RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/columns/john-stossel/2023/04/19/save-the-planet-invest-in-fossil-fuels-n1688410

Earth Day is Saturday! Hooray?

“Saving humanity from the climate crisis,” says EarthDay.org, requires us to “push away from the dirty fossil fuel economy.”

Sounds logical.

But my latest video explains why doing that is cruel to poor people.  

“Three billion people in the world still use less electricity than a typical refrigerator,” explains Alex Epstein, author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.” If they’re going to have “their first well-paying jobs … their first consistent supply of clean water … a modern life … that’s going to depend on fossil fuels.”

But the greens say we have a better replacement: wind and solar power. 

So I push back at Epstein: “Solar is getting cheaper all the time. It’s already cheaper than fossil fuels.”

“When we look at solar and wind around the world,” he answers, “it always correlates to rising prices and declining reliability. Why? Because solar and wind are intermittent. At any time, they can go near zero.”

That means wind turbines and solar farms don’t replace fossil fuel plants. You have to build them in addition to fossil fuel plants.

“We spent trillions of dollars in subsidies and mandates putting solar panels and wind turbines everywhere,” Epstein points out, “Yet we’re still having shortages of fossil fuels.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/epa-electric-vehicle-battery-warranty-mandate-biden-administration-e501f?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

The Biden Administration is promoting electric vehicles as a vast technological improvement over internal-combustion engines. But then why is the Environmental Protection Agency requiring manufacturers to provide extended EV battery warranties and durability assurances?

Under the backdoor EV mandate the EPA rolled out last week, high-voltage batteries and electric powertrain components will be required to have an eight-year or 80,000-mile warranty. Auto makers will also have to certify that EV battery performance doesn’t decline by more than 20% over five years or 62,000 miles, and 30% over eight years or 100,000 miles.

The Clean Air Act specifies a warranty period of eight years or 80,000 miles for “major emission control components” such as catalytic converters. This is to ensure that cars with more use continue to meet tailpipe emission standards. But the law was never intended to apply to EVs because they don’t have tailpipe exhausts.

The Clean Air Act also lacks a warranty requirement for EV batteries, though they can rapidly degrade, especially when cars are left in the heat. Minor defects in battery cells can also cause batteries and even whole cars to be junked. Batteries can represent up to half of an EV’s cost so it’s often not worth replacing them.

Lightly-used batteries that have to be scrapped or replaced would negate the putative CO2 emissions reductions from EVs. Manufacturing batteries, their components and minerals consumes loads of energy—mostly from coal in China, where 77% of battery cell manufacturing and some 90% of rare earth mineral processing occurs.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/04/thirty_years_of_global_warming_prophecies.html

NBC News recently touted a report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that says, “The chance to secure a livable future for everyone on Earth is slipping away.”  It further reported, “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.” This was echoed by Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council: “This is the stone cold truth laid out in unassailable science by the world’s top climate experts.  We’re hurtling down the road to ruin and running out of time to change course.”

That’s the same U.N. that was wrong 34 years ago when Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, said that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.”

Fiona Harvey, Environment Editor at the Guardian, says, “Scientists have delivered a ‘final warning’ on the climate crisis, as rising greenhouse gas emissions push the world to the brink of irrevocable damage that only swift and drastic action can avert.”  She cited a report from the IPCC, comprised of the world’s leading climate scientists.

The U.N. again.

CBS News cited a study by Atmospheric scientist Dr. Walker Ashley at Northern Illinois University who predicts storms like the ones that tore through Mississippi, killing several dozen people, could become more common due to climate change.

Now let’s shift attention to hypocritical politicians who make predictions with their mouths and actions, beginning with Barack Obama.  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts the sea level to rise by as much as 12″ in the next 30 years.  NOAA predicts the sea level rise, “…will create a profound shift in coastal flooding over the next 30 years by causing tide and storm surge heights to increase and reach further inland.  By 2050, ‘moderate’ (typically damaging) flooding is expected to occur, on average, more than 10 times as often as it does today.”

But that information didn’t deter Obama from purchasing an oceanside mansion on Martha’s Vineyard.  The 7,000 square foot house is zero feet above sea level and about a quarter mile from the sea.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said in 2019, “…there is an urgency needed in addressing man-made climate change, warning that it will ‘destroy the planet’ in a dozen years if humans do not address the issue, no matter the cost.” 

https://townhall.com/columnists/marklewis/2023/04/10/from-global-warming-to-global-cooling-to-global-warming-n2621739

Here is an interesting quote: 

“Snows are less frequent and less deep.  They often do not lie below the mountains more than one, two, or three days and very rarely a week.  They are remembered to be formerly frequent, deep, and of long continuance.  The elderly inform me that the earth used to be covered with snow about three months every year.  The rivers, which then seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do now.  [This] change…in the spring of the year is very fatal to fruits…I remember that when I was a small boy, say 60 years ago, snows were frequent and deep in every winter.” 

That was written by Thomas Jefferson in 1799, before fossil fuels dominated the energy industry, and when the earth’s population was far smaller than it is today.  From all indications, there was indeed notable warming in the 18th century from the previous “Little Ice Age” period.  

But let’s move ahead to the 20th century.  The weather changes, of course, and Paul Ehrlich, who was always wrong about everything he ever said, told us in 1969, “We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.”   Twenty years passed, no blue steam, people were still on the earth.  I guess we were lucky.  And Ehrlich was rich.

Global cooling was the craze then.  Here are a few representative quotes from the 1970s:

Boston Globe (1970): “Air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century”

LA Times (Oct. 24, 1971): “New Ice Age Coming—It’s Already Getting Colder” 

Brown Science Dept. to the White House (1972): “Deep concern with the future of the world…falls within the rank of processes which produced the last ice age.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/baseball-home-runs-blamed-on-global-warming/

Americans, at least liberal ones, lost the right to make fun of Lysenkoism, phrenology and every bit of stupid pseudoscience some years back. Ever since, “the science” has become someone’s idea of an absurd routine, part Peter Sellers and part South Park, in which the goal is to say completely absurd things with a straight face.

At the current rate of descent into absurdity, it takes the occasional new low to even get any attention.

Climate change is making major league sluggers into even hotter hitters, sending an extra 50 or so home runs a year over the fences, a new study found.

It’s basic physics.

When air heats up, molecules move faster and away from each other, making the air less dense. Baseballs launched off a bat go farther through thinner air because there’s less resistance to slow the ball.

That also probably explains the four-minute mile. We think it’s a lesson about self-confidence, but actually the only reason Roger Bannister was able to do it and so many after him was because of global warming. He was able to run faster because the air was thinner due to global warming. It’s basic physics.

Also, Alex Ovechkin’s NHL record is probably best explained by global warming. As the ice melts due to global warming, goals become easier to score. It’s basic physics.

The latest research also shows that Michael Jordan’s entire career was due to global warming. It’s just basic physics. As the global warming particles penetrate the basketball, it becomes lighter. So do basketball shoes. The event horizon around the hoop is then hyperaccelerated through the 12th dimension every time someone uses a disposable plastic plate.

The good news is that all sorts of records can now be broken as long as we just keep driving gas cars and feeding environmental consultants to packs of hungry wolves.

It’s basic physics.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/04/tornadoes_climate_change_and_the_media.html

After the recent devasting tornadoes in the Midwest and South, some media outlets scrambled to try to link the weather events to climate change, when in fact there is no hard data to support this. In fact, tornado data refute claims that tornadoes are increasing in number, range, or severity. However, Salon, Axios, and the Washington Post among others ran articles suggesting climate change is expanding the length of tornado season and area over which tornadoes commonly form, as well as adding ingredients to the atmosphere to make more and bigger tornadoes.

The Salon article, “How climate change made the Mississippi tornadoes more likely,” (actually a reprint from Grist) claimed, “That added ingredient of more heat and moisture is going to be the big thing that will influence what happens and we can expect potentially worse tornado outbreaks,” said William Gallus, a professor of meteorology at Iowa State University.  

Axios piled on with “What we know about how climate change affects tornado outbreaks,” which claims, “We also have expectations that the number of severe thunderstorms (hail, wind, tornado) will probably increase in the U.S.”

The Washington Post article, “Here’s what we know about how climate change is influencing tornadoes,” asserts, “Average global temperatures have risen more than 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 1800s, and the impact is clear: Warmer air provides more energy for storms to develop and intensify, and holds more moisture, which can also fuel storms. Warm, moist air is a key ingredient for developing severe tornadic storms.”

These claims of increased storms due to more heat and moisture are misleading at best and demonstrate a clear lack of understanding of how weather fronts collide to form tornadoes. As Climate at a Glance: Tornadoes points out: “Tornadoes typically form when very cold, dry air clashes with warm, humid air. Climate change warms the Arctic more than the tropics and subtropics, resulting in less of a clash between cold Arctic air masses and warm Gulf of Mexico air masses. As a result, fewer and less violent tornadoes are occurring today than in previous periods, despite media claims that tornadoes are getting more frequent, stronger, or both.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/05/why-we-need-an-independent-global-climate-temperature-database/

Ever since the beginning of the global warming debate, now labeled “climate change,” there has been one immutable yet little-known fact: All of the temperature data stations used to make determinations about the state of Earth’s temperature are controlled by governments.

In June 1988, when Dr. James Hansen, then-director of NASA’s Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, went before  the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to say that, “global warming has begun,” he was using temperature data collected by governments worldwide from a weather station network that was never intended to detect a “global warming signal.”

In fact, Dr. Hansen had to develop novel statistical techniques to tease that global warming signal out of the data. The problem is, these weather station networks were never designed to detect such a signal in the first place. They were actually designed for weather forecast verification, to determine if forecasts issued by agencies such as the U.S. Weather Bureau (now the National Weather Service) were accurate. If you make temperature and precipitation forecasts for a location, and there is no feedback of the actual temperatures reached and the rainfall recorded, then it is impossible to improve the skill of forecasting.

The original network of weather stations, called the Cooperative Observer Program (COOP), was established in 1891 to formalize an ad hoc weather observation network operated by the U.S. Army Signal Service since 1873. It was only later that the COOP network began to be used for climate because climate observations require at least 30 years of data from weather stations before a baseline “normal climate” for a location can be established. Once the Cooperative Observer Program was established in the United States, other countries soon followed, and duplicated how the U.S. network was set up on a global scale.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/04/how-climate-alarmism-killed-real-environmentalism/

The environmentalist movement is a political weapon. It unites the most powerful special interests in the world behind an agenda that will further centralize power and wealth, eliminate any hope of financial independence for the vast majority of people, and transition previously free and independent nations into managed, sham democracies that have lost their sovereign agency.

The overwhelming theme of environmentalism today, designed to obscure its true agenda, is the alleged “climate crisis.”

Americans may or may not eventually muster the impertinence to successfully challenge the political power grab masquerading as environmentalism today. But either way, its centerpiece, the “climate crisis,” is responsible for devastating harm both to what was once a legitimate environmentalist movement, as well as to the environment itself.

Policies ostensibly designed to manage the planet’s climate are taking attention and resources away from genuine environmental threats. At the same time, a growing percentage of people are recognizing the fraudulent essence of the “climate crisis” agenda and, as a result, are becoming indifferent to legitimate environmental concerns.

This is a tragedy. While crooked billionaires bleat incessantly about how “the planet has a fever” and grasp additional billions for their cronies in the businesses of renewable energy and “carbon credits,” we fail to address truly important environmental problems. Compared to “overheating oceans” and “burning continents,” however, these problems lack sex appeal.

Here are just a few of the environmental disasters in progress that nobody talks about either because they’re making too much money pushing the climate change scam, or because they’re thoroughly disgusted with the climate change scam and disregard all environmentalist concerns.

1) Loss of Insect Population: By some estimates, and for reasons we don’t yet adequately understand, the total insect mass on Earth is dropping by an estimated 2.5 percent per year, faster than any other endangered species. This is an existential threat. Insects pollinate many vital food crops. They play a critical role in consuming decomposing animals and plants. They are an essential link in the food chain, the glue that connects microorganisms to smaller predators. Wind turbine blades are a mass killer of insects. Whatever else is killing insects, it won’t stop because we banned fossil fuels.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/05/the-climate-madness-of-2023/

Yet again, the society of climate alarmists tell us we have little time left to address global warming. It’s a sign of desperation. What else can the merchants of madness do when we’re now closing in on nine years of a warming pause?

Last month the New York Times published an article that we swear we have read before.

“Earth is likely to cross a critical threshold for global warming within the next decade, and nations will need to make an immediate and drastic shift away from fossil fuels to prevent the planet from overheating dangerously beyond that level,” the Times’ climate scribe wrote, citing a “major new report” issued by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The IPCC paper reveals that “there is still one last chance to shift course.” But it will – naturally – “​​require industrialized nations to join together immediately to slash greenhouse gases roughly in half by 2030 and then stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere altogether by the early 2050s.”

How many other times have we heard that we were either approaching our last chance to save ourselves from global warming, or that our opportunity to do what is “right” had already passed us by? So many deadlines, so many “now or nevers,” have come and gone that it’s almost impossible to track them all.

The climate cranks are like the doomsday cultists who have the end of the world marked on their calendars and when it doesn’t arrive they say, “whoops, my math was bad. Let me recalculate and I’ll get back to you with new date.”