RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/freeman-dyson-humanist-and-climate-change-heretic/

The death of physicist Freeman Dyson on February 28 has been noted by many publications, all of which highlighted his many contributions to science. Dyson, 96, was, without doubt, a genius. He was a polymath whose interests included mathematics, number theory, biology, physics, nuclear energy, space travel, weaponry, and arms control.

While all of those accomplishments are important, Dyson’s view of climate change — or rather, his view on carbon dioxide, economic development, and what he called “the humanist ethic” — also helped spark a new type of environmentalism, one that rejects the idea that carbon dioxide is the supreme villain.

Dyson was a skeptic on the issue of catastrophic climate change, a fact that was prominently noted in the obituaries published in the Washington Post and the New York Times. The Post called it his “apostasy on global warming.” It went on, saying that while Dyson did not “deny the Earth was warming,” he broke ranks because he didn’t believe “global warming is particularly dangerous.” That view, the Post said, “is not shared by the overwhelming majority of scientists.”  The Times said Dyson “confounded the scientific establishment by dismissing the consensus about the perils of man-made climate change.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/the_collapse_of_intellectual_standards_in_science.html

Each year approximately $25 billion dollars is wasted paying for so-called renewable energy, overwhelmingly wind and solar. This is the excess cost of the renewable energy versus what it would cost to generate the same amount of electricity in existing fossil fuel plants. Because many states have accelerating legal quotas for renewable energy, called renewable portfolio laws, the money wasted each year will approximately double in the next 10-years to $50 billion each year. If the states fail to come to their senses and continue to pursue these laws, another doubling by 2040 to $100 billion per year is likely. In the state of Nevada, for example, the increasing cost of electricity will likely be equivalent to a 4% state income tax by 2030.

The renewable energy industry has powerful sources of support for its program to make money by fooling the public. There are many effective lies, repeated over and over. Long term contracts for wind or solar electricity at $25 or $30 per megawatt hour are touted as proving that renewable electricity is replacing “more expensive” fossil fuel electricity. A close examination of the cost of renewable electricity, either wind or solar, shows that the real cost of this electricity is not $25 per megawatt hour, but around $80 per megawatt hour. The difference is the federal and state subsidies. A good chunk of those federal subsidies are set to go away by 2022.

Then there is the matter of replacing fossil fuel electricity. Wind or solar electricity displaces some fossil fuel electricity, but they never replace the plants used to generate fossil fuel electricity. The fossil fuel plants are throttled back when the wind or solar is generating electricity. But sometimes wind and solar are asleep. At those times the fossil fuel plants have to power the grid without any help from the wind or solar plants. Nothing is replaced by building wind or solar plants. A dual system is created with dependable fossil fuel plants supplemented by erratically operating wind or solar plants. When fossil fuel plants are replaced, they are replaced by newer fossil fuel plants. Often natural gas replaces coal.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-2-29-is-manhattan-about-to-get-drowned-by-the-sea

Nothing, and I mean nothing, leads so quickly to the loss of all critical faculties as global warming hysteria.

One key claim in the maelstrom of global warming hype is the assertion that sea level will shortly rise and swamp coastal cities. I would put this claim in the category of total BS. For more detail than you would ever want to know on that subject, go to this link.

But for today’s purposes, assume that there is something to the claim of a big impending sea level rise. I live here in Manhattan, specifically Lower Manhattan (the southern part of the island). If sea level is about to rise and swamp coastal cities, Manhattan looks like ground zero, and Lower Manhattan in particular. We are an island surrounded by estuaries, otherwise known as the sea. Most of the southern half of our island, Lower Manhattan — the half with the high end business districts and pricey residential areas — rises up barely at all above sea level. Lower Manhattan has about 15 or so miles of shoreline, with the sea surrounding us on the East, West and South. The northern half of the island is hilly, and has much higher elevations; but in Lower Manhattan the first few blocks in from the waterfront are around 10 to 20 feet at best above mean high tide. If a big sea level rise is imminent, we are going under.

Belief in anthropogenic global warming and its associated natural disasters like sea level rise is an essential component of Manhattan groupthink. Therefore, it is clear that our politicians must “do something” about the impending calamity. But what? We’re not about to jack up some thousands of buildings by 30 or 50 feet each, even assuming that somebody could figure out how to do that.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/earth_to_climate_alarmists_warming_is_good.html

In terms of global food security, it is cold we should fear, not heat.

It’s cold tonight, and I sit at my desk, wishing it were warmer.  Even with central heat and air, winter is a difficult time.  My sinuses are inflamed, my knuckles are dry and red, and my joints are sore with the cold.  Every year I dread it more.  And now environmentalists like Jeff Bezos want to make it colder.

It’s no accident that Shakespeare wrote of “the winter of our discontent” (Richard III) and of “the icy fang / And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind” (As You Like It).  Shakespeare, who lived through some of the coldest decades of the Little Ice Age, found nothing to like about winter.  Nor did Dickens, who wrote often of “the winter of despair,” or, in a line about the short days of winter that applies to today’s liberals, “Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.”  Turn off the lights — you’re burning too much fossil fuel!

The fact is that cold is more damaging than heat.  Long, cold winters followed by cold, damp springs and summers diminish crop yields, leading to global hunger.  If the Earth were a few degrees warmer, that heat would expand corn and wheat belts to the north.  In terms of global food security, it is cold we should fear, not heat.

In the Little Ice Age, roughly from the 14th through the mid-19th century, global cooling limited food production, resulting in widespread hunger, disease, and economic stagnation.  In northern Europe, for instance, population growth was stagnant until the 19th century, and for most people, there was little improvement in daily life until after 1800.  In Britain, for example, population has soared from 10 million in 1800 to over 66 million today.  That would not have been possible in a period of cooler temperatures.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/02/28/the-academic-blacklist-climate-alarmists-dont-want-you-to-know-about/

The global warming faithful are always quick with the talking points about a “scientific consensus” that doesn’t exist, and the tale that 97% of scientists say man is causing the planet to overheat. But we’ll never hear them discuss publicly how researchers who don’t agree with the narrative have been blacklisted.

What are they afraid of?

Of course the climate alarmists will never admit such a list even exists. But Roger Pielke Jr., who teaches science, environment, and technology policy at the University of Colorado, says it does.

“A climate advocacy group called Skeptical Science hosts a list of academics that it has labeled ‘climate misinformers,’” Pielke recently wrote in Forbes. “The list includes 17 academics and is intended as a blacklist.” 

Pielke says we know this through a Skeptical Science blogger “named Dana Nuccitelli.” According to Pielke, Nuccitelli believes that Judith Curry should be “unhirable in academia” based on her statements about global warming.

Nuccitelli tweeted that “Curry’s words, as documented … are what make her ‘unhirable.’” Both the blog and Nuccitelli of course deny there’s a blacklist.

The “unhirable” Curry is no crank. She is the former chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and is a fellow of both the American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society. She stepped down from her position at Georgia Tech at the insistence of an administrator, she told Pielke. The Earth and Atmospheric Sciences dean had heard from “several activist climate scientists who had a very direct pipeline to” the dean’s office, and had expressed their “extreme displeasure” over Curry’s presence at the school, she said.

https://www.city-journal.org/needless-panic-over-disposable-plastic

New York City and other municipalities have banned plastic straws as part of a broader effort against plastic consumer products.

Why do our political leaders want to take away our plastic bags and straws? This question is even more puzzling than a related one that I’ve been studying for decades: Why do they want us to recycle our garbage?

The two obsessions have some common roots, but the moral panic over plastic is especially perverse. The recycling movement had a superficial logic, at least at the outset. Municipal officials expected to save money by recycling trash instead of burying or burning it. Now that recycling has turned out to be ruinously expensive while achieving little or no environmental benefit, some local officials—the pragmatic ones, anyway—are once again sending trash straight to landfills and incinerators.

The plastic panic has never made any sense, and it’s intensifying even as evidence mounts that it’s not only a waste of money but also harmful to the environment, not to mention humans. It’s been a movement in search of a rationale for half a century.

https://www.cfact.org/2020/02/24/could-global-cooling-silently-become-a-reality/

Trying to imply that cooling is right around the corner when we’re watching record-breaking warm ocean temperatures to me seems a big stretch, but current facts and the history around the five previous ice ages that came and melted before fossil fuels became recognizable words may be worthy of reviewing.

The real climate crisis may not be global warming, but global cooling, and it may have already started. These events may not be an anomaly, but a predecessor of things to come:

Planting was one month late due to cold Spring weather across the Great Plains of North America in both 2018 and 2019.

In 2019 Spring was wet and cold and ~40% of the huge USA corn crop was not planted.

Summer 2019 was cold, and snow came early in the Fall, and the crop was a failure across much of the Great Plains.

There were good harvests in the USA Southeast and South in 2019, and lots of grain in storage so prices did not escalate – but there were big crop losses across the Great Plains. Also, lots of that grain will be feed grade only, if they do get it off the fields.

The sun activity which is not controlled by humanity or by social media may be formulating a different forecast for the world. Even NASA has imagined a “Little Ice Age” in the future, because of solar activity that rises and falls in 11-year cycles; and the newest one begins this year, 2020.

Cool temperatures shorten growing seasons. Cool temperatures also reduce evaporation from the seas, resulting in less precipitation over land. The result is fewer months to grow crops, colder temperatures during the growing season, and less rainfall to hydrate the crops. Crop failures and famine predictably follow.

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

Over the period from November 2018 to March 2019, I wrote a series of posts on the subject of the true costs of trying to get electricity from intermittent wind and solar sources. On November 29, 2018 it was “How Much Do The Climate Crusaders Plan To Increase Your Costs Of Electricity? — Part III” On February 5, 2019 it was “Eulogy For Roger Andrews.” (Andrews was a guy who made many detailed calculations of how intermittent renewables function to drive up the cost of electricity as their penetration of the electricity market increases. Unfortunately, Andrews had died just before that post.) And on March 8, 2019 it was “Why Do Renewable Energy Sources Need Government Subsidies?”

The gist of all this was that you can’t realistically evaluate the cost of getting electricity using the intermittent renewable sources just by looking at the cost of making a kilowatt-hour of electricity when the source happens to be working at its best. Sure, a solar panel may generate some very cheap kilowatt-hours around noon on a sunny June 21. But now that you’ve invested a few billion in solar panels, what is the plan to provide the electricity people need on an overcast December 21, when the panels may work at only 3% of capacity during the day and nothing at night? If your plan is a backup system of fossil fuel facilities, now you are paying for both the solar panels and the fossil fuel plants, so you’ve close-to-doubled the cost of electricity no matter how cheap the power from the solar panels may be on the June day; plus your fossil fuel plants will still be running most of the time, and your emissions reductions will be minimal. If you want serious emissions reductions, you will need to push past 50% and on to 100% of your power from renewables, so you will need to phase out the fossil fuel plants. And replace them with — what?? And at what cost?