RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/changing_hearts_and_minds_on_nuclear_power.html

Until we’re able to fuel America and the rest of the world with cleaner forms of renewable energy, we need the ability to generate the electricity necessary to sustain civilization while curbing carbon emissions. For now, the clamor for less carbon, more renewable fuels and cleaner energy often ignores one of the cleanest, cheapest and most abundant supplies of energy on Earth. 

Nuclear power generates about 20 percent of the electricity in the United States today, but it holds the potential to create much more. Affordable electricity is also a key issue for millions of American seniors who live on fixed incomes and can ill afford higher utility bills. The 98 nuclear plants currently on-line in the U.S. contributed more than 73,000 thousand megawatt hours to the nation’s grid in January, making it the third most productive energy source behind coal and natural gas. But nuclear power generation has remained virtually flat over the past 18 years. The question is ‘why?’

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/04/23/will-the-warming-alarmists-ever-cool-it/

A decade ago, a story on National Public Radio, referring to a study from the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” said global warming was at that point “irreversible.” A couple of years earlier, the WorldWatch Institute claimed that by 2000, global warming had already been responsible for “150,000 excess deaths annually.” In between those gloomy assertions, the Union of Concerned Scientists was sure “global warming is happening” and that man was the “primary cause.”

Today, adherents call it “climate change.” And, according to a professor in Zurich, “it’s already begun.”

Of course there could be no other possible explanations for what’s being observed — and for what’s being assumed, given that the temperature record can’t be trusted. No chance there are other factors. Not the sun, not the natural climate cycle, not wobbles in Earth’s rotation or its varying elliptical orbit around the sun, nor ocean currents. It has to be human activity.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/21/earth-day-opposing-progress-trumps-protecting-the-planet/

April 21 is Earth Day, a celebration originally conceived by then-U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.) and first held in 1970 as a “symbol of environmental responsibility and stewardship.” In the spirit of the time, it was a touchy-feely, consciousness-raising, New Age experience. Most activities were organized at the grassroots level.In recent years, however, Earth Day has become an occasion for professional environmental activists and alarmists to warn of apocalypse, dish anti-technology dirt, proselytize, and raise money more to sustain their movement than to sustain the planet. Provability inevitably takes a back seat to alleged plausibility.

The Earth Day Network, which organizes Earth Day events and advocacy, regularly distorts or ignores science and exaggerates fears in order to advance its anti-technology, big government agenda. With a 2019 theme of “Protect Our Species,” this year’s event is no exception. Predictably, “our species” refers not to us humans, homo sapiens, but only to the other species on the planet, which we are destroying.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-4-16-the-soho-forum-global-warming-debate-and-the-impact-of-scientific-arguments

As you may have noticed from the announcement that appeared for the past week or so on my sidebar, the Soho Forum held a debate Monday night on the issue of Global Warming. The official resolution for the debate was Resolved: There is little or no rigorous evidence that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are causing dangerous global warming and threatening life on the planet. The debaters were Craig Idso for the affirmative, and Jeffrey Bennett for the negative.

For those who haven’t heard of it, the Soho Forum sponsors debates, roughly monthly, on current policy issues. The venue is usually the Subculture Theater, at 45 Bleecker Street in Manhattan. The Forum’s Director is long-time Barron’s senior editor Gene Epstein; and the Chief Operating Officer is my daughter Jane. Other recent Soho Forum debate topics have included things like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the causes of the 2008-09 financial crisis.

Holding a debate on the issue of global warming or “climate change” — and particularly one focused on the scientific question of whether empirical evidence supports or refutes the hypothesis of potential dangerous warming — is often difficult. Contrary to what you might think, the problem is not that it is hard to find scientifically-literate advocates for the skeptic position. Actually, there are plenty of those. Rather, the problem generally is that adherents to the alarmist cause refuse to debate anyone who disagrees with their position, often denigrating their adversaries as “climate deniers.” So Gene Epstein deserves credit for locating Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Bennett also deserves credit for being willing to put his position to the test.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/16/banning-straw-emojis-will-relieve-much-pollution-banning-straws/

Activist-peddled environmental hysterics are leading to nonsensical calls for plastic straw emojis to be banned. Prosecute the emoji thought crimes!

California lawmakers believed they were saving the planet by banning plastic straws, so they passed laws that criminalized waiters handing out the fluid vacuum tubes. Starbucks tried to one-up California with some corporate virtue signaling by ending their use of straws in drinks, but the company foolishly replaced them with sippy cup-type lids that actually use more plastic.

Now an environmental outfit is being even more ridiculous about the accursed cylindrical inhalation apparatus. The plan: to remove digital representations of the demonized drink devices. The multinational spirits conglomerate Bacardi is teaming with the environmental nonprofit Lonely Whale to implore the Unicode Consortium (the global authority on uniform programming language) to assist their efforts.

In an open missive they dubbed a “Cease And De-sip Letter,” in an effort to be cute, as well as a PSA video featuring actor Daniel Franzese of “Mean Girls” fame, the partners declared how important their efforts were. “Marine life is badly affected by plastic waste in our waterways, and refusing disposable plastics, such as the single use plastic straw, is a simple way that each of us can take action,” stated the press release.

Why are they reaching out to Unicode, specifically? Because of their noble goal: They want to remove plastic straws from emojis featuring soft drinks and cocktails. They also, by all appearances, want to be taken somewhat seriously.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-4-15-what-will-it-take-to-end-anti-greenhouse-gas-insanity

It was nearly six years ago, in one of the very early posts on this blog, that I wrote as to the global warming scam, “[E]ven as the cause becomes more and more ridiculous, the advocates just double down again and again.” At the time, world temperatures had failed to rise in accordance with alarmist predictions for about 15 years running, and I still had the naive idea that the politics of this issue ultimately would follow the scientific method; in other words, that the hypothesis of catastrophic human-caused warming would inevitably be forced to face the test of empirical evidence. Over time, empirical evidence would accumulate. As it became more and more clear that the evidence failed to support the hypothesis, the whole thing would gradually fade away. But up to that point, as I reported in that April 2013 post, what was happening was closer to the opposite. Extremely weak or completely negative empirical evidence for the hypothesis only made the advocates more and more extreme in their demands for immediate transformation of the world economy to “save the planet.”

The intervening six years have seen the ongoing accumulation of considerably more evidence, essentially all of it negative to the catastrophic global warming hypothesis, but my faith that actual evidence could resolve the issue has been almost completely shattered. Massive alterations have been made to the world thermometer temperature records by US and UK bureaucrats — almost entirely to reduce early-year temperatures and thereby create an apparent warming trend far greater than exists in the raw data. I have covered this issue extensively in a now-twenty-two part series “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.” Meanwhile, every hurricane, tornado, drought, flood, or other damaging act of nature is presented by the progressive press as evidence of human-caused “climate change” — even as the actual occurrences of such events have been definitively shown to have no increasing trend over time. Actual evidence gets massively altered, buried and/or ignored.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/huge_victory_for_genuine_scientific_inquiry_on_global_warming.htmlThe greatest “tell” for non-scientists evaluating the likelihood that the anthropogenic global warming theory is a fraud is that instead of critically examining the facts, warmists try to silence skeptics, with some of them even demanding jail for the thought-crime of questioning their unproven theory. So thorough has been the pressure to keep the fraud going and keep the billions of dollars a year in research funds flowing to universities and other research institutions pushing the party line that skeptics are under threat of firing — and some have been fired.

That’s why this news from Australia is so important. Via the Guardian:

James Cook University is considering its legal options after the federal circuit court ruled it had unlawfully sacked a professor who had criticised scientific research about the climate change impact on the Great Barrier Reef.

Peter Ridd, who was the head of the physics department at the institution from 2009 until 2016, took legal action against his dismissal.

Judge Salvatore Vasta ruled on Tuesday the 17 findings made by the university, the two speech directions, the five confidentiality directions, the no satire direction, the censure, the final censure and the termination of Ridd’s employment were all unlawful.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/the_european_lefts_extinction_rebellion_is_more_radical_than_even_the_green_new_deal.html

The Dems’ Green New Deal is simply an adaptation of the recent sustainability movement, but another movement with European origins is even more radical. Both use climate activism to disguise its core intentions of socialist indoctrination.

A review of a Finnish-to-English translation from “The Ilmastotiede blog” in “Watts Up With That?,” titled “The New Green Threat: Extinction Rebellion,” exposed the spinoff of the sustainability movement. Wikipedia describes it:

Extinction Rebellion (abbreviated as XR) is a socio-political movement intending to utilise nonviolent resistance in order to avert climate breakdown, halt biodiversity loss, and minimise the risk of human extinction and ecological collapse.

Extinction Rebellion was established in the United Kingdom in May 2018 with about one hundred academics… and launched at the end of October by Roger Hallam, Gail Bradbrook, Simon Bramwell, and other activists from the campaign group Rising Up!… The movement is unusual in that a large number of activists have pledged to be arrested and go to prison…

Participation appears confined to Western democracies (China and Russia are notably absent), and the tactics emulate hardcore leftist organizations such as Occupy. XR is much more aggressive than the Dems’ Green New Deal. Worldwide protests for climate change action are scheduled to start this week (we shall soon see if that happens). Notably, Stuart Basden, another founder, readily admits that XR is not really about climate change.