RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/09/the_hidden_energy_crisis.html

America is wrestling with the worst energy crisis in its history, a period of high prices and limited supply.

America is wrestling with the worst energy crisis in its history, a period of high prices and limited supply. According to the Brookings Institution, in 2022, the average U.S. residential retail electricity price was 15.12 cents/kWh, an 11% increase from 13.66 cents/kWh in 2021. In the first three months of 2023, the average U.S. residential monthly electricity bill was $133, or 5% higher than for the same time in 2022. There is confusion with savings or cost expectation of solar and wind conversion, also government decisions have impacted the natural gas and energy supply. While electric vehicles are a much-touted solution for replacing oil, gasoline or diesel fuel contains 40 times the energy as a state-of-the-art battery. Questionable efforts are being made by utilities and government leadership to address our energy future. Critical solutions have been avoided and hidden. Fossil-fuel plants are closing faster than green alternatives can replace them. Producers of oil and gas can’t keep up with the confusion in supply. Fantasy thinking has taken hold of President Biden and Democrat leaders. Progressives and their media followers are guilty of denial concerning the reality of how to solve a potential climate/energy crisis.

Energy and climate change are complicated. Credible scientists challenge whether there is a climate crisis. The three U.S. electric grids are old and at capacity, and many power plants are outdated. California is one example of the problem. New plants have not been brought online due to environmentalists and demonization by politicians; some have even been targeted for shutdown.  Renewable energy has been identified as having benefits and can supply up to 35% of energy demand but is unreliable since it requires wind, sun, or flowing water.  It also creates energy storage and environmental issues. The Biden administration and Governor Gavin Newsom in California have embarked on plans to eliminate the use of gas and replace all transportation vehicles, garden tools, stoves, dryers’ etc. using electrical energy.  This approach will place an overwhelming timeline and demand on existing energy resources.  It will require a huge investment in new power plants, including the potential of nuclear.  This investment will create significant upward pressure on the cost of energy and create blackouts from poor planning

https://www.theepochtimes.com/science/over-1600-scientists-sign-no-climate-emergency-declaration-5482554?utm_

International scientists have jointly signed a declaration dismissing the existence of a climate crisis and insisting that carbon dioxide is beneficial to Earth, contrary to the popular alarmist narrative.

“There is no climate emergency,” the Global Climate Intelligence Group (CLINTEL) said in its World Climate Declaration (pdf), made public in August. “Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.”

A total of 1,609 scientists and professionals from around the world have signed the declaration, including 321 from the United States.The coalition pointed out that Earth’s climate has varied as long as it has existed, with the planet experiencing several cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age only ended as recently as 1850, they said.

“Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming,” the declaration said.

Warming is happening “far slower” than predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The Real Reason Behind the ‘Climate Emergency’ Push

“Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as policy tools,” the coalition said, adding that these models “exaggerate the effect of greenhouse gases” and “ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.” For instance, even though climate alarmists characterize CO2 as environmentally-damaging, the coalition pointed out that the gas is “not a pollutant.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/climate-brainwashing/

Hammering K-12 school children nonstop about the dangers of climate change in every class, even math, art and gym, is child abuse.

Barely one-third of fourth graders can read or do math at grade level, according to the latest national scores, but climate activists are demanding kids hear about global warming in every class. New Jersey mandates it, and now Connecticut is following suit as the school year opens. In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams is requiring every public school participate in Climate Action Day.

The climate push is nakedly political, spearheaded in New Jersey by the governor’s wife, first lady Tammy Murphy, a founding member of Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project. Lessons link urban heat islands to tree placement inequities, redlining and racism.

New York City holds out activist Greta Thunberg as a climate hero and role model, telling kids to “get involved in the global student climate action movement” and “get to know community leaders and register to vote.” Everything short of pre-enrolling kindergarteners in the Democratic Party. Parents should be outraged.

Climate change is the Left’s religion. The messaging is as heavy-handed as catechism in a religious school.

It’s also scary. Children are being told that global warming is killing their favorite animals. At Slackwood Elementary School in New Jersey, first graders are taught that transportation, heating, and raising livestock are “making Earth feel unwell.”

The reality is that these children are too young to comprehend the trade-offs of moving to zero carbon immediately. A first grader doesn’t know Mommy can’t afford an electric vehicle — average price $53,000.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/29/hurricane-season-means-a-surge-in-category-5-climate-lies/

We’re about half way through the 2023 hurricane season, predicted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecasters to be a near-normal year, and it’s been rather quiet. But with a few storms brewing this week in the Atlantic, we expect to hear the usual shrieking from politicians, activists and the media, blaming the weather on man-caused climate change. Our suggestion is to pay no attention to the eco-screamers’ lamentations.

On Sunday, the National Hurricane Center issued advisories for a hurricane and a tropical storm in the Atlantic Ocean, and an advisory for a tropical storm in the Eastern Pacific. Of the three, the Atlantic storm Idalia seems to be the most dangerous. It could make landfall as a hurricane on the Gulf coast of Florida on Wednesday.

That could mean a life-changing disaster for thousands of Floridians. The climatistas, though, see opportunity in crisis. They never let a serious calamity go to waste. Before the weekend was over, the press was linking Idalia to “climate change,” which is of course code for “man-made global warming,” as if there had never been a hurricane before humans began burning fossil fuels.

The alarmist community has long insisted that weather is not the same as climate any time anyone ever pointed to mild summers and colder-than-usual winters as evidence that the global warming theory was bunk. But when it’s convenient for spreading fear, the same crowd takes isolated weather events and claims they are evidence that human activity is warming the planet.

Even in 2023, truth is still important to some of us, and the facts show that the global warming zealots are false prophets. Inconvenient to their con are data that show that death and destruction from climate-related disasters have fallen sharply over the last century. Annual fatalities from floods, droughts, wildfires, storms, and extreme temperatures have tumbled by nearly 98% over that era, from nearly 500,000 in the early 1920s to fewer than 12,000 in 2022. The details don’t fit the narrative, but when did that ever matter to the political left that continues to feed the fiction that man is setting his planet on fire?

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.