Thursday, March 14, 2024


President Biden’s Climate Aspirations

Most of what the political class calls policies are really aspirations with no policy content. They are feel-good statements that promote goals most people would support, with no associated policies that would move toward those goals. The following is an example.

The White House’s web page for the National Climate Task Force (skip down to the section “President Biden’s Actions to Tackle the Climate Crisis”) lists emissions goals for 2030, 2035, and 2050, well after President Biden will have left office, even if he serves out a second term. These are aspirations and aspirations that would have to be met by his successors, letting the president off the accountability hook.

What prompted me to write about this subject was this article titled “Biden’s scaled-back power rule raises doubts over US climate target,” which reports on an actual policy. The Biden administration has decided to exclude natural gas power plants from upcoming emissions standards.

The key point in this example is that the president’s actual policy works against the president’s stated goals.

Further down, the website lists the Biden administration’s accomplishments toward fulfilling his climate aspirations. They include a record number of electric vehicles and charging stations, new solar and wind projects, and supporting domestic manufacturing of clean energy technologies.

Those may be good things, but they are things the private sector is doing. “Support” isn’t a policy; it’s an attempt to take political credit for private sector action. If these things count as accomplishments, they are private sector accomplishments, not Biden administration accomplishments.

The website also credits the Biden administration for finalizing the strongest vehicle emissions standards in American history and proposing more robust standards for greenhouse gas and air pollution emissions. Those are not policies; they are aspirations. Should those aspirations be realized, it will be because the private sector has figured out how to reduce its emissions.

As the political season ramps up this year, notice that the “policies” that politicians will propose are not really policies at all; they are aspirations. They say, “Here are some good things I would like to accomplish if I am elected,” but they don’t say how they intend to accomplish them. They amount to feel-good slogans rather than actual public policies.

Most people will be in favor of mitigating climate change, reducing crime, securing the border, and reducing the budget deficit. Those are feel-good aspirations. Fewer people will favor specific policies aimed at realizing those aspirations. That’s why politicians talk about aspirations rather than specific policies. That’s also why those aspirations often fail to be realized.

The aspirations are popular; the policies to accomplish them are less so. That’s why the Biden administration is enacting a policy that works against his own stated goals.

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UK: Net Zero an urgent threat to national security

A new paper from Net Zero Watch makes a comprehensive case that efforts to decarbonise the steel and electricity fundamentals of the economy now represent a real and present danger to national security.

In an important intervention, Sir Gerald Howarth, Minister for International Security Strategy under David Cameron, says in the paper’s foreword:

“Our adversaries are watching us like hawks, so let us leave them in no doubt: we are rearming and rebuilding, and Net Zero is firmly on hold.”

Professor Gwythian Prins, a defence expert and one of the paper’s authors, agrees that with the recent deterioration of the world's security situation, luxury beliefs such as Net Zero must be jettisoned as a matter of urgency:

“This is the moment when the music stops. The Port Talbot closure harshly exposes the costs of luxury ‘green’ beliefs. We cannot be dependent on imports for the full range of necessary steels to rebuild our arsenals – the Navy first and foremost – and, most ridiculously, we cannot depend for them on our global antagonists."

"Furthermore, our armed forces are wholly dependent on oil to keep them in the field, and our electricity grid will collapse without gas. Any attempt to abandon them will leave us entirely at the mercy of hostile powers."

The paper also includes contributions from Gautam Kalghatgi, a professor of combustion and energy engineering, who ridicules plans to decarbonise the armed forces through use of batteries and biofuels, and the historian Guy de la Bédoyère, who sets out the eternal historical lesson that technological laggards usually end up the victims of conquest by their more advanced neighbours.

Mr de la Bédoyère said:

“It is impossible to diminish the effectiveness of a nation’s armed forces without making it a sitting duck for a more ambitious rival’s greed. But that’s exactly what our leaders seem to want to do.”

Andrew Montford, director of Net Zero Watch said:

“The three contributors make it clear that Net Zero is leaving us at the mercy of hostile powers. A Net Zero army and a Net Zero economy could both be brought to their knees in a matter of days. In these dangerous times, our politicians must re-order their priorities.”

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Population is not being told the true cost of Net Zero, warns former World Bank economist

Squeezing domestic consumption, in other words making the already squeezed poor even poorer by removing all their remaining luxuries in life (older cars, cheap foreign holidays, meat), is the only realistic way to fund the enormous sums required for the Net Zero energy transition.

Bankrupt, blackout Britain where the ever-expanding ranks of the poor get clobbered, open borders place intolerable burdens on public spending and services, the rich spivs get richer backing heavily-subsidised energy white elephants – and those of a certain age look back to the good old days of the 1970s. That isn’t quite how Professor Gordon Hughes spells it out in his excellent new report that crunches the energy transition numbers of the collectivist Net Zero project, but it might be considered a fair summation of reading between the lines.

The insanity of Net Zero becomes clearer by the day. The idea that hydrocarbons – a natural resource whose use from medicines to reliable energy is ubiquitous in modern industrial society – can be removed within less than 30 years is ridiculous. In his report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Professor Hughes concerns himself with the transition from hydrocarbons to ‘green’ technologies such as wind and solar. Forget all the politically-inspired low-ball figures of transition, he is suggesting. Looking at you, Climate Change Committee. It is likely that the amount of new investment needed for the transition will be a minimum of 5% of gross domestic product for the next 20 years, and might exceed 7.5%. Gordon Hughes is a former World Bank economist, and is Professor of Economics at the University of Edinburgh.

There is no chance of borrowing such an “astronomical” amount, notes Hughes, and the only viable way to raise the cash for new capital expenditure would be a two decades-long reduction in private consumption of up to 10%. “Such a shock has never occurred in the last century outside war, and even then never for more than a decade,” he notes.

Recent polling in the U.S. has shown that the desire of a majority of citizens to pay for Net Zero barely stretches to more than the ‘chump’ change in their back pockets. “Commitment to the energy transition is a classic ‘luxury belief’ held most strongly by those who are sufficiently well-off not to worry about the costs… Indeed at least some of those who promote the transition most strongly are among those who expect to gain from the business opportunities.” On this latter point, Hughes was possibly recalling the recent activities of rising media star Dale Vince (£110 million in wind subsidies to date, and counting).

Politicians sometimes blather about the pioneering role taken by European countries in Net Zero. Hughes points out that leaders in China and India are not fools. “Posturing about targets that are patently not achievable and might be economically ruinous is unlikely to convince anyone, although most will be too polite to point this out,” he observed.

Writing a foreword, Lord Frost identified a make-believe world inhabited by Net Zero proponents where it is claimed costs will magically come down, new technologies will somehow be invented and promised green growth will pay for everything. “But they never give any evidence for believing this – and, where we can check what they say, for example in the real costs of wind power, we can see that these cost reductions are simply not happening,” he said.

On the immigration front, Hughes notes a 1% increase in the British population every year. He notes that 4% of GDP must be invested every year in new (not replacement) capital per head. Of course nothing like this is being spent and capital per head is falling rapidly. “Just maintaining the amounts of capital per head will eat up an amount of investment equivalent to that required for the energy transition,” he states.

Squeezing domestic consumption, in other words making the already squeezed poor even poorer by removing all their remaining luxuries in life (older cars, cheap foreign holidays, meat), is the only realistic way to fund the enormous sums required for the Net Zero energy transition.

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Australian conservative opposition Confirms It Will Develop 6 Nuclear Power Sites

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has confirmed the Coalition’s energy policy—expected to be released ahead of the federal budget in May—will probably include six nuclear plant sites.

While he has yet to name the exact locations, Tasmania has been ruled out as a potential host state. It’s considered likely that the reactors would be built on the sites of old coal stations to take advantage of existing transmission infrastructure.

This means the Labor-held seat of Hunter, the independent seat of Calare, and Coalition-held Flynn, Maranoa, O’Connor, and Gippsland may be all on the shortlist for nuclear power stations.

At the Australian Financial Review Business Summit in Sydney on March 12, Mr. Dutton said the Coalition would encourage nearby communities to accept the plants by offering them subsidised energy—a model he said was used in the United States. He told the audience that it would also provide an incentive for the industry to establish jobs.

“Nuclear is the only proven technology which emits zero emission and firms up renewables,” he said.

The opposition’s position comes as modelling on Australia’s net zero transition estimates the country will need to invest hundreds of billions, and even trillions, to fully reduce emissions.

The tremendous cost stems from the widescale investment in wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, and pumped hydro (where available), but also into transmission infrastructure, as well as electrification of public transport networks and private vehicles (buying EVs instead of regular cars).

Nuclear Detractors Also Point to Cost

Energy experts say it’s difficult to estimate the cost of transitioning to nuclear, given the technology is not currently commercially available.

But during the speech, Mr. Dutton dismissed what he described as “straw man arguments” against nuclear, including cost.

“Australia’s energy mix is about 21 percent gas, 47 per cent coal, and 32 percent renewables. Ontario province in Canada is about 5 percent gas, 35 percent renewables, and 60 percent nuclear. South Korea is about 30 percent gas, 30 percent coal, and 30 percent nuclear, with the balance mainly hydro … Australians pay almost double what Ontario and South Korean residents pay,” he said.

He said reactors produce a “small amount of waste” and said the government had already signed up to deal with nuclear waste via the AUKUS agreement.

The Australian Radioactive Waste Agency (ARWA) found there were 2,061 cubic metres of intermediate-level waste in 2021, compared to 1,771 cubic metres in 2018. It projects 4,377 cubic metres in the next 50 years, compared to 3,734 cubic metres projected in 2018.

Intermediate-level waste is produced in nuclear medicine—for example, imaging, scanning and radiotherapy.

Currently, the waste is stored in more than 100 places, but most of it is held at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) facilities in Lucas Heights, Sydney.

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Wednesday, March 13, 2024



America’s Energy Scam! A deliberate exploitation of humanity that only increases emissions!

America is aggressively pursuing “green” electricity and actively phasing out crude oil to reduce emissions generated in America by deliberately increasing worldwide exploitations of humanity, environmental degradation, and increased emissions.

California Governor Gavin Newsom, President Joe Biden, and world leaders are not cognizant enough to know that wind turbines and solar panels only generate occasional electricity and cannot manufacture tires, cable insulation, asphalt, medicines, and the more than 6,000 products now made from the petrochemical derivatives manufactured from crude oil.

Without a replacement for the petrochemical derivatives manufactured from crude oil, phasing out oil would also phase out the medical, military, transportation, communications, and electrical power industries, none of which existed before the 1800s.

Climate change may impact millions, but without fossil fuels and the infrastructures and products we have today that did not exist before the 1800s, we may lose billions from diseases, malnutrition, and weather-related deaths.

Eradicating the world of crude oil usage would ground the 20,000 commercial aircraft, and more than 50,000 military aircraft worldwide, leave the 50,000 merchant ships tied up at docks, and discontinue the military and space programs! Without a backup plan to replace crude oil, the 8 billion on this planet will face the greatest threat to humanity without jets, merchant ships, and space programs.

America’s climate policies being introduced are particularly harmful to developing countries. America is probably the most environmentally controlled country in the world, but by deliberately relying on poorer developing countries for our fuels and products, we are “leaking” to other countries:

In the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis in 1977, the Department of Energy was established to lessen our dependence on foreign oil, but today, with its 14,000 employees and a 48 billion dollar budget, the D.O.E. continues to remain dead silent and has allowed California, the fourth-largest economy in the world to increase imported crude oil from 5 percent in 1992 to almost 60 percent today of total consumption.

California is home to 9 International airports, 41 Military airports, and 3 of the largest shipping ports in America. California’s growing dependency on other nations is a serious national security risk for America!

China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin are great war historians. As World War I and II historians, Russia, China, and OPEC know, the country that controls the minerals, crude oil, and natural gas controls the world! It’s shocking that of all the Generals who report to President Biden (Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Space Program), NONE have asked the President how we will run our military ships, planes, vehicles, and supply products to our troops WITHOUT oil?

It’s a no-brainer that an attack on the ports at San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Long Beach could paralyze the American economy, causing huge reductions in fuels for California’s in-state infrastructures and stagnating the supply chain of products for the entire country.

Meanwhile, California continues to constantly reduce its in-state refining capacity, which refines fuels and petrochemicals for society’s materialistic demands and continues to grow its dependency on foreign oil.

A few notes about ELECTRICITY:

Everything that needs electricity, such as the basic light bulb, computers, iPhones and iPads, televisions, washing machines, and X-ray equipment, is made with oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil.

Every method of generating electricity, such as wind turbines, solar panels, hydroelectric, nuclear, coal, and natural gas power plants, exists only because the parts and components of the generation system are made with crude oil derivatives.

Renewables, like wind turbines and solar panels, only generate occasional electricity from inconsistent breezes and sunshine but manufacture no products for society.

Fossil fuels, on the other hand, manufacture everything for the 8 billion living on this planet, i.e., products and transportation fuels.

Most importantly, today, there is a lost reality that the primary usage of crude oil is NOT for generating electricity but to manufacture derivatives and fuels, which are the ingredients of everything needed by economies and lifestyles to exist and prosper. Energy realism requires that the legislators, policymakers, and media that demonstrate pervasive ignorance about crude oil usage understand the staggering scale of the decarbonization movement.

The ruling class and powerful elite have yet to identify the replacement for the oil derivatives that are the basis of more than 6,000 products and all the fuels for the merchant ships, aircraft, military, and space programs that support the 8 billion living on this planet.

The American government provides incentives and tax deductions to transition society to EVs, but those incentives are financial incentives for the continuation of Child Labor and Ecological Destruction “Elsewhere.” Is it ethical and moral to provide financial support to developing countries that are mining for exotic minerals and metals to build EV batteries for Americans?

We’ve become a very materialistic society over the last 200 years, and the world has populated from 1 to 8 billion because of all the products and different fuels for planes, ships, trucks, cars, military, and the space program that did not exist before the 1800s. Until a crude oil replacement is identified, the world needs a backup plan that replaces crude oil that will support the manufacturing of the products of our materialistic society.

Today’s materialistic world cannot survive without crude oil! Conversations are needed to discuss the difference between just ELECTRICITY” from renewables and the “PRODUCTS” that are the basis of society’s materialistic world. Wind turbines and solar panels are themselves MADE from oil derivatives and only generate occasional electricity but manufacture NOTHING for society.

How dare the ruling class, powerful elite, and media avoid energy literacy conversations about the “Elephant in the Room.” The end of crude oil, which is manufactured into all the products and transportation fuels that built the world to eight billion people, would be the end of civilization, as “unreliable electricity” from breezes and sunshine cannot manufacture anything.

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Net Zero Watch welcomes British Government recognition of need for gas

Net Zero Watch has welcomed the announcement that the Government will support new gas-fired power stations.

The campaign group said that it was the latest sign of a shift towards more pragmatic energy policies. It said the new plants were vital for energy security, but noted that the need for subsidies, announced at the same time, was a reflection of a broken energy system.

Net Zero Watch’s head of policy, Harry Wilkinson, speaking to TalkTV’s Julia Hartley-Brewer said:

‘People can debate this decision if they like, but this was the inevitable result of the fact that the lights will go out if we do not build this firm, reliable capacity…It’s the right decision, but it has come very late. We have to remember that Britain has some of the most expensive electricity prices in the world, particularly for businesses, and that’s done an enormous amount of damage.’

The decision is likely to be opposed by the Labour Party, whose shadow Secretary of State, Ed Miliband, remains committed to full decarbonisation of the grid by 2030. Most analysts view this target as infeasible.

Because the new stations will only be used occasionally, they will have to be heavily subsidised. The need for such support generation is well known, but today’s announcement is an important recognition that gas will remain indispensable.

Dr John Constable, Net Zero Watch’s energy director, said:

‘Net Zero dies, not with a bang, but a whimper. Subsidising new gas power stations to prop up unreliable and uncontrollable wind and solar means that the failing Net Zero target can limp along for another five or ten years at huge consumer cost and vast economic damage. Looking on the bright side, these power stations will eventually be used as part of the desperate return to fossil fuels that is inevitable as reality bites home and wind and solar are abandoned. But with a little courage all of this absurd cost could have been avoided. What a mess.’

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Climate doomsday theory goes up in smoke

Decades of scientific speculation have painted super volcanic eruptions as potential extinction-level events. However, new research suggests that even the most monstrous of eruptions wouldn’t quite lead to such frigid scenarios.

Indonesia’s Toba volcano: An explosive past

Around 74,000 years ago, Indonesia’s Toba volcano unleashed a huge eruption that made modern volcanic events look like mere firecrackers. It was 1,000 times stronger than the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. The eruption sent a huge plume of ash and gas into the atmosphere, covering much of the globe in a thick layer of debris.

But how it impacted Earth’s climate afterward remains a lingering mystery. While experts agree on some cooling effects, just how severe the aftermath gets much murkier, with estimates ranging from a few degrees drop to a potential ice age.

New simulations by NASA and Columbia University scientists offer a more reassuring picture. Their study shows that even a super-eruption like Toba would likely cause a global temperature decline of only about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius), far from a civilization-ending catastrophe. So why the tempered outcomes?

“The relatively modest temperature changes we found most compatible with the evidence could explain why no single super-eruption has produced firm evidence of global-scale catastrophe for humans or ecosystems,” said lead author Zachary McGraw, a researcher at NASA GISS and Columbia University. Here’s a video from Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell on a potential supervolcano blow-up.

Role of Sulfur particles

Previous models focused on the immense sulfur dioxide plume released by super-eruptions that condenses into tiny sunlight-blocking particles high in the atmosphere. Here’s the twist: scientists discovered that the size of these aerosol particles dictates just how chilly things get.

The tinier the particles, the greater their sunlight-blocking potential. Unfortunately, gleaning the size of particles from eruptions thousands of years old is extraordinarily difficult, leading to vastly differing estimates.

Luis Millán, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, who was not part of the study, suggested that further research be conducted on the cooling mechanisms of super-eruptions. He believes that a comprehensive analysis of models, as well as additional laboratory and model studies on the factors that influence the size of volcanic aerosol particles, are necessary to move forward.

Millán stated that the ongoing uncertainties show that geoengineering via stratospheric aerosol injection is far from being a viable option.

Geoengineering lessons from natural disasters

Super-eruptions are very rare events, occurring once every 100,000 years or so. The last one happened more than 22,000 years ago in New Zealand. The most famous example may be the Yellowstone Crater eruption in Wyoming about 2 million years ago.

This finding could even influence the debate on geoengineering, wherein scientists propose artificially injecting particles into the atmosphere to slightly dim the sun and counter global warming. Understanding the intricate workings of these natural volcanic systems provides crucial insights into the potential (and unintended) consequences of such intentional climate control strategies.

While super-eruptions might not hold the doom-and-gloom capacity some predicted, the power of volcanoes to shape our planet remains uncontested. This research is a reminder of nature’s ever-churning forces and the delicate balance of our climate.

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The Leftist Australian government is hiding many dark environmental secrets

The Albanese government is embracing some of the worst practices of dictator-driven governments to conceal controversial environmental measures. The secrecy may be necessary because the measures curb mining in Australia, hit many property developments, restrict solar farms and hurt farmers.

I emphasise this commentary is not about the detail of what is planned — I don’t know the detail. My contribution is to reveal the extraordinary third world practices being embraced by Anthony Albanese to conceal what is planned so it can be rushed through the parliament.

I fear the designers have no regard to the revenue implications of what they plan. Their title “The Nature Positive Plan” looks to be in the tradition of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

The secrecy measures are nothing short of extraordinary and are equally dangerous as those used by former PM Scott Morrison to conceal the fact he was taking on extra ministries.

I set out below how the truth behind “The Nature Positive Plan” is being concealed.

Representatives from leading companies and other interested parties are invited to go into a room to look at parts — not all — of the draft legislation.

But before they are allowed to enter the room, they must sign a voluminous confidentiality agreement preventing them from discussing both their entry into the room and the contents of the draft legislation they are about to be shown. I do not know the exact penalties for breaching that agreement, but the fines will be heavy and jail a possibility.

Once the agreement is signed, those allowed to enter the room are told they must not photograph any of the draft legislation on the table and cannot take it away. They are given a fixed time to take notes using blank paper and a pen.

There is some discussion allowed about the draft, but I don’t know the details. The participants are allowed to take their notes away with them. Nothing else.

I don’t know the people who were invited but almost certainly some will be international companies who later (illegally) will report back to international boards, including those in the US (our defence partner), this is a country where very strange practices are taking place.

To overseas eyes used to third world countries, it must reek of corruption, but I don’t think money-based corruption is taking place. It's all about extreme left wing agendas.

As I understand it, there have been several of these bizarre events. Only a government with something very dangerous to conceal would embrace this sort of tactic.

It is publicly known the Albanese government is planning a new tranche of legislation to replace the current Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999.

The EPBC Act was a carefully prepared document. The states and federal governments set the framework and then industry groups, individual companies, environmental groups, scientists, conservationists, subject-matter experts, and the general community were consulted extensively.

The EPBC Act was developed over years before the federal government published a discussion paper, then an exposure draft, to get detailed feedback on the entire suite of changes.

The Albanese government thinks it can replace this substantial, 1,100-page legislation (plus hundreds of further pages of subsidiary legislation) in short time.

Australia as a nation spends its mining, agriculture and property revenue by providing very high levels of social services. Jim Chalmers, in recognition of this revenue source, has taken steps to make mining approvals smoother.

But, I suspect the treasurer does not know exactly what is being planned. You will remember he advocated pensioners use the gig economy to gain the extra income he was allowing them to earn without impacting pension entitlements.

He didn’t know the industrial relations legislation was going to hit the gig economy hard.

It is understandable an ALP government would seek to upgrade the environmental rules set down in the 1990s. But the right way to go about it is to bring the community together with wide consultation — just as was done in the 1990s.

I am told one version of the environmental secrecy technique was used before the industrial relations bill was put on the parliamentary table. The industrial relations blueprint was a total mess and will endanger our economy. And its “loopholes” title was also in the Orwell tradition.

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Tuesday, March 12, 2024



Scientists Expose Major Problems With Climate Change Data

Temperature records used by climate scientists and governments to build models that then forecast dangerous manmade global warming repercussions have serious problems and even corruption in the data, multiple scientists who have published recent studies on the issue told The Epoch Times.

The Biden administration leans on its latest National Climate Assessment report as evidence that global warming is accelerating because of human activities. The document states that human emissions of “greenhouse gases” such as carbon dioxide are dangerously warming the Earth.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) holds the same view, and its leaders are pushing major global policy changes in response.

But scientific experts from around the world in a variety of fields are pushing back. In peer-reviewed studies, they cite a wide range of flaws with the global temperature data used to reach the dire conclusions; they say it’s time to reexamine the whole narrative.

Problems with temperature data include a lack of geographically and historically representative data, contamination of the records by heat from urban areas, and corruption of the data introduced by a process known as “homogenization.”

The flaws are so significant that they make the temperature data—and the models based on it—essentially useless or worse, three independent scientists with the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES) explained.

The experts said that when data corruption is considered, the alleged “climate crisis” supposedly caused by human activities disappears.

Instead, natural climate variability offers a much better explanation for what is being observed, they said.

Some experts told The Epoch Times that deliberate fraud appeared to be at work, while others suggested more innocent explanations.

But regardless of why the problems exist, the implications of the findings are hard to overstate.

With no climate crisis, the justification for trillions of dollars in government spending and costly changes in public policy to restrict carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions collapses, the scientists explained in a series of interviews about their research.

“For the last 35 years, the words of the IPCC have been taken to be gospel,” according to astrophysicist and CERES founder Willie Soon. Until recently, he was a researcher working with the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian.

“And indeed, climate activism has become the new religion of the 21st century—heretics are not welcome and not allowed to ask questions,” Mr. Soon told The Epoch Times.

“But good science demands that scientists are encouraged to question the IPCC’s dogma. The supposed purity of the global temperature record is one of the most sacred dogmas of the IPCC.”

The latest U.S. government National Climate Assessment report states: “Human activities are changing the climate.

“The evidence for warming across multiple aspects of the Earth system is incontrovertible, and the science is unequivocal that increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases are driving many observed trends and changes.”

In particular, according to the report, this is because of human activities such as burning fossil fuels for transportation, energy, and agriculture.

Looking at timescales highlights major problems with this narrative, Mr. Soon said.

“When people ask about global warming or climate change, it is essential to ask, ‘Since when?’ The data shows that it has warmed since the 1970s, but that this followed a period of cooling from the 1940s,” he said.

While it is “definitely warmer” now than in the 19th century, Mr. Soon said that temperature proxy data show the 19th century “was exceptionally cold.”

“It was the end of a period that’s known as the Little Ice Age,” he said.

Data taken from rural temperature stations, ocean measurements, weather balloons, satellite measurements, and temperature proxies such as tree rings, glaciers, and lake sediments, “show that the climate has always changed,” Mr. Soon said.
“They show that the current climate outside of cities is not unusual,” he said, adding that heat from urban areas is improperly affecting the data.

“If we exclude the urban temperature data that only represents 3 percent of the planet, then we get a very different picture of the climate.”

Homogenization

One issue that scientists say is corrupting the data stems from an obscure process known as “homogenization.”

According to climate scientists working with governments and the U.N., the algorithms used for homogenization are designed to correct, as much as possible, various biases that might exist in the raw temperature data.

These biases include, among others, the relocation of temperature monitoring stations, changes in technology used to gather the data, or changes in the environment surrounding a thermometer that might impact its readings.

For instance, if a temperature station was originally placed in an empty field but that field has since been paved over to become a parking lot, the record would appear to show much hotter temperatures. As such, it would make sense to try to correct the data collected.

Virtually nobody argues against the need for some homogenization to control for various factors that may contaminate temperature data.

But a closer examination of the process as it now occurs reveals major concerns, Ronan Connolly, an independent scientist at CERES, said.

“While the scientific community has become addicted to blindly using these computer programs to fix the data biases, until recently nobody has bothered to look under the hood to see if the programs work when applied to real temperature data,” he told The Epoch Times.

Since the early 2000s, various governmental and intergovernmental organizations creating global temperature records have relied on computer programs to automatically adjust the data.

Mr. Soon, Mr. Connolly, and a team of scientists around the world spent years looking at the programs to determine how they worked and whether they were reliable.

One of the scientists involved in the analysis, Peter O’Neill, has been tracking and downloading the data daily from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its Global Historical Climatology Network since 2011.

He found that each day, NOAA applies different adjustments to the data.

“They use the same homogenization computer program and re-run it roughly every 24 hours,” Mr. Connolly said. “But each day, the homogenization adjustments that they calculate for each temperature record are different.”

This is “very bizarre,” he said.

“If the adjustments for a given weather station have any basis in reality, then we would expect the computer program to calculate the same adjustments every time. What we found is this is not what’s happening,” Mr. Connolly said.

These concerns are what first sparked the international investigation into the issue by Mr. Soon and his colleagues.

More here:

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NZ Government Removes Climate Targets from Transport Plan

Climate targets are no longer a priority under the New Zealand government’s latest plan for the transport sector.

In its recently released draft policy statement (pdf) on land transport, the National-led coalition government outlined its investment strategy for the next decade with an estimated total spending of NZ$20 billion (US$12.3 billion).
Under the draft plan, while the government is committed to reducing carbon emissions by facilitating the electrification of New Zealand’s vehicle fleets, it does not consider climate targets a priority.

Instead, the government’s top priority is to support economic growth and productivity through investing in transport projects.

It also wants to raise maintenance levels and enhance the resilience of state highways and local and rural roads, as well as improve the transport network’s safety and value for money.

This marks a significant change compared to the previous Labour government, which identified climate change as a key issue of its transport policy.

The shift in focus also means that relevant government departments and agencies may not be subject to emission reduction requirements when making transport investment decisions.

The government stated that the new plan would help build and maintain a transport system that allowed people to travel quickly and safely.

Among the investments laid out in the report were $2.3 billion for public transport services and $2.1 billion for public transport infrastructure over the next three years.

The government also planned to spend another $3.1 billion to $4.8 billion to fix potholes on state highways and local roads.

“Over the next three years, our investment of around $7 billion per year prioritises economic growth and productivity, increased maintenance and resilience, safety, and value for money,” Transport Minister Simeon Brown said in a statement

“It balances the need for investing in new projects while ensuring our transport system is maintained to a high standard.”

Strong Criticism from Climate Change Advocates

Following the government’s announcement, All Aboard Aotearoa, a coalition of advocacy groups that supports a net zero transport system, lashed out at the draft plan, calling it a “disgrace.”
“This is a transport plan that wouldn’t have been out of place in 1955 in Los Angeles,” Paul Winton, a trustee of All Aboard Aotearoa, told Radio New Zealand.

“Back in the days, when they thought that building roads and suburbs as far as the eyes could see was something that would drive the economy and drive better lives for people. But 60 years later, we know that is not the case.”

Mr. Winton also warned that the government would face legal challenges from activists if it adopted the draft plan.

“The wires are running hot with the various legal activists at the moment looking at how they can curtail this destructive approach to transport planning,” he said.

Meanwhile, Ia Ara Aotearoa Transporting New Zealand, a road freight peak body, welcomed the government’s new policy.

“We’re pleased to see the government following through on their election commitments to re-start the road building pipeline, focus on the dangerous and potholed condition of our streets and highways, and avoid road user charges and fuel excise increases in their first term,” said Interim CEO Dom Kalasih.

“Over the past few years, our members were disappointed to see revenue from vehicle users diverted into unproductive investments in rail, coastal shipping, and walking and cycling, while the condition of the roads continued to decline. It’s great to see Minister Brown committing to turning this around, despite challenging fiscal constraints.”

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Swedish Electric Buses Charged By Diesel Generators

We are constantly being told that we should switch to electric vehicles to reduce climate emissions

In Sweden there is a company called X-trafik that operates busses in the cities of Gävle and Sandviken. They have bought in 52 electric busses from the Chinese company BYD in order to become “environmentally friendly”.

However, this ‘green’ shift has caused massive chaos with freezing busses in the ice cold Swedish winter and hundreds of cancellations.

Of course, all paid for by the Swedish tax payer.

Turns out that the electric busses didn’t have enough range and they couldn’t charge the busses fast enough, which led to up to 100 busses being cancelled every day, leaving people stranded in the cold Swedish winter.

In fact, there simply isn’t enough energy and infrastructure to go around in order to charge all these new electric busses.

The Solution?

They have now brought in massive diesel generators to be able to charge the electric busses – this of course at an extra cost.

Yes, you read that correctly. They cannot charge the new electric busses because there isn’t enough charging capacity to go around.

This reminds me of how they had to use diesel generators to keep wind turbines in Scotland warm during the winter.

It sounds very funny, until you think about the fact that YOU are paying for this madness.

So they had to bring in DIESEL generators in order to charge these new “environmentally friendly” busses.

You literally cannot make this up.

People are being told that it is good for the environment, but in reality they are getting scammed.

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Households pay after Highland wind farms earn £68 million for nothing

Static wind turbines in the Highlands cost consumers nearly £68 million in 2023.

They accounted for more than one-quarter of all Scottish wind farms receiving “constraint” payments for zero energy output, new figures show.

According to the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF), a lion’s share of such payments to UK wind energy suppliers found its way north of the border last year.

Of the £307.2m total for the whole of Britain, the National Grid Electricity System Operator (National Grid ESO) paid a record £275.3m to a total of 86 Scottish generators.

The Highlands led the pay-out league in terms of wind farm numbers, with 22 sites across the region getting payments totalling £67.8m.

Top of the constraint payments league table in the area is SSE Renewables’ 66-turbine Stronelairg wind farm, near Fort Augustus, which received nearly £11.6m.

But the two biggest earners in Scotland were both offshore.

Moray East wind farm, a 100-turbine development in the Cromarty Firth, received nearly £43m for machines delivering no energy.

And the 114-turbine Seagreen scheme off the coast of Angus earned constraint payments totalling nearly £40m.

An onshore wind farm, Clyde, near Abington in South Lanarkshire, comes in third at nearly £16.9m.

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Monday, March 11, 2024




Polar Bears and Coral Reefs Are Doing Just Fine

We live on a beautiful planet, filled with a dizzying assortment of interesting creatures and living organisms. The vast majority of people want to see that life flourish, so it is no wonder that particularly attractive species like cute (usually) polar bears and colorful corals are often used to promote climate alarmism.

Corals and polar bears are two very different kinds of animals in all ways but one: climate alarmists love to claim they are particularly threatened by the modest warming that has occurred since the end of the Little Ice Age. Those claims are false.

For coral reefs, changes in ocean pH and temperature can cause bleaching, and sometimes death. Therefore, a change over time in both of those variables due to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) supposedly will lead to mass elimination of corals around the world.

It is true that sudden changes in temperature and other water conditions can cause bleaching, which occurs when the symbiotic algae that gives coral structures their color is killed or jettisons itself. However, what is not true is that this phenomenon always or even usually leads to coral death. In reality, decades of research have shown that corals often bounce back from these events, including in cases where scientists had previously labeled the reef as a total loss.

Such was the case with Coral Castles reef, which was bleached by a 1998 El Niño event. When scientists returned to take another look in 2015, they were stunned to find it thriving. This occurred despite the fact that they had predicted the reef would take 100 years to recover. Later, the researchers stated in a press release that “[o]ur projections were completely wrong.”

Coral polyps, the anemone-like animals that actually build the reef structure, can struggle in “too much” heat. But corals typically thrive in warmer waters, not cold, and have survived for the past 60 million years through periods where temperatures and carbon dioxide levels were far higher (and lower) than they are today. The vast majority of corals exist in tropical or subtropical waters, near the equator, and rather than disappearing, have been expanding their range slightly towards the poles amid recent modest warming trends.

The Great Barrier Reef (GBR), subject of frequent climate alarmist propaganda, is also doing fine. Recent bleaching events, especially around 2012, in the GBR were hailed as the permanent end of the reef by climate doomsayers. However, the GBR had other plans. In 2022, the GBR saw the highest coral extent on record.

That’s the tropics; now we put on the long underwear and look to the far North, to probably the most famous animal poster child for the supposed threat of climate change: the polar bear.

Polar bears are threatened, we are told, because summer sea ice is melting, and soon the polar bears will not have access to their traditional hunting grounds and prey. This sounds like common sense, but even common sense is sometimes wrong, as with the polar bears.

Far from dying off from a little warming, polar bear numbers have substantially increased since the 1960s, when they were protected from overhunting. Recent estimates put their population somewhere around 32,000 individual bears, three times as many as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service counted in the 1960s. While some subpopulations have seen declines, new subpopulations are still being discovered. Polar bears have survived during periods of Earth’s history when summer sea ice was basically nonexistent, like during the much warmer Eemian period, about 125,000 years ago.

Photographs of starving, sickly bears circulated in the media are intentionally misleading. They are meant to paint a picture that is very different than reality. Data show that polar bears are carrying more fat into the winter months than they did in decades prior, and they have better rates of cub survival and more stable litter sizes. The overall outlook for polar bear welfare looks highly promising.

In short, real-world data show that both polar bears and coral reefs are doing far better than alarmists would have you believe is the case based on flawed climate models. Stick to the data, and you will find good news for animal and nature lovers everywhere.

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Convincing Proof That NET ZERO Is An Utter Waste Of Resources

Peter J. Morgan writes: 21 February 2024

Let us never forget that the term Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) was deliberately morphed by its promoters to become “Climate Change”. This was a deliberate obfuscation, and now people, who should know better, use the term ‘climate change’ when they mean ‘the changing climate’ brought about by natural forces, not more atmospheric CO2.

Just over three and two years ago respectively, Physicists Prof. Emeritus Dieter Schildknecht and Coe et al. (David Coe, Dr Walter Fabinski and Dr Gerhard Wiegleb) independently calculated from fundamental physics and the HITRAN database of spectroscopic properties of gases, that the climate sensitivity of carbon dioxide is only 0.5 Celsius degrees, which is one-sixth of the IPCC’s ‘best estimate’ (read ‘best guess’). (The climate sensitivity of a greenhouse gas is defined as the increase in Earth’s mean temperature caused by every doubling of the atmospheric concentration of that gas.)

Further, Coe et al. calculated that the climate sensitivity of methane is 0.06 Celsius degrees, and that of nitrous oxide is 0.08 Celsius degrees. IMHO, all four physicists deserve to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, for proving that carbon dioxide is insignificant as a greenhouse gas, and in Coe et al.’s case, that methane and nitrous oxide are, too. In truth, CO2 is essential to all life on Earth, and is not a pollutant, despite the fact that in their ignorance, greenies and the MSM ignorantly and persistently claim that it is. Far from being a major problem necessitating that mankind’s emissions of that gas be drastically curtailed, more of it would be beneficial in feeding an increasing global population, whilst simultaneously reducing the need for irrigation and pesticides.

Water vapour, which is ever-present naturally, and is absolutely out of the control of mankind, is the overwhelmingly dominant greenhouse gas. Earth’s water cycle is in truth the omnipresent grand air conditioner and atmosphere cleanser. The lead author of Coe et al., David Coe, has calculated that it will take about 250 years from now for the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide to double from today’s 420 ppm to 840 ppm, by which time Earth’s mean temperature will have increased by only 0.5 Celsius degrees above what it would have been had the atmospheric concentration of CO2 remained constant at 420 ppm.

That in no way means that earth’s mean temperature will have increased by 0.5 Celsius degrees over those 250 years – it may actually have decreased due to natural causes overwhelming the tiny warming effect of CO2. Nobody knows enough to make accurate predictions of it. Thus there is no climate crisis and there never will be.

Earth’s climates are forever changing due to natural causes that overwhelm the effect of increasing carbon dioxide. Thus NET ZERO is an utter waste of resources, for ZERO EFFECT.

Before anybody can legitimately claim that Physicists Schildknecht and Coe et al. are wrong, they must follow the long-established norms of physics and provide proper scientific refutations of both the Schildknecht and Coe et al. papers.

Note 1: Neither the Schildknecht paper nor the Coe et al. paper has ever been refuted.

Note 2: The Legal Profession regards what an expert says as being evidence, whereas the Engineering Profession regards that as being merely opinion (otherwise known as testimony). To the Engineering Profession, experts’ opinions are not evidence unless they are based on verifiable physical evidence. Many Court judgements have been flawed because of the failure of the Legal Profession, which includes the Judiciary, to grasp these important facts.

Note 3: Nobody has ever provided any verifiable physical evidence that carbon dioxide – let alone the tiny fraction of it produced by mankind – causes any significant global warming. Not the IPCC. Not the Royal Society. No state meteorological office. No climate scientist. All they have is the output of computer models based on false assumptions.

Note 4: The government of China, knowing all this, is building new coal-fired electricity generating capacity at a rate of more than 1000 MW (Huntly-size) every week. India also knows all this and is striving to outdo China’s build rate. More CO2 reduces plants’ need for water and is beneficial to plant growth. More CO2 is therefore helping to green our planet.

Note 5: Australasia (i.e., New Zealand and Australia) emits just under 1% of all the world’s GHGs. Cutting Australasia’s emissions to zero – if indeed that were possible, which it isn’t – would not make a measurable difference to global mean temperature. Instead.

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Look to Germany to See America’s Future Under the Green Energy Agenda

Germany’s gross domestic product has been falling since the third quarter of 2022, causing fears of the first 2-yearlong recession since the early 2000s. German farmers are openly protesting new climate regulations that would raise the price of diesel fuel, vital for tractors and farm machinery. This discontent is mirrored by the general public, which is opposed to higher energy costs that drag down the economy. Recent polls show a significant shift in public opinion that’s increasingly opposed to the coalition government.

Unlike the U.S. House of Representatives or the Senate, where invariably one party secures a ruling majority, multiple German parties must form a coalition to reach the required 50%+1 majority threshold.

Currently, the Green Party, the Social Democratic Party, and the Free Democratic Party comprise this coalition. The latest polls show all these parties polling far below their 2021 election results while the more right-leaning parties, such as the Christian Democratic Union and the Alternative for Germany, are surging in popularity.

The recent economic slowdown has resulted in widespread political discontent, and the core of the slowdown has been disastrous energy policy.

Instead of the government focusing on making energy affordable, it has continued its commitment to the “Energiewende”—the “Energy Transition”—a government project aimed at radically shifting from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. One of the project’s stated goals is to increase the use of renewable energy sources to 80% by 2030 and 100% by 2035. The end goal is to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2045.

Germany’s closure of its nuclear plants in April 2023 has made achieving net-zero targets significantly more challenging, given that nuclear power is capable of generating substantial amounts of carbon emissions-free electricity. The economic effect of these decisions is palpable for ordinary people, who feel it each month when paying their energy bills.

According to the most recent data published by the German Federal Statistical Office, consumers have been paying an average of 46 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity. For comparison, the average price of electricity in the United States during December was just under 13 cents per kWh.

Cost disparities can also be seen in the price of gasoline. At the fuel pump, German consumers pay an average price of $7.23 per gallon, compared to $3.33 in America.

These high energy costs are slowing other aspects of the economy, leading to dramatic losses in purchasing power for consumers and threatening to make production unprofitable for many companies. In addition, small businesses and farmers, which rely on electricity and fertilizers to operate, respectively, have been hit extremely hard by these recent price increases.

In addition, the slowdown in global trade is profoundly affecting Germany’s export-centric economy, exacerbating the overall economic decline. Unfortunately for Germans, recent economic forecasts do not offer much hope either. Economists predict the economy to grow only by around 0.2% in 2024.

Large German companies have already taken notice and acted accordingly. Around 67% of German companies have moved at least some operations abroad, citing high energy prices and inflation as their main reasons for leaving. This wide-scale deindustrialization is especially prevalent for the mechanical engineering, industrial goods, and automotive sectors—the backbone of the German economy.

The tipping point came in February, when the famous family-owned dishwasher manufacturer Miele announced that it would cut thousands of jobs and move production to Poland. Luxury car manufacturer Porsche initially planned on building a new car battery manufacturing plant domestically and then switched gears by announcing plans to open the proposed plant in America. Both the lack of future investment and deindustrialization create a snowball effect, worsening the situation.

Widespread dissatisfaction with Germany’s green policies should be a lesson for America. At the heart of the problem is Germany’s failure to allow for the energy industry to create affordable energy for its citizens. For years, the anti-business green energy agenda has decreased carbon emissions but increased the economic crisis. Germany’s experience shows that America needs a sound energy policy, not the arbitrary climate goals the current administration is pursuing.

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Unachievable at any cost

Political blindness in Western Austraia

Two weeks ago, we got a taste of the brave new world of renewable energy. Victoria’s grid collapsed on a hot and windy afternoon. 530,000 homes were left without power, train lines were shut down, schools and businesses had to close their doors, phones couldn’t be used even for emergency calls, and hundreds of sets of traffic lights were out of order.

The same fate awaits Western Australia unless it reverses course on its ideological determination to pursue Net Zero.

In June 2022, the WA state government announced its plan to close all coal-fired power stations (Collie, Muja, and Bluewaters) in the state by 2030 as part of a commitment to an 80 per cent emissions reduction target by that year.

This will result in the removal of two-thirds of the WA network’s current electricity supply.

The justification for this policy was the ‘overwhelming uptake of rooftop solar’, adding that, ‘…an estimated $3.8 billion will be invested in new green power infrastructure in the South West Interconnected System (SWIS), including wind generation and storage, to ensure continued supply stability and affordability. This investment is expected to pay for itself by 2030-31 relative to the status quo of increasing electricity subsidies.’

A detailed analysis conducted for the IPA by Senior Research Fellow Kevin You, former General Manager of Generation at Western Power Mark Chatfield, and this correspondent, demonstrates that this plan is neither feasible nor achievable at any cost.

Our research shows that the cost to replace coal-fired power generation will be far more than the already huge sum of $3.8 billion – it will be far greater than even 10 times that amount.

WA’s vast size means that it is geographically isolated, not only from the rest of the country, but internally. Therefore, it cannot be connected to a national energy grid, as is the case with states on the eastern seaboard. It must – and does – produce and rely on its own energy. Therefore, the huge fluctuations that arise from taking out coal in the main network cannot be addressed by relying on other states.

In the southwest of the state, there has been an historical reliance on coal, but WA also has abundant energy in the form of gas.

Following the discovery of large gas reserves in the mid-1970s on the North West Shelf, the Dampier to Bunbury Natural Gas Pipeline (DBP) was constructed. It is one of Western Australia’s most critical pieces of energy infrastructure.

The pipeline was privatised under the Court government in 1998, however, the easement surrounding the pipeline was not privatised. In fact, it was enlarged to accommodate potential future expansions to the gas pipeline’s transmission capacity.

Until now, gas has been able to back up the increasing move to solar and wind. The state’s domestic gas reservation policy, which requires gas exporters to set aside 15 per cent of reserves for domestic use, has been considered a key to avoiding the energy shortages and price rises seen in the east.

However, the warning signs are already there that the WA government’s Net Zero energy policy will not provide the stable, affordable, reliable power its proponents claim.

The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) in a recent report suggested WA could face electricity blackouts as soon as 2025 unless it fills a forecast shortfall in energy supply.

This report is the first time AEMO has given a forecast that takes into account WA’s commitment to transitioning off coal-fired energy by 2030, which it says would strip an estimated 1,366 MW of power generation out of the system.

Unfortunately, the WA public is not being told of the true costs of the WA government’s 2030 renewable energy feel-good dream. There is the real threat that Western Australians will not be able to keep the lights on or turn on the air conditioning when they need to.

A key finding of our analysis is that by phasing out coal by 2030 and without expansion of the DBP, even if:

wind capacity from today is trebled

battery capacity is increased nine-fold

the state’s solar capacity is doubled

Greater Perth and the Wheatbelt still risk blackouts close to four months in a year.

Our analysis shows further that, theoretically to maintain the network in the absence of coal and gas, there would have to be a massive overbuild of renewables, requiring approximately:

50 batteries, with a total capacity of 5000 MW, (currently one battery is in service)

8,000 MW of solar factories, currently at 180 MW

12,000 MW of wind factory capacity, currently at 1,040 MW

4,134 MW of rooftop domestic solar capacity, currently it is 2,406 MW

Once transmission easements, poles and wires are added in, we calculate the total cost to be – not $3.8 billion – but more than $52 billion, which is equivalent to over 130 per cent of budgeted general WA government spending for the financial year ending 2024.

This can only result in ever-increasing energy bills for ordinary Western Australians. As far as we can tell, no thorough cost-benefit analysis has been done of the government’s plan, especially in relation to battery production and storage.

Consider also the destruction of the environment – and much of the state’s available arable land – by plastering its landscape with solar panels and wind factories.

All in a reckless pursuit of emissions reduction. Let’s not forget that Australia is responsible for just over 1 per cent of the world’s emissions.

Less than one-fifth of that 1 per cent comes from WA, and about 6 per cent of that one-fifth of the 1 per cent comes from WA’s coal-fired power stations.

Therefore, shutting them down would contribute to reducing roughly 0.013 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions.

For $52 billion, the money would be better spent keeping coal-fired power stations open for the foreseeable future and in the meantime expanding the DBP and buying gas, which is the only way to avoid blackouts while sensibly reducing emissions.

If WA wants to avoid what happened in Victoria, its government must abandon its ideological fantasy of Net Zero, which, as our research shows, is unachievable at any cost.

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Sunday, March 10, 2024



Microplastics have been found in human organs and blood, including the heart

The Green/Left have been getting hysterical about microplastics for some time but but this is the first substantial link among humans. So it cannot be accepted as a firm link until other studies have confirmed it

Microplastics have been linked to increased risk of death in a small but significant study that is one of the first to establish a correlation between plastic in the body and Australia’s biggest killer – heart disease.

More than half of people undergoing surgery for clogged arteries had blood vessels riddled with microplastics, the study found, and those patients had a far greater chance of heart attack, stroke and death compared to people whose arteries were free from plastic.

Italian scientists recruited 257 people with carotid artery disease, where fatty plaque deposits restrict blood flow to the brain. Microplastics lurked in the plaques of about 60 per cent of patients.

Three years after undergoing surgery, 20 per cent of the patients with microplastics in their arteries had died, or suffered a stroke or heart attack.

Only 7.5 per cent of patients free from microplastics suffered the same fate.

Once the scientists controlled for other risk factors, they put the people with microplastics in their arteries at four-and-a-half times greater risk of heart attack, stroke and death.

The study spurred influential US public health expert Dr Philip J Landrigan to call for single-use plastics to be ditched.

Finding microplastics in plaque was a breakthrough discovery in itself, which raised urgent questions, he said.

“The first step is to recognise that the low cost and convenience of plastics are deceptive and that, in fact, they mask great harms,” Landrigan wrote in a The New England Journal of Medicine editorial.

“Should exposure to microplastics and nanoplastics be considered a cardiovascular risk factor? What organs in addition to the heart may be at risk?”

Microplastics are less than 5 millimetres in size, while nanoplastics are smaller than a micrometre and capable of entering cells. The particles are shed by sources including plastic bottles, food containers, synthetic clothing and car tyres.

This small study is part of a developing line of inquiry into whether ingesting micro and nanoplastics increases risk of cardiovascular disease, which causes a quarter of all deaths in Australia.

Scientists have uncovered microplastics in our brains, lungs and placentas. Last year, they were discovered in the human heart for the first time. The fragments lace our blood, urine and breastmilk. But research into the damage microplastics wreak on health is nascent and contentious.

Much of what we do know is based on animal studies or analysis of cells, which are imperfect proxies of human bodies.

In zebrafish and mice, ingested microplastics quickly migrated to “blood-rich” organs including the heart, kidneys and arteries, a 2023 review reported. The plastics trigger inflammation, oxidative stress and cell death, resulting in abnormal heart rates and impairment of cardiac function within study animals.

More research across the board is urgently needed.

The scientists behind the Italian artery study pointed out their finding identifies a correlation rather than a causation between microplastics and increased risk of death.

It may be that the people with microplastics in their arteries had greater exposure to air pollution (which contains microplastic), which could be behind the increased risk of stroke and heart attack.

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No Significant Warming in One of the Most Climate-Sensitive Parts of the Planet, Ice Core Data Show

There has been no significant warming in one of the most climate-sensitive parts of the planet, analysis of Greenland ice core data shows, casting further doubt on the alarmist climate narrative.

We are all familiar with the climate change scare narrative. Red coloured maps of the globe, polar bears stranded on ever diminishing ice floes, extreme weather events etc. When you read a climate change related article or scientific paper it nearly always opens with a statement underlining the severity of the situation facing mankind. What is usually lacking is perspective.

I am not interested in ‘expert’ opinion unless it is supported by empirical data and perspective. Selected sources must be reliable and have ample past data to encompass solar cycle variation. Ideally these data need to come from a region of the planet that is sensitive to global warming. What data from the world of paleoclimatology fit that criteria?

When snow falls, it contains a mix of oxygen isotopes. During warm periods, more heavy oxygen isotopes are found in the snow, while cold periods have more light oxygen isotopes. By analysing these ratios in ice cores, scientists can learn about past temperatures and climate conditions. The ice is laid down in annual layers which can be dated accurately. Consequently, we can construct an accurate temperature record where sufficient ice accumulation exists, such as in polar regions.

If anthropogenic climate change is a real threat, due primarily to the burning of fossil fuels, then we are expecting to see a clear rise in temperature above and beyond the normal variation. This was attempted and published by Michael Mann et al. and is widely known as the hockey stick graph. The main problem with this graph is that it was constructed using 12 sets of proxy measurements which included three sets of ice core data. The ice core data went back only 500 years and the remaining extrapolation relied on tree ring data. There was considerable uncertainty of measurement which was highlighted in his original paper (Figure 1), and a period of 1,000 years provides us with limited perspective in relation to the impact of solar cycles.

Note the light grey area is an estimate of the uncertainty of measurement and extrapolation.

There seems to be a dearth of records that provide temperature proxies for recent times that are relevant to the sudden rise in carbon dioxide levels (1860 to current). However, I did locate data from two overlapping periods from Renland peninsula in Eastern Greenland. The two studies that reported the results from these ice core measurements had quite different themes. The first, which covered the period from 1960 to 10,000 BC, commented on the high temperatures in the Holocene period and the impact on the ice sheet. The second covering 1801 to 2014 examined local site variability. The creation of these datasets was a gargantuan effort. It remains a mystery why these papers did not comment on the temperature trends or indeed try and link the two datasets. Below is a graph combining these two isotope ratio data sets (Figure 2). The black line (far right) is the key as it is a 20 year rolling average of the more recent dataset (brown dots). The first dataset (blue dots) has data points every 20 years, so this rolling average enables a more valid comparison.

These data tell us we’re in one of the coldest spells in the approximately last 9,000 years. Was the only way up? Virtually all global records indicate a steady warming in recent times. I have added green lines to help visualise the ‘normal’ variation in the last 9,000 years. Clearly recent warming is within this normal variation.

I have added another graph (Figure 3) with linear trend lines to each of the datasets to demonstrate how important perspective is in assessing climate change. If we take the trend from 1801 to 2014 (purple dashed) and compare it with that from the last 10,000 years (green line) it seems alarming. But from the longer trend the reader can see that variation in both sets of data is quite normal.

There is also a serious lack of agreement between the Mann hockey stick graph (Figure 1) and these data. It should be borne in mind when making this comparison that the Mann graph attempted to reconstruct temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere whereas the data I have cited here are from a specific area of Eastern Greenland.

The next graph (Figure 4), focusing on the overlap period (1800 to 2014), provides the degree of validity of aligning these two datasets. There appears to be excellent correlation when comparing the black and red lines, implying the data are good proxies for temperature.

In summary, these data indicate there is no significant global warming signal coming from one of the most sensitive parts of the planet. Any warming may be latent, but this seems to be a bit of a stretch.

This absence of a signal could be explained by the fact that the relationship of carbon dioxide to global temperature is logarithmic and above a certain concentration there is minimal direct impact relative to solar cycles.

There are many climate scientists who have devoted their lives to saving mankind but unless these data are invalid, they need to return from the chill winds of the polar regions. Is it game over for the climate change scare narrative?

See original for graphics

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Climate dieting: Eating our way to a brave green world

It had to happen eventually I suppose. An expert group (advising the National Health and Medical Research Council) has decreed that Australia’s official nutritional guidelines must detail the carbon dioxide footprint of each food group they cover. The implication is clear. When we reflect on our dietary habits, we need to consider not only our own health and wellbeing, but the impact of what we consume on the earth’s atmosphere and weather patterns.

Man, it appears, is no longer an end in himself. For the religious, that divinely ordained creature made in the image of God. And for humanists, the starting point and destination of all ethical value and merit. He is not even Hamlet’s ‘quintessence of dust’, ultimately signifying nothing. No, he is a pest and nuisance, a blight on the otherwise pristine environment. If, for understandable electoral reasons, he can’t be eradicated entirely, his malign footprint must at least be made smaller, according to these experts. The sooner this can be done, the better.

You might think this is peak folly for climate change madness. A veritable ‘jump the shark’ moment. But if insanity, as G.K. Chesterton once observed, is following an idea to its outermost logical consequence, it may only be the beginning.

No doubt, our food packaging will soon have to detail the contents’ carbon footprint, perhaps also the menus in our restaurants and cafes. Perhaps the nutrition experts will come up with a ‘net zero’ sustainability deduction to apply to our recommended daily calorie intake. If we all lose a little too much weight and muscle mass in the process, perhaps to the point of shortening our life spans, that’s an added bonus.

Of course, our carbon dioxide footprint is not limited to what we consume. With every exhalation, after all, we deposit this ‘pollutant’ into the atmosphere. (I will draw a veil over the specific category of human emissions which accompany indigestion.) Vigorous exercise must therefore be frowned upon. And perhaps too any kind of activity, including love-making, which increases our respiration rate.

Indeed, if human life is the problem, perhaps we need to revise our euthanasia guidelines accordingly. As a civilised community, we might still set a high bar for people wanting to take this irreversible step, but if the purely medical arguments in any particular case are finely balanced, climate experts may well argue, why not allow sustainability concerns to decide the matter? Not only would the terminally afflicted be put out of their misery, they would have the consolation, as they take their final climate-damaging breath, of knowing they were saving the planet.

While it may clothe its arguments in morality and appeal to (some confected distortion of) science, the climate change movement is ultimately concerned with power. The power of the few over the many, which Lenin famously identified as the basic question of politics. The more honest climate advocates admit this openly, arguing that no part of our lives must remain untouched in the fight against global warming. All policy and regulatory levers must be deployed in this campaign.

Just think about what this means. In the pursuit of arbitrary, ideologically-informed and utterly pointless emission reduction targets, our traditional policy and regulatory goals are being sacrificed. So too, the integrity of our traditional regulatory regimes.

Our new nutritional guidelines, we are told, will no longer be purely about our health. If this sounds shocking, it is nothing new. Our energy sector regulations long ago abandoned the objective of cheap and reliable power. Indeed, by embracing intermittent wind and solar, they are working against it. Planning and environmental regulatory regimes have been similarly corrupted, giving intermittent energy developers free rein to do their worst in the face of local protests. Even financial and corporate regulation is in play: the quaint idea of a level investment playing field for capital has given way to political incentives to plough money into green activities. History tells us that crony capitalism always ends in tears and a huge taxpayer bill, but apparently this can be disregarded.

As we rush headlong in pursuit of our brave green world, the electorates of other Western countries are starting to have doubts, including in the UK, the US and many continental European countries. And of course, China and India, who account for almost all the planet’s carbon dioxide emissions growth, never joined the crusade in the first place. Why this blindness in Australia? Why this folly?

In 1984, Barbara Tuchman wrote a book, The March of Folly, identifying the worst examples of government folly in history. Her starting point? The Trojans accepting, against all good sense, a wooden horse from their Greek enemy. Governments are guilty of folly, she explains, when they adopt policies which can only end in disaster for their people. The major cause of folly, Tuchman points out, is ‘wooden-headedness’, an insistence on ‘assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs’.

The ‘surpassing wooden-head of all sovereigns’, in Tuchman’s view, was Philip II of Spain who believed he could conquer England with his Armada in 1588. For Philip, according to an unnamed historian, ‘no experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence’. Far from a character flaw, this would seem to be an essential prerequisite for a climate change minister.

The single greatest instance of government folly in my lifetime, and there has been a great deal of competition, was our catastrophic bipartisan response to the Covid pandemic. Our health bureaucrats, both state and federal, were at the very heart of this. You would hope that they have been chastened by the experience, even if they have never (to date) been properly held to account. The experts wanting to hijack our nutritional guidelines appear to have learnt nothing however.

I always try to end my columns with a constructive suggestion. I direct this at all those in government working on climate change interventions. When announced, these should indeed include accurate information on the negative footprint they will leave. Not on the earth’s atmosphere, but on our freedoms, standard of living and quality of life.

Now that would be a public service.

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Why the truth about weather disasters matters

Watching the news, you get the sense that climate change is making the planet unlivable.

We are bombarded with images of floods, droughts, storms and wildfires. We see not only the deadly events nearby but also far-flung disasters when the pictures are scary enough.

Yet the impression this barrage of catastrophe gives us is wildly misleading and makes it harder to get climate change policy right. Data shows climate-related events such as floods, droughts, storms and wildfires aren’t killing more people. Deaths have dropped precipitously. Across the past decade, climate-related disasters have killed 98 per cent fewer people than a century ago.

This should not be surprising because the trend has been obvious for many decades, although it rarely gets reported. A century ago, in the 1920s, the average death toll from weather disasters was 485,000 a year. In 1921, the New York Herald headlined its full-page coverage of droughts and famines across Europe “Deaths for Millions in 1921’s Record Heat Wave”. Since then, almost every decade there have been fewer deaths, with 168,000 average dead per year in the 1960s and less than 9000 dead per year in the most recent decade, 2014-23.

The 98 per cent drop in climate-related deaths is revealed by the most respected international disaster database, which is the gold standard in measuring these impacts. It’s reliable because very deadly catastrophes have been documented fairly consistently across the century.

It is true that smaller events – often with far fewer or no fatalities – are likelier to have been overlooked in the past because there were fewer people and less advanced technology. That is why some media and climate campaigners increasingly point to a rise in reported events (rather than the declining death toll) as evidence that climate change is ravaging the planet.

But all of the increase has been in less serious events, whereas more deadly events are few and declining. The “rise” is due to technology and the global interconnectedness that allows much better reporting of ever-smaller events, wherever they take place.

This is clear because the increase is seen in all categories of disasters measured – not only weather disasters but also geophysical disasters such as volcanoes and earthquakes, and technological disasters such as train derailings. Not even radical climate activists claim that climate change is causing more trains to derail or more volcanoes to erupt.

That is why fatalities provide a much more robust measure. These are falling dramatically because richer, resilient societies are much better at protecting citizens than poorer, vulnerable ones. More resources and innovation mean more lives saved. Research shows this consistently across almost all catastrophes, including storms, cold waves, and floods.

One much-cited study shows that at the beginning of this century, an average of 3.4 million people experienced coastal flooding, with $US11bn in annual damages. Around $US13bn or 0.05 per cent of global GDP was spent on coastal defences.

By the end of this century, there will be more people in harm’s way, and climate change will mean sea levels rise up to a metre. If we do nothing and keep coastal defences as they are today, vast areas of the planet will be routinely inundated, flooding 187 million people and causing damage worth $US55 trillion annually, costing more than 5 per cent of global GDP.

But richer societies will adapt before things get that bad – especially because the cost of adaptation is low in comparison to the potential damage, at just 0.005 per cent of GDP. This sensible adaptation means that despite higher sea levels, fewer people than ever will be flooded. By 2100, there will be just 15,000 people flooded every year. Even the combined cost of adaptation and climate damages will decrease to just 0.008 per cent of global GDP.

These facts help show why seeing the bigger picture matters. Linking every disaster to climate change – and wrongly suggesting that things are getting much worse – makes us ignore practical, cost-effective solutions while the media focuses our attention on costly climate policies that help little.

Enormously ambitious climate policies costing hundreds of trillions of dollars would cut the number of flooded people by the end of the century from 15,000 to about 10,000 a year. While adaptation saves almost all of the 3.4 million people flooded today, climate policy can, at best, save just 0.005 million. The calculation is even more stark for poor countries, which have few resources and little disaster resilience.

Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) suffered the largest recorded global death toll of 300,000 from a hurricane in 1970. Since then it has developed and improved warning systems and shelters. Across the past decade, hurricane deaths have averaged just 160, almost 2000 times lower. To help countries achieve fewer disaster deaths, we should promote prosperity, adaptation and resilience.

Of course, weather disasters are just one aspect of climate change, which is a real global challenge that we should fix smartly. But when we are inundated with “weather porn” and miss the fact that deaths have dropped precipitously, we end up focusing on the least effective policies first.

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Thursday, March 07, 2024



Our Obsession With Control over nature

Paul Abela below seems to think it is self-evident that mankind has no right to control nature. He bolsters that view by saying that changes in the natural world could be disastrous to us and implies the non-sequitur that therefore we should not make changes to the natural world. So he thinks there is both a moral and a utilitarian case for us to meddle as little as possible with nature.

The utilitarian case is easy to refute: Civilization exists BECAUSE we have modified nature extensively. Modifying nature has been very GOOD for us and there is no reason to think that the control over nature that we have is suddenly going to harm us. It could conceivably do so but we are more than ever able to foresee problems coming our way and are more able to prevent those problems from actually arriving or to adapting to them in various ways if they do arrive

The moral case is simply a bald assertion with no supporting argumentation. It runs up against the old philosophical conundrum of how do we find out what is right and wrong? Most analytical philosophers claim that there is no objective instance of right or wrong. It exists in the mind of men but different minds have different ideas of what it is. Is killing babies wrong? The ancient Greeks did not think so and they were highly civilized. So we cannot doubt Paul Abela's enthusiasm for nature but we are perfectly entitled not to share that enthusiasm. Mankind DOES have dominion over nature and there are no philosophical or utilitarian reasons to overturn or limit that


It will cost you anywhere between $32,000 and $200,000. If you can afford it, you’re knowingly signing up for something that has a high risk of death. If you overcome any lingering fears you’ll see plenty of the 322 victims entombed in ice as you struggle slowly towards your destination. Climbing Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world, is not for the faint-hearted. But that doesn’t stop 800 people attempting to summit the mountain each year, with plenty of others waiting in line. It’s a dream for thousands, but it’s a bit of a head-scratcher as to why.

The desire to summit Everest is a product of an obsession that has come to define our relationship with nature. We are addicted to overcoming its boundaries. To tame it. To defeat it. To beat it. The world constantly pits ‘man vs nature’. We compete against it and are obsessed with ‘beating’ it — even though it has no idea it’s competing. And in ‘defeating’ it, we believe we have somehow overcome it.

This obsession with control is deep-rooted in the human psyche. It stems from the idea that nature exists in service of humanity, a belief that has its roots in religion. In Genesis 1:28, God commanded the human race to have dominion over every living thing. A belief shared by the ancient Greeks and best exemplified by Aristotle, who argued, “plants are evidently for the sake of animals, and animals for the sake of Man; thus Nature, which does nothing in vain, has made all things for the sake of Man.”

Little has changed in our attitude to living animals in the last 2000 years. There is a definitive hierarchy of which man is at the pinnacle. Wild animals, which are now remarkably few in number, are slaughtered by poachers to sell their ivory, fur coats, or other body parts. If wild animals aren’t slaughtered, they are placed in zoos for us to gawk at.

Unbelievably, as late as 1969, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) defined conservation as the “rational use of the environment to achieve the highest quality of living for mankind.”

Driven by ego

Our ambivalence to nature and the attitude that it exists in service of man has led to an exploitative relationship developing. Man is driven by ego, we are separate from nature and behave as if it exists for us to do as we please.

Take our framing of the climate crisis as an existential risk that could destroy Earth. It will do nothing of the sort. The climate crisis is a crisis because it will destroy the conditions humanity needs to thrive on Earth. If those conditions change it will remain a haven to life, but that life will take a different form. One that is conducive to thriving in the new environmental conditions that are set to prevail.

It’s humanity that has a problem. Not Earth. Yet, our ego-driven, human-centric view of the Earth means the idea Earth could exist without humanity is incomprehensible.

We have formed a relationship with nature based on being some arrogant controller. How different things would be if humanity had an ‘eco’ perspective, and we used our intelligence and ability to work in symbiosis with nature for the common good. If we felt responsible and duty-bound to look after the Earth and act as its guardian.

Forget about all of that. The benefits to us are all that matters — any negatives to the environment are dismissed as inconsequential — externalities that don’t exist when money and profits, the things that are prized above all else, are there to be made.

The idea that nature may have some intrinsic value is nonsense. Its only role is to create value for humans if and when we choose to use it. That’s why 100 million sharks are killed each year for their meat and to make delicacies such as shark fin soup. It’s why over the last 50 years 17 percent of the Amazon Rainforest has been deforested. It’s why the African Elephant is mercilessly poached so we can slice off their tusks and use the ivory to make jewellery. The tragic ongoing ‘elephant holocaust’ means the African elephant faces extinction.

Our obsession with control needs to be placed into context. Throughout human history, arguably up to the beginning of the twentieth century, we’ve had anything but control. Most people lived on the edge of existence, one failed crop away from famine and starvation. The natural world was dangerous, inauspicious, and brutal. There was little understanding of the processes and rules governing nature.

The image of mother nature being some kind of nurturing force is a product of modern society. As the political scientist Robert Inglehart puts it in The Silent Revolution, for our ancestors, “one’s life expectancy is approximately thirty years. A woman spends most of her adult life in pregnancy and child-bearing, burying most of her offspring before they have grown out of childhood.” To sum it up, life was brutal and full of suffering.

Our ancestors may have believed God gave us dominion over the natural world, but it is only in modern society that we have truly begun to control nature. This ability is the result of the powerful combination of science and technology.

Knowledge is power

Scientific breakthroughs best exemplify the axiom that knowledge is power. Science helps to understand the natural world; technology is the application of this understanding. The combination released humanity from the limits set on pre-industrial societies and led to vast improvements in human well-being. One of the most profound is the eradication of viruses that plagued humanity.

Smallpox, the deadliest disease in human history, is estimated to have killed three hundred million people in the twentieth century alone. Having launched a vaccination campaign against the virus in 1967, the World Health Organization declared its successful eradication in 1977. This triumph is a marvel of modern science.

The ultimate visual expression of our control over nature is the city. These human ecosystems have become enormous in scale. Greater Tokyo, home to 38 million people stretches to 22,000 km². There are 34 megacities with populations of over ten million people.

When you look at a city, you look at a cityscape, not a landscape. The human ecosystem exists outside of nature and separates man from it. It is the ultimate expression of how we have tamed nature and moulded it to suit our needs.

The problem we have now is that technology provides us with too much control. Technology has made us so powerful we’re changing the environmental conditions we need to sustain civilization. This fact would have been incomprehensible to those living a few generations ago. It’s still a little incomprehensible now.

We’ve always existed in a technological age so we take our reality and the high living standards it provides for granted. If the outcomes of our technological age weren’t so apocalyptic, this ability to control the world would be astonishingly impressive.

The way we interact with the environment has transformed beyond recognition and yet we still maintain a deep-rooted desire for control. If we have any chance of overcoming the ecological crisis our relationship with the natural world must transform.

As awareness of our impacts on the Earth has increased, environmentalism has flourished. There have never been more people who not only have an appreciation for the wonders of the natural world, but are seeking to restore it and live in harmony with it.

Environmentalists call for a shift to an eco perspective. This call stems from a place of humility and is grounded in an awareness that nature doesn’t need us to survive, but we depend on it for every conceivable thing.

If the environment changes, we risk suffering social collapse. There must be some kind of acknowledgement that this isn’t a mutual relationship. Earth isn’t benevolent, it doesn’t exist to serve humanity.

The thing is, you can't just wipe the slate clean and reimagine our relationship with nature. While the numbers of environmentalists swell, the human relationship with nature remains dominated by the arrogant controller. As long as it is, we will continue to disregard our influence on the natural world and hurtle towards a future of profound suffering. Seeing how deeply rooted our relationship with nature is, maybe that’s precisely what’s needed to create an epiphany. To shed the shell of the egotistical controller and embrace the humble eco guardian.

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CFACT Says Offshore Wind Violates Clean Air and Clean Water Acts

In formal comments, CFACT has asked EPA to assess the adverse impact of the giant Virginia offshore wind project on air and water quality. The issue is far-reaching because all big offshore wind facilities could have these adverse effects.

CFACT points to three specific impacts, two of which come from what are called the “wake effects” of operational offshore wind facilities. Both effects have been observed and modeled in large European offshore operations. I discuss these wake effects in my article HERE.

The first effect CFACT calls the reduced energy air plume. They explain it this way:

“The wake effect is the well-established fact that the air flow downwind of an operating wind turbine has significantly less energy than the air flow upwind. This is because the turbine’s job is to remove energy from the air flow, converting it into electricity. By some estimates, 50% of the energy is removed.”

The Virginia offshore wind facility is removing energy from a 150-square-mile area, thus creating a massive reduced energy plume. The adverse impact is that this plume could increase the ozone levels in nearby urban areas. Ozone flourishes in low energy air.

Immediately onshore from the Virginia wind facility lies the city of Virginia Beach. This sounds like a little tourist town, but it is, in fact, Virginia’s biggest city. It is half again bigger than Pittsburgh.

Virginia Beach is presently in compliance with the EPA ozone standard, but not by much, so the adverse impact of the offshore wind-reduced energy plume is a serious concern. This will be a concern for other coastal urban areas that are onshore of big wind facilities. EPA should be required to take a hard look at this potential impact of reduced energy air on ozone compliance.

The second wake effect is, in a way, the opposite in that there is too much energy. Each wind tower causes turbulence in both the air flow and the water currents as they pass by. This turbulent energy disturbs the sea floor so much that it creates a suspended sediments plume that flows with the current.

Here again, we are talking about a 150-square-mile plume generator, so the result could be massive. There is a large body of scientific literature on the potential adverse impact of these sediment plumes on marine life.

CFACT points out that EPA appears to be ignoring this serious impact in violation of the Clean Water Act. An impact of this magnitude should require a permit under the CWA, but no such permit has been made public.

Perhaps it has not occurred to EPA to apply the CWA to offshore wind facilities. But it should. The law applies to the “navigable waters” of the US. The Virginia facility is certainly in navigable waters, as several shipping lanes have to be rerouted around it. All the offshore wind facilities presently in development had better be in US waters as the Feds are collecting billions in lease payments for them.

At this point CFACT is merely raising the question, why isn’t the Clean Water Act employed in offshore wind industrialization?

The third issue CFACT raises is technological. EPA is considering issuing an air quality permit for the construction and operation of the Virginia facility. Their primary concern is the exhaust emissions from the huge number of boat trips involved.

CFACT points out that other countries are starting to use electric boats in order to avoid these emissions. In fact, there are service boats specifically designed to be charged directly from the wind facility’s output.

The Clean Air Act requires EPA to call for the best available control technology. Electric boats would seem to fit this requirement, and the firms employed in carrying out this construction should be required to deploy them.

Given these facts, it appears the EPA has not been doing a proper job of offshore wind impact assessment and permitting under both the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.

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The Guardian Should Know That One Mild Winter Is Not Climate Change, Nor Is It Alarming

A recent article in The Guardian, “Vanishing ice and snow: record warm winter wreaks havoc across US Midwest,” describes the very mild winter much of the American Midwest has experienced this year, claiming that it is due to climate change. While a declining trend towards less-severe winters may in part reflect modest warming, the intensity of this winter’s warmth is more likely explained by El Niño.

The Guardian asserts that ice cover across the Great Lakes has been declining since the early 1970s, writing that while the historic average for mid-February is around 40%, “this year it was about 4%.” Grand Forks, North Dakota; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Minneapolis-St Paul, Minnesota, are listed as having recorded their warmest winter, and the Guardian links to evidence in the form of an article from weather.com. Interestingly, directly beneath the states listed in the weather.com post referenced in the article is this statement, “[t]he Twin Cities’ warmest winter, by the way, was 146 years ago in 1877-78, when Rutherford B. Hayes was president.” The Guardian neglected to mention that.

Climate change is the culprit, claims The Guardian, but their own weather.com source lists two natural causes for this year’s mildness, including El Niño and a lack of “persistent blocking patterns – such as the Greenland block – that pull cold air from Canada and lock it into the U.S. for longer than a few days.”

Regarding El Niño, weather.com says “[w]armer winters are typical across the northern tier of states during a strong El Niño.”

Continuing, weather.com reports:

Despite a few recent storms, this season’s winter storm pace across the country is the slowest in 10 years. That’s left just 14% of the Lower 48 covered by snow as of Feb. 26. The warmth also left Great Lakes ice cover at a 51-year low for mid-February, including an ice-free Lake Erie and just a few small bays of Lake Superior with any ice.

In case you missed the point, the ice was this low 51 years of global warming ago, when the Earth was not only cooler, but it was in a cooling trend. A recent post at Climate Realism covers this specific subject in more detail, with H. Sterling Burnett writing “the last time the Great Lakes ice coverage was this low in January was in the early 1970s, a time when global average temperatures were cooling, which many scientists claimed at the time could be a sign of a coming ice age.”

In fact, ice coverage data for the Great Lakes show that coverage is highly variable from year to year. Plotted annual maximum data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory show as much. (See figure below)

The data across all the Great Lakes do indicate that recent years have seen more below-average years, but high years are still found, and it depends on the individual lake. On Lake Superior, Erie, and Huron, for example, most winters touch the 90% ice coverage range. On Lake Michigan, which has lower ice coverage averages, the record ice coverage is tied between two years; 1977 and 2014. Lake Ontario likewise traditionally has less coverage, and has its record high in 1979, and second-highest ice coverage in 2015.

The Guardian also says that a “report published in January found that the number of -35F (-37.2C) readings in northern Minnesota have fallen by up to 90%,” they point out that low temperatures play a role in weed and pest control, which is true enough, however they neglect to mention that extreme cold kills human beings as well, and at much higher rates than extreme heat does. They also fail to mention that longer, colder winters result in fewer crop rotations and production.

In Climate at a Glance: Temperature Related Deaths, multiple studies back up the fact that cold is deadlier than heat all around the world. One study, published in the Lancet in 2021, found that while 600,000 people die globally from heat, over 6 million die from cold. (see the figure, below) Further, cold related deaths have declined at more than double the rate that heat related deaths have increased.

The number of severely cold winters may be modestly trending downwards around the Great Lakes and across portions of the American Midwest, but almost everyone would agree that fewer -35℉ days is a blessing not a curse. This year’s winter is particularly mild not because of climate change but because of natural weather patterns, and a long-term trend in declining extreme cold is actually better for human survival. Contrary to The Guardian’s reporting, climate doomsaying is not an appropriate response to the available data.

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Environmentalism: from concern about clean air to throwing soup at the Mona Lisa

Garrett Hardin was a professor of biology and environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara. His “commons” was a metaphor drawn from the traditional English practice of shared grazing and agricultural land to which all members of a community had access. Commons were inherently prone to abuse, Hardin argued, because every user of the commons will exploit it to maximize personal benefit without regard to the other users, leading ultimately to the collapse of the commons as a useful resource.

Hardin extended the metaphor of the commons to include all natural resources, including the air, water, other species, even the entire Earth. The tragedy of Hardin’s expansive commons was the inexorable march to environmental doom, driven by the folly of human freedom. “No technical solution” could halt its march, no ingenious tinkering could fix the problem. Rather, Hardin asserted that the juggernaut could only be arrested through “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.” To save ourselves, we would have to give up many freedoms we take for granted, specifically “relinquishing the freedom to breed.”

Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” is perhaps the most influential paper ever to come out of the field of ecology. Within its six pages were sown the seeds that have grown into the vast industry that is modern environmentalism. If you’ve ever wondered how environmentalism got from simple concern for clean air and water and preservation of wilderness and its wonderful creatures, to Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion and throwing soup at the Mona Lisa, it was Garrett Hardin who drew the map.

Hardin’s path to the tragedy of the commons was itself mapped out by the English economist and cleric, Thomas Malthus. When Thomas Carlyle famously cast economics as the “dismal science” — a “dreary, desolate… quite abject and distressing science” — it was Thomas Malthus he had in mind. Malthus’s economic philosophy was one of finitude and futility. Human populations always grew faster than could the food supply, he asserted, leading inexorably to famine, disease, perpetual poverty and war: the “Malthusian catastrophe.” Malthus’s economics stands in marked contrast to that of his near-contemporary Adam Smith’s more hopeful economics of free trade, free markets and the inscrutable “invisible hand” that would guide societies to prosperity and liberty. The history of economics has been a long contention between these two competing ideas.

Malthusian economics considered people to be aimless particles pushed this way and that by powerful and indifferent forces. People are considered to have no agency whatsoever, or whatever agency they might have, encompass no other sentiment but selfishness. The only way out of the Malthusian catastrophe would be restraint of human nature, through “mutual coercion mutually agreed upon,” as Garrett Hardin put it. Tyranny

A big part of Malthus’s appeal at the time was his mathematical argument, which imparted a faux certainty to his claims. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace both were inspired by Malthus’s mathematics, for example, however, Malthus’s mathematics were simplistic and naïve and failed to account for the fact that humans do, in fact, have individual agency — and that the range of moral sentiments was far wider than mere selfishness.

Nevertheless, Malthusianism continues to find devoted acolytes wherever simplistic and naive mathematical presumptions reign. Presently, it is climate change that fits that bill, and it is climate change where the Malthusian tragedy of the commons is again rearing its head — no, having its head propped up, Weekend at Bernie’s style — by a group of twenty-three scholars (they always seem to come in packs) in the prestigious pages of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. There, they call for a “new paradigm” (that buzzword) to stave off the tragedy of the Anthropocene “planetary commons.”

Their new paradigm goes beyond mere governments managing common resources, like sea-floor mineral prospecting. Rather, they are advocating a more ambitious program to take control of the “biophysical systems” that impart resiliency to the Earth’s function. These systems include the atmosphere, hydrosphere (oceans, lakes, rivers and aquifers), the biosphere (encompassing all of the Earth’s biota), the lithosphere (all terrestrial ecosystems, and the cryosphere — ice and snow). Exerting such control, they say, will require “mobilization of efforts at an unprecedented scale, including future research” (read spending), which can only be done through a “nested Earth system governance approach.” This will mean “[adjusting] notions of state sovereignty and self-determination,” taking on “obligations and reciprocal support and compensation schemes … comprehensive stewardship obligations and mandates,” all with the aim to protect “Earth-regulating systems in a just and inclusive way.” You get the idea: “following the science” means a world government that subordinates those pesky notions of self-government and national sovereignty.

Doomsday scenarios are nothing new in the genre of “climate action.” Usually, such contributions bristle with weasel words such as “may,” “possibly,” “perhaps” and the ilk (e.g. the impending extinction of insects). Not so the planetary commons paper, which bristles with alarmist certitude. We are driving the Earth toward dangerous instability, rapidly pushing us past “tipping points” where the Earth will be plummeted irreversibly into disaster, making the Earth inhospitable to life itself. We are sinners in the hands of an angry goddess.

The whole thing is a house of cards, which a little digging will expose. Let’s begin with that word in the title: “Anthropocene.” What does it mean? It sounds science-y, but in fact “Anthropocene” is a neologism proposed in 2000 that demarcates the past 250 years from the Holocene, the geological epoch that began around 11,000 years ago, and which encompasses the rise of modern humans. It is no accident that the Holocene-Anthropocene boundary is set at 250 years before the present: it coincides with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

The Anthropocene is the stand-in for the eschatological End Times. Like the End-Times, it is defined by a basket of horrors and portents:

An order-of-magnitude increase in erosion and sediment transport associated with urbanization and agriculture; marked and abrupt anthropogenic perturbations of the cycles of elements such as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and various metals together with new chemical compounds; environmental changes generated by these perturbations, including global warming, sea-level rise, ocean acidification and spreading oceanic “dead zones”; rapid changes in the biosphere both on land and in the sea, as a result of habitat loss, predation, explosion of domestic animal populations and species invasions; and the proliferation and global dispersion of many new “minerals” and “rocks” including concrete, fly ash and plastics, and the myriad “technofossils” produced from these and other materials.

No mention is made, of course, of the dramatic reductions of poverty, extensions of life spans, improved agricultural productivity, cleaner air and water, safer environments that also mark the Industrial Revolution. Those are Hardin’s “technical solutions,” to be dismissed as the false consciousness that merely delays the springing of the Malthusian trap. We best be wary.

The Anthropocene is not a scientific term: it is an entirely political construction. Being able to sell it as scientific has long been a coveted tool to advance the climate change agenda. This has meant a long march through the institutions that govern geological nomenclature. That effort came to fruition in 2019, at a meeting of the International Union of Geological Sciences in Cape Town, where a vote was taken to formally recognize the Anthropocene as a geological epoch. It passed by a supermajority of 88 percent in favor, which by the rules of the Society, closed off the matter from further debate. What was the actual vote? Thirty-three individuals voted to recognize the Anthropocene, and four dissented. Was this scientific consensus? Technically it was, but we keep in mind the deceptive power of percentages: the 2022 membership of the Geological Society of America totaled 18,096. Remember these figures the next time we hear about a scientific “consensus.”

With the Anthropocene established as a formal geological epoch, the door was opened for climate activists to advance a political agenda masquerading as “science.” The planetary commons paper, for example, asserts that we have already passed six of nine “tipping points,” putting us THIS CLOSE to catastrophe. That sounds dire, to be sure. But just what determines a tipping point, and how do we know we’re past it? One of the references cited in support of this claim is a paper (with many of the same authors as the planetary commons paper) which defines the “safe operating space” for the nine variables. What determines the limits of the “safe operating space”? Why, it’s the presumed conditions prior to the Anthropocene! The circle is thereby closed: the politically-defined Anthropocene is used to set the politically defined “safe operating space” for the Earth, which sets the course for “navigating” through the perilous Anthropocene. Follow the science! The agenda is clear: reverse the Industrial Revolution and return civilization to the illusory halcyon of the Holocene. This is the climate change echo chamber at work: a collection of mutually-reinforcing arbitrary presumptions dressed up in a science-y costume.

It would be amusing were it not for the costume being flashy enough to take in the mid-wit rubes that constitute our present-day ruling class. Danger lurks there, which was expressed eloquently 264 years ago by Adam Smith in his 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments:

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it… He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

Garrett Hardin was, in his time, also a “man of system,” and it’s worth remembering that our last flirtation with the tragedy of the commons did not end well, especially not for Garrett Hardin himself, who now seems to be somewhat of an embarrassment to our present-day presumptive “persons of system.” We seem to have learned nothing since 1968, or for that matter, since 1759.

Will history repeat, this time as farce? Or will it be tragedy?

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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