RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/media-climate-change-truth-degrees-warming-disaster-hurricanes-flooding-adaptation-infrastructure-united-nations-11630703058?mod=hp_opin_pos_3#cxrecs_s

If “news” is about how today differs from yesterday, the press missed a lot of news in the long-awaited new report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that was issued a few weeks ago.

After 41 years of promoting a fuzzy and unsatisfying estimate of how much warming might result from a doubling of atmospheric CO2, the world’s climate science arbiter has finally offered the first real improvement in the history of modern climate science.

Through five previous U.N. assessment plus their predecessor, the 1979 Charney Report, the likely worst-case was a rise of 4.5 degrees Celsius. This came from averaging the result of inconsistent computer climate simulations about which the IPCC knew only one thing: They couldn’t all be right and perhaps none were.

Using real-world data, the new report now says the worst case is a 4-degree rise. More important, with much greater confidence than before, disastrous outcomes above 5 degrees are now found to be very unlikely.

In another departure, the U.N. panel now says the dire emissions scenario it promoted for two decades should be regarded as highly unlikely, with more plausible projections at least a third lower.

The report also notes, as the press never does, the full impact of these emissions won’t be manifested until decades, even a century, later. The ultimate likely worst-case effect of a doubling of CO2 might be 4 degrees, but the best estimate of the “transient climate response” this century is about 2.7 degrees, or 1.6 degrees on top of the warming experienced since the start of the industrial age.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=a7306c1128

It’s easy to look at “climate change” litigation in the U.S. and conclude that a good percentage of our environmental bureaucrats and judges who get involved in these things are crazy. Thus many courts around the country (mostly state courts) have allowed lawsuits seeking damages against oil companies over greenhouse gas emissions from their products to proceed at least beyond the preliminary stages. And the EPA, early in the Obama administration (2009) issued what is called the “Endangerment Finding,” declaring CO2 and other GHGs to be a “danger to public health and welfare” — a ridiculous determination that the Trump administration nevertheless did not attempt to undo, and which substantially ties the government’s hands in contesting wacky climate-related cases. Not that the Biden Administration can be counted on to contest these cases at all, no matter how preposterous.

But we do have in the U.S. this thing called the doctrine of “non-justiciability.” That is the doctrine under which our courts steer clear of cases that ask courts to rule broadly on matters of public policy that are more legitimately the province of the legislatures. At the federal level, the non-justiciability doctrine arises out of the separation of powers embodied in the Constitution’s structure, as well as by the language of Article 3 Section 2, which describes the jurisdiction of the federal courts only in terms of “Cases” and “Controversies.” The doctrine has been around for a long time, and is well-established in many precedents. As discussed in my most recent post, it was the non-justiciability doctrine that sank the Juliana case, which sought to get a court to order the end of the use of fossil fuels in the U.S. on the basis of the Due Process clause of the Fifth Amendment and the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Even two of three Obama-appointed judges on the Ninth Circuit panel agreed with that rationale. Had the case reached the Supreme Court, the 6-3 “conservative” majority, in my judgment, would be highly likely to apply the “non-justiciable” rationale to privately-brought litigation that seeks a fundamental restructuring of the economy through court order. (A different issue is whether the Supreme Court, in the presence of the Endangerment Finding, would try to overrule a restructuring of the economy via EPA or other bureaucratic regulation that claimed some statutory basis, however flimsy.)

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/31/global-warming-narrative-takes-another-hit/

We have been constantly told for what seems like as long as we can remember that Antarctica is shrinking because man’s carbon dioxide emissions are overheating our planet. While fearmongering has made its way around the world countless times, the truth is still pulling on its boots.

So what is the truth? It’s quite straightforward: Antarctic sea ice has been growing.

According to the Japan Meteorological Agency, the continent’s annual maximum sea ice has grown for three straight years. The annual mean is increasing, and the annual minimum has also expanded for three consecutive years. The long-term trend lines for the annual maximum and mean, starting in 1979, are noticeably moving upward, while the trend line for the annual minimum is ascending, as well, though much more modestly.

Doesn’t fit the doomsday narrative, does it?

Please don’t think this is an isolated and therefore meaningless example. There are many other facts that show the global warming fears are overblown.

For instance, two years ago, we showed that predictions claiming that the Great Lakes were drying up due to man-made global warming were, if we might use a term favored by the current occupant of the White House, malarkey.

Moving up to today, we’re reading that “many parts of Europe have not had much of a real summer, having seen much cool and wet weather this year,” and that there’s August snow in Austria, which is not just “one-day freak weather event” but the beginning of a snowy period and a usually cool cycle.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hurricane-ida-climate-resilience-lesson-new-orleans-louisiana-11630358067?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

“Government can’t command the tides, but it can protect people from them.”

The pictures of Hurricane Ida’s wreckage across Louisiana are grim, and the storm isn’t over. But the good news is that New Orleans appears to have weathered the tempest as well as could be expected thanks to its post-Katrina flood-protection investments. This is a reminder of how hardening infrastructure against unpredictable Mother Nature pays off.

Ida slammed into Louisiana’s Port Fourchon on Sunday as a Category 4 storm with wind speeds of 150 miles an hour and one to two inches of rain an hour. Its winds tie it as the fifth strongest storm to hit the U.S. mainland. Such heavy winds and precipitation will inevitably cause flooding and damage buildings.

But the bigger worry going into Ida was that a catastrophic storm surge would breach New Orleans’s levees and submerge the city as happened 16 years ago to the day during Hurricane Katrina. Clocking in as a lower-grade Category 3 storm when it made landfall, Katrina killed some 2,000 people and caused an estimated $125 billion in damage. New Orleans took years to recover.

Yet Louisiana and the feds have since spent $14.5 billion on bolstering flood walls, levees and drainage systems. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reinforced pumping stations to withstand 205 mile-per-hour winds and established redundant power systems to operate them if the electric grid fails, as it did Sunday.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

We live in strange times. We don’t think through the consequences of ending “endless wars.” We don’t debate what it means for our children and grandchildren to add trillions of dollars to a national debt that already, as a percent of GDP, is the highest since the Second World War. We permit hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many of whom are infected with COVID-19, to enter our country illegally through our southern border, while limiting the number of legal immigrants. We have replaced free-thinking skeptics with acolytes for big government. The dark arm of progressivism is aimed at increasing the power of government and decreasing the role of the individual. When it comes to climate change, progressives borrow from George W. Bush: Either you are with us, or you are against us. There is no room for debate.   

In part, this is because of the leisure time we have gained through economic success. The technological advances and the increased wealth of our nation and its people – results of free market capitalism operating under the rule of law – would be unimaginable to our grandparents. Included in our well-being is the environment, which is far healthier than it was twenty, fifty and a hundred years ago. It was individuals, not government agencies, that led that change – through eleemosynary organizations like the Sierra Club and Audubon Societies. New York City began to migrate from coal to oil in the 1930s and Los Angeles recognized the problem of smog in the 1940s, both long before the advent of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in December 1970. Government regulations have hastened the move to a healthier environment, but they were not the instigator. It is the wealth produced through capitalism, operating in a society that encourages individual initiative, which has afforded us the ability to focus on climate. It is ignorance of that past that helps feed the myth that it is government, not free market capitalism, that has been the principal force for the good of our environment. In seeking political power, progressives pander to the electorate on soft issues – “wokeness,” inclusion, identity, equity, critical race theory and hurtful words – while they fail to encourage those traits that historically led to success: merit, aspiration, competition, diligence and hard work.

On August 10, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report on climate and projections for the future. How many people have read its 4,000 pages? Not many, I suspect. I, for one, have not. According to summaries, the Earth has experienced a two-degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature since industrialization began about two hundred years ago. We know man has been responsible for some of that increase, but the exact level remains in question. Nevertheless, a recent lead editorial in my local paper, The Day, expressed no doubt as to the cause: “Humans have heated the planet about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the dawn of the industrial age.” The next day Steven Koonin, director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “As is now customary, the report emphasizes climate change in recent decades but obscures, or fails to mention, historical precedents that weaken the case that humanity’s influence on the climate has been catastrophic.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/20/where-the-sun-dont-shine-climate-alarmists-thinking/

We’re building,” reads the headline of an op-ed written by Sen. Bernie Sanders for the British Guardian, “Congress’ strongest-ever climate bill.” Why? “Because the planet is in peril.” If so, it’s not because of human greenhouse gas production, says one group of researchers.

But scientific findings are no deterrent to predatory politicians. Backed by nothing more than a bloated certitude, the Vermont socialist declares “the planet will face enormous and irreversible damage” if “the United States, China and the rest of the world do not act extremely aggressively to cut carbon emissions.”

Man-made carbon dioxide emissions – the political left’s go-to whipping boy. Human CO2 emissions, in the febrile minds of Sanders and other members of the climate doomsday cult, is responsible for a nearly uncountable number of ills: hotter temperatures, more potent storms, wildfires, melting ice caps and glaciers, armed conflict, migration, poverty, famine, drought, floods, species extinction, weeds, pests … and a host of conditions and events so absurd no half-rational person would ever think of them.

Virulent though it might be, Trump Derangement Syndrome is hardly the mental health menace that Carbon Obsession Disorder has been for decades

Occasionally alarmists will point out that methane is a greenhouse gas. Yet their fixation has long been on CO2. But let’s be clear: Other factors impact climate and temperature, and few can match the power of the sun (which Democrats should be confident in, since they worship at the altar of the solar panel). According to the researchers who recently published a peer-reviewed paper in ​​Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, the most recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, whose value we’ve assessed, “is grounded in narrow and incomplete data about the sun’s total solar irradiance.”

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/08/17/does_climate_change_cause_extreme_weather_now_heres_a_scorcher_of_a_reality_check_789878.html

The Pacific Northwest was hit with a record-shattering heat wave in June, with temperatures over 35 degrees higher than normal in some places. On June 28, Portland, Ore., reached 116 degrees. Late last week the region suffered another blast of hot weather, with a high in Portland of 103 degrees. The New York Times didn’t hesitate to pronounce the region’s bouts of extreme weather proof that the climate wasn’t just changing, but catastrophically so.

To make that claim, the Times relied on a “consortium of climate experts” that calls itself World Weather Attribution, a group organized not just to attribute extreme weather events to climate change, but to do so quickly. Within days of the June heat wave, the researchers released an analysis, declaring that the torrid spell “was virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.”

World Weather Attribution and its alarming report were trumpeted by Time magazine, touted by the NOAA website  Climate.gov , and featured by CBS News, CNBC, Scientific American, CNN, the Washington Post, USAToday, and the New York Times, among others.

The group’s claim that global warming was to blame was perhaps less significant than the speed with which that conclusion was provided to the media. Previous efforts to tie extreme weather events to climate change hadn’t had the impact scientists had hoped for, according to Time, because it “wasn’t producing results fast enough to get attention from people outside the climate science world.”

“Being able to confidently say that a given weather disaster was caused by climate change while said event still has the world’s attention,” Time explained, approvingly, “can be an enormously useful tool to convince leaders, lawmakers and others that climate change is a threat that must be addressed.” In other words, the value of rapid attribution is primarily political, not scientific.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/why_all_the_climate_crisis_mumbojumbo_doesnt_add_up.html

Fear is a great motivator, but it comes with a catch.  It tends to inhibit good decision-making.  Demagogues love it because it works so well.  Right now, the Northern Hemisphere is having serious heat waves in many locations.  Oy, vey!  But wait…let me look at this here calendar.  Oh, gee — it’s the middle of August.  Just a coincidence, I guess.

We used to learn in school that there were these things called ice ages.  The last one, the Pleistocene, ended about 10,000 years ago, and it lasted only about 2.5 million years, give or take.  At its peak, 30% of the Earth’s surface was covered with ice.  The oceans were way lower, too. 

The jury is still out on why ice ages happen and why they end.  Back in the 1970s, it was established that the sun goes through a 22-year intensity cycle…sort of.  The hockey stick guy, Michael Mann, wrote an article for Scientific American explaining that his bungled warming prediction was the result of forgetting to include the solar cycle in the data used for his computer model.  I commented online that that was a pretty amateurish mistake for someone who gets paid to be a scientist.  They then yanked my commenting privilege, thus demonstrating the corruption of science by politics.  I didn’t renew my subscription after having one for 30 years, and they spent a bunch of money junk-mailing me to send them the next check.

There’s also this pesky thing called tectonics, in which the Earth’s land masses move around slowly, sometimes bumping into each other, causing large-scale buckling such as the Himalayas.  One of the tip-offs for the establishment of this concept is the uncanny way that South America fits right into the west coast of Africa, just like a part of a giant jigsaw puzzle.

Somehow, it seems, change is now a bad thing, although it’s always been inevitable.  Oh, yeah — there are the demagogues and engineered ignorance, courtesy of your local union-thug teachers.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-8-12-the-idiots-answer-to-global-warming-hydrogen

Hydrogen! It’s the obvious and perfect answer to global warming caused by human CO2 emissions. Instead of burning hydrocarbons (fossil fuels) we can leave out the carbon part, burn just the hydrogen, and emit nothing but pure water vapor. H2 + O = H2O! Thus, no more CO2 emissions . Why didn’t anyone think of this before now?

Actually, the geniuses are way ahead of you on this one. President George W. Bush was touting the coming “hydrogen economy” as far back as 2003. (“In his 2003 State of the Union Address, President Bush launched his Hydrogen Fuel Initiative. The goal of this initiative is to work in partnership with the private sector to accelerate the research and development required for a hydrogen economy.”). Barack Obama was not one to get left behind on an issue like this. In the run-up to the Paris Climate Conference in 2015 Obama’s Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz announced, “[F]uel cell technologies [i.e., hydrogen-fueled motors] are paving the way to competitiveness in the global clean energy market and to new jobs and business creation across the country.” Then there’s the biggest hydrogen enthusiast of all, PM Boris Johnson of the UK, who promises that his country is at the dawn of the “hydrogen economy.” (“Towards the end of 2020, Prime Minister Boris Johnson released details of a 10-point plan for a so-called ‘green industrial revolution.’. . . This year will also see the government publish a Hydrogen Strategy that will “outline plans” to develop a hydrogen economy in the U.K.”)

And let us not forget California. If you look at my post from two days ago about California’s plans for “zero carbon” electricity, you will find a chart showing that by 2045 they plan to have some 40 GW of what they call “Zero Carbon Firm” resources. What does that mean? In the print below the chart, they reveal it: “hydrogen fuel cells.” (Their current amount of hydrogen fuel cells contributing to the grid is 0.)

So basically, hydrogen is the perfect answer to our problems, right? Wrong. Only an idiot could think that hydrogen offers any material useful contribution to the world’s energy supply.