https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXxHfb66ZgM
https://pjmedia.com/trending/new-u-s-climate-report-a-scientific-embarrassment/
The U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA), released last Friday, provides a superb illustration of journalist H. L. Mencken’s (1880-1950) claim:
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
The 1,656-page NCA report, produced by a team from thirteen federal agencies, is riddled with imaginary hobgoblins. Especially mistaken is the NCA’s repeated reference to increased warming and extreme weather events, both in the recent past and in the future. The NCA asserts:
Observations collected around the world provide significant, clear, and compelling evidence that global average temperature is much higher, and is rising more rapidly, than anything modern civilization has experienced …
While NASA’s claim that there has been slightly more than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 deg Fahrenheit) of warming since 1880 is likely correct, there has been no additional warming since the new millennium. This is referred to as the “Global Warming Hiatus” by the climate modeling community. Contrary to the outputs of climate models that project continued warming, the Earth’s climate appears to be cooling down, with increasing cold weather extremes worldwide in the last six years.
The past two winters have been especially cold over North America. November 2018 set low temperature records across the contiguous U.S., with three winter storms as of November 28 and the coldest Thanksgiving Week in one hundred years. Among some of the cold records: 19 F (degrees Fahrenheit) was recorded at New York City’s Central Park on November 22, which was the park’s coldest Thanksgiving since 1871; on the same day, the temperature at the top of Mount Washington in northern New Hampshire fell to -26 F, the coldest ever recorded for November. This beat the previous record of -20 F on Nov. 30, 1958.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/national-climate-assessment-doomsday-scenarios-fearmongering/
The doomsday scenarios in the National Climate Assessment are close to impossible.
The latest National Climate Assessment, released just last week, aims to plant yet another seed of climate catastrophism into the mind of the public. Predictably, its worst-case scenarios got huge play in the media. After all, disaster sells.
But the doomsday scenarios that animated talking heads throughout the weekend aren’t just highly unlikely; they’re close to impossible. For example, the report speculated that climate “inaction” could result in as much as a 10 percent drop in U.S. gross domestic product by 2100. Admittedly, a lot can happen in 82 years. But a 10 percent drop in GDP is more than twice the loss suffered during the Great Recession.
How could things get so bad? Well, put garbage in, and you’ll get garbage out. The study, funded in part by climate warrior Tom Steyer, calculates these costs by assuming that the world will be 15 degrees Fahrenheit warmer by 2100. That mind-boggling assumption is even higher than the worst-case scenario predicted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In other words, it is completely unrealistic.
Other scary projections in the National Climate Assessment rely on a theoretical climate trajectory known as Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP 8.5) — one of four trajectories that climatologists use to estimate the effects of different greenhouse-gas concentrations.
To put it plainly, RCP 8.5 assumes a combination of extreme factors — all bad — that are not likely to all coincide. It assumes “the fastest population growth (a doubling of Earth’s population to 12 billion), the lowest rate of technology development, slow GDP growth, a massive increase in world poverty, plus high energy use and emissions.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/endangered-species-habitat-check-1543365316
Amid all the hand-wringing about a polarized Supreme Court, note Tuesday’s unanimous decision for regulatory sanity. The case concerned whether a frog’s “critical habitat” can include land where the frog doesn’t live and can’t survive.
Weyerhaeuser v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife involves more than 1,500 acres in Louisiana that the government declared “critical habitat” for the dusky gopher frog, which is protected under the Endangered Species Act. Two problems: The critter hasn’t been seen in those parts for about five decades, and it can’t survive on the land without clearing forest canopy.
The timber company that operates on the land sued on the sensible grounds that the place can’t be critical habitat if the creature would die on arrival. The law allows Fish and Wildlife to designate certain unoccupied areas as critical habit but only if they’re essential to the conservation of the species. The designation threatens development on the land and could cost the owners $34 million by the government’s estimates.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled for the government in a decision with no limiting principle—by the circuit’s logic, a desert could be critical habitat for a fish, as more than a dozen state attorneys general pointed out in an amicus brief to the Supreme Court.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/what-californias-fire-follies-can-teach-us/
As is normal these days, the blame game is already being waged in the wake of the most recent 2018 Californian bushfires. On the one hand are the doomsayers who claim the fires are a result of climate change. At the other end of the spectrum are those blaming “environmental terrorists” for preventing effective pre-fire management, such as forest thinning and fuel-reduction burning.
Depressingly, the climate changers include influential Australians such as Stuart Ellis, CEO of the Australasian Fire and Emergency Services Authority, and Richard Thornton, director of the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre. Both are quoted in The Guardian newspaper attributing the Californian fires to climate change, with no qualification. Fascinatingly, the second group includes Ryan Zinke, the US Secretary of the Interior, and Sonny Perdue, US Secretary of Agriculture, who oversees the U.S. Forest Service. Zinke makes no bones about his view that responsible preparation of potential fire grounds was prevented by environmental zealots, whom he brands “terrorists”.
As in most matters where science, politics and human affairs intermix, the reality is more complex than either of these contrasting opinions. As happens so often in the media these days, the single-issue commentators are not addressing the fire problem but are using alarm over the fires to promote another agenda. For example, Australian bushfire research and emergency response agencies promote climate change anxiety to generate increased funding; the Trump administration wants to revive logging for economic and social reasons, and cites overstocked, dying forests (locked away by ‘green’ administrations) as the fundamental cause of the fires.
I am not an expert on the Californian situation, but I have been there many times and have many colleagues in the American fire community who have helped to educate me and shape my views. What follows is my perspective on what is going on, and what is likely to transpire. I am trying to look at the bigger picture, rather than focus on one issue or another.
For a start, California is a big place with a wide range of climates, vegetation and topographical situations and therefore a range of different bushfire challenges. Irrespective of any recent “climate change”, most of California has always experienced hot, dry summers and cool wet winters, and droughts have always periodically occurred. There is also (usually in late summer) the scourge of the infamous Santa Ana winds. These are hot, dry, strong winds originating in the desert country to the east that sweep down the Sierra Mountains into coastal southern California. This air mass is so dry, it acts on a bushfire like opening the door of a blast furnace. Furthermore, wind velocity often peaks between midnight and dawn, ensuring people in the path of a newly-started fire receive little warning and awake to be confronted by wind-driven flames.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272052/latest-manipulative-national-climate-assessment-joseph-klein
Last Friday, the Trump administration released the latest volume of the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment, which was prepared by scientists from 13 government agencies with contributions from outside scientists. The development of this report was well underway during the Obama administration. Nevertheless, the Trump White House did not change the report’s content. When President Trump was asked on Monday whether he had read the report, he replied, “I’ve seen it, I’ve read some of it, and it’s fine.” He remains skeptical, however, regarding the report’s dire predictions of the extent to which climate change will have a supposedly devastating impact on the U.S. economy by the end of this century. “I don’t believe it,” he said, also noting that China and other countries were largely responsible for the problem, not the United States. The president has every reason to be skeptical of the report’s doomsday forecasts for the U.S. economy.
“Climate change is transforming where and how we live and presents growing challenges to human health and quality of life, the economy, and the natural systems that support us,” the report’s authors wrote. At the same time, the authors admitted the difficulties in making predictions as to the “cascading impacts” climate change may have on “the natural, built, and social systems we rely on individually and through their connections to one another.” The authors also acknowledged that “it is hard to quantify and predict all the ways in which climate-related stressors might lead to severe or widespread consequences for natural, built, and social systems.” Nevertheless, after admitting the difficulty of making such predictions, the report’s authors did just that in very specific terms. No wonder President Trump has his doubts.
Indeed, the authors of the just released National Climate Assessment report projected what they believe is likely to happen in the United States by the middle and the end of this century if drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are not taken in time. The authors purported to quantify the devastating effects in the United States on health, the environment, agriculture, trade, infrastructure, and the economy if there is continued growth in greenhouse gas emissions at the current rate. The authors predicted between 3,900 and 9300 more deaths per year by the end of the century. They broke down their end-of-century forecast by type of climate change-related harm to the economy. There will be $141 billion from heat-related deaths, $118 billion from sea level rise and $32 billion from infrastructure damage, they predicted. Under one of their scenarios, “almost two billion labor hours are projected to be lost annually by 2090 from the impacts of temperature extremes, costing an estimated $160 billion in lost wages.” All told, according to the latest National Climate Consensus report’s authors, “annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century—more than the current gross domestic product (GDP) of many U.S. states.”
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/11/latest_global_warming_lies_from_us_global_change_research_program.html
The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) has released its latest doomsday climate report. This organization, part of the federal government, has been in business for a long time, releasing nonsense reports concerning the supposed global warming threat. I attended meetings of the federal advisory committee associated with the program in 2011 and wrote an article about that particular circus. Federal advisory committees are supposed to be committees of experts with a diversity of viewpoints. The committee in 2011 consisted of supposed experts with only one point of view, that we are threatened by doomsday global warming.
The USGCRP suffers from a lack of imagination. Its reports imitate the style and approach of the United Nations International Panel On Climate Change (IPCC). The USGCRP uses the IPCC as a trusted source. The problem is that the IPCC is not to be trusted. One idea broached at the 2011 meeting is present in the 2018 report. In 2011 the activists wrestled with the problem that nobody was paying much attention to their reports. They decided that there should be customized reports for different parts of the U.S. The idea was that people would be more concerned if there were specific doomsday predictions for their neighborhood. The country was divided into regions as shown in the map below. Doomsday forecasts for the regions are taken from climate models, sometimes supplemented by a procedure known as downscaling.
https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2018/11/26/junk_science_has_become_a_profitable_industry_110810.html
Should we believe the headline, “Drinking four cups of coffee daily lowers risk of death”? How about, “Mouthwash May Trigger Diabetes. . .”? Should we really eat more, not less, fat? And what should we make of data that suggest people with spouses live longer?
These sorts of conclusions, from supposedly scientific studies, seem to vary from month to month, leading to ever-shifting “expert” recommendations. However, most of their admonitions are based on flawed research that produces results worthy of daytime TV.
Misleading research is costly to society directly because much of it is supported by the federal government, and indirectly, when it gives rise to unwise, harmful public policy.
Social science studies are notorious offenders. A landmark study in the journal Nature Human Behaviour in August reported the results of efforts to replicate 21 social science studies published in the prestigious journals Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015.
The multi-national team actually “conducted high-powered replications of the 21 experimental social science studies — using sample sizes around five times larger than the original sample sizes” and found that “62% of the replications show an effect in the same direction as the original studies.” One out of the four Nature papers and seven of the seventeen Science papers evaluated did not replicate, a shocking result for two prestigious scientific journals. The authors noted two kinds of flaws in the original studies: false positives and inflated effect sizes.
Science is supposed to be self-correcting. Smart editors. Peer review. Competition from other labs. But when we see that university research claims – published in the crème de la crème of scientific journals, no less — are so often wrong, there must be systematic problems. One of them is outright fraud – “advocacy research” that has methodological flaws or intentionally misinterprets the results.
A quick refresher course to remind us of previous global warming/cooling scares By Jack Hellner ****
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/11/a_quick_refresher_course_to_remind_us_of_previous_global_warmingcooling_scares.html
In light of the new, much-hyped “official” report on global warming that is being pushed by almost all the media and the record cold that is occurring now in many parts of the U.S., it would be helpful if some enterprising journalist actually reported how often the people have been scared by previous warnings of global warming or cooling.
An article in Wattsupwiththat.com from 2014 encapsulates the multiple intentional scares from 1895 on. Throughout the entire 120 year period fossil fuel use was growing exponentially, population growth was exploding, and CO2 concentration was increasing. The fact that temperatures both rose and fell during this period shows that there is no correlation between temperature, fossil fuels, CO2 and the human population. Storm activity, floods, droughts, and sea levels have also fluctuated throughout billions of years.
There are a huge number of bullet points in this article. I have left in some to highlight the difference in scare tactics at various points in time by the media who seem to just repeat whatever they are told and don’t care how far off previous predictions have been:
A brief history of climate panic and crisis… both warming and cooling
For at least 120 years, climate “scientists” have been claiming that the climate was going to kill us…but they have kept switching whether it was a coming ice age, or global warming.
(A timeline of claims follows, updated to 2014)
https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/21/rent-s
President Trump announced last month that his administration will take actions to allow the year-round sale of fuel containing 15 percent ethanol, which is currently banned during summer months. The rent-seeking justification for this expansion of a flawed policy revved up immediately, in the form of a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Iowa U.S. Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst. They lauded the decision, as well as the existing federal mandate to blend ethanol with transportation fuels, citing the contributions to the nation’s job growth, GDP, and tax revenues.
The same arguments could be made for a federal law mandating that all the alcohol in hard liquor and mouthwash be derived from corn. Would that be sound public policy?
Politics aside, any defense of U.S. ethanol policy must embrace a series of fallacies which include:
ethanol produced from corn makes the U.S. less dependent on fossil fuels,
ethanol lowers the price of gasoline,
an increase in the percentage of ethanol blended into gasoline boosts the overall supply of gasoline, and
ethanol is environmentally friendly and lowers global carbon dioxide emissions.
Although none of these claims is true, the ethanol lobby continues to promote them, and many politicians—particularly in the major corn-producing states—seem intoxicated by them.
Politicians like to say that ethanol is environmentally friendly, but these claims are misleading. Although corn is a renewable resource, it has a far lower yield relative to the energy used to produce it than ethanol from sugar cane. Moreover, ethanol yields about 33 percent less energy per gallon than gasoline, so mileage drops off significantly. Fuel costs for Americans are often artificially inflated due to the low energy content of ethanol (in spite of a possible octane boost) and the high costs faced by fuel companies trying to comply with ill-conceived fuel regulations. In a 2014 study, the Congressional Budget Office found that raising the mandated use of corn ethanol raises motor fuel prices.
