RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-climate-change-tort-racket-1528499384

Liberals want to use racketeering laws to prosecute so-called climate-change skeptics. But the real conspiracy may be between plaintiff lawyers and Democratic politicians who have ganged up to shake down oil companies.

San Francisco, Oakland, New York and Seattle have sued five global oil giants—BP, Chevron , ConocoPhillips , ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell —for billions in future damages from climate change. Brass-knuckled plaintiff firm Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro has been shopping around the lawsuit to other cities desperate for cash.

No court has recognized common-law claims for injuries supposedly caused by climate change, and the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in AEP v. Connecticut (2011) that the Clean Air Act pre-empts public nuisance torts against corporations for greenhouse-gas emissions. So the cities are now arguing that the mere production and promotion of fossil fuels create a public nuisance, and the suits are heading to court.

San Francisco and Oakland were counting on a home courtroom advantage with their choice of legal venue give that climate change is something of a religion in California. But Clinton-appointed federal Judge William Alsup is calling fouls as he sees them.

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/7175/full
Myron Ebell is Director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, and Chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition, which aims to dispel myths about global warming.

Donald J. Trump has made many decisions since becoming President of the United States that have offended the permanent political establishment in Washington; and in foreign policy, he has also shocked political elites in Britain and Europe by doing things that are simply not done. To take a recent notable example, in May Trump stopped pretending that payoffs to Iran would slow the ayatollahs from developing nuclear weapons. Before that, he angered pro-Arabists everywhere by moving the American embassy to Israel’s capital, Jerusalem. But perhaps the foreign policy decision most upsetting to politically correct sensibilities everywhere occurred on June 1, 2017 when the President announced that the US would withdraw from the Paris climate treaty.

In the months leading up to the announcement, intense pressure was put on Trump to stay in Paris from every direction — environmental pressure groups, Democrats in Congress, mainstream media, Hollywood celebrities, countless CEOs of international corporations, and several members of his own administration, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. The push by world leaders peaked at the G7 summit meeting in May 2017 in Sicily, but in the end all the cajoling and coaxing from Prime Minister May, Chancellor Merkel, President Macron, and EU Commission President Juncker did not convince Trump to break his campaign promise.

Although Trump made clear in his Rose Garden speech why undertaking international commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is not in America’s national interest, he created confusion when he added: “I’m willing to immediately work with Democratic leaders to either negotiate our way back into Paris, under terms that are fair to the United States and its workers, or to negotiate a new deal that protects our country and its taxpayers . . . And we’ll make it good, and we won’t be closing up our factories, and we won’t be losing our jobs.” He added to the confusion in January when, as the BBC reported, he said, “we could conceivably get back in”.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-has-run-its-course-1528152876

Mr. Hayward is a senior resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley

“Scientists who are genuinely worried about the potential for catastrophic climate change ought to be the most outraged at how the left politicized the issue and how the international policy community narrowed the range of acceptable responses. Treating climate change as a planet-scale problem that could be solved only by an international regulatory scheme transformed the issue into a political creed for committed believers. Causes that live by politics, die by politics.”

Climate change is over. No, I’m not saying the climate will not change in the future, or that human influence on the climate is negligible. I mean simply that climate change is no longer a pre-eminent policy issue. All that remains is boilerplate rhetoric from the political class, frivolous nuisance lawsuits, and bureaucratic mandates on behalf of special-interest renewable-energy rent seekers.

Judged by deeds rather than words, most national governments are backing away from forced-marched decarbonization. You can date the arc of climate change as a policy priority from 1988, when highly publicized congressional hearings first elevated the issue, to 2018. President Trump’s ostentatious withdrawal from the Paris Agreement merely ratified a trend long becoming evident.

A good indicator of why climate change as an issue is over can be found early in the text of the Paris Agreement. The “nonbinding” pact declares that climate action must include concern for “gender equality, empowerment of women, and intergenerational equity” as well as “the importance for some of the concept of ‘climate justice.’ ” Another is Sarah Myhre’s address at the most recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union, in which she proclaimed that climate change cannot fully be addressed without also grappling with the misogyny and social injustice that have perpetuated the problem for decades.

The descent of climate change into the abyss of social-justice identity politics represents the last gasp of a cause that has lost its vitality. Climate alarm is like a car alarm—a blaring noise people are tuning out. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/three_climate_change_questions_answered.html

A claimed nearly unanimous scientific consensus on fear of climate change has caused a push to substantially reduce or even eliminate the use of fossil fuel in favor of solar and wind. But three crucial questions are 1) is the scientific community really united?, 2) can solar and wind take over any time soon to provide the required vital energy for the maintenance of modern civilization in today’s world of 7 billion people?, and 3) has CO2 caused any harm yet? The answer to all three questions is no.

A major theme of this essay is that many assertions can easily be checked out by a simple Google search.

One of the most persistent false impressions, which the mainstream media have ingrained in us, is that 97% of scientists agree that CO2 is indeed doing irreparable harm. However, this figure was obtained not by a respected, impartial polling organization, but by believers for their own purposes.

Exactly what do the 97% agree on? Had the question been “Do you believe that the Earth’s climate is changing, and does mankind have an effect on the climate?,” the response would not have been 97%, but 100%. But had the question been “Is burning fossil fuel such a threat that there should be a major effort to stop?,” who knows? Probably less than 50%. That question was never asked on a large-scale survey, done by a respected polling organization and documented in a place easily available to the public.

To get an idea of how divided the scientific community is, a petition was circulated, led by Friedrich Seitz, the president of the National Academy of Sciences, disputing the ill effects of CO2. It garnered 32,000 signatures, over 9,000 by Ph.D. scientists. To justify the 97%, there would have to be another opposing petition signed by a million scientists.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/pope-francis-climate-change-oil-executives-meeting/

Pope Francis will meet with a group of executives representing the largest oil producers and investment firms at the Vatican next week to discuss a coordinated response to climate change, Axios reported Friday.

News of the meeting, which will reportedly include representatives from BlackRock, BP, ExxonMobil, and others, comes exactly one year after President Trump withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, signaling that the U.S. would cede its position as a global leader on climate change to other nations as well as non-state actors.

Spurred by an increasingly robust clean-energy market and public pressure on corporations to fill the vacuum left by the Trump administration with respect to climate change, executives reportedly plan to embrace the message of Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment, “On Care for Our Common Home,” in developing strategies.

The meeting was reportedly organized with assistance from the University of Notre Dame, which declined to comment on its involvement.

“All along the way, we have said that any energy-related meeting involving the Vatican and Notre Dame would be a private dialogue among the attendees,” Leo Burke, director of the Notre Dame business school’s climate-investing initiative, told Axios.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/bill-nye-proposes-free-market-tax-on-cow-farts/

On Monday, mechanical engineer-turned-science TV host Bill Nye called for a government-mandated “fee” on cow farts. He even had the gall to refer to this tax as a “free-market” proposal.

“Well, this is what we can do and it’s a win-win: to have a fee on carbon,” Nye suggested. “So if you are raising livestock and producing a lot of carbon dioxide with your farm equipment and the exhaust from the animals, then you would pay a fee on that and it would be reflected in the price of meat, reflected in the price of fish, reflected in the price of peanuts.”

Nye told the Daily Beast’s Marlow Stern that this “would be a free-market way to reckon the real cost of a meat diet on the world.” He also insisted that “a carbon fee would be a fantastic thing for the world.”

Interestingly, Nye shot down the idea of pushing global vegetarianism to prevent climate change. “Well, we can all say that here in the developed world where we have the luxury of choice, but if you ware in a developing country, you need protein and your agriculture may not be sophisticated enough to provide you the protein,” he said.

“I don’t want to get in the business of judging people who aren’t vegetarians,” Nye explained, shortly before proposing a meat tax on cow farts.

Many climate alarmists have pushed vegetarianism as a solution to climate change. In 2010, the United Nations Environment Programme advocated a global vegan diet because “animal products cause more damage than [producing] construction minerals such as sand or cement, plastics or metals. Biomass and crops for animals are as damaging as fossil fuels.”

Of all known and imagined consequences of climate change, many people fear sea-level rise most. But efforts to determine what causes seas to rise are marred by poor data and disagreements about methodology. The noted oceanographer Walter Munk referred to sea-level rise as an “enigma”; it has also been called a riddle and a puzzle.

It is generally thought that sea-level rise accelerates mainly by thermal expansion of sea water, the so-called steric component. But by studying a very short time interval, it is possible to sidestep most of the complications, like “isostatic adjustment” of the shoreline (as continents rise after the overlying ice has melted) and “subsidence” of the shoreline (as ground water and minerals are extracted).

I chose to assess the sea-level trend from 1915-45, when a genuine, independently confirmed warming of approximately 0.5 degree Celsius occurred. I note particularly that sea-level rise is not affected by the warming; it continues at the same rate, 1.8 millimeters a year, according to a 1990 review by Andrew S. Trupin and John Wahr. I therefore conclude—contrary to the general wisdom—that the temperature of sea water has no direct effect on sea-level rise. That means neither does the atmospheric content of carbon dioxide.

This conclusion is worth highlighting: It shows that sea-level rise does not depend on the use of fossil fuels. The evidence should allay fear that the release of additional CO2 will increase sea-level rise.

The California Energy Commission voted Wednesday in favor of requiring that almost all new homes built in the state are equipped with rooftop solar panels.

The new energy efficiency standards, which are the first of their kind in the country, require that solar panels be included on all single and multi-family homes built after January 1, 2020, unless they rise above three stories.

The new standards, which will also exempt some homes deemed to be too shady, are part of governor Jerry Brown’s broader effort to decrease the state’s carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2030.

Critics of the new initiative allege it will adversely effect the housing market, citing the California Energy Commission estimate that the measure will raise the cost of new homes by an average of nearly $10,000 — a particularly troubling impact in a state plagued by high housing costs.

“With home prices having risen as much as they have, I think home buyers would find it a little distasteful to be forced to pay more for solar systems that they may not want or feel like they can’t afford,” Brent Anderson, a spokesman for homebuilder Meritage Homes Corp, told Bloomberg. “Even though, in the long term, it’s the right answer.”

Proponents view it as an appropriately aggressive measure to combat climate change and cite the state’s finding that it will likely reduce energy costs by $80 per month for the average household.

Here are some articles and stories that are minimally reported, if at all, because they do not fit the agenda that humans, fossil fuels, and CO2 are causing disastrous global warming and climate change.

From the Detroit News:

April on track to be the coldest in 143 years

No, you’re not crazy. It has been the coldest April in more than 140 years.

A year ago today, on April 19, 2017, it was 78 degrees and sunny, while Thursday’s expected high is 48 degrees, said National Weather Service meteorologist Trent Frey.

As of Thursday, the average temperature for April is 38.3 degrees, slightly warmer than April 1874, the coldest on record at 37.6 degrees.

From the Chicago Tribune:

More spring snow in Chicago, and forecasters call April’s start among coldest in 130 years

The first half of April marks the second-coldest start to the month since 1881, about when the weather service started keeping records, said Mott of the weather service.

From Watts Up With That:

Some Major U.S. cities headed for coldest April in recorded history

Some major U.S. are on track to be part of a record cold April. “Some cities in the east are experiencing temperatures a full 10 to 15 degrees F colder than normal, says meteorologist Jaclyn Whittal. Those cities include Buffalo, Chicago and Detroit. Those in the northern tier of the U.S. either graciously accept winter[.]