. 2015). The scary question is this: what do Arctic residents do if there are actually as many as 58,000?
See my new book (Crockford 2019) for the full rationale and references used to arrive at this figure.
The bottom line: it is scientifically unacceptable for the PBSG to continue to refuse to provide an extrapolated ‘best guess’ global estimate for polar bears, given that the scientifically accurate estimate they crave is essentially unattainable. An estimate of about 39,000 (range 26,000-58,000) at 2018 is not only plausible but scientifically defensible. Read the rest of this entry »
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