RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2020/07/the-arctics-hottest-day-not-so-fast/

“Last year, climate alarmists were beside themselves to alert the world that an all-time high temperature was scorching Antarctica. Just lately they’ve tried the same con with the Arctic, this latest claim no more credible than its predeccessor. It seems the only thing reaching new heights is the climateers’ shamelessness .”

Midsummer madness takes many forms. The combination of seasonal heat and light can produce eccentric behaviour when a global virus is hogging the headlines, such as the tendency to ramp up a single, yet-to-be-confirmed temperature measurement at a remote location – this time in northeast Siberia – into a climate scare.

Consider the media reaction to an alleged 38C reading on June 20, 2020 – “around 100 degrees Fahrenheit on the first day of summer” – at Verkhojansk, a Russian town ten kilometers inside the Arctic Circle (66°33′48.1″ north latitude), population about one thousand. It was like striking a match in a room full of hydrogen at the Hyperbole Club. From Helsinki to Kilkenny, from Scotland to Geneva, London and beyond, the MSM and Twitterati went wild with climate-angst (here, here and here).

Introducing the “unbelievably superhot” event on BBC’s Science in Action program five days later – Record high temperatures – in the Arctic – the presenter said: “It’s out of the COVID-pan and into the global warming fire.” Steve Vavrus, a University of Wisconsin climatologist, was one of the guests. Asked whether he was seeing “trends in the duration or regularity of these kind of persistent weather ratings”, Vavrus was even more emphatic:

This is connected to global warming. We’ve seen record warming for many years, if not most years of this decade. We know the Arctic is warming two to three times faster than the rest of the planet. One of the most important things to remember about this Arctic heatwave we’re experiencing right now is that it’s really not a fluke event. It’s an exclamation point on a long-term Arctic trend.”

https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2020/07/08/scott_stringer_burdens_new_york_city_taxpayers_with_his_woke_ways_498355.html

New York City comptroller Scott Stringer is at again. Last Wednesday, the man responsible for the New York City Employees’ Retirement System’s (NYCERS) five pension funds wrote to the CEOs of 67 companies demandingthat they disclose the demographics of their employees by race, gender, and ethnicity—including in their leadership and senior management. “Creating a national movement on the green economy. That’s what Sunrise has been all about,” Stringer earlier declared at a virtual People’s Assembly on BlackRock in May. It’s one thing to have Sunrise Movement activists agitating for a far left Green New Deal that Congress is highly unlikely to pass. It’s quite another to have a climate activist running the $150bn of the city’s pension funds—the nation’s fourth largest.

According to a March report by the City’s Independent Budget Office, the Covid market meltdown, causing a 20% decline in asset values, would require an extra $412m in employer contributions for 15 years. The city’s pension funds were already in poor shape. Three years ago, a realistic estimate of NYCERS pension liabilities implied an average funded ratio of 47%, meaning that the NYCERS pension funds had less than half the money needed to pay promised benefits.

Putting a longtime climate activist in charge of running city pension money has turned out to be financially disastrous.

https://townhall.com/columnists/pauldriessen/2020/07/07/reporting-renewable-ener

Joe Biden has drifted far to the left and made it clear that, if elected president, he would restrict or ban fracking, pipelines, federal onshore and offshore drilling, and use of oil, coal and even natural gas. He’s selected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as his climate and energy advisor and is expected to choose an equally “progressive” woman of color as his running mate (and president-in-reality).

He may also employ federal financial regulations to slow or strangle fossil fuel companies’ access to low-cost capital, further preventing them from producing oil, gas and coal. His official climate plan promises to require “public companies to disclose climate risks and the greenhouse gas emissions in their operations and supply chains.” By compelling them to present a litany of climate and weather risks supposedly caused or worsened by fossil fuel emissions, the rules could sharply reduce lender and investor interest in those fuels and hasten the transition to wind, solar, battery and biofuel technologies.

Those risks exist primarily in highly unlikely worst-case scenarios generated by computer models that reflect claims that manmade carbon dioxide has replaced the sun and other powerful natural forces that have always driven Earth’s climate (including multiple ice ages) and extreme weather. Actual data are often“homogenized” or otherwise manipulated to make the models appear more accurate than they are.

Models consistently predict average global temperatures0.5 degrees C (0.9 F) higher than measured. The12-year absence of Category 3-5US-landfalling hurricanes is consistently ignored, as are the absence of any increase in tropical cyclones, the unprecedented absence of any violent tornadoes in 2018 – and the fact that violent twisters were far fewer during the last 35 years than during the 35 years before that.

However, pressure group mob politics and the refusal of climate alarmists to discuss model failures and contradictory scientific evidence would likely make these realities irrelevant in a Biden administration. That would have devastating consequences for a US economy struggling to recover from Covid-19 and compete in a world where Asian, African and other countries are not going to stop using fossil fuels to improve living standards, while they mine the raw materials and manufacture the wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and biofuel equipment the USA would have to import under a Green New Deal (since no mining and virtually no manufacturing would be permitted or possible under Biden era regulations).

https://spectator.us/an-environmentalists-apology-i-was-guilty-of-alarmism/

This article was originally published on Forbes website, but subsequently taken down. It has been republished on The Spectator’s UK website. Read the UK version here. 

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening, it’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.

I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30, so I may seem like a strange person to be saying this.

But as an energy expert asked by the US Congress to provide objective expert testimony and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as an Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know:

Humans are not causing a ‘sixth mass extinction’
The Amazon is not ‘the lungs of the world’
Climate change is not definitively making natural disasters worse
Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska
Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have declined in Britain, Germany, and France from the mid-1970s
Netherlands is becoming richer, not poorer while adapting to life below sea level
We produce 25 per cent more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter
Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are potentially larger threats to species than climate change
Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
Preventing future pandemics requires more not less ‘industrial’ agriculture

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/a_winning_trifecta_for_climate_science_and_rationality_.html

Three recent authors, each coming from a strong environmental activist background, sound the common theme that the hyper-green environmental activists have cost us trillions and hurt the poor.

First there was Michael Moore’s Planet of the Humans, then came Bjorn Lomborg’s False Alarm, and now Michael Schellenberger’s Apocalypse Never.  All three authors sound the common theme that the  hyper-green environmental activists who have captured, politicized, and monetized  the concern for the environment have, as Lomborg explains, created  a false climate  alarm  which has “costs us trillions, hurts the poor, and fails to fix the planet.”  To varying degrees, all three authors come from a strong environmental activist background, which observation makes their public revelations even more noteworthy.

Planet of the Humans, the recent film produced by Michael Moore, caused consternation and a considerable backlash from the green activists and their allied backers by pointing out how traditional energy companies had co-opted the environmental movement by donning a green alter-ego and embracing renewable energy.  By doing so, the corporations gained access to government funding/subsidies for wind turbine and commercial solar power installations and created a public relations victory for their vociferous eco-shareholders.  Moore’s revelation that the reality of needing to provide 24/7 reliable electricity to consumers ensures that fossil fuel plants will remain the primary energy sources because of the failure of wind or solar to provide power if there is no wind or sufficient sun.  Renewables do not displace reliable fossil-fuel power plants.  Consumers energy bills do not go down, but go up, when renewables are imposed.

Moore also documented that renewables require large amounts of rare earths, cement, and fossil fuel energy in their production.  They are both notoriously inefficient in land use, and impose destruction of large areas of native habitats.  Further environmental destruction is due to the fact that the best wind or solar location is often remote from the most needed consumer base, thereby requiring the construction  of massive electric transmission lines.  “Factories claiming to have gone ‘beyond coal’ again and again turn out to be relying on natural gas.”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-6-18-biyb4kqu2wfj71beidexgg8exb

Here in the United States, the environmental movement has been completely taken over by the campaign to ban use of fossil fuels, with the stated goal of slowing or preventing “climate change.” But at this point, is the “climate” campaign really about the climate in any meaningful way? The alternative hypothesis is that the principal goal of the anti-fossil-fuel movement in the United States is destruction of the American freedom-based economic system, commonly going by the name of “capitalism.”

So let’s consider whether the anti-fossil-fuel campaign in the U.S. could really be about its avowed goal of saving the planet from climate change caused by greenhouse gases. If that were the case, then the campaigners would be principally focused on the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, mostly CO2, not only in the U.S. but in the world.

The campaigners are definitely focused on blocking any and all fossil fuel development in the United States. Environmental groups with what seem like infinite funding sources bring litigations on any and every possible theory to seek to block absolutely every proposed fossil fuel development in this country.

To illustrate the relentlessness of the litigation war, consider something called the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP), a multi-billion dollar project intended to deliver natural gas from sources in West Virginia over to the Atlantic coast of Virginia. An environmental group called the Cowpasture River Preservation Association, represented by environmental lawyers from the Southern Environmental Law Center, brought a suit to stop the pipeline on the ground that its permit to cross the Appalachian Trail, which had been granted by the Forest Service, was not properly authorized. As you are likely aware, earlier this week the Supreme Court ruled in that case that the Forest Service had the power to issue the permit.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/16/covid-19-model-failures-show-why-climate-science-isnt-settled/

The scientific models used to predict the global impact of the COVID-19 crisis have cast into acute doubt the idea of iron-clad, unquestionable scientific modeling itself. Model failure has had potentially catastrophic effects on the world economy. It should have similar effects on claims about the indubitable nature of climate-science models, and of policies ostensibly flowing from them.

One devastating example illustrates the problem with the COVID-19 models.  Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London published a report in mid-March based on an infectiousness model that predicted that without total lockdown, half a million Britons and 2.2. million Americans could die of the virus. His report was critical in guiding both Britain and many American states to take extreme lockdown measures, rather than milder and less economically destructive courses.

The model, and the report, turned out to be nonsense. The model was a poorly coded mess that contained vital errors and couldn’t be replicated. Meanwhile, Ferguson so little trusted his own predictions that his mistress continued to travel across London for assignations with him, in violation of rules based on his model and ignoring the risks that he himself had predicted.

All of this illustrates the profound danger of declaring apocalyptic models about natural (or potentially partly natural and partly human-assisted) processes “settled” and certain, and then making drastic policy and business decisions on that basis.

These lessons clearly translate to the climate-policy debate. Proponents of extreme climate action assure us that their models are irreproachable, the science is settled, and their policy path is required. But recent developments have taught us better.

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/502718-the-world-health-organizations-truth-cleansing-pandemic

You thought the World Health Organization’s job was direct and coordinate authority on global pandemics? Forget it. Last month, the WHO produced its “Manifesto for a healthy recovery from COVID-19.” Far from addressing its own lamentable failure to halt the spread of the virus, the document is little more than a demand for a global Green New Deal dolled up in the garb of public health.

The pandemic, WHO’s director-general, Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, tells us, is a reminder of “the intimate and delicate relationship between people and planet.” Efforts to make the world safer from another one are doomed unless they address “the critical interface between people and pathogens.” Human pressure on the environment, the WHO claims, increases the risk of new infectious diseases. Recovery plans from the pandemic should therefore “lessen our impact on the environment, so as to reduce the risk at source,” as if new deadly viruses are randomly transmitted from wild animals to people wandering through forests, rather than in Chinese wet markets or, in some instances, even cultivated in research labs. 

Arguing for a quick energy transition, the WHO says the costs of renewable energy are dropping. Exactly why, say, burning coal carries a higher risk of unleashing the next pandemic rather than cutting down forests from whence the COVID-19 virus supposedly came, in order to make way for wind farms, the WHO doesn’t say. As Michael Moore’s movie “Planet of the Humans” vividly shows, wind and solar require enormous land-takes and have huge environmental impacts.

But the WHO’s recovery manifesto isn’t about science and rationality. It’s the soul of Thomas Malthus entering public health. Restoring a pristine environment is the goal, humanity becomes the problem, and industrialization – by harnessing nature for the purpose of human flourishing – is the original sin. The WHO’s message that environmental degradation caused the pandemic is exactly what influential audiences in the West want to hear.