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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

Climate Cult Tyrants Are Still Worse Than COVID Tyrants By Stephen Kruiser

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2023/08/28/the-morning-briefing-climate-cult-tyrants-are-still-worse-than-covid-tyrants-n1722563

Freedom-loving Americans have had a rough go of it since the first arrival of the Wuhan Chinese Bat Flu on our shores. The Trump/Fauci alliance made things bad enough, but the tyrannical flex got really bad when Joe Biden was installed in the presidency. As we have seen in recent weeks, the COVID fetish Left is attempting to relive its glory days of oppression.

With the stink of the pandemic government heavies still lingering so strongly, the Climate Cult thugs have been hoping to keep their campaign of error and terror continuing unabated without anyone noticing. We do occasionally discuss them here in the Briefing, but it’s time to check in again.

There is, of course, a lot of overlap between the COVID tyrants and the climate tyrants. The lefties do often like to specialize, however. The climate commies have been grifting in that lane for so long that they don’t really need to pay attention to any opportunities that may come along on the COVID panic front.

John Kerry — America’s Ugliest Trophy Wife — is tasked with demonizing anyone who questions the Climate Cult orthodoxy, and Ben wrote about his latest antics:

The corporate state is intent, apparently, on ramping up its propaganda against so-called “climate deniers,” presumably to set the rhetorical groundwork for more extreme legal and social action against them in the future. So it dispatched something called its “climate envoy,” John Kerry, to Scotland with that aim.

Democrats’ climate change blame game for Hawaii fire confronted by reality after Maui identifies cause White House clean energy czar John Podesta said Hawaii fires were ‘fueled by climate change’ By Thomas Catenacci

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/democrats-climate-change-blame-game-hawaii-fire-confronted-reality-maui-identifies-cause

Hawaiian officials attributed the cause of catastrophic wildfires to alleged failures from the state’s main power utility company and downed power lines this week after Democrats blamed the disaster on global warming.

In a lawsuit filed Thursday, the government of Maui County, Hawaii, alleged Hawaiian Electric Company (HECO) and its subsidiaries failed to properly power down live electrical equipment amid a red flag windstorm earlier this month. Due to this failure, downed power lines operated by the utility company sparked a series of deadly fires on the island, the lawsuit claimed.

“The lawsuit alleges that the Defendants acted negligently by failing to power down their electrical equipment despite a National Weather Service Red Flag Warning on August 7th,” Maui County said in a release announcing its lawsuit. 

“The lawsuit further alleges HECO’s energized and downed power lines ignited dry fuel such as grass and brush, causing the fires,” the announcement added. “The lawsuit also alleges failure to maintain the system and power grid, which caused the systemic failures starting three different fires on August 8th.”

Maui County argued in the lawsuit that HECO has a duty “to properly maintain and repair the electric transmission lines, and other equipment including utility poles associated with their transmission of electricity, and to keep vegetation properly trimmed and maintained so as to prevent contact with overhead power lines and other electric equipment.”

However, Democratic lawmakers, a top White House official and Hawaii Gov. Josh Green have all blamed the event, which has claimed the lives of at least 115 people, on human-caused global warming.

Vivek Ramaswamy is the only one who got it right By Jack Hellner

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/08/vivek_ramaswamy_is_the_only_one_who_got_it_right.html

At the Republican presidential primary debate, Vivek Ramaswamy was the only person who gave the correct answer on whether climate change is caused by humans. He said the climate change agenda is a hoax and that more people die each year from the climate change agenda than from climate change itself. 

Glenn Kessler, the fact-checker at WaPo, was confused by this statement, as I expect almost all the media, educators, entertainers, and other Democrats were because they have been indoctrinated for decades that global warming and storms are causing massive harm and deaths throughout the World. 

The problem is they just repeat what they are told without ever asking questions or doing simple research.  The leftist agenda to control people has always been more important than the truth. 

Vivek Ramaswamy says ‘hoax’ agenda kills more people than climate change

We puzzled till our puzzler was sore — this claim makes no sense.

By Glenn Kessler

Since the media won’t do any research, I will do it for them. 

In 26 out of the 30 years between 1990 and 2020, there were fewer than 10,000 deaths from storms.  In 2020, there were a whopping 1,700 people who died worldwide from storms. 

In 2020, storms were the cause of death to more than 1.7 thousand people across the globe. In the past three decades, the highest annual death toll due to storms was registered in 1991, when storm events were responsible for the death of more than 146 thousand people worldwide. That year, a massive cyclone hit Bangladesh, becoming one of the deadliest storms of the century. The death count due to storms was also remarkably high in 2008, mainly associated with a cyclone which hit Myanmar in May.

To put the 1,700 deaths in perspective, 67 million people died in 2022 from all causes.  The 1,700 is less than one hundredth of one percent. 

1.5 Degrees Of Climate Fabrication

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/24/1-5-degrees-of-climate-fabrication/

Ghoulish scold John Kerry, the White House’s climate hobgoblin, has repeatedly warned that the world is not on track to contain a 1.5-degree Celsius increase in global temperature above the pre-industrial level, and this means disaster is looming. Others have made the same point, and the media just goes along for the ride. Their predictions are worthless, though. We know this because the United Nations told us so.

The rock-solid, undeniable fact is that it’s impossible to make long-term climate predictions, because our climate is ever changing and volatile. It says so in the Third Assessment Report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:

“The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”

And it has said this since 2001, when that report was put together.

Yet Kerry and his ilk, and we use that term with with greatest contempt we can muster, continue to tell us they can predict the global temperature of the future and it’s going to burn us all.

The alarmists point to the sentence that follows, which says, “Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions.” They then claim that damning passage is taken out of context.

How Science is Done These Days Tony Thomas

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2023/08/how-science-is-done-these-days/

There’s nothing new about mainstream climate scientists conspiring to bury papers that throw doubt on catastrophic global warming. The Climategate leaks showed co-compiler of the HadCRUT global temperature series Dr Phil Jones emailing Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann, July 8, 2004:

I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth, a colleague] and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!

Thanks to a science whistle-blower, there’s now documentation of a current exercise as bad as that captured in the Jones-Mann correspondence. This new and horrid saga – again involving Dr Mann – sets out to deplatform and destroy a peer-endorsed published paper by four Italian scientists. Their paper in European Physical Journal Plus is titled A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming and documents that extreme weather and related disasters are not generally increasing, contrary to the catastrophists feeding misinformation to the Guardian/ABC axis and other compliant media.

The witch-hunt has Australian elements. Last September, The Australian’s environment writer, Graham Lloyd, highlighted the paper (paywalled) and its conclusion that the “extreme events emergency” was overblown. Sky News Australia, which twice reported the study, picked up more than 400,000 views and thousands of comments.

The green-left Guardian countered with a hit-piece by in-house cataastrophist Graham Readfearn featuring professors Lisa Alexander and Steve Sherwood, both of NSW University. They alleged cherry-picking and misquoting. Their main specific complaint was that the Italians’ paper had drawn on the 2013 5th IPCC Report rather than the recent 6th Report. (The Italians say they submitted the paper before the 6th Report emerged).

The Guardian’s fuss caught the attention of Agence France-Presse’s (AFP) Marlowe Hood, who modestly styles himself “Senior Editor, Future of the Planet” and “Herald of the Anthropocene”. He penned his own diatribe for The Australian (paywalled but also here) against the Italians’ paper. Jumping the gun on any editorial inquiry, AFP branded the study “faulty” and “fundamentally flawed”, involving “discredited assertions” and “grossly manipulated data”. This abuse was normal since AFP and The Guardian are leaders of the Covering Climate Now (CCN) coalition of some 500 media outlets with reach to a 2 billion audience. These outlets signed the CCN pledge to hype catastrophism and rebut and censor any scepticism about our planet’s forecast fiery fate.

There’s More To Story Than ‘Climate Change’ — The Media Must Keep Pushing And Asking Questions About The Lahaina Fires Linnea Lueken

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/23/theres-more-to-story-than-climate-change-the-media-must-keep-pushing-and-asking-questions-about-the-lahaina-fires/

The legacy media, quick to attribute every natural disaster to climate change, has actually done some good reporting recently on the tragic wildfires that destroyed the town of Lahaina and killed probably more than 100 people as many are still missing. Media reports were not so honest at first.

In the initial days after Lahaina burned, of course, outlets like The New York Times breathlessly said climate change made Hawaii “a tinderbox.”

This is despite the fact that, regardless of the public perception of Hawaii that the Times authors give, “a far cry from the dry landscape normally associated with fire threats,” the island state is actually one of the most fire-prone in the country. This is due in large part to its unique geography, which allows eastern trade winds to dump water on the eastern volcanic slopes – leading to the familiar verdant rainforest. But the western sides of Maui and the other islands in the chain are a lot drier naturally, and are home to dry grassy hills.

This effect was compounded by a passing hurricane to the south. Because the wind goes from a high-pressure zone to a lower-pressure zone, the low pressures of Hurricane Dora far to the south aided in the accelerated downhill wind speeds on Maui. These high, dry winds knocked around power cables that may have led to the initial sparks, which were then turned into firestorms that swept downhill and through town. 

So, are hurricanes to blame? No. Despite media claims, data show hurricanes are not getting more frequent or extreme. Is drought the culprit? Also, not likely. While the Times cited a 2015 study that claimed Hawaii was seeing less rainfall, available drought severity and coverage data seem to refute this.

View in browser When humanity becomes the enemy Few are aware of the links between fascism and climate change Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/when-humanity-becomes-the-enemy?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

At the end of the 18th century, the economist Thomas Malthus predicted that the world’s population would outstrip food supplies unless the increasing number of people was checked by restraints such as war, famine or disease. As a result of his apocalyptic prediction, he thought that most people should die without reproducing.

In fact, although the world’s population has massively increased since then, hunger and the absolute poverty that produces starvation have declined. Science, progress and human ingenuity produced a dynamic which Malthus failed to foresee, along with other flaws in his thinking. So he has been proved spectacularly wrong. Everyone knows that… don’t they? 

Well, apparently not. From the readers’ comments thread below my column in this morning’s Times of London (£), it appears that most of them believe Malthus was right! Reader and after reader wrote it was obvious that the world’s resources were finite, and so it was obvious that there were too many people in the world as a result. 

The fact that the global catastrophe Malthus had predicted hadn’t happened was brushed aside. All that meant, they said, was that this hadn’t happened yet. But it would in the end!

This absence of reason is alarming; but it explains why so many have fallen for today’s corresponding myth of imminent global apocalypse: catastrophic man-made global warming. “Malthus was right!” tells us something very frightening about public ignorance, gullibility and the persistent grip of religion-substitute beliefs that are a byway to hell.

In my Times column, I wrote about the reaction of a leading British demographer, Professor Sarah Harper, to the 20-year low in the birthrate in England and Wales which reflects a long-term trend of falling birth rates across the world. 

Professor Harper commented that falling birthrates in the west were “good for . . . our planet”. Declining fertility in rich countries, she said, would help to address the “general over-consumption that we have at the moment”, which was having a negative impact on the world.

The Maui wildfires are proof that carbon zealotry can kill By Betsy McCaughey

https://nypost.com/2023/08/18/the-maui-wildfires-are-proof-that-carbon-zealotry-can-kill/

Zero carbon zealotry can be dangerous to your health. In fact, in the hands of government officials, it can kill.

Ask the grieving families of Maui, the Hawaiian island ravaged by wildfires last week.

As the fires raged, liberal media blamed the devastation on climate change.

“How Climate Change Turned Lush Hawaii into a Tinderbox,” announced The New York Times. 

Sorry, the evidence is piling up that the opposite is true.

Zero carbon extremism diverted the island’s main electrical producer, Hawaiian Electric, from insulating wires, clearing areas around vulnerable transmission sites and taking other precautions to prevent wildfires it knew were likely to occur.  

It dithered on prevention, while pouring funds and manpower into meeting the Hawaiian government’s mandate that all electricity must be produced from renewables by 2045.

The death toll from Lahaina Fire has reached 111, but will go higher, because much of the island hasn’t  been searched. 

The fire’s already the deadliest in US history. But wildfires ignited by inadequately maintained electrical transmission systems — uninsulated wires, flimsy poles, out-of-control plant growth — have also devastated Texas, Colorado and California.

Six out of 20 recent wildfires in California, including the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85, the Kinkade fire in Sonoma in 2019 and the Dixie Fire in 2022, were caused by sparks due to aging transmission equipment and poor maintenance.

The EPA Defies the Supreme Court The agency imposes a ‘suite’ of climate policies and doesn’t even try to hide its own lawlessness. By Chris Horner

https://www.wsj.com/articles/epa-environmental-protection-supreme-court-regulation-unconstitutional-climate-change-administrative-state-biden-42f31ce3?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

In politics, inadvertently telling the truth is called a “gaffe.” Last year Michael Regan, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, made a remark in passing that gave away the Biden administration’s plans for enforcing its climate agenda through a “suite of rules” imposed under programs lacking any credible connection to climate. A few months later, a Supreme Court opinion transformed Mr. Regan’s indiscretion into justification for wholesale judicial repudiation of the Biden administration’s climate regulatory blitz.

Mr. Regan’s comment came on March 10, 2022, when he addressed the press following his keynote address to CERAWeek, a climate conference in Houston. A reporter asked about vulnerabilities of the EPA’s approach to installing climate regulation through the Obama-Biden Clean Power Plan, which was then awaiting judgment by the court. Mr. Regan replied that the agency had abandoned the idea of relying on any specific grant of regulatory authority. Instead it was in the process of tightening rules under numerous and varied regulatory programs all at once, pressuring disfavored operations to close and compelling investment consistent with the EPA’s desires.

Mr. Regan went on to cite rules to tighten regulation of mercury, ozone, soot, hazardous air pollutants, water effluent and coal ash under acknowledged congressional grants of authority. But he also called the “expedited retirement” of power plants “the best tool for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions” and opined that the “industry gets to take a look at this suite of rules all at once and say, ‘Is it worth doubling down on investments in this current facility or operation, or should we look at the cost and say no, it’s time to pivot and invest in a clean-energy future?’ ”

This already reflected something of a scofflaw position. Congress never approved what Mr. Regan described. It became a serious problem when the justices struck down the Clean Power Plan in June. West Virginia v. EPA held that the agency didn’t have the authority it claimed to force power-plant closures by setting unmeetable emission standards and thus dictate, as the court had put it, “how Americans get their energy.”

Chief Justice John Roberts noted for the 6-3 majority that after Congress had repeatedly considered and rejected providing the agency authority to regulate power-sector greenhouse gases, the EPA claimed “to discover an unheralded power” that represented a “transformative expansion in [its] regulatory authority” to force “generation shifting.”

Growing Warnings: Biden Could Get Scorched by Green Dependency on Red China By Ben Weingarten

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/08/17/growing_alarm_that_bidens_net-zero_approach_could_get_scorched_by_red_chinas_green_energy_dominance_973447.html

President Biden’s stance toward China hardened this month when he issued an executive order prohibiting American investment in Chinese companies developing advanced technologies that could be used by the military.

But a growing chorus of critics, including some Democrats, argue that the administration’s effort to grapple with America’s foremost adversary is contradictory, illustrated in the White House’s Beijing-empowering pursuit of ambitious climate change goals. 

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, as the White House has called for, will almost assuredly make the United States dependent on China while enriching it.

China currently holds a commanding position in the clean energy industry, controlling the natural resources and manufacturing the components essential to the Biden administration’s desired alternative energy transition. Energy experts believe that its dominance will become more entrenched in the years ahead because of domestic environmentalist opposition to perceived “dirty” mining and refining operations, and the Biden administration’s “clean energy” spending blitz – which could provide Chinese companies and subsidiaries billions in subsidies. 

The Biden administration also considers it imperative to get buy-in from Beijing on dramatically reducing emissions, given it produces more than a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions globally.