RUTHFULLY YOURS

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?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/greta_and_pals_need_to_protest_in_front_of_the_chinese_embassy.html

This is great news unless you are a leftist who wants to blame the U.S. first and last.

Check this out:

According to a report released on Tuesday by the International Energy Agency (IEA), “The United States saw the largest decline in energy-related CO2 emissions in 2019 on a country basis.”

It sounds as if we’re doing just fine after we dropped out of the Paris Climate Change Accords.

I wonder how China is doing!

Our success cleaning up the environment is not surprising.

First, we are a free and democratic society that demands clean air and clear water.

Second, the international environmental movement hates capitalism more than clean air.  These people are really leftists using climate change or global warming to promote their anti-U.S. agenda.

So can someone ask Miss Greta a question?  Why aren’t you marching in front of the Chinese embassy?  That’s where the disregard for the environment is! 

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2020/02/shed-no-tears-for-rajendra-pachauri/

It’s a worthy saying, “Do not speak ill of the dead”, but I’ll make an exception for Dr Rajendra Pachauri. The chair of the IPCC for 13 years, to 2015, died at 79 last Thursday, January 13, of heart problems. He bugged out of the IPCC abruptly when a 29-year-old woman employed at his TERI think-tank called the cops about his sexual harassment for 15 months since almost the day she arrived there. He then used the labyrinths of the Indian court systems to stall the prosecutors for five years and ruin the life of his courageous young victim. A TERI panel affirmed her complaint, in which she  deposed:

I feel broken and scarred in body and mind due to Dr. Pachauri’s behaviour and actions. I get frequent panic attacks due to the constant harassment and being made to feel like an object of vulgar desire from this man, who is old enough to be my grandfather.

Apart from taking sexual advantage of his top-dog status at TERI and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Pachauri was a perjurer, an habitual liar and fantasist about the IPCC, a hypocrite, corrupt, and a non-scientist prepared to defame real scientists to cover his own and the IPCC’s gross bumbling. All round, he was an exemplar of the carpet-baggers aboard the catastrophic-warming bandwagon, currently on a roll involving $US1.5 trillion global spending a year. This essay documents the above.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/12/why-the-green-new-deal-would-destroy-the-environment/

A few minutes of serious thought from self-described environmentalists would prompt a realization that if the Green New Deal, a program championed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, were implemented, it would create an environmental disaster.

In recent decades, policymakers have forced public utilities to generate increasingly more electricity from fashionable “renewable energy” sources, especially wind and solar, and pushed automakers to manufacture more electric vehicles. Their chief goal is to eliminate reliable, affordable, generally clean fossil fuels, including natural gas, even though they generate most of America’s electricity and power most U.S. transportation.

Environmentalists claim to worry that carbon dioxide from these fuels will cause devastating global warming. Many would also eliminate nuclear power, which they say is inherently unsafe.

As I argue in a new Heartland Institute policy study, however, environmentalists have paid too little attention to the serious harm Green New Deal policies would inflict on the environment — including scenic lands, wildlife habitats, and threatened and endangered species. Implementing the Green New Deal would undermine the very values environmentalists have espoused for decades.

America faces a dilemma. Will it focus on real environmental problems that do measurable harm to human and ecological wellbeing, or will it mandate policies to head off climate disasters that are based on warming predictions have been repeatedly proven wrong by real-world empirical observations? Will it recognize that harnessing intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar energy requires enormous amounts of raw materials and mining, resulting in massive land-use impacts and human rights abuses, and is anything but clean, green, renewable, and sustainable? Or will it ignore all this?

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

It was particularly warm in Northeast Georgia this past week — no doubt thrilling the earth-worshipping faithful. We’ve also been very wet. After the latest round of rain, temperatures returned to a more winterlike feel. On this past Friday, there were a few murmurings of small amounts of snow on Saturday morning. Of course, any amount of snow in Georgia is news, but as late as Friday evening (scroll to the bottom of the page for the video of the Friday evening/Saturday morning forecast), most forecasts were making little of the potential snowy event.

According to the Friday forecasts, most of north Georgia was only going to get one-half inch to one inch of snow, and temperatures were going to warm into the mid-to-upper forties by Saturday afternoon. Thus, any snow that fell was supposed to melt quickly. We were paying special attention to these forecasts because we were traveling several miles for a karate tournament on Saturday morning.

Even on Saturday morning, forecasters were still saying the snow was going to be minimal and not much of a concern. We left our northeast Georgia house headed southwest about 9:30 a.m. Saturday morning. The snow was just starting to fall. The storm was moving southwest to northeast, so we were heading right into it. As we traveled, the snowfall was getting heavier. The precipitation on radar looked impressive. We were barely thirty minutes down the road, and we started getting nervous.

The snow was quickly piling up and the traffic was slowing down. It was as if we were headed to a global warming conference and Al Gore’s plane had just landed! As we continued on our way we saw several cars on the sides of the road, unable to navigate the snow-covered asphalt. What’s more, as we communicated with friends already at the tournament, we were getting reports of road closures.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/great-exploitations-greta-thunberg-to-get-her-own-bbc-show/

Well, it’s starting to become more clear why Greta Thunberg wanted to trademark her name. It turns out that BBC Studios is developing a TV show about Greta Thunberg.

As of this writing, there is no release date, no number of episodes set, and no network attached yet. If there’s no title yet, I think it should be called “Skipping School.”

But, we do have a series description courtesy of BBC Studios:

The series will follow Greta’s international crusade, which takes her to the front line of climate change in some of the most extraordinary places on earth, as she explores what actions could be taken to limit climate change and the damage it causes.

As she travels Greta meets not only leading scientists but political leaders and business heavyweights, exploring the scientific evidence with them and challenging them to change.

The films will also charts her own journey into adulthood as she continues to be confronted by the real world consequences of inaction; and will share some of the quiet moments as she writes the impactful speeches that are now broadcast and analysed around the world, as she lives a teenage life like no other.

Greta is also the subject of a new documentary at Hulu that is also being developed.

“Climate change is probably the most important issue of our lives so it feels timely to make an authoritative series that explores the facts and science behind this complex subject,” said Rob Liddell, the producer of the upcoming series on Greta. “To be able to do this with Greta is an extraordinary privilege, getting an inside view on what it’s like being a global icon and one of the most famous faces on the planet.”

Is it just me, or this girl being over-exposed?