RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/thats-smoke-not-climate-change-canada-fire-forest-management-new-york-d8dcdb65?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Around 1 p.m. on Wednesday the sky began to darken, and an orange haze descended on Manhattan. I watched in amazement from my Midtown office as Mother Nature dimmed the lights and quietly reminded Gotham City of her awesome power.

What made New Yorkers feel as if they were on Mars was smoke from forest fires that wafted south from the Canadian province of Quebec and hung around amid a stalled weather pattern. People in New York tend to be outside more than most Americans because their commutes involve traveling on foot rather than going from door to door in a car. Residents were told to avoid exposure to the bad air. The Yankees postponed their game with the White Sox. Exceedingly low visibility forced LaGuardia Airport to ground planes for a time. By evening the worst had passed, though the smell of something burning lingered.

If only the effects on public policy were equally fleeting.

Evaluating the causes of this complex event calls for humility, curiosity and thoughtfulness. But politicians are in charge. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer jumped in front of a camera on Wednesday to proclaim that “we cannot ignore that climate change continues to make these disasters worse.” President Biden called the Canada burn “another stark reminder of the impacts of climate change.” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau joined the chorus.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/06/co2_is_a_climate_red_herring.html

CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHG) such as methane have been suspected for more than a century of being potentially harmful atmospheric warming agents.  The climate movement began more recently with the advent of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1989 and the release of Al Gore’s prize-winning film An Inconvenient Truth in 2006.  Climate alarm began as “man-made global warming” and, when cooling was observed even as CO2 levels continued to rise, morphed into “climate change.”

Those of us who can look behind the virtue-signaling mantra of climate change understand the theory that man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from burning oil and gas are dangerously warming the planet.  We can also appreciate the idea that marginal warming may be amplified by increased water vapor and clouds as a result of elevated CO2.  A large number of computer models are built on the presumptions of this theory.

But are our CO2 inputs to the atmosphere a real threat to our magnificent planet?  The evidence tells us no.  Although we are in the midst of a broadly warming period following the end of the most recent ice age, satellite and weather balloon data suggest that the models (and theory) are off by quite a bit.  The models project much more warming than observed in back casts.  That is interesting but perhaps not definitive.  There is also evidence that the atmosphere has slipped into a new cooling period that could lead to the next ice age.

A seminal review paper by Wijngaarden and Happer (here) illustrates a critical limitation of CO2 radiation transfer that makes it impossible for this trace molecule to cause runaway global temperature.  The limitation is known as saturation.  The key figure from the Wijngaarden-Happer paper diagrams the inhibiting effect of various greenhouse gases on infrared radiation to space.  GHGs reduce Earth’s reradiation of incoming shortwave solar radiation to space as longwave heat radiation.  Reduced reradiation of heat means air and surface warming.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-administration-newrange-mine-duluth-minnesota-natural-resources-ac88ff1d?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Americans hoping that President Biden’s agreement to sign permitting reforms as part of the debt-ceiling compromise signaled a policy change are going to be disappointed. His Administration’s hostility to natural-resource development continues apace.

On Tuesday the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers revoked a Clean Water Act permit granted by the Trump Administration for the NewRange copper and nickel mine in Minnesota’s Duluth Complex. The area isn’t virgin land. The Duluth site is part of the fabled Iron Range, which provided 70% of the iron ore that America used during World War II.

“Minnesota’s Iron Range has played a vital role in helping build America,” candidate Biden proclaimed in September 2020. “U.S. manufacturing and mining was the Arsenal of Democracy in World War II. It must be part of the Arsenal of American Prosperity today, helping power an economic recovery for working families.” Apparently not.

His Administration picked the anniversary of D-Day to deep-six the NewRange mine, which would provide minerals to power electric vehicles and his green-energy transition. The U.S. will have to import the minerals from arsenals of autocracy like Russia and China.

In other acts of economic masochism, the Interior Department last month delayed a decision on whether to let Alaska build a 211-mile road to a critical minerals mining area. The project was initially approved by Trump regulators, but Biden officials agreed to conduct a second review after green groups sued. The Administration also recently put on ice a copper mine in Arizona.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hanoi-jane-blames-white-men-for-the-climate-crisis/

Jane Fonda used her appearance at this year’s Cannes Film Festival to charge that racism and patriarchy are the causes of climate change. Jane Fonda is still the left-wing extremist she was during the Vietnam War when she was photographed on a North Vietnamese 37mm gun mount and served as a shill for the enemy back then.

“It’s good for us all to realize, there would be no climate crisis if there was no racism,” Hanoi Jane proclaimed at the film festival. “There would be no climate crisis if there was no patriarchy. A mindset that sees things in a hierarchical way. White men are the things that matter and then everything else [is] at the bottom.”

“We have to arrest and jail those men,” Fonda demanded.

What about the women (biological and trans) and people of color who drive or take public transportation, fly, use electricity, and heat their homes – all with fossil fuels? Do they have immunity from punishment under Hanoi Jane’s rules because they belong to politically correct identity groups? And how do the cows that produce methane gas emitted into the atmosphere fit in with her racism-patriarchy paradigm?

How does Jane Fonda justify her own large carbon footprints left from maintaining her former Beverly Hills mansion and the 6,679-square-foot townhouse that she reportedly bought recently for $5.45 million? Or the carbon footprints left from all the flights that Fonda has taken to attend climate change protests and get herself arrested while acting the part of a revolutionary with her celebrity friends? This hypocrite even agreed to accept, in her words, “quite a bit of money” from 90-year-old Austrian building tycoon Richard Lugner for accompanying him to the Vienna Opera Ball sponsored by Austrian oil and gas company OMV.

https://www.climatedepot.com/2023/06/01/climate-lockdowns-begin-france-bans-short-haul-flights-in-favor-of-train-travel-to-cut-carbon-emissions/?mc_cid=f104f256f4&mc_eid=262379acc3

Marc Morano comment on banning short airline flights: “You were warned! This is what a climate lockdown looks like. This is what the Great Reset looks like. The climate agenda demands you give up airline travel, car travel, cheap reliable energy, and plentiful food. Net Zero goals are now dictating vehicle shortages to force more people into mass transit.

They’re going after your freedom of movement; they’re going after private car ownership, they’re going after everything it means to be a free person and turning it over to the administrative state.” 

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-clean-green-blackouts-bankruptcy-america

Rick Perry is the former governor of Texas and 14th secretary of energy.

From the beginning, President Joe Biden has made it clear his administration will focus on a “clean” and “green” future, including an aggressive move toward electric vehicles (EVs).

Unfortunately, his administration continues to overestimate electric vehicle market trends and force a massive volume of EVs into a power grid that simply isn’t prepared. Their latest move comes from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), whose proposed new tailpipe emissions standards for light- and heavy-duty vehicles are so strict the administration predicts a shocking two-thirds of new vehicles sold in 2032 would be electric vehicles.

The goal of this proposal is not just about cleaner cars, but a broader plan by Biden and the environmental lobby to force the extinction of internal combustion engine vehicles and reach zero emissions by 2050. While decreasing emissions is certainly a laudable goal, the path the administration and its agencies are using to get us there is not a realistic one and will create problems and huge costs for the American public.

As one outlet noted, “The new rules would require nothing short of a revolution in the U.S. auto industry, a moment in some ways as significant as the June morning in 1896 when Henry Ford took his ‘horseless carriage’ for a test run and changed American life and industry.”

The rule will certainly change the auto industry, but in this instance, the revolutionary change will only exacerbate serious challenges we face, not conquer them.

First take our nation’s power grid. Where do you think that electricity is coming from when you plug your car into a charger? Growing demand for electricity is already straining our aging power grid and a flood of new demand from EVs will only strain it more. 

The Electric Power Supply Association recently pointed to National Renewable Energy Laboratory calculations in 2021 finding that electrifying the economy could increase electric demand by as much as 81% in 2050 – a calculation made without the EPA’s new rule. Heading into the summer, The North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) warned our nation’s power grid is already in precarious shape with renewed risks for outages due to rising temperatures and intense storms. The EPA should heed this warning before moving forward with their proposed rule.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2023/05/climate-modelling-rubbish-in-rubbish-out/

“The rest is history: the history of how dodgy “post-normal” science joined up with a pseudo-scientific “precautionary principle” to corrupt the UN, IPCC and WMO and, despite the “vast uncertainties”, ultimately created the NetZero decarbonising monster that is disrupting countries — and energy markets — everywhere on the bogus pretext of “fighting climate change”.

Complexity and perplexity go together like a horse and carriage, or in this case, the climate and a modeller. When probability claims masquerade as genuine predictions and international agencies and governments promote alarmism at every opportunity and confirmation bias distorts the search for truth, the outcome is today’s witch’s brew of “climate change” hyperbole and “save-the-planet” activism that is now disrupting every aspect of life.    

Consider the World Meteorological Organization’s press release of May 17, 2023: Global temperatures set to reach new records in the next five years. It warned that:

Global temperatures are likely to surge to record levels in the next five years, fuelled by heat-trapping greenhouse gases and a naturally occurring El Niño event, according to a new update issued by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). 

There is a 66% likelihood that the annual average near-surface global temperature between 2023 and 2027 will be more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for at least one year.  There is a 98% likelihood that at least one of the next five years, and the five-year period as a whole, will be the warmest on record.

A temporary reprieve from a french-fry fate is possible. But hold the champagne. The world is still going to exceed 1.5°C “with increasing frequency”. Unless we prostrate ourselves with more fervour at the altar of NetZero it could become permanent. Whatever happens, like Rick and Ilsa in Casablanca, we will always have Paris. 

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/05/the-ethical-inferiority-of-renewables/

Imagine for a moment that you’re a “believer in climate change action”, perhaps even a Teal candidate recently elected to Parliament on the strength of your concern, and that of your electorate, about carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. You fly (on a fossil-fuelled aircraft) to one of the world’s most impoverished countries—the Democratic Republic of Congo, let us say—and then drive (almost certainly not in an electric vehicle) carefully and slowly over rough, muddy, unsealed roads to an impoverished shanty town.

Alighting from the air-conditioned car into the tropical heat, you look a destitute couple in the eye and, through a Congolese interpreter, tell them: “I’m sorry, but you and your children—as well as billions of other impoverished people—cannot have what I’ve taken for granted since the day I was born: fossil-fuelled development and its immeasurable benefits such as clean drinking water, an effective sewerage system, decent accommodation, sufficient nourishing food, modern medical attention, local, national and global transport and communications and much else besides. You cannot have these essentials because they’re fossil-fuelled; I advocate the rapid elimination of fossil fuels, and my influential friends and I mean to get our way.” You then return to the airport, fly home and demand “climate action now!”

If that remains your position, you’re not alone: among the most despicable moral failings of the zealots of decarbonisation, environmental, social and governance principles (so-called ESG, which one astute critic has defined as “Economic Suicide Guaranteed”), “net zero” and the like, is an indifference to the point of callousness that elevates a “first world” ideology above all else—including the welfare of the world’s poorest people. Bluntly, climate activists are at best shallow, parochial and self-centred, and at worst, greedy narcissists.

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2023/05/24/another_green_energy_assault_on_the_west_901421.html

In March, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL) introduced legislation, called the SITE Act, which will allow thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines to be sited over state and local objections, and allow developers to take privately owned lands through eminent domain.  The stated goal is to enable the development of vast quantities of heavily subsidized wind and solar power in rural areas and transmit it to cities where the electricity is needed to meet unrealistic and costly electrification mandates, such as those in California and New York.

The New York Times, for one, is celebrating.  Forcing rural states, which many Times readers deride as “flyover country,” to supply the electricity needs of coastal urban ones is seen by the Times as rural states’ obligation.  In a May 4, 2023, editorial, the Times wrote, “To tap the potential of renewable energy, the United States needs to dramatically expand the electric grid between places with abundant wind and sunshine and places where people live and work.”  Authority for siting new transmission lines would be under the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which already has authority over siting of new natural gas pipelines.  

That same editorial also stated, “The federal government — the mechanism Americans have created to act in the interest of people in America as a whole — is where those decisions should be made.”  Given the actions taken in the past by the Bureau of Land Management, which has prevented ranchers from grazing on millions of acres of federally owned lands; the Forest Service, which last year began a prescribed burn on a windy day, despite please not to, and caused the largest wild fire in New Mexico’s history; and the Environmental Protection Agency, which considers every stream, pond, and arroyo to be a regulated wetland, many in rural states would likely disagree.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/a_strong_el_nio_in_2023_not_likely.html

Global warming completely stopped in 2018.  Temperatures will likely remain steady until 2025 and may decline slightly by 2030.  A strong El Niño in 2023 is unlikely.  I’ll explain all of my predictions — after we hear from the experts.

NOAA recently predicted a 55% chance of a strong El Niño in late 2023.  The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) threw more fuel on the fire when it announced, “There is a 98% likelihood that at least one of the next five years, and the five-year period as a whole, will be the warmest on record.”  Obviously, the MSM had a field day with this.  Take for example this headline from USA Today: “Scientists warn an El Niño is likely coming that could bring scorching heat to Earth.”

Rather than taking the well worn path of pointing out flaws in the predictions of NOAA, the IPCC, or the WMO, I’ll instead show how the sun is likely responsible for almost every detail in global temperatures over the last 125 years, and that it is also responsible for triggering strong El Niños.

Two empirical, or black-box, models were created to predict global temperature.  The first model uses solar magnetic field data from the Wilcox Solar Observatory (WSO).  The second model uses sunspot data from WDC-SILSO, the Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels.  Both predictions will be compared to global temperature anomaly data from NOAA.

Solar magnetic field data collection began in 1976.  The complete WSO dataset can be viewed in a single graphic, often referred to as a butterfly diagram.  It looks complicated, but it’s really not.  It’s just a plot of solar magnetic field intensity over time as a function of the sun’s latitude.  The two colors represent north and south polarity magnetism.  Unlike the Earth, where magnetic north has conveniently stayed in the Northern Hemisphere for the last 780,000 years, the sun’s magnetic field changes polarity every 11 years.