RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/in-the-race-for-climate-leadership-everyones-a-loser-opinion/ar-AARGkLg

Last year, Joe Biden campaigned on the promise that America would lead the world in the fight against climate change. At last month’s Glasgow climate conference, however, President Biden diluted candidate Biden’s bold promise to a plaintive “hopefully”—implying, he said, leadership by example. At home, his climate plan in the Build Back Better bill is stalled in the Senate, and his election pledge to legislate a net-zero enforcement mechanism by the end of his first term has gone nowhere.

Aspirations to climate leadership are faring little better in Europe. Germany’s new traffic-light political coalition—the red SPD, the yellow Free Democrats, and the Greens—is making the Paris climate agreement its top priority. In April, Germany’s constitutional court ruled that its 2050 net-zero target was so distant that it violated the freedoms of young people. So, along with Sweden, Germany became the first country to legislate a 2045 net-zero target. Yet the new German government’s net-zero plan, as outlined in the coalition agreement, may as well have been designed to worsen Europe’s current energy crisis and sink its largest and most successful economy.

Under the timetable inherited from the Merkel government, zero-emitting nuclear power—which only a decade ago accounted for one-fourth of German electricity generation—will be phased out by the end of next year. To make matters worse, the new coalition is bringing forward the closure of all Germany’s coal-fired power stations from 2038 to 2030 and at the same time raising the share of renewables to 80 percent. Notes energy expert Lucian Pugliaresi, Germany’s energy policy initiatives “will not be sufficient to meet demand for electricity in Germany in 2030.”

https://www.sciencenatures.com/2021/12/a-mini-ice-age-could-hit-earth-by-2030.html

Amid rising concerns over the effects of global warming, a group of scientists has claimed that the Earth could in a little over a decade be hit by a “mini ice age” that would freeze major rivers. The startling prediction is based on a mathematical model of the Sun’s magnetic energy which also suggests that Earth’s temperature will start dropping in 2021.

The plummeting temperature will then lead to something called the “Maunder minimum”, which is referred to a previous mini ice age that occurred between 1646 and 1715, turning London’s Thames into a frozen river, scientists claimed. The latest research, led by maths professor Valentina Zharkova at Northumbria University, is built on a previous research that predicts the movements of two magnetic waves produced by the Sun. It also foretells rapidly decreasing magnetic waves for three solar cycles that will begin in 2021, and last for as many as 33 years.

According to the model, the two magnetic waves will become increasingly offset during Cycle 25, which peaks in 2022. During Cycle 26 between 2030 and 2040, the waves will become out of sync, causing reduction in solar activity by as much as 60 percent.

 “In cycle 26, the two waves exactly mirror each other — peaking at the same time but in opposite hemispheres of the Sun,” Zharkova reportedly said in 2015 while conducting a previous research on the phenomenon. “Their interaction will be disruptive, or they will nearly cancel each other. We predict that this will lead to the properties of a ‘Maunder minimum’.”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-12-4-fossil-fuel-restriction-dam-starting-to-break

Somewhere a couple of decades or so ago, the rich parts of the world embarked on a program of replacing energy from fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) with energy from intermittent “renewables” (mainly wind and solar). In trendy academic, journalistic, and otherwise progressive circles, the idea took hold that this was the way to “save the planet.” This program was undertaken without any detailed engineering study of how or whether it might actually work, or how much it might cost to fully implement. In the trendy circles, there took hold a blind faith in the complete ability of the government, by dispensing taxpayer funds, to order up whatever innovation might be needed to move us forward to this energy utopia.

The latest UN-orchestrated effort to implement the renewable energy program, known as COP 26, has just broken up. To read the verbiage emanating from the affair, all is on track, if a bit slower than one might have hoped.

But I have long predicted that this program would come to an end when (absent some miraculous innovation that nobody has yet conceived) the usage of the renewables got to a sufficient level that their costs and unworkability could not be covered up any longer. Until very recently the pressure of elite groupthink has been able to maintain a united front of lip service to the cause. But consider a few developments from the past few weeks, just since the end of COP 26:

Japan

Japan tends to keep its head down in international affairs, and at COP 26 signed on to the happy talk group communiqués without raising any particular issues. But there is no getting around that Japan has the third largest economy in the world — after the U.S. and China, and larger than any European country — so its actions in energy policy are inherently significant. Also, Japan has relatively little energy production of its own, is heavily dependent on imports, has harsh winters, and has a growing Chinese military and economic threat right on its doorstep. Is Japan really going to trust its fate to intermittent wind and solar energy?

On December 1 Bloomberg reported: “Japan Is Backing Oil and Gas Even After COP26 Climate Talks.” It seems that this rather significant country may be seriously re-thinking the move away from fossil fuels. Excerpt:

Government officials have been quietly urging trading houses, refiners and utilities to slow down their move away from fossil fuels, and even encouraging new investments in oil-and-gas projects, according to people within the Japanese government and industry, who requested anonymity as the talks are private.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/the-new-nuclear-moment/

Parts of the Left are shifting to pro-nuclear

The past few weeks have seen a radical change in the outlook for nuclear energy. Coincident with the global COP26 conference, major center-left forces have shifted their position from opposition to support. While a year ago French president Emmanuel Macron was calling for cutting the nuclear fraction of France’s electric power from its current 75 percent down to 50 percent (thereby eliminating the world’s only actually decarbonized major electric-power grid), on November 9 he called for “relaunching construction of nuclear reactors in our country . . . to guarantee France’s energy independence, to guarantee our country’s electricity supply and achieve our objectives, in particular carbon neutrality in 2050.” Whereas a few months ago European Union bureaucrats drawing up the “taxonomy” that defines which energy sources would be considered carbon-free (i.e. valid substitutes for fossil fuels) excluded nuclear power, now nearly all except the fanatical Germanic states have reversed themselves. Indeed, the map of pro- and anti-nuclear Euro­pean countries now closely resembles a map of World War II circa March 1945, shortly before the taking of the Ludendorff Bridge broke the last line of organized resistance in the Reich.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/the-extraordinary-hidden-costs-of-the-climate-change-transition/?utm_source=

How climate policy will weaken the West

T o achieve per capita economic growth, an economy must either produce goods and services that were not previously produced or produce the existing goods and services in a more efficient way. If an economy continues to produce the old goods and services but replaces the inputs with a more costly set of inputs, per capita growth will be negative. Such an economy would become poorer over time and less wealthy in per capita terms. This is the likely future of the U.S. and Europe as they stumble their way toward an effort to transition their economies to a different, more expensive, set of energy sources.

If, as a homeowner, you were suddenly told that you needed to rebuild your home with a whole new set of more costly materials, you would not be pleased. But if the goal of this costly rebuilding were saving the planet, you might tolerate the transition.

Hoping to spare you and your neighbors the harmful effects of your current building materials, you begin the transition. The fact that there is a target date for this transition will, of course, dramatically increase the costs of this transition, which will be considerable in any event. When the transition is complete, you will have less wealth than you would have had, had there been no such transition. But you say to yourself, at least I am doing some future good for me and my neighbors. Saving the planet seems like a worthwhile goal.

Looking down the block you see multiple new homes being constructed utilizing the exact same materials that you are being asked to remove from your house. These materials are much cheaper than those used in the project on which you embarked, and thus your neighbors, constructing their new homes, will likely be prospering by producing their homes, identical to yours in most respects, by using the cheaper building materials.

https://nypost.com/2021/11/30/the-comic-cries-of-climate-apocalypse-50-years-of-spurious-scaremongering/

The recent UN climate summit in Glasgow was predictably branded our “last chance” to tackle the “climate catastrophe” and “save humanity.” Like many others, US climate envoy John Kerry warned us that we have only nine years left to avert most of “catastrophic” global warming.

But almost every climate summit has been branded the last chance. Setting artificial deadlines to get attention is one of the most common environmental tactics. We have actually been told for the past half-century that time has just about run out.

This message is not only spectacularly wrong but leads to panic and poor policies.

Two years ago, Britain’s Prince Charles announced that we had just 18 months left to fix climate change. This wasn’t his first attempt at deadline-setting. Ten years earlier, he told an audience that he “had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world.”

In 2004, a major UK newspaper told us that without drastic action, climate change would destroy civilization by 2020. By that time, it foretold, major European cities would be sunk beneath rising seas, Britain would be plunged into a “Siberian” climate as the Gulf Stream shut down and mega-droughts and famines would lead to widespread rioting and nuclear war. Not quite what happened last year.

And these predictions have been failing for decades. In 1989, the head of the UN’s Environment Program declared we had just three years to “win — or lose — the climate struggle.” In 1982, the UN was predicting planetary “devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust” by the year 2000. Indeed, at the very first UN environment summit in Stockholm in 1972, almost 50 years ago, the organizer and later first UN Environment Program director warned that we had just 10 years to avoid catastrophe.

In 1972, the world was also rocked by the first global environmental scare, the so-called “Limits to Growth” report. The authors predicted with great confidence that most natural resources would run out within a few decades while pollution would overpower humanity. At the time, Time magazine described the future as a desolate world with few gaunt survivors tilling freeway center strips, hoping to raise a subsistence crop. Life magazine expected “urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution” by the mid-1980s.

The scares were, of course, spectacularly misguided on both counts. They got it wrong because they overlooked the greatest resource of all, human ingenuity. We don’t just use up resources but innovate ever-smarter ways of making resources more available. At the same time, technology solves many of the most persistent pollution problems, as did the catalytic converter. This is why air pollution in rich countries has been declining for decades.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/30/those-ugly-climate-models/

The narrative that man is cooking his planet like an overdone Thanksgiving turkey has survived only because the media have propped it up. But we’re confident that eventually the story will collapse. The evidence does not favor the climate alarmists.

A most-recent example that should help tilt the scales back toward sanity: Researchers have found that warming in the Arctic Ocean is not a recent event that coincides with post-war industrial acceleration and the growth of automobile ownership. It began at the outset of the previous century.

According to a University of Cambridge study, the warming arrived “decades earlier than records suggest,” and is “due to warmer water flowing into the delicate polar ecosystem from the Atlantic Ocean,” says Science Daily

“The results, reported in the journal Science Advances, provide the first historical perspective on Atlantification of the Arctic Ocean and reveal a connection with the North Atlantic that is much stronger than previously thought.”

In other words, there are climate and environmental influences that still aren’t fully understood.

Yet all we hear is that we have to trust the scientists, who have reached a consensus that man’s fossil-fuel burning habit is bringing planetary disaster. No dissent from this declaration is permitted. Those who refuse to pledge allegiance to the accepted story are branded as undesirables.

This is where we are in 2021, and where we’ve been for a couple of decades – in the world of climate studies, junk science has overtaken honest and open inquiry.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/the_profound_junk_science_of_climate.html

Climate change prophecy hangs its hat on computer climate models. The models have gigantic problems. According to Kevin Trenberth, once in charge of modeling at the National Center for Atmospheric research, [none of the] “models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate” [of the Earth]. The models can’t properly model the Earth’s climate, but we are supposed to believe that if carbon dioxide has a certain effect in the imaginary Earths of the many models it will have the same effect on the real earth.

The climate models are an exemplary representation of confirmation bias, the psychological tendency to suspend one’s critical facilities in favor of welcoming what one expects or desires. Climate scientists can manipulate numerous adjustable parameters in the models that can be changed to tune a model to give a “good” result. Technically, a good result would be that the climate model output can match past climate history. But that good result competes with another kind of good result. That other good result is a prediction of a climate catastrophe. That sort of “good” result has elevated the social and financial status of climate science into the stratosphere.

Once money and status started flowing into climate science because of the disaster its denizens were predicting, there was no going back. Imagine that a climate scientist discovers gigantic flaws in the models and the associated science. Do not imagine that his discovery would be treated respectfully and evaluated on its merits. That would open the door to reversing everything that has been so wonderful for climate scientists.  Who would continue to throw billions of dollars a year at climate scientists if there were no disasters to be prevented? No, the discoverer of any flaw would be demonized and attacked as a pawn of evil interests. Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer come to mind. There are many more skeptical scientists keeping quiet in varying degrees.

Testing a model against past history and assuming that it will then predict the future is a methodology that invites failure. The failure starts when the modeler adds more adjustable parameters to enhance the model. At some point one should ask if we are fitting a model or doing simple curve fitting. If the model has degenerated into curve fitting, it very likely won’t have serious predictive capability.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/manchin-urges-biden-to-restore-keystone-xl-pipeline/

Senator Joe Manchin (D., W. Va.) on Tuesday called on President Biden to reinstate the Keystone XL pipeline as the U.S. struggles with gas shortages and skyrocketing prices.

“I continue to call on President Biden to responsibly increase energy production here at home and to reverse course to allow the Keystone XL pipeline to be built which would have provided our country with up to 900,000 barrels of oil per day from Canada, one of our closest allies,” the moderate senator said in a statement.

“To be clear, this is about American energy independence and the fact that hard-working Americans should not depend on foreign actors, like OPEC+, for our energy security and instead focus on the real challenges facing our country’s future,” Manchin said, referring to the group of major oil-producing countries.

The statement came after the Biden administration announced plans to release 50 million barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve to combat soaring gas prices.

Manchin, who is the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has previously advocated against Biden’s decision to revoke a permit for the pipeline. In February, he said that pipelines nationwide “continue to be the safest mode to transport our oil and natural gas resources, and they support thousands of high-paying, American union jobs.″

However, Biden has suggested that the U.S. end its dependence on fossil fuel and has committed to forging a path for the U.S. to have a carbon-free electric grid by 2035 and net zero emissions by 2050.

“This is the decade that will determine the answer. This decade,” Biden said during an international climate summit earlier this month. “The science is clear: We only have a brief window left before us to raise our ambitions and to raise — to meet the task that’s rapidly narrowing.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/global_warming_scaremongers_refuted_as_arctic_ice_growing_on_track_to_be_the_most_ice_in_2_decades.html

The scariest scenario of the global warming doomsayers has been the idea that the melting Arctic ice cap would put coastal cities underwater. For example:

‘Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice,’ reported the BBC back in 2007. ‘Their latest modelling indicates that northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.’

Professor Wieslaw Maslowski from the Department of Oceanography of the US Navy predicted an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the summer of 2013.

Maslowski added that his prediction was on the conservative side, too: “Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007. So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.”

There are plenty more such forecasts:

‘Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice,’ reported the BBC back in 2007. ‘Their latest modelling indicates that northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.’

Professor Wieslaw Maslowski from the Department of Oceanography of the US Navy predicted an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the summer of 2013.

Maslowski added that his prediction was on the conservative side, too: “Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007. So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.”