RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/endangered-species-habitat-check-1543365316

Amid all the hand-wringing about a polarized Supreme Court, note Tuesday’s unanimous decision for regulatory sanity. The case concerned whether a frog’s “critical habitat” can include land where the frog doesn’t live and can’t survive.

Weyerhaeuser v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife involves more than 1,500 acres in Louisiana that the government declared “critical habitat” for the dusky gopher frog, which is protected under the Endangered Species Act. Two problems: The critter hasn’t been seen in those parts for about five decades, and it can’t survive on the land without clearing forest canopy.

The timber company that operates on the land sued on the sensible grounds that the place can’t be critical habitat if the creature would die on arrival. The law allows Fish and Wildlife to designate certain unoccupied areas as critical habit but only if they’re essential to the conservation of the species. The designation threatens development on the land and could cost the owners $34 million by the government’s estimates.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled for the government in a decision with no limiting principle—by the circuit’s logic, a desert could be critical habitat for a fish, as more than a dozen state attorneys general pointed out in an amicus brief to the Supreme Court.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/what-californias-fire-follies-can-teach-us/

As is normal these days, the blame game is already being waged in the wake of the most recent 2018 Californian bushfires. On the one hand are the doomsayers who claim the fires are a result of climate change. At the other end of the spectrum are those blaming “environmental terrorists” for preventing effective pre-fire management, such as forest thinning and fuel-reduction burning.

Depressingly, the climate changers include influential Australians such as Stuart Ellis, CEO of the Australasian Fire and Emergency Services Authority, and Richard Thornton, director of the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre. Both are quoted in The Guardian newspaper attributing the Californian fires to climate change, with no qualification. Fascinatingly, the second group includes Ryan Zinke, the US Secretary of the Interior, and Sonny Perdue, US Secretary of Agriculture, who oversees the U.S. Forest Service. Zinke makes no bones about his view that responsible preparation of potential fire grounds was prevented by environmental zealots, whom he brands “terrorists”.

As in most matters where science, politics and human affairs intermix, the reality is more complex than either of these contrasting opinions. As happens so often in the media these days, the single-issue commentators are not addressing the fire problem but are using alarm over the fires to promote another agenda. For example, Australian bushfire research and emergency response agencies promote climate change anxiety to generate increased funding; the Trump administration wants to revive logging for economic and social reasons, and cites overstocked, dying forests (locked away by ‘green’ administrations) as the fundamental cause of the fires.

I am not an expert on the Californian situation, but I have been there many times and have many colleagues in the American fire community who have helped to educate me and shape my views. What follows is my perspective on what is going on, and what is likely to transpire. I am trying to look at the bigger picture, rather than focus on one issue or another.

For a start, California is a big place with a wide range of climates, vegetation and topographical situations and therefore a range of different bushfire challenges. Irrespective of any recent “climate change”, most of California has always experienced hot, dry summers and cool wet winters, and droughts have always periodically occurred. There is also (usually in late summer) the scourge of the infamous Santa Ana winds. These are hot, dry, strong winds originating in the desert country to the east that sweep down the Sierra Mountains into coastal southern California. This air mass is so dry, it acts on a bushfire like opening the door of a blast furnace. Furthermore, wind velocity often peaks between midnight and dawn, ensuring people in the path of a newly-started fire receive little warning and awake to be confronted by wind-driven flames.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272052/latest-manipulative-national-climate-assessment-joseph-klein

Last Friday, the Trump administration released the latest volume of the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment, which was prepared by scientists from 13 government agencies with contributions from outside scientists. The development of this report was well underway during the Obama administration. Nevertheless, the Trump White House did not change the report’s content. When President Trump was asked on Monday whether he had read the report, he replied, “I’ve seen it, I’ve read some of it, and it’s fine.” He remains skeptical, however, regarding the report’s dire predictions of the extent to which climate change will have a supposedly devastating impact on the U.S. economy by the end of this century. “I don’t believe it,” he said, also noting that China and other countries were largely responsible for the problem, not the United States. The president has every reason to be skeptical of the report’s doomsday forecasts for the U.S. economy.

“Climate change is transforming where and how we live and presents growing challenges to human health and quality of life, the economy, and the natural systems that support us,” the report’s authors wrote. At the same time, the authors admitted the difficulties in making predictions as to the “cascading impacts” climate change may have on “the natural, built, and social systems we rely on individually and through their connections to one another.” The authors also acknowledged that “it is hard to quantify and predict all the ways in which climate-related stressors might lead to severe or widespread consequences for natural, built, and social systems.” Nevertheless, after admitting the difficulty of making such predictions, the report’s authors did just that in very specific terms. No wonder President Trump has his doubts.

Indeed, the authors of the just released National Climate Assessment report projected what they believe is likely to happen in the United States by the middle and the end of this century if drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are not taken in time. The authors purported to quantify the devastating effects in the United States on health, the environment, agriculture, trade, infrastructure, and the economy if there is continued growth in greenhouse gas emissions at the current rate. The authors predicted between 3,900 and 9300 more deaths per year by the end of the century. They broke down their end-of-century forecast by type of climate change-related harm to the economy. There will be $141 billion from heat-related deaths, $118 billion from sea level rise and $32 billion from infrastructure damage, they predicted. Under one of their scenarios, “almost two billion labor hours are projected to be lost annually by 2090 from the impacts of temperature extremes, costing an estimated $160 billion in lost wages.” All told, according to the latest National Climate Consensus report’s authors, “annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century—more than the current gross domestic product (GDP) of many U.S. states.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/11/latest_global_warming_lies_from_us_global_change_research_program.html

The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) has released its latest doomsday climate report. This organization, part of the federal government, has been in business for a long time, releasing nonsense reports concerning the supposed global warming threat. I attended meetings of the federal advisory committee associated with the program in 2011 and wrote an article about that particular circus. Federal advisory committees are supposed to be committees of experts with a diversity of viewpoints. The committee in 2011 consisted of supposed experts with only one point of view, that we are threatened by doomsday global warming.

The USGCRP suffers from a lack of imagination. Its reports imitate the style and approach of the United Nations International Panel On Climate Change (IPCC). The USGCRP uses the IPCC as a trusted source. The problem is that the IPCC is not to be trusted. One idea broached at the 2011 meeting is present in the 2018 report. In 2011 the activists wrestled with the problem that nobody was paying much attention to their reports. They decided that there should be customized reports for different parts of the U.S. The idea was that people would be more concerned if there were specific doomsday predictions for their neighborhood. The country was divided into regions as shown in the map below. Doomsday forecasts for the regions are taken from climate models, sometimes supplemented by a procedure known as downscaling.

https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2018/11/26/junk_science_has_become_a_profitable_industry_110810.html

Should we believe the headline, “Drinking four cups of coffee daily lowers risk of death”? How about, “Mouthwash May Trigger Diabetes. . .”? Should we really eat more, not less, fat? And what should we make of data that suggest people with spouses live longer?

These sorts of conclusions, from supposedly scientific studies, seem to vary from month to month, leading to ever-shifting “expert” recommendations. However, most of their admonitions are based on flawed research that produces results worthy of daytime TV.

Misleading research is costly to society directly because much of it is supported by the federal government, and indirectly, when it gives rise to unwise, harmful public policy.

Social science studies are notorious offenders. A landmark study in the journal Nature Human Behaviour in August reported the results of efforts to replicate 21 social science studies published in the prestigious journals Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015.

The multi-national team actually “conducted high-powered replications of the 21 experimental social science studies — using sample sizes around five times larger than the original sample sizes” and found that “62% of the replications show an effect in the same direction as the original studies.” One out of the four Nature papers and seven of the seventeen Science papers evaluated did not replicate, a shocking result for two prestigious scientific journals. The authors noted two kinds of flaws in the original studies: false positives and inflated effect sizes.

Science is supposed to be self-correcting. Smart editors. Peer review. Competition from other labs. But when we see that university research claims – published in the crème de la crème of scientific journals, no less — are so often wrong, there must be systematic problems. One of them is outright fraud – “advocacy research” that has methodological flaws or intentionally misinterprets the results.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/11/a_quick_refresher_course_to_remind_us_of_previous_global_warmingcooling_scares.html

In light of the new, much-hyped “official” report on global warming that is being pushed by almost all the media and the record cold that is occurring now in many parts of the U.S., it would be helpful if some enterprising journalist actually reported how often the people have been scared by previous warnings of global warming or cooling.

An article in Wattsupwiththat.com from 2014 encapsulates the multiple intentional scares from 1895 on. Throughout the entire 120 year period fossil fuel use was growing exponentially, population growth was exploding, and CO2 concentration was increasing. The fact that temperatures both rose and fell during this period shows that there is no correlation between temperature, fossil fuels, CO2 and the human population. Storm activity, floods, droughts, and sea levels have also fluctuated throughout billions of years.

There are a huge number of bullet points in this article. I have left in some to highlight the difference in scare tactics at various points in time by the media who seem to just repeat whatever they are told and don’t care how far off previous predictions have been:
A brief history of climate panic and crisis… both warming and cooling

For at least 120 years, climate “scientists” have been claiming that the climate was going to kill us…but they have kept switching whether it was a coming ice age, or global warming.

(A timeline of claims follows, updated to 2014)

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/21/rent-s

President Trump announced last month that his administration will take actions to allow the year-round sale of fuel containing 15 percent ethanol, which is currently banned during summer months. The rent-seeking justification for this expansion of a flawed policy revved up immediately, in the form of a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Iowa U.S. Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst. They lauded the decision, as well as the existing federal mandate to blend ethanol with transportation fuels, citing the contributions to the nation’s job growth, GDP, and tax revenues.

The same arguments could be made for a federal law mandating that all the alcohol in hard liquor and mouthwash be derived from corn. Would that be sound public policy?

Politics aside, any defense of U.S. ethanol policy must embrace a series of fallacies which include:

ethanol produced from corn makes the U.S. less dependent on fossil fuels,
ethanol lowers the price of gasoline,
an increase in the percentage of ethanol blended into gasoline boosts the overall supply of gasoline, and
ethanol is environmentally friendly and lowers global carbon dioxide emissions.

Although none of these claims is true, the ethanol lobby continues to promote them, and many politicians—particularly in the major corn-producing states—seem intoxicated by them.

Politicians like to say that ethanol is environmentally friendly, but these claims are misleading. Although corn is a renewable resource, it has a far lower yield relative to the energy used to produce it than ethanol from sugar cane. Moreover, ethanol yields about 33 percent less energy per gallon than gasoline, so mileage drops off significantly. Fuel costs for Americans are often artificially inflated due to the low energy content of ethanol (in spite of a possible octane boost) and the high costs faced by fuel companies trying to comply with ill-conceived fuel regulations. In a 2014 study, the Congressional Budget Office found that raising the mandated use of corn ethanol raises motor fuel prices.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-green-logrolling-classic-1542579487

For a perfect example of green daydreaming gone awry, look to the waters off Virginia Beach, which will soon feature two wind turbines with blades rising as tall as the Washington Monument. It’s impressive engineering, but it makes zero economic sense, according to Virginia’s utilities regulators. They’ve issued a scorching order that . . . approves the project. Yes, the surprise ending is that their factual analysis doesn’t matter under a green fiat from the state Legislature.

Dominion Energy , Virginia’s biggest utility, plans to spend $300 million to build the two turbines 27 miles off the coast. Together they will produce 12 megawatts of power, enough for 3,000 homes. This first pair of turbines is a “demonstration project” to let Dominion gather data and experience. Then, as soon as 2024, it could begin dotting the adjacent waters with hundreds more, enough to generate 2,000 megawatts and light 500,000 homes.

This summer Dominion asked Virginia’s State Corporation Commission, which regulates electric utilities, to deem the plan “prudent.” As reason to act swiftly, it cited pressure to cut carbon emissions. Senate Bill 966, championed by Dominion and signed in March by Gov. Ralph Northam, set a state objective of 5,000 megawatts of solar and wind power by 2028.

The commission’s 20-page order, issued Nov. 2, is a takedown from front to back. “Dominion’s customers will pay the costs of this Project,” it says. The two turbines will generate electricity at 78 cents a kilowatt-hour—compared with 9.4 cents for new onshore wind, 5.6 cents for new solar, and around three cents for energy bought on the open market.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/16/misguided-environmentalism-blame-californias-wildfires/
The saddest part about these fires in California is that they are self inflicted. Californians should not allow such mismanagement to continue.

I grew up in California’s Ventura County and have family in both southern and northern California. Right now, the most deadly fire in California’s history is racing across northern California. The Camp Fire has already killed at least 56 people, burned down 7,700 homes, and destroyed the entire town of Paradise. A brush fire is also wreaking havoc on southern California. The Woolsey Fire has destroyed 98,362 acres, killed two people, and damaged several Hollywood landmarks such as the set of “MASH” and the Reagan Ranch.

Article after article blames two things for California’s frequent fires: global warming and human action. For example, a BuzzFeed article is titled, “How A Booming Population And Climate Change Made California’s Wildfires Worse Than Ever.” While dry conditions make fires more likely and people often start them, this misses the big picture. President Trump summed it up on Nov 10. He wrote, “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor … Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/climate-scientists-discover-error-in-m

Two researchers have been forced to issue a major correction to a recent study indicating oceans have been warming at a significantly higher rate than previously thought due to climate change.

The paper, published October 31 in the scientific journal Nature, suggested ocean temperatures have risen roughly 60 percent higher than estimated by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But, after errors in the authors’ methodology were identified, they realized their findings were roughly in line with those of the IPCC, after all.

The researchers’ alarming findings were uncritically reported by numerous mainstream-media outlets but Nic Lewis, a mathematician and popular critic of the consensus on man-made climate change, quickly identified errors.

“The findings of the . . . paper were peer reviewed and published in the world’s premier scientific journal and were given wide coverage in the English-speaking media,” Lewis wrote in a critique of the paper. “Despite this, a quick review of the first page of the paper was sufficient to raise doubts as to the accuracy of its results.”

Ralph Keeling, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who co-authored the paper, said he and his partner, Laure Resplandy of Princeton, quickly realized the implications of their mistake once Lewis pointed it out.