RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

Noted environmentalist but failed science prognosticator and multi, multi, multi-millionaire Al Gore, whose lavish homes fit the lifestyle of a Democrat former senator, former Democrat vice president, failed Democrat presidential candidate, Academy Award-winner, Grammy-winner, Nobel Peace Prize-winner, and all-around hypocrite chimes in on fellow (yeah, yeah, she’s a woman) Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.)’s equally non-scientific scheme to ruin the USA while getting rich — probably — and more famous in the process.

The Green New Deal resolution marks the beginning of a crucial dialogue on climate legislation in the U.S. Mother Nature has awakened so many Americans to the urgent threat of the climate crisis, and this proposal responds to the growing concern and demand for action. The goals are ambitious and comprehensive — now the work begins to decide the best ways to achieve them, with specific policy solutions tied to timelines. It is critical that this process unfolds in close dialogue with the frontline communities that bear the disproportionate impacts today, as this resolution acknowledges. Policymakers and Presidential candidates would be wise to embrace a Green New Deal and commit to the hard work of seeing it through.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/the_19781997_warming_trend_is_an_artifact_of_instrumentation.html

Now we tackle, using newly available data, what may have caused the fictitious temperature trend in the latter decades of the 20th century.

We first look at Ocean data. There was a great shift, after 1980, in the way Sea Surface Temperatures [SSTs] were measured; [REF. see Goretzki and Kennedy et al. JGR 2011 Fig. 2] “Sources of SST data:” Note the drastic changes between 1980 and 2000 as global floating drifter buoys geographic changes increasingly replaced opportunities for sampling SST with buckets.

Data taken from floating drifter buoys increased from zero to 60% between 1980 and 2000. But such buoys are heated directly by the sun with the unheated engine inlet water in lower ocean layers; this combination leads to a spurious rise in Sea Surface Temperature [SST] when the data are mixed together.

In merging them, we must note that buoy data are global, while bucket and inlet temperatures are (perforce) confined to (mostly commercial) shipping routes. Nor do we know the ocean depths that buckets sample; inlet depths depend on ship type and degree of loading.

Disentangling this mess requires data details that are not available. About all we might demonstrate, is the possibility of a distinct diurnal variation in the buoy temperatures.

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

As I started writing this on the balmy, increasingly socialist left coast on January 27th, the U.S. media were full of dire predictions of a catastrophic cold snap in the Midwest and New England. The same day, in Brussels, 70,000 people (35,000 of them clueless schoolchildren) demonstrated with slogans like “Winter is not coming anymore,” “Nature grows, capitalism blows” and “Stop denying the earth is dying.”

Alas, Winter did come to both the Midwest and Europe and did so with a vengeance. At least 21 people have died of hypothermia in the U.S. so far, and at least 10 in Poland. Temperatures dipped to a hellish minus 23 degrees Fahrenheit (-30.5 Celsius) in Chicago, and minus 14 degrees Celsius (7 F) in Poland. Eleven U.S. states recorded temperatures lower than –14 F, or below those measured north of the Arctic Circle in Barrow, Alaska.

More to the point, as Powerlineblog’s John Hinderaker tells us in a perceptive piece, the deep freeze affecting his home state of Minnesota has much to tell us about the futility of green energy as the putative panacea of global warming doom. It turns out that as Minnesotans were freezing, renewable energy was nowhere to be found. The wind wasn’t blowing and in the entire MISO area (15 states in the Midwest and the South) it generated a measly 4% of the energy and operated at a miserable 24% of installed capacity, prompting Hinderaker to ask pointedly “why do we need wind farms”? Why indeed? To answer this question, it is worth delving into some of the other figures Hinderaker provides.

https://www.city-journal.org/cuomo-green-new-deal-wind-energy-new-york

In his State of the State speech earlier this month, New York governor Andrew Cuomo declared that he was launching “the next phase of the Green New Deal.” New York, Cuomo said, will mandate that the state’s utilities produce 100 percent “carbon-neutral” electricity by 2040. As a step toward that goal, Cuomo announced plans to deploy 9,000 megawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2035, a move he touts as “the most aggressive offshore wind goal in U.S. history.”

Cuomo’s move is the latest version of what appears to be a competition among east coast states to see which one can set the most ambitious offshore wind-energy goals. New Jersey has a goal of 3,500 megawatts, Massachusetts plans for 1,600, and Rhode Island is aiming for 1,000. Building offshore wind projects is contentious—the battle over the 468-megawatt Cape Wind project in Massachusetts, which was finally scuttled in 2015, lasted more than a decade—and expensive. That’s why relatively little offshore wind capacity has been built around the world.

Cuomo and his renewable-energy allies are aiming to take their projects offshore because of fierce local upstate opposition to proposed onshore wind projects. But even if Cuomo’s target of 9,000 megawatts of new offshore wind gets built over the next 16 years (and I’m willing to bet that it won’t be), nearly half of that capacity will be needed merely to replace the zero-carbon electricity now being produced by the Indian Point nuclear plant. For years, Cuomo pushed for the premature closure of the 2,069-megawatt nuclear facility in Westchester County. Two years ago, the governor announced that the plant will be permanently shuttered by 2021.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-may-be-the-worst-regulation-ever-11548890635

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has created what may be the most bewildering, least cost-effective regulation ever. In July 2016, Congress passed a law mandating that all food containing genetic material that has been modified with recombinant DNA or “gene-splicing” techniques bear labels clearly identifying it as “bioengineered.” The statute acknowledged that bioengineered food is neither more nor less safe than other food, but the new rule—the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard, or NBFDS—won’t help consumers understand that. It will only leave them confused.

Under the NBFDS, two identical bottles of corn oil on a supermarket shelf could be labeled differently—one as bioengineered, one not—even though both were derived from the same field and are identical in processing and quality. Both labels would comply with the regulation because the new rule doesn’t require a label “if the food does not contain detectable genetically modified material.” The NBFDS allows manufacturers to make voluntary disclosures on such products, but not that they “may contain” bioengineered ingredients.

The word “detectable” poses its own problems. Technologies will evolve and become ever more sensitive, so that a single molecule of “genetically modified material” would make a food bioengineered. This is an invitation to meritless litigation over what is “detectable.”

Under the 2016 statute, labels are mandatory only if the food must also bear labels administered by FDA or USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service. Complying with the rule will require such detailed knowledge of the existing universe of food regulations that food lawyers will end up cross-eyed or wealthy—or both. Consider this gem: “Seafood, except Siluriformes (catfishes), and meats such as venison and rabbit are subject to the [Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act] (but not the Federal Meat Inspection Act). Thus, a multi-ingredient food product that contains one of these as the first ingredient would be subject to the NBFDS. A multi-ingredient product that contained one of these as the second most predominant ingredient or lower, could also require disclosure, unless the product is otherwise exempt (for example, due to the predominance of another ingredient such as chicken or beef).”

http://thefederalist.com/2019/01/30/federal-agencies-nutrition-obesity-recommendations-junk-science/

Over the past decade, my colleagues and I have published analyses in top medical and scientific journals showing that no human could survive on the diets the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Health and Human Services (HHS) used to create the dietary guidelines for Americans. To be precise, we demonstrated that the methods used by researchers at public health agencies produced data that were physiologically implausible and inadmissible as scientific evidence. We further showed that these pseudo-scientific methods and meaningless data generated a fictional diet-centric discourse on obesity and chronic disease, with significant consequences for public health policy.

Yet despite our rigorous analyses plus scathing critiques from scientists around the world, federal public health agencies repeatedly refused to address contrary evidence and re-examine their demonstrably invalid methods. As a result the USDA, HHS, National Cancer Institute (NCI), and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) continue to use meaningless dietary data to tell Americans what to eat and drink while promoting futile “diet-centric” public health policies such as menu-labeling mandates and banning large sodas.

Nevertheless, federal agencies impeding scientific progress is merely the tip of the iceberg. Recent events show that the U.S. research establishment is incompetent and corrupt, existing largely to transfer wealth from hard-working Americans to elite academics.
Taxpayer Funding Is A Substitute For Scientific Rigor

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/01/a-note-on-climate-change-and-bushfires/

Fixing the climate so as to fix the bushfire crisis is particularly popular with the authorities. Being able to blame the climate for unstoppable bushfires is, politically speaking, a beautiful strategy: it absolves governments and agencies of accountability. Plus, what empire-building bureaucrat doesn’t want a budget boost to buy water bombers in bulk lots?

A recent article in the Sunday Telegraph paints a despondent picture: horrible bushfires are “the new normal” because of climate change. The fire season, we learn, now extends to nearly 10 months of the year, and bushfires have become so intense that they cannot be stopped before immense damage is done. According to recently retired NSW fire commissioner Greg Mullins (now a member of the Climate Council): “The price of inaction [on climate change] will increasingly be paid in lives lost and communities shattered”.

This echoes comments made in the wake of the bushfire that destroyed the town of Yarloop in Western Australia in 2016. The conditions were described by authorities as “unprecedented”. And following the 2018 Queensland bushfires, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk told reporters “If you want to know what caused those conditions, I’ll give you an answer – it’s called climate change”.

Let’s assume for the moment that this is all correct. Put aside the views of most bushfire experts that the basic problem is failure to prepare the potential fire grounds in the expectation of fire. For the sake of argument, let’s accept that, thanks to climate change, the bushfire threat in Australia is now completely out of hand and deteriorating by the day. So what is to be done?

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/01/catastrophisms-gold-plated-non-solutions/

According to the IPCC, all 190-odd Paris signatories will need to at least double their current commitments and then actually achieve them. In other words, stopping global warming is a pipe dream, despite the vast sums that effort consumes and which might be better spent on more realistic environmental goals.

The Paris Climate Change Agreement is an initiative of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body. This is more than just background information. The UN is one of the most corrupt organisations on Earth. It began with good intentions but has been subsumed by a totalitarian Green/Left agenda that is underpinned by a persistent and insistent anti-West, anti-capitalism rhetoric. The Paris Agreement is no exception to this extreme Green/Left agenda.

What follows does not seek to debate on the hypothesis of catastrophic global warming being caused by man’s use of fossil fuels. But, just to set the scene, let me start with a little ‘climate change’ history. You may accept all that you read or hear about imminent climate catastrophe and that it is all the fault of human CO2 emissions. What you don’t often hear is that climate scientists themselves are in disagreement about how much of a problem global warming is. In the era of recorded history we have had three climatic periods which were arguably as warm or warmer than today. These are the Minoan, Roman and Medieval Warming Periods. During the Medieval Warm Period, Vikings were able to colonize, graze cattle and grow crops in Greenland. Human remains dating from that time have been found below today’s permafrost, meaning the ground wasn’t frozen when they were buried. Greenland today is less hospitable than it was then. So what we are now seeing is not unprecedented.

Following the MWP we entered what is known as the Little Ice Age (LIA), when the Thames regularly froze over. At some point in the 1600s we began to emerge from the LIA by virtue of a long, slow warming process which continues to this day. Climate scientists argue that this natural warming has been magnified by our CO2 emissions since about the 1850s. What they don’t know is how much of the observed warming since the 1850s is natural and how much is man-made. I don’t want to debate climate change as such. It is such a complex area. Suffice to note that observed warming this century is less than half of what the average of 100-odd climate scientists’ computer models predicted.