RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/now-its-a-climate-emergency-11563138092

When President Trump declared a national “emergency” in February to take money from the Pentagon to build his border wall, these columns warned he was setting a precedent that Democrats would exploit. Well, that day has arrived, as Democrats last week introduced a resolution in Congress declaring a national emergency due to climate change.

Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a joint resolution declaring that the climate Apocalypse is nigh, and demanding “a national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization of the resources and labor of the United States at a massive-scale.” Some commentators are calling the resolution “symbolic,” noting a contradictory provision that reads “nothing in this concurrent resolution constitutes a declaration of a national emergency for purposes of . . . any special or extraordinary power.”

Yet Oregon Representative Earl Blumenauer, who also introduced it, made his inspiration clear. “The national emergency is not the border, it’s the climate,” Mr. Blumenauer said on a press call. A Sanders spokesperson also drew the comparison, noting that, in contrast to Mr. Trump’s “phony national emergencies,” the Sanders resolution addresses a genuine “existential” threat.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=a

If you follow closely the subject of hypothesized human-caused global warming, you probably regularly experience, as I do, a strong sense of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, you read dozens of pieces from seemingly authoritative media sources, as well as from important political officeholders, declaring that the causal relationship between human CO2 emissions and rapidly rising global temperatures is definitive; declaring that “the science is settled”; and further declaring that impending further increases in temperatures over the next decade or several decades are an “existential crisis” that must be addressed immediately through complete transformation of our economy at enormous cost.

On the other hand, you studied the scientific method back in high school, and you can’t help asking yourself the basic questions that that method entails:

What is the falsifiable hypothesis that is claimed to have been empirically validated? You can’t find it!

What was the null hypothesis, and what about the data caused the null hypothesis to be rejected? You can’t find that either!

Where can you get access to the methodology (computer code) and the full data set that was used in the hypothesis validation process; and are those sufficient to fully replicate the results? You can’t find these things either!

You learn that there have been major after-the-fact adjustments to the principal data sets that are used to claim rapidly warming global temperatures and to justify press releases claiming that a given year or month was the “hottest ever.” You look to see if you can find details supporting the data alterations, and you learn that such details are not available, as if they are some kind of top secret from the Soviet Union. (You can read my 23-part series on this subject at this link.)

Kim Cobb is a US climate scientist and one of many who did not take well to the election of Donald Trump. Mother Jones reports sympathetically on the poor woman’s parlous mental state and that of many, many of her similarly afflicted colleagues.

Cobb entered what she now calls “an acute mental health crisis.” Most mornings, she could not get out of bed, despite having four children to tend to.

She would sob spontaneously. She obsessed about the notion that the US government would take no action to address climate change and confront its consequences. “I could not see a way forward,” she recalls.

“My most resounding thought was, how could my country do this?

“I had to face the fact that there was a veritable tidal wave of people who don’t care about climate change and who put personal interest above the body of scientific information that I had contributed to.”

Her depression persisted for weeks. “I didn’t recognize myself,” she says.

Eventually, when climate hysteria passes from front page to the padded green cell inhabited by phrenology and eugenics, those other discarded aberrations of science, the medical dictionaries will likely list Doomsday Dementia Syndrome as an example of transitory mass delusion. It will be illustrated by a wind turbine, a rich and rolling-in-it rent-seeker and a stupendously inflated electricity bill.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/07/former_aussie_deputy_pm_becomes_backbencher_suddenly_tells_the_truth_about_global_warming.html

You’ve probably never heard of Barnaby Joyce, but he has twice been deputy prime minister of Australia, from February 2016 to October 2017 and from December 2017 to February 2018.  During both terms, he served as leader of Oz’s National Party, which frequently allies with the country’s biggest conservative party, called the “Liberal Party.”  The National Party was formerly known as “The Country Party” and represents farmers, grazers, and other rural residents.

Like the United States, Australia is subject to agitation for CO2 emissions reduction in the name of “saving the planet.”  As deputy P.M. serving in coalition under the leadership of warmist true believer Malcolm Turnbull, Joyce could not speak his mind for fear of those interests.

But Australia has a new liberal (conservative) government following federal elections last May 19, with the margin of victory attributed by most observers to the opposition by Scott Morrison, the new leader of the Liberals, to closing a major coal mine.  And Barnaby Joyce became a backbencher.

In that capacity, Joyce is answerable only to his constituents in rural New South Wales.

As columnist Andrew Bolt put it (link paywalled):

Former Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce is now a backbencher and can finally tell the truth about the global warming scare[.]

On his Facebook page,  Joyce wrote:

The very idea that we can stop climate change is barking mad. Climate change is inevitable, as geology has always shown.” These are the views of New Zealand lecturer of geology, David Shelley. A person vastly more competent than me and the flotilla of others telling the kids the world is going to end from global warming.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/07/what_it_will_take_for_the_wind_and_solar_industries_to_collapse.html

The solar electricity industry is dependent on federal government subsidies for building new capacity.  The subsidy consists of a 30% tax credit and the use of a tax scheme called tax equity finance.  These subsidies are delivered during the first five years.

For wind, there is subsidy during the first five to ten years resulting from tax equity finance.  There is also a production subsidy that lasts for the first ten years.

The other subsidy for wind and solar, not often characterized as a subsidy, is state renewable portfolio laws, or quotas, that require that an increasing portion of a state’s electricity come from renewable sources.  Those state mandates result in wind and solar electricity being sold via profitable 25-year power purchase contracts.  The buyer is generally a utility with good credit.  The utilities are forced to offer these terms in order to cause sufficient supply to emerge to satisfy the renewable energy quotas.

The rate of return from a wind or solar investment can be low and credit terms favorable because the investors see the 25-year contract by a creditworthy utility as a guarantee of a low risk of default.  If the risk were to be perceived as higher, then a higher rate of return and a higher interest rate on loans would be demanded.  That in turn would increase the price of the electricity generated.

The bankruptcy of PG&E, the largest California utility, has created some cracks in the façade.  A bankruptcy judge has ruled that cancelation of up to $40 billion in long-term energy contracts is a possibility.  These contracts are not essential or needed to preserve the supply of electricity because they are mostly for wind or solar electricity supply that varies with the weather and can’t be counted on.  As a consequence, there has to exist and does exist the necessary infrastructure to supply the electricity needs without the wind or solar energy.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-7-6-7669n2g879mcy2hwtzxadnscm8

An important focus of this blog is on trying to find the true “climate leader” among all the world’s political jurisdictions. After all, somebody needs to get out front to save us from the climate crisis. But who? Germany? They adopted the Energiewende policy in 2010, and have since thrown hundreds of billions of dollars at transitioning to “renewable” energy. Result: windmills everywhere, consumer electricity bills triple the U.S. average per kWh, and emissions essentially flat since the 2010 start of the program. China? They were awarded the mantle of “climate leadership” by the New York Times back in March 2017, shortly before Pravda figured out that China had hundreds of gigawatts of coal power plants under construction in their own country, and many hundreds of more gigawatts of such plants under construction in other countries around the world. The talk of energy transition was all a charade.

So now it’s time for some real progressives to show how it’s done. As reported here on June 19, New York ‘s legislature has now passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. The goals of the Act are to get 70% of electricity from “renewables” by 2030, followed by reduction of all carbon emissions — not just from the electricity sector — by 85% below 1990 levels by 2050. Admittedly, this new Act has just been passed. But we’ve been talking about transitioning to renewable energy for many years. Surely we should be setting the example for the world by now. Let’s take a look at where we are, and what the plans are from here.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-7-3-the-greatest-scientific-fraud-of-all-time-part-xxiii

The scandal that I call “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time” is the alteration of official world temperature data by a small number of government employees in the US and the UK. Uniformly, the alterations have the effect of lowering temperatures early in the record, and raising recent temperatures, in order to create and enhance a warming trend that does not exist in the data as originally reported. The purpose of the fraudulent data alteration is to support the continuation of the “global warming” climate scare. To read the prior 22 posts in this series, go to this link.

Despite what you might think from reading the mainstream press, the past few years in world temperatures have not been particularly good for the continuation of climate alarm. No matter how you measure them (the main methods being ground thermometers, weather balloons, and satellites), world atmospheric temperatures have gone down for more than three years since a peak reached in early 2016. The data set that I consider to be the most reliable — the satellite-based measurements from the University of Alabama at Huntsville — gives the global temperature “anomaly” for the most recent month (June 2019) as +0.47 deg C. That is well down from the peak of +0.88 deg C in early 2016, and represents a decrease of about a third of what had been the entire increase since the satellite record began in 1979. Here is the most recent UAH global lower atmosphere temperature graph:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/07/the_primal_scream_of_climate_change_fanatics.html

In 1968, Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, which became a bestseller.  The premise of the book was that worldwide famine was going to destroy humanity.  According to the professor, this frightening scenario was scheduled to happen in the 1970s and 1980s, due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals.  Hmmm…sounds as though he was giving mankind about 12 years before Armageddon would occur.  Whom does that remind you of?  Anyway, his solution was immediate action to limit population growth!  We know how well that worked out!

During the 1970s, we entered a period of academic conjecture on a subject that came to be known as global cooling.  This theory was based on studies that suggested that a buildup of glaciers was occurring and could cause imminent cooling of the Earth’s surface, leading to another Ice Age.  Glaciers are made up of fallen snow that, over many years, compresses into large, thickened ice masses.  Presently, glaciers occupy about 10 percent of the world’s total land area, with most located in polar regions like Antarctica, Greenland, and the Canadian Arctic.  Glaciers are remnants from the last Ice Age, when ice covered nearly 32 percent of the land and 30 percent of the oceans.  At 10 percent, we’re doing well.

As we moved into the 1980s, another climate scare was taking root.  Acid rain gave new meaning to the term “the sky is falling.”  According to the alarmists of that era, there was a form of precipitation that contained an acidic quality with elevated levels of hydrogen ions.  They claimed that the acid rain was having harmful effects on plants, aquatic animals, and our infrastructure.  Nothing much was said about walking in the rain or drinking rainwater.  After a series of studies and the emergence of a new term called the “ozone hole,” life went on pretty much the same as always.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/06/disentangling_the_renewable_energy_scam.html

The solar energy industry is telling its pals in Congress that it are willing the lose most of its subsidies.  The current subsidy for solar is 30% of the construction cost.  To that subsidy, an additional 10% subsidy is available due to special fast depreciation for solar energy plants.  The 30% subsidy is scheduled to ramp down to 10% by 2022 and thereafter remain at 10%.  This is not a consequence of declining costs of solar that makes the industry no longer in need of such a large subsidy.  Solar electricity is a mature industry, and cost declines are moderate.  The real reason the solar people are happy with a lower subsidy is that the 30% investment tax credit (ITC) is not their most important subsidy.  The real subsidy is more complicated and better hidden.

The real subsidy is rooted in renewable portfolio requirements in about 30 states. These states require that a certain percentage of electricity come from renewable sources. The quota ramps over time. For example it might ramp from 20% now to 50% by 2030.  These quotas create a chain of events that guarantee solar and wind energy a market for years to come with a guaranteed profit. If that is not enough, the industry is trying to freeze the quotas into state constitutions so as to make it difficult for the electricity consumers to get out of the trap that has been set for them.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/06/28/science_as_political_orthodoxy_140663.html

There is an intellectual orthodoxy being imposed by the left, abetted by much of the news media. Certain viewpoints are forbidden — not simply regarded as wrong, but not permitted to be considered.

We can observe this attitude at our colleges, where speakers who challenge leftist premises have been forcibly silenced. But it is most entrenched in discussions about global warming, in which non-orthodox views are treated the way religionists treat challenges to biblical dogma. A striking example is provided by a recent New York Times front-page story. 

The print-version headline reads: “In Climate Fight, Trump Will Put Science on Trial.” On the continuation page, the headline is even stronger: “. . . Put Science Itself on Trial.” (The online headline is not quite so aggressive: “Trump Administration Hardens Its Attack on Climate Science.”)

The article presents what it calls the Trump administration’s “attack on science,” which will “undermine the very science on which climate change policy rests.” What exactly is being proposed? “[T]he U.S. Geological Survey …  has ordered that scientific assessments produced by that office use only computer-generated climate models that project the impact of climate change through 2040 rather than through the end of the century, as had been done previously.” Consequently, the reporter notes, “parts of the federal government will no longer be able to fulfill what scientists say is one of the most urgent jobs of climate science studies: reporting on the future effects of a rapidly warming planet.”