RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday took the Obama fuel economy rules off autopilot. This is good news for consumers, automakers and the U.S. economy, but the Trump Administration’s big test will be negotiating around the political potholes.

Corporate average fuel economy (Cafe) standards are a vestige of the 1970s gas shortages. Like the Nixon-era price controls, the fuel standards were intended to reduce gas consumption. But the environmental left long ago hijacked the rules to impose their vision of an electric-car future.

In 2012 the Obama EPA turned up the Cafe dial and mandated a fleetwide average of 54.5 miles a gallon by 2025 with a midpoint review in 2017. After President Trump won the election, Obama EPA chief Gina McCarthy blazed through the review and upheld the 2012 targets no matter the economic and technological obstacles.

Passenger cars were about half of U.S. vehicle sales in 2012 when gas averaged $3.60 a gallon. But last year they made up only about a third of the fleet mix, and their share has been declining amid lower gas prices. This will make it nearly impossible to hit future targets even with cleaner technologies. By the Obama EPA’s own projections, fewer than 1% of gas-burning vehicles would meet its 2022 target.

Many automakers have met EPA’s targets so far by selling small and electric cars at a loss, and some have shifted production to lower-cost Mexico. Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne has estimated that his company loses $14,000 on each Fiat 500e.

The EPA announced Monday that it will begin to roll back Obama-era vehicle-emission standards due to concerns the regulations were overzealous and the product of “politically charged expediency.”

The emissions standards, which would have applied to cars and light trucks produced between 2022 and 2025, were a core component of the Obama administration’s commitment under the Paris Climate Accords to cut U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions 26 to 28 percent by 2025. The announcement represents the conclusion of the Trump administration’s review of the regulations and the beginning of a months-long rule-rewriting process.“Obama’s EPA cut the midterm evaluation process short with politically charged expediency, made assumptions about the standards that didn’t comport with reality and set the standards too high,” EPA administrator Scott Pruitt wrote in a statement.

Pruitt also announced the agency will “reexamine” a waiver granted by the Obama administration, which allows California to set its own, more stringent vehicle-emissions standards. The move will likely prompt yet another legal battle between the Trump administration and California, which has established itself as a bastion of judicial resistance to federal immigration and environmental policy under the administration.

While Democrats viewed the Obama EPA regulations as a necessarily aggressive response to climate change, the agency has been criticized by industry stakeholders and Republican lawmakers for setting unrealistic goals. Automakers missed 2016 tailpipe-emission targets by 9 grams per mile and Obama EPA officials conceded that they would likely come up short of the 54.5 mile per gallon fuel-efficiency target for autos produced in 2025, as well.

Five American oil companies find themselves in a San Francisco courtroom. California v. Chevron is a civil action brought by the city attorneys of San Francisco and Oakland, who accuse the defendants of creating a “public nuisance” by contributing to climate change and of conspiring to cover it up so they could continue to profit.

No trial date has been set, but on March 21 the litigants gathered for a “climate change tutorial” ordered by Judge William Alsup —a prospect that thrilled climate-change alarmists. Excited spectators gathered outside the courtroom at 6 a.m., urged on by advocates such as the website Grist, which declared “Buckle up, polluters! You’re in for it now,” and likened the proceeding to the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial.

In the event, the hearing did not go well for the plaintiffs—and not for lack of legal talent. Steve W. Berman, who represented the cities, is a star trial lawyer who has made a career and a fortune suing corporations for large settlements, including the $200 billion-plus tobacco settlement in 1998.

“Until now, fossil fuel companies have been able to talk about climate science in political and media arenas where there is far less accountability to the truth,” Michael Burger of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University told Grist. The hearing did mark a shift toward accountability—but perhaps not in the way activists would have liked.

Judge Alsup started quietly. He flattered the plaintiffs’ first witness, Oxford physicist Myles Allen, by calling him a “genius,” but he also reprimanded Mr. Allen for using a misleading illustration to represent carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and a graph ostensibly about temperature rise that did not actually show rising temperatures. CONTINUE AT SITE

Most would consider this an odd question and probably ignore it or just delete it. Not so fast, please, my friends! The answer to the question is important in understanding the puzzling ineffectiveness of the greenhouse gas (GHG) carbon dioxide (CO2) in warming the climate — as seen in the 20th century record and as deduced from the existence of the widening gap between the model results based on rising CO2 and observations of atmospheric temperatures by both satellites and radiosondes [Fig. 1]

Fig. 1 –Model results vs. observations[i]

Note the growing “gap.”

“Greenhouse gas” only means that CO2 absorbs some infrared (IR) radiation; it does not guarantee climate warming.

In fact, the outcome depends mostly on atmospheric structure, measured by balloon-borne radiosondes. It is expressed by the so-called atmospheric lapse rate (ALR), defined as change in atmospheric temperature with altitude.[ii] [Note that “lapse rate” has nothing to do with back-sliding alcoholics and smokers.]

Physicists who have examined our counter-intuitive hypothesis, all agree with the science — albeit somewhat reluctantly. Such is the power of group-think that even experts, with some exception, find the idea that CO2 might cool the climate difficult to accept.

People have been enjoying and drinking coffee for thousands of years and recent health studies suggest it’s rather good for you, but now, all of a sudden, the State of California claims it has “science” to support the notion that coffee causes cancer.

That’s why some numbskull judge ruled that now all coffee must carry warning labels, same as dreaded, dangerous, cigarettes, warning everyone of cancer and attempting to get at least some people to stop. Can you say: ‘judiciary out of control?’

Associated Press reports:

A Los Angeles judge has determined that coffee companies must carry an ominous cancer warning label because of a chemical produced in the roasting process.

Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle said Wednesday that Starbucks and other companies failed to show that benefits from drinking coffee outweighed any risks. He ruled in an earlier phase of trial that companies hadn’t shown the threat from the chemical was insignificant.

The Council for Education and Research on Toxics, a nonprofit group, sued Starbucks and 90 other companies under a state law that requires warnings on a wide range of chemicals that can cause cancer. One is acrylamide, a carcinogen present in coffee.

What this activist suit and consequent judicial overreach represent is a sort of medicalization of food, nanny-state-style, as if food itself were some sort of toxic medicine, full of side effects, instead of a combination of risks and rewards, all ameliorated by moderation of use. And this judicial order to label coffee as cancerous is hideously disproportionate – the same sorts of carcinogens criticized in the coffee roasting process found in minute quantities can also be found in roasted peppers and bacon, too. Now coffee joins the ranks of all the other things that can possibly cause cancer, along with air pollution and BPA water bottles and building materials, many of which also carrry warnings yet change no behavior and improve no one’s quality of life. Now coffee needs to carry the explicit warning label, as if we would all like to buy a product full of as many warnings of side effects as an advertised prescription medicine on television, and as if those labels actually give any useful context or probability of cancer. It’s nonsense, because people who do get cancer rarely ever know what actually causes it. What’s more, as oncologists will tell you, none of these risk factors, not one, have anything like the predictive power of getting cancer as genetics do.

While professed journalists were taking dutiful dictation from local alarmists keen to blame bushfires on global warming, a telling court case has been unfolding in California, where catastropharians set out to sue Big Oil for wrecking the planet. It hasn’t gone as planned.

The current tactic of global-warming catastrophists is to sue major oil companies for wrecking the planet — never mind that fossil-fuel energy has lifted billions from squalor and back-breaking toil during the past 150 years and continues to do so. The most advanced of these cases is now playing out in a US federal court in San Francisco before Judge William Alsup. Because he’s insisting on evidence about human causation of warming, the case has tested the soundness of orthodox climate science and so far found it wanting.

Leading sceptic scientists have also submitted briefs, opening up a climate debate warmists have been desperate to avoid for the past decade. This article will look at the court case and then at the history of climate debates.

In the US there’s a rash of lawsuits by green/liberal plaintiffs against the federal government and oil majors, with one echoing the ‘children’s crusade’ of 1212. The plaintiffs, 21 kids the youngest no more than ten, have been marshalled to sue the US government for allegedly fostering climate warmth and degrading the kids’ “rights to life, liberty and property”.[1] One plaintiff, 19-year-old Sophie Kivlehan, is the granddaughter of James Hansen, godfather of the global anti-CO2 jihad and a man who has obscenely compared coal trains with those that transported Jews to Nazi extermination camps.[2] [3]

But the big excitement last week was the so-called “Exxon knew” lawsuit brought by the cities of San Francisco and neighbouring Oakland against five oil majors.[4] The two plaintiffs claim the oil producers conspired Big Tobacco-style to conceal the climate harm of their products. The majors are supposedly responsible for the local sea level rise and should therefore pay billions of dollars for sea walls, dykes, whatever.

Well, yes, it’s all ridiculous. The San Francisco tide gauge (1854-2016) shows an upward trend complicated by some sinking of the land — the city is, after all, in an earthquake zone, and has been rocked repeatedly — but the “rise” is still a mere eight inches over the past 100 years. The plaintiffs’ lawyers are nevertheless making their song and dance about the rise, savouring a reported 23% of any damages to be paid by Big Oil. Their case relies by necessity on future sea-damage forecasts by the shaky CMIP5 suite of climate computer-models, and then they need to demonstrate that the oil majors are responsible, as distinct from, say, car and truck drivers who actually pump out the emissions. Another six Californian counties and cities are trying to run similar cases and in New York, the city wants $US20 billion restitution from the oil majors (less, of course, a hefty cut for the lawyers).

The Environmental Protection Agency will no longer rely on “secret” scientific data to justify regulations, Administrator Scott Pruitt announced last week. EPA regulators and agency-funded researchers have become accustomed to producing unaccountable, dodgy science to advance a political agenda.

The saga began in the early 1990s, when the EPA sought to regulate fine particulate matter known as PM2.5—dust and soot smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter. PM2.5 was not known to cause death, but by 1994 EPA-supported scientists had developed two lines of research purporting to show that it did. When the studies were run past the EPA’s Clean Air Science Advisory Committee, it balked. It believed the studies relied on dubious statistical analysis and asked for the underlying data. The EPA ignored the request.

As the EPA prepared to issue its proposal for PM2.5 regulation in 1996, Congress stepped in. Rep. Thomas Bliley, chairman of the House Commerce Committee, sent a sharply written letter to Administrator Carol Browner asking for the data underlying studies. Ms. Browner delegated the response to a subordinate, who told Mr. Bliley the EPA saw “no useful purpose” in obtaining the data. Congress responded by inserting a provision in a 1998 bill requiring that data used to support federal regulation must be made available to the public via the Freedom of Information Act. But it was hastily written, and a federal appellate court held the law unenforceable in 2003.

The controversy went dormant until 2011, when a newly Republican Congress took exception to the Obama EPA’s anticoal rules, which relied on the same PM2.5 studies. Again the EPA was defiant. Administrator Gina McCarthy refused requests for the data sets and defied a congressional subpoena. CONTINUE AT SITE

The east coast of the United States just endured a rare spring snowstorm. How could this happen when NASA is constantly announcing that we have record high temperatures?

Advocates of the global warming theory have been predicting rising temperatures since around 1983. Available data indicated no such trend, so these advocates found reasons to adjust past temperatures downward. People who remembered the 1930s as being the hottest decade of their lifetimes were ignored. If people witness spring snowstorms, should they be ignored, too?

Recent scientific work predicts that the sun’s output will diminish in our lifetimes. Valentina Zharkova et al, here and here, estimate that we will have an ice age from about 2020 to 2053.

The theory about ice ages is simple. Do you remember when your science teacher would rap two tuning forks against a table? They would make two tones plus a periodic lull, which your teacher called a beat. Zharkova believes that the sun has two resonances and they sometimes cause a beat. The last beat that we observed, the Maunder Minimum, was from 1645 to 1715. It accompanied a climatic episode known as the “Little Ice Age” (LIA).

Much to the regret of the warmist establishment, its grant-lapping minions and the rent-seeking camp followers who have made our electricity amongst the world’s dearest, witches and heretics are no longer tossed on a pyre. These days, it is reputations and careers that are incinerated.

The Little Ice age was quite severe in Europe from 1550- 1700. After the prosperity and plenty of the medieval warm period, the LIA led to impoverishment, crop failure, starvation and a resurgence in witch burnings. Every misfortune was an excuse to accuse someone of being a witch working under the direction of Satan. Many of these accusations were the result of some calamity caused by an extreme weather event.

For example, in 1626 a hailstorm struck Germany and dropped a metre of hail. Two days later an Arctic front descended on Europe. Rivers froze, grapes on the vine ‘exploded’ and rye and barley crops were destroyed. Then came a severe frost the likes of which had not been seen for 500 years. Because all of this was so unusual it was determined to be ‘unnatural’ and there arose a cry that sorcerers and witches must be responsible and must be punished. Around 5000 were burnt in Germany alone.

It is estimated that across Europe there were at least 50,000 executions during this period, all carried out with the blessing of the educated and privileged. It was dangerous to be a sceptic because those who dissented from the hysteria were inevitably themselves accused of sorcery subject to the same punishments. Thus was any debate stifled.

weyerjean bodinLegal philosopher Jean Bodin (left) in 1580 insisted that witchcraft was the most terrible problem facing humankind. Bodin championed the international attack against sceptics, such as physician Johann Weyer (right), who tried to bring some scientific rationality to the discussion by pointing out that “confessions” obtained through torture were both worthless and immoral. In response, Bodin accused Weyer of witchcraft. Sceptics had to be wrenched out of society, he thundered, with any country tolerating them certain to be struck by plagues, famines and wars.

Sound familiar? If the modern parallels escape you, let us compare the dark past with what has happened over the last 30 years. And if James Cook University’s disgraceful shunning of Professor Peter Ridd comes to mind, so much the better.

Every perceived extreme weather event is attributed the evil CO2 causing global warming which causes the climate to go totally berserk and, of course, it’s those evil white capitalistic CO2 spewing industries which are the devil’s servants.
Global warming-caused climate change is the most terrible problem facing mankind.
Sceptical of the two points above? Well you must be one of those “climate denier”. Burning at the stake is no longer permitted, but being marginalized, ostracized and harassed is perfectly okay.
The scientific method of observation — hypothesis, develop testable predictions, gather data to test predictions, refine, alter or reject hypothesis — is not applicable to global warming “fact”. The “science is settled”, don’t you know, so no debate will be tolerated. Just send more grants, please, so warmists can continue to “prove” something they insist is already beyond dispute. As Macquarie University assures prospective students, the thriving field of climate-change validation opens up “career prospects and further research opportunities”.