Displaying posts categorized under

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

‘Climate Change’: Grift of the Century? Part I Dismantling Capitalism, Transferring Wealth, Dismantling the West by Robert Williams

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21454/climate-change-grift

Perhaps the climate hoax is actually not about saving the environment? What is it, then?

Some environmental problems of pollution are clearly caused by man; the effect of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), as in certain hairsprays for instance, on the ozone layer over the Antarctica. CFCs thin, or make a “hole,” in the planet’s ozone layer that protects the people from harmful ultraviolet rays. There is also the very real man-made problem of insoluble trash in the oceans. Generally, however, the problems of pollution are separate from those of climate change. Whatever can reasonably be done to curb man-made pollution should, of course, be advanced, but sometimes climate change and pollution overlap – seen by many, apparently, as an invitation to muddle and conflate them.

Climate change is largely caused by solar flares. So far, at least, there is not a blessed thing anyone can do about them. Many industries offer grants for papers that support the efficacy of their products that relate to climate change. Solar flares, regrettably, do not offer grants.

[Former Special Presidential Envoy for Climate] Kerry and his family flew on 48 trips and emitted more than 300 metric tons of carbon dioxide in just the 18 months between January 2021 and July 2022. Private jets “are 10 times more carbon intensive than airliners on average, and 50 times more polluting than trains,” according to a 2021 report. Kerry justified his polluting by declaring, unfortunately without a trace of irony, that private jets were the “only choice for somebody like me.”

The answer was supplied as early as 2015 by Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change: “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”

That would mean the destruction of capitalism and the world economy, however long that takes.

When the global elites arrived in Davos, Switzerland, in 2023 to discuss the urgent need to declare climate emergencies, they did so using more than 150 private jets.

Any journalists or commentators who dare to question or oppose the climate change orthodoxy are immediately shunned as “climate deniers” and met in the legacy media with an instant end to their careers.

“What is, in my view, even more dangerous, is the quasi-scientific form that their many times refuted forecasts have taken upon themselves.” — Former Czech President Vaclav Klaus, The New American, December 22, 2009.

Klaus stressed that environmentalism disguises itself as science. Under this disguise, it attempts to force its precepts on humanity. When it comes to global warming or climate change, that process is made easier: the topic is scientifically complex, which makes it hard for most people to refute the climate scammers.

“For the last 16 years, temperatures have been going down and the carbon dioxide has been going up and the crops have got greener and grow quicker. We’ve done plenty to smash up the planet, but there’s been no global warming caused by man…. I still say it’s poppycock! If you believe it, fine. But I don’t and there’s thousands like me.” — David Bellamy, English botanist and former BBC broadcaster, The Daily Mail, January 22, 2013.

It is no wonder that the climate change scam won the day. Few people have been willing to risk their livelihoods to fight against the manipulation.

Meanwhile, at the latest UN Climate Conference, COP29, which took place in Baku, Azerbaijan in November 2024, the agenda to destroy the world’s economy and the West by forcing wealth redistribution made new strides…. [Developing countries] apparently demanded $1.3 trillion annually. In the words of energy expert Alex Epstein: “The basic idea here is what they call ‘climate reparations,’ which is the idea that the US and others have ruined the world with fossil fuels, and so we have to pay a trillion dollars a year to make up for it, which, by the way, if the US paid that, that’s $7,700 per household per year.”

Notably, China retained its status as a “developing country” at the COP29, thereby exposing the enormous extent of the climate hoax. According to the International Energy Agency, “China’s total CO2 emissions exceeded those of the advanced economies combined in 2020, and in 2023 were 15% higher.” In addition, while China continues to build more coal-fired power plants than the rest of the entire world combined, the West continues on the path of deindustrialization in the name of the climate.

Thankfully, President Donald Trump, once again, has withdrawn the US from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. As the past has shown, however, such a withdrawal holds no future guarantees. Trump also withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement during his first term, but President Joe Biden then brought the US back the first chance he got. For this reason, it is crucial that the current US administration do all it can to publish the truth about the climate scam and work towards ending it across the board.

At the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos this January, Klaus Schwab’s wife, Hilde Schwab, opened the annual meeting with the assertion that Antarctica is melting.

Net Zero Is A Big Fat Zero For Economic Growth

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/03/10/net-zero-is-a-big-fat-zero-for-economic-growth/

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions was going to save the planet at no cost. Turns out it’s an economy wrecker, which is more feature than bug for many a climate alarmist.

Kallum Pickering, chief economist at Peel Hunt, a London-based investment bank, took on the claim of Labour Party British Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who said that pursuing net zero greenhouse gas emissions didn’t require a deceleration of economic growth. What he found was “sad to say,” but he stands by the facts.

“The result of the UK’s decarbonization efforts appears to be weak economic growth, stalling living standards, high energy prices and deindustrialization – without denting rising global emissions,” he wrote last week in the Telegraph.

“Net zero is strangling our economy,” says the headline over Pickering’s column, because “limiting available electricity has stifled productivity.”

On the Peel Hunt website, Pickering explained that data from 189 countries indicated there is “a strong positive correlation between living standards and energy consumption – showing a clear link between falling energy capacity and weak productivity in the UK.” He notes that “the decline in UK electricity supply, which started in 2006, coincided with the start of structural weakness in productivity growth.”

Bluntly put, without cheap and reliable energy, which is what we get from fossil fuels, an economy turns sclerotic. Which is why the political left works so feverishly to end gas and oil. As we have said so many times before, the agenda behind cutting greenhouse gases is in actuality an assault on capitalism, which, as the legendary Milton Friedman famously said, is the only economic system that has enabled the masses to escape from “grinding poverty.”

The Green Energy Delusion The current approach to energy and environmental policy isn’t just unsustainable—it has put us on a collision course with reality. Paul Brown

https://quillette.com/2025/03/04/the-green-energy-delusion/

I. Physical Constraints

Energy is not just another commodity. It’s absolutely fundamental to our modern civilisation. Every thing we do—from feeding ourselves to staying warm to manufacturing medicines—requires energy input. And not all energy sources are created equal.

A barrel of oil contains about fifty times more energy than the most advanced viable battery of the same weight. This gap is never going to close significantly. It can’t. The energy a battery can supply is dependent on the flow of electrons between different materials, each of which can provide a certain number of electrons for any given weight. You can improve the battery’s charging time or durability or the number of times it can be charged before it starts to fail, but you can’t change the fundamental composition of the materials available any more than you can change lead into gold.

Batteries, then, are heavy and they’re going to remain that way. This is not a problem for many applications—including phones, laptops, and small household devices. In these cases, the lower energy density isn’t a major drawback since the devices are small and frequently rechargeable, and weight isn’t a limiting factor in their performance. But for things that need energy input to move—cars, trucks, planes—the extra weight creates a cascading series of problems. A heavier vehicle needs more energy to move, which means that it needs bigger batteries, which means adding yet more weight, which means that more energy is needed to move it. Thanks to this weight penalty, electric vehicles often require significantly more raw materials in their construction, and more energy in their day-to-day operation, than their advocates admit.

Aircraft face uniquely stringent weight considerations: every kilogramme of battery reduces payload capacity while, unlike fuel, batteries don’t become lighter during flight. So the reduced payload that would result from using batteries means fewer passengers or less cargo per flight, which in turn means we would need to schedule more flights to move the same number of people or amount of goods. In addition, aircraft combustion engines operate at relatively steady speeds—there’s not much acceleration or deceleration, no sitting in traffic, and no braking from which energy can be recouped. Since there is a direct relationship between weight and range or payload, aircraft are naturally incentivised to be as efficient as possible.

So battery-powered aircraft are unlikely to work well in the foreseeable future—but what about cars? It’s the policy in many developed countries to shift to electric vehicles—in the UK, they’re planning to ban new sales of internal combustion cars from 2035, and in Norway almost 90 percent of new car sales are electric due to carrot-and-stick policies. But from a full-system environmental perspective, this doesn’t make sense. Since not only are there weight penalties—batteries make cars heavier and heavier cars then require even bigger, heavier batteries to move—but there are issues of energy efficiency to take into account.

The Times, They Aren’t Never A-Changin’

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/03/06/the-times-they-arent-never-a-changin/

Sunday, its largest circulation day of the week, the New York Times ran a lengthy, triple-bylined story intended to stir up fear and anger over the Trump White House’s climate policy. It was no example of civically minded journalism, just another propaganda piece to fuel the global warming tale.

Right from the top, the reporters tell readers that President Donald Trump “has severely damaged the government’s ability to fight climate change, upending American environmental policy with moves that could have lasting implications for the country, and the planet.”

“Could?” That’s what the entire global warming scare is built on, coulds and maybes and possiblies.

Yet the reporters screech that “Mr. Trump has gutted federal climate efforts, rolled back regulations aimed at limiting pollution and given a major boost to the fossil fuel industry.” Let’s not confuse carbon dioxide with pollution, which the alarmists continually do. Just because the federal government has classified CO2 as a “threat to human health and welfare,” that doesn’t mean that it is. As every school kid knows, it’s essential to life.

Naturally we can’t have any boosting of the fossil fuel industry, since it merely provides the cornerstone of modernity and there’s nothing in line, no, not even renewables, to replace it.

At this point, just two paragraphs in, it’s clear this story is no piece of journalism. It’s agitprop for green nonsense and the Democratic Party’s agenda to run the economy from Washington and blue-state capitals.

The Resistance To Climate Alarmism Grows

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/03/03/the-resistance-to-climate-alarmism-grows/

The end is near. That’s what we’ve been told since the beginning. The doomsdayers have cited a variety of cataclysms that will do us in, from asteroids to resource exhaustion to a dying sun. But they all have one thing in common: So far, they’ve all been wrong. Same with the climate alarmists. And the public is catching on.

A study, published by the Stanford University School of Sustainability, no less, found that “resistance to climate action has become a global movement that strengthens after governments implement climate-related policies.”

“We found that counter climate change organizations tend to emerge after pro-environmental policies are institutionalized in government,” said the study’s senior author.

Of course they do. As our friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity observed, this has happened “maybe because the war on fossil fuels has deindustrialized Germany and many other European nations. Maybe it’s because green energy is so much more expensive to produce. Maybe because the biggest polluters like China have done nothing.”

Let’s add another “maybe.” The resistance is likely also based on a growing skepticism. We have been bombarded by global warming scare stories for more than three decades and yet we’re still here. No matter how much the alarmists cheat, lie, obfuscate and bully, it’s obvious that the entire narrative is based on assumptions, speculation and political ideology. Every claim they make can be easily refuted. To name a few, which we’ll call the big three:

We just lived through the hottest year/month/week/day on record. This is meaningless. Hottest compared to what? The only reliable measure we have is from satellite readings that go back to only 1979 and they show nothing to get worked up about

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time — Part XXXIII

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2025-3-1-the-greatest-scientific-fraud-of-all-time-part-xxxiii

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time is the fraud by which our government alters existing U.S. and worldwide temperature data in order to enhance an apparent warming trend, and thereby support a narrative of supposedly dangerous global warming. This is Part XXXIII of this series, which goes back to July 2013. A composite link to all 32 prior posts in this series can be found here.

As has been widely reported and discussed, the arrival of the new Trump 2.0 presidency is bringing disruption and change to many areas of a previously complacent federal bureaucracy. One of the areas where disruption appears to be hitting is an agency called NOAA — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is a part of the Department of Commerce. NOAA is the place where the world and U.S. temperature data are collected and compiled — and altered.

Will the new disruption shed some light upon the systematic alterations of our temperature data? It’s too early to tell, but there is reason to hope.

First up, CBS News reported just yesterday that massive layoffs have hit NOAA. The headline is “Hundreds of NOAA employees laid off in latest cuts to federal workforce.”

Hundreds of staffers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, were laid off Thursday. . . . A congressional source told CBS News the layoffs affected 880 NOAA employees. . . . Prior to Thursday’s cuts, NOAA had about 12,000 staffers across the world.

880 staffers out of 12,000 would be about a 7+% cut.

Everybody Freeze! It’s the Climate Police

https://www.thefp.com/p/everybody-freeze-climate-police

https://newsletter.doomberg.com/

In their quest to slow climate change, bureaucrats in the U.S. and Canada advance restrictive edicts that make very big headlines and very little difference.

We have it on good authority that it sometimes gets quite cold in Canada during wintertime. As our Canadian readers can attest, in such brutal conditions machinery often acts a little funky. Batteries refuse to turn over, hard things become brittle, fluids freeze or gum up, and dimensions of solid materials quite literally contract. Operating an automobile in this environment can be particularly challenging for the passenger and engine alike, as both need to be warmed up before they can be expected to perform within specifications. In particularly harsh conditions, a car might require 15 to 20 minutes of idling before the engine and cabin reach comfortable conditions, and remote car starters have become incredibly popular solutions.

An ironclad canon of the Church of Carbon™ is that parishioners are not allowed to have nice things, which explains the following bit of regulatory tomfoolery:

In what it is calling “a bold move” to combat climate change, the City of Ottawa has introduced a strict by-law limiting residents from using remote car starters to warm up their vehicles for more than one minute before driving. The law, intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve local air quality, has sparked heated debate, especially given Ottawa’s notoriously harsh winters. The new rule allows vehicles to idle for just 60 seconds if the driver is not inside.

Yes, you read that right: It is illegal in Ottawa to heat up your car in subzero weather. Further in the same article, we find an early leading candidate for quote of the year:

“Every little bit counts,” said city councillor Laura Green. “We know it’s cold, but we also know that climate change is a real and urgent problem. This is about protecting our future.”

We should confess that we have been unable to verify that Green exists or is quoted accurately in the article. No such person is listed on the city leadership’s website, for example, suggesting her name or job title may have been inaccurately reported.

1-In-3 Americans Distrust Climate-Change Claims Made By Activists, Policymakers: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/24/1-in-3-americans-distrust-climate-change-claims-made-by-activists-policymakers-ii-tipp-poll/

Until recently, the U.S. and the rest of the developed world pursued a costly global policy of “net-zero” carbon emissions to battle the supposed ill-effect of climate change. But President Donald Trump has changed all that by ending the U.S.’ commitment to the global net-zero effort. Will today’s highly partisan voters support Trump? The latest I&I/TIPP Poll data suggest a high-degree of skepticism among many voters over global warming’s threat.

Three-quarters of those responding to the I&I/TIPP Poll agreed there are reasons for “public skepticism toward climate-change policies,” while just over a third of voting-age Americans say they themselves “distrust” the information used to sell previous climate-change policies.

For the national online poll, taken from Jan. 29-31, 1,478 adults were first asked: “How much do you trust the claims made by climate change activists and policymakers?” The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.6 percentage points.

While 50% said they either trust “completely” (20%) or “somewhat” (30%), another 36% said they “completely” (20%) or “somewhat” (16%) distrust claims made by climate activists and politicians.

Once again, political affiliation plays a role in how voters see the issue. Democrats overwhelmingly say “trust” (67%) over “distrust” (21%) the climate-change claims that have been made, but Republicans are more skeptical, with 37% answering “Trust” and a 51% majority answering “Distrust.” Among independents, responses were somewhere in the middle, at 47% ‘Trust” and 35% “Distrust.”

Trust in the climate claims rises with income. Of those earning $30,000 or less a year, “trust” was 46%; for those at $30,000-$50,000 a year, 47%; for those at $50,000-$75,000 a year, 51%; and for those over $75,000, 63%.

A follow-on question asked the following: “What do you think is the main reason for public skepticism toward climate change policies?”

The responses showed what really concerns people most about the public response to the hypothetical threats of climate change. Of those responding, 25% cited “Lack of clear, transparent scientific data,” 22% responded “Perceived hypocrisy of leaders and activists,” 17% agreed on “Economic consequences of proposed policies,” and 8% answered “Media exaggeration of climate risks.”

Green Idiocy’s Inevitable Consequences David King

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/doomed-planet/green-idiocys-inevitable-consequences/

The last chapter of Donald Horne’s 1964 classic The Lucky Country opened with the prophetic statement that “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck”. Much has been written over the last 60 years about what Horne intended to convey with his book title, and the source of the luck, including Horne’s own explanation in his 1976 sequel Death of the Lucky Country; but it is a common theme that Australia’s relative prosperity is and has been despite the quality of its leadership, not because of it.

While there have of course been interludes of reasonable government, at both Federal and State levels, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are now at a low ebb in Canberra (and in Victoria); it is such a low ebb that the Lucky Country is now better described as a Kakistocracy, which is loosely defined as “a state or society governed by its least competent or suitable citizens.” The term derives from the Greek word for “the worst”, kakistos; it is of course tempting to speculate a shared origin with the colloquial English and Dutch (amongst others’) word for excrement!

The atrocities in current government policies are nowhere more evident than in the area of energy policy. Let us look at just a few examples.

Government initiatives to stop the use of gas in households is an excellent example. Gas is currently delivered with very little energy loss into homes, where it is efficiently converted for heating, cooking or whatever. Governments are now saying this same gas has to be delivered to a gas-fired power station, where it is converted into electricity at, at best, 60% efficiency. This electricity is then delivered to homes, after suffering further unavoidable transmission losses, where it is converted into heat energy.

Cold Winters Mean Global Warming? In What World? By Brian C. Joondeph

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/02/cold_winters_mean_global_warming_in_what_world.html

Baby, It’s Cold Outside is a popular Christmas song from another era, long before the MeToo virus infected society. The virus turned harmless flirting into a crime against humanity, disqualifying perpetrators from employment, government service, or polite society.

Today, we sing, ma’am, sir, they, or ze, it’s cold outside.

How cold? “With an average temperature running 3.6 degrees below normal, this is currently the coldest January nationally (lower 48) since 1994”, says Kevin Williams, meteorologist and President of Weather-Track, Inc.

Another meteorologist, Joe Bastardi, agrees. “The nation for Jan is now the coldest max temps since 1988 at – 4.2.”

Logic suggests that cold winters, especially record-setting ones, mean that the planet may not be warming, as global warming alarmists insist.

In response, these Chicken Littles merely changed the name from “global warming” to “climate change” to mask the obvious contradiction of a warming planet causing colder winters.

This is similar to how illegal aliens became illegal migrants, then undocumented individuals, and finally just immigrants or visitors, making no distinction between law-abiding and border-crashing “visitors” to America.