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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

Climate Change Theory: What’s Wrong with it? By William Lippincott

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/03/climate_change_theory_whats_wrong_with_it.html

Dr. William Lippincott is a retired environment scientist. His inferences are based on extensive literature research on the mechanisms of climate variability, a task open to any student of the scientific method.

How climate alarmism is being sold in a distinctly unscientific manner.
I can’t believe I’m still writing about climate change. I’d have stopped long ago were it not for persistent calls to blow up the U.S. economy in order to save the planet. The cult-like demand for action permeates every part of public life, government, media, academia, even K-12. Rep. Among the draconian policy solutions, Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal would have enormous negative impact on our economy.

For the record, climate does vary — think ice ages. And a combination of natural climate variability and measurement problems make the likelihood of singling out a human fingerprint very low. I look here at how climate alarmism is being sold in a distinctly unscientific manner.

The term ‘science’ properly refers to the scientific method, which is a system of inference designed to weed out incorrect ideas in favor of those supported by experiment and observation. The crux of the scientific method is rejection of theory rather than proof of it. From Bacon to Hopper and Feinman, it has been well understood that scientific theory must be “falsifiable,” that is, subject to test and rejection. Falsifiability depends on narrow and specific conditions imposed by theory. If the conditions fail, the theory is wrong.

San Bernardino County Says No to Big Renewables By Robert Bryce

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/renewable-energy-land-use-san-bernardino-county/

The biggest county in America doesn’t want big solar or wind projects.

It may be the largest county in America by land area, but San Bernardino County, Calif., has decided it doesn’t have enough room for big wind or big solar projects. On February 28, the county’s board of supervisors approved a measure that bans large renewable-energy projects on more than 1 million acres of private land.

The move provides yet another example of how the energy sprawl that inevitably comes with large-scale renewable-energy deployment is colliding with the interests of rural landowners and local governments that don’t want “green” projects in their neighborhoods. Of course, there’s no small irony that that collision is happening in California, which passed a law last year that requires utilities to be getting 60 percent of their electricity from renewables by 2030.

As Los Angeles Times reporter Sammy Roth drily noted, achieving those renewable-energy goals “will require cooperation from local governments — and big solar and wind farms, like many infrastructure projects, are often unpopular at the local level.” All across the country rural landowners and governments have been rejecting or restricting renewable projects, and they’re doing so at the very same time that left-leaning politicians and some of the country’s biggest environmental groups are claiming that the U.S. must quit using hydrocarbons and nuclear energy, and instead rely solely on renewable energy for our electricity.

In January, some 600 environmental groups, including 350.org, Food & Water Watch, Friends of the Earth, and the Environmental Working Group, submitted a letter to the U.S. House of Representatives, which said that the U.S. must shift to “100 percent renewable power generation by 2035 or earlier.” It continued, saying any “definition of renewable energy must . . . exclude all combustion-based power generation, nuclear, biomass energy, large-scale hydro, and waste-to-energy technologies.” For good measure, it said this new hypothetical electric grid must have the “ability to incorporate battery storage and distributed energy systems that are democratically governed.”

Dr. Happer will set them free By David Archibald

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/03/dr_happer_will_set_them_free.html

President Trump has finally appointed someone to cure the U.S.’s disease of global warming hysteria

It was easy enough to predict that Trump would appoint Dr. William Happer to set up a Presidential Committee on Climate Science.

Two years have passed and have been lost. The first years of the Trump administration were hobbled by poor Cabinet picks, a proportion of whom conspired against him and others who were just hopeless. Scott Pruitt at the EPA should have got on with Dr Happer’s appointment straight away but instead spent $3.5 million on his own security detail. In the meantime, the climate juggernaut rolled on, producing 1,500 pages of alarmist nonsense in an official government report.

You can tell how important Dr Happer is by the forces that have been marshaled against him. The three major lefty media organizations — CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times — all came out to say Dr. Happer’s efforts would be wasted. The Democrats are alarmed, calling Dr Happer’s proposed panel “dangerous.”

Schumer Calls for Bipartisan Panel to Craft Climate Change Legislation By Bridget Johnson

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/schumer-calls-for-bipartisan-panel-to-craft-climate-change-legislation/

WASHINGTON — Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) introduced a resolution today urging colleagues to create a panel on climate change like the one created by Democrats in the House.

The move comes after Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) vowed Tuesday to get Dems on the record soon on the Green New Deal plan to drastically cut emissions.

“The Green New Deal continues to be an interesting discussion for, particularly, Republicans and we will, of course, give our Democratic friends who’ve been advocating this proposal an opportunity to debate it and vote on it on the Senate floor sometime in the next couple of weeks,” McConnell said.

Schumer decried that today as a “political stunt” but said McConnell’s move has unintended consequences: “For the first time in a long time the Senate is finally debating the issue of climate change — and it’s about time, if you ask me.”

“Climate change is an urgent crisis, an existential threat to our country and our planet. The last four years have been the warmest four years on record. Sea levels are rising. Marine life and fishing communities are being destroyed. Wildfires have roared across the West and more powerful hurricanes have buffeted our coastlines. Over the next few decades, climate change will affect every part of American life: our health, our economy, our national security, even our geography,” Schumer said. CONTINUE AT SITE

New peer-reviewed study reveals majority of scientists are skeptical of ‘global warming crisis’By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/03/new_peerreviewed_study_reveals_majority_of_scientists_are_skeptical_of_global_warming_crisis.html

Without the claimed “scientific consensus” on global warming or climate change, the Green New Deal becomes just another progressive con game, but with the highest stakes ever.

Writing in Forbes, James Taylor shows that the supposed 97% “scientific consensus” on global warming is false:

Don’t look now, but maybe a scientific consensus exists concerning global warming after all. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.

The survey results show geoscientists (also known as earth scientists) and engineers hold similar views as meteorologists. Two recent surveys of meteorologists (summarized here and here) revealed similar skepticism of alarmist global warming claims.

Gas-guzzling car rides expose AOC’s hypocrisy amid Green New Deal pledgeBy Isabel Vincent and Melissa Klein

https://nypost.com/2019/03/02/gas-guzzling-car-rides-expose-aocs-hypocrisy-amid-green-new-deal-pledge/

Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to save the planet with her Green New Deal, but she keeps tripping over her own giant carbon footprint.

“We’re like, ‘The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,’ ” the progressive darling said in January, speaking of herself and her fellow millennials. “And, like, this is the war; this is our World War II.”

Last week, she ratcheted up the rhetoric: “It is basically a scientific consensus that the lives of our children are going to be very difficult” due to climate change. “And it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: is it OK to still have children?”

The guiding principle of her eco-vision is to bring about “a full transition off fossil fuels and zero greenhouse gases” within 10 years.To achieve this, the GND fact sheet says, the nation must “totally overhaul transportation by massively expanding electric vehicle manufacturing, build charging stations everywhere, build out high-speed rail … create affordable public transit available to all, with goal to replace every combustion-engine vehicle.”But the woman who boasts of a “razor-sharp BS detector” seems to have trouble sniffing out her own.Since declaring her candidacy in May 2017, Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign heavily relied on those combustible-engine cars — even though a subway station was just 138 feet from her Elmhurst campaign office.

The Politics, Science, and Politicized Science of Climate Change By Edward Ring

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/02/the-politics

One has to wonder if the shock and despair described in David Bowie’s 1971 hit, “Five Years,” would be the preferred collective mentality for humanity, at least if the relentless propaganda campaigns of climate change activists are successful. And one must admit they have powerful allies at their disposal. A climate alarm consensus informs America’s entire educational, entertainment, and media establishments, along with most corporate marketing, and most political platforms from the local city council to the United Nations.

Climate alarm shouldn’t be a hard sell, and it isn’t. The horror inspired by natural conflagrations taps into primal, instinctual fears; when vividly imagining terrifying acts of nature, even the most hardened skeptic might have a moment of pause.

California’s horrifying wildfire that incinerated the town of Paradise in November 2018 is a good example. Later that month, retiring Governor Jerry Brown appeared on “Face the Nation” and predicted, “In less than five years even the worst skeptics are going to be believers.”

Taking shameless advantage of every natural disaster to stoke fears of climate change has become normal. In October 2018, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a special report predicting imminent global climate catastrophe. A month later, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a grim “Fourth National Climate Assessment.” In both cases, news reports included cataclysmic images designed to tap our deepest, most unreasoning and terrifying species memories; tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, fires.

The Total Futility Of Trying To Save The Planet By Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Francis Menton

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=23e577be66

In trendy progressive states here in the U.S., we know how we are going to solve “climate change.” We are going to slash our “greenhouse gas” emissions. Here in New York City, we’re going to reduce our GHG emissions by 80% by 2050. If you don’t believe it, you can just ask Mayor de Blasio. New York State? Same goal, 80% by 2050. California also has a goal of reducing GHG emissions 80% by 2050. Surely, this will solve the problem.

New York and California seem to think that they are big stuff in the world. After all, who is more important than we wealthy coastal U.S. elites? But unfortunately, on a global scale, we don’t really have enough population to count for much. As usual, when it’s time to do the arithmetic, the progressives fall on their faces. Let’s look at some numbers.

New York State has a population of about 20 million. California has about twice that population, 40 million. For comparison, the country of India has a population of about 1.4 billion — about 23 times the combined total of New York and California.

For greenhouse gas emissions, the latest number I find for New York come from 2015, with a total of 218.14 million tons of CO2 equivalent. With twice the population, California as you would expect has about twice the emissions, about 430 MMtCO2e in 2016 per this chart from Grist. For comparison, India’s emissions were about 2.4 billion tons of CO2 equivalent, or close to 4 times the combined total of New York and California. And India is still relatively early in the process of industrializing and building out its electrical grid.

Senate Democrats Introduce Bill to Push Radical ‘Climate Change’ Agenda in K-12 Schools Transforming America’s schoolchildren into climate warriors. Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273001/senate-democrats-introduce-bill-push-radical-sara-dogan

Senate Democrats are seeking to enact legislation that would provide federal funding to indoctrinate K-12 schoolchildren in a radical unscientific agenda on the purported risks of “climate change.”

Titled the “Climate Change Education Act,” the bill was first proposed last April by Senator Edward Markey (D-MA). It would authorize the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to establish a “Climate Change Education Program” and provide grants to develop teacher education programs, create “model State climate change curricula” for K-12 students, and “ensure that students graduate from high school with high climate literacy.”

Of course, these proposals are merely doublespeak for an attempt to use federal dollars and scare tactics to shape the next generation of Americans into radical environmental activists and proponents of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.

The proof is in the bill itself. Rather than acknowledging that manmade climate change is a disputed scientific theory, the Democrats’ legislation states outright that “The evidence for human-induced climate change is overwhelming and undeniable.”

The global warming pause By S. Fred Singer

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/the_global_warming_pause.html

CO2 may no longer affect climate.

The non-warming of the climate has become a topic much discussed since about 2005. John Christy has testified to Congress about the “gap” between IPCC climate models, which are based on steadily increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 and observations of atmospheric temperatures, measured by both satellites and radiosondes, 1978-2015. [REF hyperlink; see Christy fig. below]There have been many attempts to explain this discrepancy, ranging from a flat denial that such a gap exists [REF*; Tom Karl, Science, 2015 pp. 1469-1472, doi: 10.1126/science.aaa5632] to attempts to account for the “missing incoming energy.” For example, Kevin Trenberth has proposed that the missing energy instead of warming the atmosphere, “hides” in the deep ocean, to be released later.

Based on all the foregoing discussion, of the log-dependence of CO2 forcing, [REF Myhre et al, GRL, 1998 vol. 25, doi: org/10.1029/98GLO1908] and its possible climate-cooling effect, I have a simpler hypothesis on the ineffectiveness of CO2 in warming the climate. I realize, however, that this explanation is unacceptable to IPCC, and to many climate-warming advocates. However, I believe the “gap,” now 40 years long, according to Christy, has existed throughout the Industrial Revolution — and probably during the whole of the Holocene. In other words, I consider the “pause” may be permanent.