RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-8-12-the-idiots-answer-to-global-warming-hydrogen

Hydrogen! It’s the obvious and perfect answer to global warming caused by human CO2 emissions. Instead of burning hydrocarbons (fossil fuels) we can leave out the carbon part, burn just the hydrogen, and emit nothing but pure water vapor. H2 + O = H2O! Thus, no more CO2 emissions . Why didn’t anyone think of this before now?

Actually, the geniuses are way ahead of you on this one. President George W. Bush was touting the coming “hydrogen economy” as far back as 2003. (“In his 2003 State of the Union Address, President Bush launched his Hydrogen Fuel Initiative. The goal of this initiative is to work in partnership with the private sector to accelerate the research and development required for a hydrogen economy.”). Barack Obama was not one to get left behind on an issue like this. In the run-up to the Paris Climate Conference in 2015 Obama’s Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz announced, “[F]uel cell technologies [i.e., hydrogen-fueled motors] are paving the way to competitiveness in the global clean energy market and to new jobs and business creation across the country.” Then there’s the biggest hydrogen enthusiast of all, PM Boris Johnson of the UK, who promises that his country is at the dawn of the “hydrogen economy.” (“Towards the end of 2020, Prime Minister Boris Johnson released details of a 10-point plan for a so-called ‘green industrial revolution.’. . . This year will also see the government publish a Hydrogen Strategy that will “outline plans” to develop a hydrogen economy in the U.K.”)

And let us not forget California. If you look at my post from two days ago about California’s plans for “zero carbon” electricity, you will find a chart showing that by 2045 they plan to have some 40 GW of what they call “Zero Carbon Firm” resources. What does that mean? In the print below the chart, they reveal it: “hydrogen fuel cells.” (Their current amount of hydrogen fuel cells contributing to the grid is 0.)

So basically, hydrogen is the perfect answer to our problems, right? Wrong. Only an idiot could think that hydrogen offers any material useful contribution to the world’s energy supply.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/progressives-green-energy-boondoggle-based-fantasy-bruce-thornton/

Last Thursday Joe Biden posed for a photo op with representatives from automobile manufacturers. They gathered there to mark the Biden administration’s plan to raise the miles-per-gallon standard that gasoline powered vehicles must achieve––52 MPG by 2026. The compensation for automakers will comprise more regulatory credits for carmakers and subsidies for electric vehicle (EV) consumers, which will lead to higher prices for trucks and SUVs to offset their losses on EVs. This means consumers of those popular vehicles will be subsidizing EV drivers. And more taxpayer money will go to increasing available electricity, providing more and faster charging stations, and improving battery capacity.

As the Wall Street Journal editorialized, “Behold Big Business colluding with Big Government to grab subsidies and raise consumer prices,” a form of “corporate socialism, or state capitalism.” This unholy alliance calls to mind the “military-industrial complex” Dwight Eisenhower warned about in 1961, a warning still pertinent today.

At least during the Cold War a nuclear-armed Soviet Union posed an existential threat that justified cooperation between politics and the armaments industries. Today, the purveyors of anthropogenic, catastrophic global warming (ACGW) ––the more accurate label masked by the euphemism “climate change”–– are using a dubious theory riddled with uncertainty to justify such crony capitalist policies. The challenges to ACGW in the last few decades have exposed those uncertainties and the dubious “science” proponents claim to be “settled,” and so can justify spending trillions  of taxpayer dollars,

For example, MIT professor of atmospheric science Richard Lindzen, and Princeton emeritus professor of physics William Happer have written, “We are both scientists who can attest that the research literature does not support the claim of a climate emergency. Nor will there be one. None of the lurid predictions — dangerously accelerating sea-level rise, increasingly extreme weather, more deadly forest fires, unprecedented warming, etc. — are any more accurate than the fire-and-brimstone sermons used to stoke fanaticism in medieval crusaders.” So too physicist Steven E. Koonin, who writes in his new book Unsettled. What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, “The science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have on it.”

On top of the contested rationale for pouring billions of tax-payer dollars into one industry, the logistics of enlarging electricity production for “green” technology like wind turbines, solar panels, and half-ton batteries for EVs, not to mention expanding exponentially the electrical grid, are formidable, as Mark Mills has reported:

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/climate_scientists_admit_exaggerated_warming_.html

Last week, a group of scientists sent shock waves through the climate-science community. They boldly pointed out that current climate models exaggerate greenhouse warming.

In other words, they confirmed what climate skeptics have been arguing all along: that most computer climate models forecast unrealistic warming — warming not observed anywhere in the real world.

Could this be a turning point for climate science? Has the hitherto staunch resistance to any kind of scrutiny regarding the dangerous warming narrative come to an end?

Scientific Method

Science is not a body of facts. It is a method of finding facts — a method that is inherently skeptical. Not cynically skeptical, but humbly skeptical. It insists, as the motto of the Royal Society, nullius in verba, roughly translated “take nobody’s word for it,” that a scientist’s every claim be tested — over and over and over. Thus, as the philosopher of science Robert K. Merton put it in 1938, “Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/08/10/apocalypse-porn/

There’s a new trend online. Forget blacking out your Instagram page to show how much you care for black lives. Never mind bigging up your pronouns. That’s so last month. Right now it’s all about apocalypse porn. Across social media, the caring set are sharing images of the ‘hellfires’ in Greece and the aftermath of the floods in Europe and the wildfire currently raging in Northern California, all with the same message: this is climate change. This is the world our greedy, destructive species has created. This is the hell that awaits us all if we don’t stop taking cheap flights to Malaga and drinking from plastic straws. ‘Welcome to global warming!’, as one observer of the Greek fires quipped.

Apocalypse porn is everywhere. You can’t open a newspaper or switch on a tablet right now without being confronted with images of fire and floods. Plagues of locusts can’t be far behind. The front page of this morning’s Guardian is devoted to an image of an elderly Greek woman in a state of distress as an ‘inferno’ nears her home on the island of Evia. (Funny, I don’t remember the Guardian rallying behind the elderly Greeks who were pummelled by the distinctly manmade horror of EU austerity, but let’s not dwell on bygones.) Footage of Greeks sailing away from a raging fire has been shared hundreds of thousands of times. ‘Very apocalyptic’, said one journalist. Not just apocalyptic, but really apocalyptic. We’re beyond Revelations – this is worse.

The recent European floods are spoken of as warnings to mankind, as if Nature were a sentient force reprimanding us for our hubris and folly. Footage of flooded German and Belgian towns was marshalled by armies of virtue-signallers to the cause of ‘raising awareness’ about man’s self-made apocalypse. ‘How many dead will we accept [before we act]?’, asked one Belgian scientist. Change your ways or people will die. Images of flooded Tube stations in London were instantly held up as glimpses of the future, warnings from the generation of the 2050s who will live short, hot, suffering lives if we don’t achieve Net Zero in the next five years. It all echoed leading green thinker Mark Lynas’s medieval sermon several years back – that if humanity doesn’t change its ways, then ‘Poseidon [will be] angered… his wrath will know no bounds’.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/09/pants-on-fire-u-n-issues-another-climate-report/

The United Nations issued yet one more climate report Monday. It’s best ignored. Of course the Democratic Party and its media department, always looking for a Reichstag fire, have weaponized it.

The hysterical responses to the Summary for Policymakers from the ​​Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report were exactly what we expected.

“A Hotter Future Is Certain, Climate Panel Warns. But How Hot Is Up to Us,” says the New York Times’ screamer headline.

The BBC dutifully quotes U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, a member of Portugal’s Socialist Party, who said the report “is a code red for humanity.”

CNBC says “the world’s leading climate scientists on Monday delivered their starkest warning yet about the deepening climate emergency.”

Despite the alarms, and claims that some irreversible damage has been wrought, the IPCC says there is still a small chance to avoid devastation. If we act now. If we make deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. If we enact policies that just happen to be identical to the pieces of the policy lineup the political left has been pressing for decades but hasn’t been able to pass by other means.

To better understand what the U.N. and its political and media allies are up to, let’s backtrack to a previous climate report.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/08/wind-and-solar-energy-are-environmental-disasters.php

It is ironic that wind and solar energy are promoted as “green,” when in fact one of their worst qualities is the damage they do to the environment. Solar panels are manufactured in China using slave labor (Uighurs) and coal-fired power plants for electricity. The irony is heavy. And both wind and solar require vast quantities of minerals and hazardous substances.

A fundamental problem with wind and solar is that they are extremely low-intensity energy sources. The amount of land required to produce a substantial amount of electricity is enormous. This is one of the subjects of a paper by Robert Bryce, one of the country’s leading energy experts, titled Not In Our Backyard. The paper documents rural America’s largely successful battle to block large-scale renewable energy projects. The paper includes some eye-opening data, including the fact that in order to reach “net zero” emissions of CO2 through use of wind and solar, 228,000 square miles–an area equal to the states of California and Washington–would need to be dedicated to wind turbines and solar panels.

On August 12, one week from today, Robert Bryce will present two programs on the environmental evils of wind and solar, along with American Experiment’s Isaac Orr, whose own paper on the environmental impacts of wind and solar will be forthcoming imminently.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-natural-disasters-ahr-river-flood-germany-wildfire-risks-11628177742?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. That old quip, often attributed to Mark Twain or his friend Charles Dudley Warner, now guides most news coverage of severe weather. The media say that natural disasters are a result of climate change and we need to adopt radical policies to combat them.

But this framing tells only a small part of what is scientifically known. Take the recent flooding in Germany and Belgium, which many, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, are blaming on climate change. Yet a new study of more than 10,000 rivers around the world shows that most rivers now flood less. What used to be a 50-year flood in the 1970s happens every 152 years today, likely due to urbanization, flood-control measures, and changes in climate.

Some rivers still flood, and reporters flock there, but more scare stories don’t mean more global flooding. The river Ahr, where most of the German flood deaths occurred, had a spectacular flow on July 14, 2021, but it was lower than deadly flows in 1804 and 1910. The real cause of increased fatalities from riverine flooding in Germany and many other places is more people building settlements on flood plains, leaving the water no place to go. Instead of more solar panels and wind turbines to combat climate change, riverside communities need better water management. And foremost, they need a well-functioning warning system so they can evacuate before disaster strikes.

Here, Germany has failed spectacularly. Following the deadly European floods in 2002, Germany built an extensive warning system, but during a test last September most warning measures, including sirens and text alerts, didn’t work. The European Flood Awareness System predicted the floods nine days in advance and formally warned the German government four days in advance, yet most people on the ground were left unaware. Hannah Cloke, the hydrologist who set up the system, called it “a monumental failure.”

But of course, blaming the deadly floods on climate change instead of taking responsibility for the missed early warnings is convenient for politicians like Ms. Merkel, who, during a visit to Schuld, a devastated village on the Ahr, said, ”We must get faster in the battle against climate change.”

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2021/08/clean-green-and-absolutely-sustainable/

One of history’s most valuable lessons is that much of what is widely believed at any one time will later be viewed as nonsense, and it is vanishingly unlikely that this does not still apply.  On the contrary, our current system of education is now actively pursuing an indoctrination in postmodern thought which seeks to deny, demean and dismiss the all-too-brief ascendancy of reason and evidence as embodied in the scientific method.  The impetus for this is simple. Reason and evidence threaten established careers, status and beliefs held dear in academia, and it is they who determine the content of education.

Resistance to this corruption of science is fading in favour of the notion of an innate, intuitively understood ‘higher’ morality.  Only the uncompromising clarity of the consequences of errors and false beliefs leaves engineering as one of the last remaining redoubts of simple evidence based truth.

A primacy of reason and evidence over authority and faith has been the essential foundation for the extraordinary advance in the human condition arising from Western Civilisation over the past few centuries.  However, this is now under existential threat by a rising surge of totalitarian ideology.  In a time of unprecedented prosperity, ease, and comfort, it appears a substantial slice of the populace is unhappy and seeking some greater meaning and purpose in life, albeit something which also requires minimal personal cost and effort. Public virtue signalling by conspicuously approving or disapproving ideas of negligible personal consequence has become epidemic, and there is a rich smorgasbord of such concerns from which to choose.  Environmental threats, various social inequalities and sexual aberrations, especially relating to gender, are currently the fashion.

The idea of an imminent and dire threat to the global climate from fossil fuel emissions and the necessity of a complete shift to wind and solar power is especially favoured. Although there is strong evidence to indicate the threat is far more uncertain and less severe than is being claimed and the limitations of the so-called renewable energy are manifold, reason and evidence rarely ever seem able to induce a committed believer to reconsider their faith. 

Fortunately, in this instance there is another option, and it offers a no-regrets solution that conforms far better to the unfolding reality.  It also affords the added bonus of avoiding a detour into the dustbin of history for those who cannot wake up and catch up.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2021/07/how-warmists-package-panic/

That the latest World Weather Attribution (WWA) post, Rapid attribution analysis of the extraordinary heatwave on the Pacific Coast of the US and Canada June 2021, has twenty-one contributors from prestigious research groups around the world gave it even more piquancy. What a treat! I had not been so flummoxed since reading Alan Sokal’s  scholarly hoax over two decades ago: “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”. 

The WWA post, alas, is neither hoax nor parody, but the real deal: a collaboration — in record time, no less — “to assess to what extent human-induced climate change made this heatwave hotter and more likely”. Whether “human-induced climate change” – whatever that is – was present at all was not on the menu.

So it’s down the rabbit hole of questionable-cause logical fallacies in search of an answer: post hoc ergo propter hoc: ‘after this, therefore because of this’; “since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X”; or if you prefer, cum hoc ergo propter hoc: ‘with this, therefore because of this’.

A rooster crowing before sunrise does not mean it caused the sun to rise. A lot of cocks crowing before a big conference, however, could cause an increase in the flow of money into the Green Climate Fund. Cock-a-doodle-do. Whatever the case, we clearly need a New Law of Climate Change:

Climate alarmism (CA) increases exponentially as time, T, to the next United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP) or atmospheric Armageddon (AA) declines to zero; where CA is measured by the frequency of MSM and social media amplification occurring in a specific period of observation, P.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/07/15/another-global-warming-fact-alarmists-want-buried/

The entire climate change movement has been shady from its beginnings. Data have been hidden, truth has been sacrificed to politics, and hypocrisy and personal interests among its “leaders” have produced a giant credibility deficit. The more we learn, the worse the alarmists look.

Take, for instance, a new report that shows greenhouse gas emissions are not an American or Western problem. They are primarily a Chinese problem. A study from Sun Yat-sen University in China found that more than half of the world’s urban greenhouse gas emissions are generated in only 25 big cities, and 23 of them are located in China.

In other words, if the entire developed world cut its greenhouse gas emissions as activists, politicians, journalists, and celebrities have demanded, nothing would change regarding the climate. (This assumes human carbon dioxide emissions are responsible for warming the planet, which is a load of speculation that’s yet to be proved.)

The paper’s findings remind us of the great plastic scare that’s “inspired” lawmakers to outlaw single-use plastic bags, plastic straws, plastic utensils, and other modern products, in a mass pretense of doing something when in reality they’re doing nothing but inconveniencing people.

The data show ​​90% of ocean plastic pours into the sea from “the top 10 rivers with the highest loads” of plastic debris, according to the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. None are in the U.S., which contributes only about 1% percent of all plastic debris found at sea. Eight of them though are in Asia, while two are in Africa.

While it provides useful information, the Sun Yat-sen study isn’t a shocking revelation. We’ve known for at least a decade that while agitators campaigned to force developed economies to eliminate fossil fuel use, China and India have been busy building hundreds of coal plants in an effort to spread the First World prosperity that the climate alarmists have enjoyed their entire lives. Late last year, the Canadian Energy Centre, affiliated with the Alberta government, reported that as of 2020, 350 coal-fired power plants were under construction worldwide. Seven were in South Korea, another 13 in Japan. But China and India were building 184 and 52 plants, respectively.