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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

Tony Thomas: The Scientific Method: Hate, Spite, Spleen

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2018/09/scientific-method-hate-spite-spleen/

As all who browsed the infamous Climategate emails will know, the men and women of science can go to almost any lengths to suppress, harass, slander and deride those whose theories are at odds with their own. Well guess what? It’s not just climateers who are at home in the gutter.

In the trillion-dollar global warming controversy, how objective is the science community? Scientists claim to be a priestly and virtuous caste concerned for truth and for the welfare of the planet. Ex-PM Kevin Rudd’s formulation went that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was the work of 4000 “humorless guys in white coats”.[i] Human-caused global warming is so contentious that it’s hard to step back and look objectively at the white-coated practitioners. So let’s switch to a less important science controversy and observe how scientists behave.

Here’s the case study: Was it an asteroid or volcanoes that killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago? The topic doesn’t get anyone emotional. The arguments have nothing to do with electricity bills, there is no cause for dumping prime ministers, capitalism is not at stake, and world government is not required. My dinosaur-debate text is a 9000-word blockbuster by Bianca Bosker in the latest (September) issue of The Atlantic. which informs us that the dinosaur researchers’ behavior is appalling. Name-calling. Blackmailing over academic careers. Data-tampering. Boycotts. Grant-snaffling. Peer review corruption. Consensus-touting… As you discover the details, you might notice parallels with the climate wars. Just one tiny example: $444m taxpayer money thrown to purported Barrier Reef saviors, while James Cook University sacks Professor Peter Ridd who challenged the reef alarmists’ data.

Now back to dinosaurs. In 1980, Luis Alvarez, who had already won the 1968 Nobel Prize for physics, made his claim that an asteroid’s hit finished the big lizards. This pitted the “Impacters” against the “Volcanists”, who blamed eruptions. The Impacters say a 9km-wide asteroid hit at Chicxulub by the Gulf of Mexico with the force of about 10 billion Hiroshima bombs, creating fireballs, earthquakes and a long darkness: an Old Testament version of hell, as The Atlantic puts it. These Impacters insist the science is now settled to near-total certainty. It’s as settled as evolution, they say, “The case is closed.”

California Climate Policies Facing Revolt from Civil-Rights Groups By Robert Bryce

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/california-climate-change-policy-hits-poor-residents-hardest/Hugely expensive green mandates will hit poor Californians the hardest.

In April, civil-rights groups sued to stop some of California’s policies designed to address climate change. Then on Monday, California governor Jerry Brown signed into law SB 100, which requires the state’s utilities to obtain all their electricity from carbon-free sources by 2045. Before signing the bill, Brown said the legislation was “sending a message to California and to the world that we’re going to meet the Paris agreement.” In fact, it will only increase the hardships that California’s climate policy imposes on the poor, as detailed in the lawsuit.

High electricity prices should be a concern for California policymakers, since electric rates in the state are already 60 percent higher than those in the rest of the country. According to a recent study by the Berkeley-based think tank Environmental Progress, between 2011 and 2017 California’s electricity rates rose more than five times as fast as those in the rest of the U.S. SB 100 will mean even higher electricity prices for Californians.

In addition to cost, the all-renewable push set forth in SB 100 faces huge challenges with regard to energy storage. Relying solely on renewables will require a battery system large enough to handle massive seasonal fluctuations in wind and solar output. (Wind-energy and solar-energy production in California is roughly three times as great during the summer months as it is in the winter.) According to the Clean Air Task Force, a Boston-based energy-policy think tank, for California to get 80 percent of its electricity from renewables would require about 9.6 terawatt-hours of storage. This would require about 500 million Tesla Powerwalls, or roughly 15 Powerwalls for every resident. A full 100 percent–renewable electricity mandate would require some 36.3 terawatt-hours of storage, or about 60 Powerwalls for every resident of California.

Increasing reliance on renewable energy also means increasing land-use conflicts. Since 2015, more than 200 government entities from Maine to California have voted to reject or restrict the encroachment of wind-energy projects. In 2015 the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously in favor of an ordinance banning large wind turbines in the county’s unincorporated areas. Three other California counties — San Diego, Solano, and Inyo — have also passed restrictions on Big Wind. Last year, the head of the California Wind Energy Association lamented that “we’re facing restrictions like that all around the state,” adding that “it’s pretty bleak in terms of the potential for new development.” The result of the anti-wind restrictions can be seen in the numbers. Last year, California had about 5,600 megawatts of installed wind capacity. That’s roughly 150 megawatts less than what the state had back in 2013.

Hurricane Florence is not climate change or global warming. It’s just the weather.Roy W. Spencer

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/09/14/hurricane-florence-climate-change-global-warming-weather-greenhouse-flood-column/1289272002/
It’s likely due to natural weather patterns, not climate change as some have already said.

Even before Hurricane Florence made landfall somewhere near the border of North and South Carolina, predicted damage from potentially catastrophic flooding from the storm was already being blamed on global warming.

Writing for NBC News, Kristina Dahl contended, “With each new storm, we are forced to question whether this is our new, climate change-fueled reality, and to ask ourselves what we can do to minimize the toll from supercharged storms.”

The theory is that tropical cyclones have slowed down in their speed by about 10 percent over the past 70 years due to a retreat of the jet stream farther north, depriving storms of steering currents and making them stall and keep raining in one location. This is what happened with Hurricane Harvey in Houston last year.

But like most claims regarding global warming, the real effect is small, probably temporary, and most likely due to natural weather patterns. Any changes in hurricanes over 70 years, even if real, can easily be part of natural cycles — or incomplete data. Coastal lake sediments along the Gulf of Mexico shoreline from 1,000 to 2,000 years ago suggest more frequent and intense hurricanes than occur today. Why? No one knows.
Unusual things happen in nature sometimes

The Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635 experienced a Category 3 or 4 storm, with up to a 20-foot storm surge. While such a storm does not happen in New England anymore, it happened again there in 1675, with elderly eyewitnesses comparing it to the 1635 storm.

Obama’s slimy little Deep State environmental cabal is at it again By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/09/obamas_slimy_little_deep_state_environmental_cabal_is_at_it_again.html

Under President Obama, the Environmental Protection Agency grew to gargantuan proportions, issuing 4,000 regulations, adding more than 33,000 pages to the Federal Register, and dumping $50 billion in compliance costs on business, making itself one of the biggest and most powerful agencies in the U.S. government – quite a feat for an organization without a Cabinet seat.

With all that power, it was also famous for its incompetence and corruption, in that it had a problem obeying rules other people obeyed and always got away with it. Gold King Mine on the very yellow Animas River, anyone? That also applies to the behavior of its Obamaton leaders, who communicated with secret email accounts (remember Richard Windsor?) and got rewarded with fabulous Silicon Valley social media jobs in the revolving-door aftermath. They were amply augmented in their activities by the Obama State Department and the Obama National Security Council, which conducted business pretty much the same way.

Now it turns out this same corrupt bunch is at it again, in a new Competitive Enterprise Institute report called “Government for Rent,” put on by the respected Christopher C. Horner.

According to the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard:

A shadow government made up of former Obama climate change aides and funded by wealthy environmental advocates is supplementing liberal governors in an “off-the-books” operation to help them win approval of sweeping global warming changes and defy President Trump, according to a new investigative report.

In it’s [sic] “Government for Rent” report, the Competitive Enterprise Institute published dozens of emails detailing the scheme and the efforts by governments to have the activists draw up official state climate change agenda paid for by private donations.

Kerry Would Sue Trump for ‘the Lives That Will be Lost’ Due to Climate Change By Nicholas Ballasy

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/kerry-would-sue-trump-for-the-lives-that-will-be-lost-due-to-climate-change/

WASHINGTON – Former Secretary of State John Kerry, author of Every Day is Extra, predicted that “lives will be lost” due to President Trump’s position on climate change, calling his time in office a matter of “life and death.”

“This is why it’s the anecdote to what Bob Woodward lays out [in his new book Fear: Trump in the White House]. This book describes how we accept and fight, many times unsuccessfully, more times successfully, to make our democracy work and never had we needed to do that more than right now. We’re in trouble,” Kerry said about his memoir during a discussion at the Carnegie Center for International Peace on Monday evening.

“I don’t try to be a troublemonger or to be somebody who tries to scare people, but I’m telling you folks – and I write about this in the last chapter of the book – I mean, I wish I could find legal standing to bring a case against Donald Trump for the lives that will be lost and the property that will be damaged and the billions of dollars because of his decision on climate change. This is life and death. Our democracy matters that much,” he added.

Kerry also criticized Trump’s handling of relations with North Korea and Europe.

“What is happening is the sloppiness of the diplomacy that is going on with Kim Jong-un, the sloppiness of his reckless statements in Europe at a time when Europe is already weakened somewhat, and it matters to us more than ever since the end of World War II. I mean, these things matter, enormously, and we’ve got to fight for them,” he said.

Kerry recalled the “huge division” in the country when he stood up against former President Nixon during the Vietnam War.

“I was arrested for civil disobedience and demonstrating against the war, so it was divisive and I certainly earned some enemies for a lifetime through that experience. And we saw some of them come to the forefront in ’04, that’s what that was about,” Kerry said, referring to the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” ads that aired during his presidential run in 2004. “That wasn’t about my record. It was about them being angry I opposed the war and told the truth.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Trump’s energy policies are driving Democrats crazy by Rupert Darwall

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/trumps-energy-policies-are-driving-democrats-crazy

The EPA’s recently announced Affordable Clean Energy rule, replacing former President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, is the most significant shift towards energy sanity in more than a decade. And it’s driving Democrats crazy.

President Trump’s new rule finally swings the pendulum back from the moment in 2007 when former President George W. Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act. The absurd aim of that bill was to replace oil from the ground with energy grown from plants.

California governor Jerry Brown, whose state is legislating for 100 percent renewable energy by 2045, blasted the rule change, calling it ” A declaration of war against America and all of humanity.” Delaware Democratic Sen. Tom Carper said it would send clean energy jobs to China, oblivious to the reality that Democrats’ war on coal is already doing exactly that.

Climate scientists are also losing their minds. Forget the Mueller probe, Ben Santer, an atmospheric scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, blogged. There is no doubting the Trump administration’s complicity in a much more serious offense – “the failure to acknowledge, address and mitigate the risks of human-caused climate change.”

But Santer got his facts wrong. There’s no scientific disagreement. The impact assessment accompanying the affordable energy rule does indeed acknowledge that greenhouse gas emissions impose costs on society. The new rule’s real and important change is that it finally constrains the scope of power station emissions regulation to within current law.

Fall Madness – Hurricanes and Global Warming By Brian C. Joondeph

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/09/fall_madness__hurricanes_and_global_warming.html

Fall is officially upon us with the passing of Labor Day. After this seasonal landmark, we are not supposed to wear white. I’m surprised CNN’s Don Lemon hasn’t found something racist in this tradition.

Football season has started, kneeling players and all. It’s been a busy week for the media as we are now less than two months away from the critical Congressional midterm elections. The media is not taking a knee; instead, they are on full offense with the Bob Woodward book and the anonymous NY Times op-ed, both full-fledged assaults on President Trump.

Fall is also hurricane season which means not only football jerseys coming out of the closet, but the hackneyed global warming doomsday predictions. The left-wing media, however, may not give hurricane season its due since there are more important stories to cover, like Colin Kaepernick, the Bret Kavanaugh confirmation circus, and Pocahontas wanting to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump.

Tropical Storm Florence is in the Caribbean and heading toward Florida, with early storms Helene and Isaac hanging out off the coast of Africa, deciding whether to huff and puff, or really blow the house down.

Florence, not yet a hurricane, but expected to become one, looks like it will impact the Carolinas. Or maybe up the US coast. Or possibly Florida. Or maybe harmlessly out to sea. The spaghetti models show all the possibilities. Here are the complied guesses from Weathernerds.

Environmentalists Need to Get Real The problem isn’t climate-change denial. It’s doubt that activists have the answers.By Walter Russell Mead

https://www.wsj.com/articles/environmentalists-need-to-get-real-1536010580

“Many environmentalists fail to grasp that the real problem isn’t skepticism that the climate is changing, or even that human activity is a leading cause of the change. Millions worry about climate change and believe human activity is in large part responsible. But they do not believe that the climate movement has the answers for the problems it describes. Green policy blunders, like support for ethanol in the U.S. and knee-jerk opposition to nuclear power, erode confidence that environmental activists—who too often have an anticapitalist, Malthusian and technophobic view of the world—can be trusted, to as they often say, to “save the planet.”

Last week French environmental minister Nicolas Hulot, once a prominent supporter of President Emmanuel Macron, threw in the towel. “I don’t want to lie anymore. I don’t want to create the illusion that my presence in the government means that we are on top of [environmental] issues,” he said during a live broadcast announcing his resignation.

Mr. Hulot is not alone among environmentalists in denouncing the hypocrisy and inadequacy of government action on climate change. The Paris accords are “a fraud, really, a fake,” said climate activist James Hansen in 2015. “There is no action, just promises.”

Three years later, Mr. Hansen’s words look prescient. Even ostensibly committed countries like Germany and France are on course to miss the voluntary 2020 targets they announced to such fanfare in 2015. The Climate Action Tracker estimates that only Morocco and Gambia are on a “Paris agreement compatible” path.

The climate-change movement is stuck, even after a scorching summer elevated the issue across much of the Northern Hemisphere. It is powerful enough to command lip service from politicians, but too weak to impose the policies it says are needed to prevent catastrophic change.

Peak Oil: A Lesson in False Prophecy By S. Fred Singer

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/09/peak_oil__a_lesson_in_false_prophecy.html

As recently as 10 years ago, we were told that the world was running out of oil soon. Horrors! Then, directional drilling and fracking opened up the prolific resource of “tight” oil shale. New production records are being set daily; the U.S. now leads the world in oil reserves, ahead even of Saudi Arabia.

Hubbert’s Peak

Geophysicist and noted pioneer of ground water flow in aquifers Dr. M. King Hubbert was being celebrated as a prophet. He had predicted that U.S. oil production would peak around 1970 – and it did! Of course, the price of oil was then only around $2 a barrel; it is now around $75, and will surely go higher.

The National Petroleum Council [NPC], made up of the leaders of the oil industry and other experts, told us, in 1970 as I recall, that if oil prices ever reached $3 a barrel, the vast resource of the Colorado kerogen would become commercial. Some oil companies actually mined some kerogen and retorted it to extract the locked-up but uneconomic oil. The world oil price is now around $75 a barrel — and sure to rise further.

David Archibald That Other Paris Pact, the One We Ignore

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/09/paris-treaty-important/

While our leaders have been eager to impress the world with Australia’s resolve to hobble its economy before the altar of the climate gods, another international accord is observed only in the breach. That’s the one insisting we maintain 90-day fuel supplies.

It seems we are finally rid of Julie Bishop, who resigned in a huff as foreign minister because she wasn’t made prime minister. Apparently, among the slights of her rejection, what particularly rankled was her failure to get a single party-room vote from any of her fellow WA Liberals. Presumably they know her better than anyone, which no doubt explains a lot. For others, those who have not lashed themselves to the mast of the Liberals’ Hesperus, she also uttered this reminder of her lack of fitness for higher office: Australia must honour the Paris Agreement and reduce emissions by 26%. “When we sign a treaty,” , she said, “parties should be able to rely on us.”

Yes, we should honour the Paris agreement — but not the climate one. There is a far more important treaty, also signed in the City of Light, to which are signatory. This is the International Energy Agency agreement of 1974, born out of the OECD in response to the First Oil Shock. The idea was that all the signatories would keep 90 days of fuel supplies on hand and be prepared to share in the event of an emergency.

Australia signed on in 1979 but is not honouring our treaty obligations. We know that because the new Department of Energy, under its new Minister Angus Taylor, says so. From the website (emphasis added):

As an IEA [International Energy Agency] member and signatory to the IEP Treaty, Australia is required to hold oil stocks equivalent to at least 90 days of the previous year’s average daily net oil imports. The Department is working to implement Australia’s compliance plan to address the current shortfall in oil stockholdings. The Department’s priorities for the IEA include working with the IEA to progress Australia’s plan to return to IEP treaty compliance.