RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://catallaxyfiles.com/2019/01/16/david-bidstrup-if-one-problem

Back in the 1970’s the big climate scare was the “impending ice age”. Temperatures had fallen since the 1930’s and Arctic sea ice was in abundance. All the “scientists” and the “scientific bodies” agreed that we would freeze. There was “concensus”.

The main problem with global cooling was it could not be attributed to anything “anthropogenic”. Carbon dioxide was supposed to heat us up and the Milankovitch cycles and sunspot activity were outside mans “control”. There was nothing we could do except to prepare to become extinct as agriculture failed and mass starvation culled us from the earth.

Fortunately temperatures began to rise and by 1988 the climate problem became how to stop us all from frying. This was a better problem because the fanciful notion that carbon dioxide, with its magical property of “trapping heat” and “radiating it back towards us”. The magical “greenhouse effect”,( that is nothing like a real greenhouse), became the culprit and that gave them a means of “control”. They could “stop climate change” if only we gave up having cheap reliable electricity and glass in the windows. I wonder when they will work out how to control volcano’s – that’s a hard one so they will probably let it go through to the keeper.

There was also a moral dimension to the story. All of the “advanced counties” who had benefited from the dreaded CO2 and advanced their standard of living had done so by “causing climate change” that would affect outer bong-bong land. We were guilty of eco-terrorism and had to atone.

For some reason that is beyond rationality, the task of co-ordinating the “science” and sorting out the method to make reparations for our sins was given to the United Nations, one of the most ineffectual organisations in the world. In the best bureaucratic tradition the IPCC became the 300 kg Gorilla that sat wherever it wanted to. Meetings were held in exotic places and attended by thousands of “dignitaries”, “scientists” and hangers on. Our recently departed Premier attended one of them with a film crew in tow so that his virtue was captured for posterity. While all this happened the state electricity supply was trashed and the state debt increased.

https://spectator.org/fact-free-politics-from-climate-change-to-trickle-down/
Empty catchwords reveal a mind that’s unwilling to analyze and debate.

In this era when there has been more information available to more people than at any time in the past, it is also true that there has been more misinformation from more different sources than ever. We are not talking about differences of opinion or inadequate verification, but about statements and catchwords in utter defiance of facts.

Among the most popular current catchwords are “climate change deniers.” Stop and think. Have you ever — even once in your entire life — seen, heard or read even one human being who denied that climates change?

It is hard even to imagine how any minimally knowledgeable person could deny that climates change, when there are fossils of marine creatures in the Sahara Desert. Obviously there has been quite a climate change there.

The next time someone talks about “climate change deniers,” ask them to name one — and tell you just where specifically you can find their words, declaring that climates do not change. You can bet the rent money that they cannot tell you.

Why all this talk about these mythical creatures called “climate change deniers”? Because there are some meteorologists and other scientists who refuse to join the stampede toward drastic economic changes to prevent what others say will be catastrophic levels of “global warming.”

There are scientists on both sides of that issue. Presumably the issue could be debated on the basis of evidence and analysis. But this has become a political crusade, and political issues tend to be settled by political means, of which demonizing the opposition with catchwords is one.

It is much the same story on economic issues. Any proposal to reduce income tax rates is sure to bring out claims that these are “tax cuts for the rich,” based on the “trickle-down theory” that reducing the taxes collected from the rich will cause some of their wealth to “trickle down” to people with lower incomes.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/green-new-deal-renewable-energy-cannot-meet-needs/

Vast stretches of land would be needed for an all-renewable scenario. Which is why landowners are fighting solar and wind companies.

The energetic chatter of the moment is dominated by talk about the Green New Deal — a collection of proposals that would require running the entire American economy on renewable electricity within a decade or so.

The Green New Deal has been endorsed by scads of liberal politicians including New York governor Andrew Cuomo, former California state senator Kevin de León, media darling and newly sworn-in Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and anti-hydrocarbon activist Josh Fox. The goals of the Green New Deal are nothing short of radical. As the website for the left-wing think tank Data for Progress explains, the Green New Deal aims to “transform the economy and the environment in ways that achieve sustainability, equity, justice, freedom, and happiness.” Achieving happiness has never been easy. Even harder will be the Green New Deal’s aim of completely eliminating the use of coal, oil, and natural gas by 2050.

How all this happiness and energy legerdemain will be achieved is anyone’s guess. Supporters are particularly vague about how they would find the hundreds of billions — or even trillions — of dollars needed to attempt such a plan. Nevertheless, there is one unassailable fact about the Green New Deal: It is not green. Indeed, the entire notion of an all-renewable-energy system is the antithesis of environmental protection and scenic conservation.

The backers of the Green New Deal — along with their allies at big environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and others that tout all-renewable schemes — refuse to acknowledge the simple truth that deploying renewable energy at the scale required to fuel the U.S. economy would require covering state-sized territories with nothing but wind turbines and solar panels. It would also require stringing tens of thousands of miles of new high-voltage transmission lines.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dont-let-anti-gmo-fanatics-thwart-improved-photosynthesis-crops/

I have never understood the implacable opposition by some — primarily on the Left — to the creation of GMO crops that would improve plant nutrition and increase crop yields. It is flat-out unreasoning — and in my view, anti-human, because it would allow millions to remain hungry unnecessarily by imposing a crippling “precautionary principle” approach to agricultural science and idealize the genetic purity of plants.

Thus, the totally benign “yellow rice”– which could prevent vitamin A deficiency in the developing world by genetically engineering rice to produce beta-carotene — remains opposed adamantly by anti-GMO activists. A Swiss experimental wheat field intended to develop a plant that is resistant to fungal infection was trampled asunder by activists.

I assume these radicals will also fight against the genetic altering of plants to improve the efficiency of photosynthesis — now successfully accomplished experimentally with tobacco plants — that opens the potential to dramatically increase rates of growth. From the NPR story:

They experimented with tobacco plants, just because tobacco is easy to work with. They inserted some new genes into these plants, which shut down the existing detoxification assembly line and set up a new one that’s way more efficient. And they created super tobacco plants. “They grew faster, and they grew up to 40 percent bigger” than normal tobacco plants, Cavanagh says. These measurements were done both in greenhouses and open-air field plots. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2018/12/still-taking-water-in-the-alarmist-archipelago/

The woke and the dumb, the self-interested and the careerists, those who know better but go along — taken together they form a loose but the powerful alliance that stands athwart attempts to begin the long, slow reversal of climate insanity’s grip on public policy.

Some years ago I wrote a review for Quadrant of Rupert Darwall’s excellent book The Age of Global Warming: A History. The book was a history of how the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) had come to be accepted science, accepted policy and accepted popular belief all over the globe.

My conclusion was that the period of writing would in the future come to be seen as the end of global warming as a ruling ideology. This would occur despite the efforts of global warming believers, who would never go away but would simply come to be seen as an irrelevance.

Six years on, it is now clear I was both right and wrong. The believers have decidedly not gone away, indeed they prosecute the climate wars ever more intensely. But they clearly are not yet an irrelevance, a spent force. On the contrary, their efforts indeed continue to bear much fruit. They occupy the commanding heights of government bureaucracies, academia, mainstream media, supranational bodies, corporations and the indoctrinated minds of schoolchildren. Their theories have divided conservative parties across the West, especially in Australia. They have achieved the unbelievable outcome of getting left-of-centre parties once owned by the working class to adopt, holus bolus, policies which massively disadvantage and impoverish those parties’ once principal constituents. The climateers have managed this despite the fact that what they propose as theory is embarrassing nonsense, actually gibberish, and can be seen to be such by a reasonable person after a single minute’s reflection.

The argument for “climate action” so widely embraced is based on a handful of highly questionable empirical propositions linked by such non sequiturs as would be immediately apparent to any Logic 101 student. The CAWG position is, essentially, that one, the earth is warming; two, that this is recent and considerable; three, that it is largely caused by human activity; four, that it is dangerous; five, that we (humans) can do something about it; six, we humans should do something about it; and seven, we must mitigate rather than adapt.

Every one of these propositions is open to massive conjecture. To take just the first and second – that the earth is warming considerably – Anthony Watts of WUWT fame and Jennifer Marohasy, closer to home, have demonstrated time and again the tricks performed in the measurement of temperatures, the re-positioning of weather stations into areas exposed to urban heat islands and the re-jigging of raw data to achieve apparent warming. The whole shebang is held together by mathematical computer models, not by verifiable, readily replicable (therefore testable) empirical data. CAGW attempts to explain a highly complex, dynamic, uncertain, multi-dimensional natural systems through simple models that make a mockery of the dynamism and complexity of nature.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/12/the_500million_climate_carnival_concludes.html

COP 24 just concluded in Poland. Nearly 23,000 climate saviors attended this 24th annual climate carnival.

Every year, plane-loads of concerned busybodies fly to some interesting new location to spend tax dollars on a well stocked 12-day holiday. They concoct plans to ration and tax the energy used by real workers, farmers, and families back home.

Few delegates arrived by bicycle or solar-powered plane – a fleet of at least 100 commercial, private, and charter aircraft brought them at a cost estimated at U.S. $57M. When the costs of hotels, ground transport, food, entertainment, air-conditioning, and office services are added, the bill is likely to top $500M.

Australian taxpayers supported 46 junketeers. Now these Chicken Littles are back home spreading climate scare stories and lecturing locals not to overspend on Christmas presents.

There is a bright side: all that carbon dioxide emitted by planes, cars, buses, heaters, stoves, beer, champagne, and Poland’s coal-fired power stations will help global plant growth.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/defeat-in-the-air-at-the-climate-conference-11545178525

The latest climate talks ended here Saturday, a day late, with agreement largely reached on a rule book to implement the nonbinding Paris Agreement. The bigger story is how the United Nations climate process is losing its battle with reality.

“Will civilization descend into another dark age?” Al Gore bellowed. “I’m getting worked up early.” Yet compared with the euphoria three years ago in Paris, defeat hung in the air as delegates faced the realization that whatever they agreed in the hall had little relevance to developments in the world.

Negotiators sought to slow the rise of greenhouse emissions—around 2% a year world-wide for the past two decades. For the three years straddling the 2015 Paris conference, carbon-dioxide emissions were more or less flat. Then they resumed their upward trend—up 1.6% in 2017 and a projected 2.7% this year. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released on the eve of the conference, all scenarios limiting warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit assume steep reductions in coal consumption—to zero by 2050.

That’s not going to happen. According to the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, a German think tank close to Chancellor Angela Merkel, what it calls the renaissance of coal continues, using up the available carbon budget within a decade.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/only-good-management-can-prevent-forest-fires-11545090601

Representative McClintock, a Republican, represents California’s Fourth Congressional District.

Pundits and politicians have taken to calling the rising incidence of catastrophic wildfire “the new normal.” But California’s experience in the 21st century is neither new nor abnormal. It is, in fact, the old normal. The devastation unfolding today is how nature manages forests. Like an untended garden, an abandoned forest will grow until it chokes itself to death. Nature deals with morbid overcrowding through drought, disease, pestilence and ultimately catastrophic wildfire.

Scientists studying charcoal deposits in California estimate that prehistoric wildfires destroyed between 4.5 million and 11.9 million acres a year. When Juan Cabrillo dropped anchor in San Pedro Bay in October 1542 (the height of the Santa Ana fire season), he promptly named it the “Bay of Smoke.”

Our modern sensitivities reel at the devastation of the Camp Fire, which recently incinerated 153,000 acres, wiped out the entire town of Paradise, and claimed at least 86 lives. Yet in 1910 the “Big Burn” in Idaho and Montana consumed three million acres, wiped out seven towns, and killed 87 among a far smaller and sparser population.