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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

Lockdown Proponent Bill Gates Quietly Funding Plan To Dim The Sun’s Rays By Tyler Durden

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/lockdown-proponent-bill-gates-quietly-funding-plan-dim-suns-rays?utm_campaign=&utm_content
A project conducted by Harvard University scientists and funded largely by Microsoft founder Bill Gates to test sun-dimming technology to cool global warming is quietly moving forward in Sweden.

We know what you’re thinking – this can’t be real… but it is.

Reuters reports that the Harvard project “plans to test out a controversial theory that global warming can be stopped by spraying particles into the atmosphere that would reflect the sun’s rays.”

In Sweden, plans to fly a test balloon next year are already underway.

The test balloon will not release any particles into the atmosphere, but “could be a step towards an experiment, perhaps in the autumn of 2021 or spring of 2022.”

Those experiments may see “up to 2 kg of non-toxic calcium carbonate dust” released into the atmosphere.

Bill Gates is living proof that just because you once did something very smart to make your mark on the world, it doesn’t necessarily make you a smart person.

Having the gall to play God by dimming the sun’s rays and thinking it won’t lead to drastic and unpredictable problems makes that case rather obvious.

Causation Of Climate Change, And The Scientific Method Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-1-2-causation-of-climate-change-an

Let’s have yet another go at trying to apply the scientific method to the subject of causation of climate change. This is just basic logic, and not that complicated. We can do it.

As simple and basic as this is, you will shortly see that the agglomeration of all of the world’s leading “climate scientists” can’t figure it out. They are completely lost and befuddled. Check me and see if I’m wrong.

The proposition we are addressing is the one for which you see a constant drumbeat of advocacy. It runs something like, “the climate is changing, and we are the cause.” OK, nobody denies that the climate is changing; but how about the “we are the cause” part? What is the proof?

Let’s apply the scientific method. We start with the basic maxim that “correlation does not prove causation.” Instead, causation is established by disproof of all relevant alternative (“null”) hypotheses.

Everybody knows how this works from drug testing. We can’t prove that drug A cures disease X by administering drug A a thousand times and observing that disease X almost always goes away. Disease X might have gone away for other reasons, or on its own. Even if we administer drug A a million times, and disease X almost always goes away, we have only proved correlation, not causation. To prove causation, we must disprove the null hypothesis by testing drug A against a placebo. The placebo represents the null hypothesis that something else (call it “natural factors”) is curing disease X. When drug A is significantly more effective at curing disease X than the placebo, then we have disproved the null hypothesis, and established, at least provisionally, the effectiveness of drug A.

Back to climate change. The hypothesis is “humans are causing significant climate change.” An appropriate null hypothesis would be “observed climate change can be fully explained by some combination of natural factors.” How might you test this?

In 2021, let’s challenge green tyranny Tim Black

http://www.spiked-online.com/2020/12/31/in-2021-lets-challenge-green-tyranny/

At the start of the year, the world’s plutocrats gathered alongside their political allies in Davos for the World Economic Forum, and listened excitedly while special guest Greta Thunberg berated them for not going far enough in the fight to save the planet. It was a telling moment, capturing just how central environmentalism – especially today’s self-flagellating, end-of-days version – now is to the worldview of the West’s political, business and cultural elites.
 

It has been quite the rise. For much of environmentalism’s history, it was largely on the fringes of elite discourse, not at the centre. It was the counter-enlightenment preserve of landed aristocrats, disillusioned Tories (the origins of the Green Party), and the New Left. Not the mission statement of prime ministers, multinationals and the very institutions of globalist rule, from the EU to the UN.

But that is what it has become in recent decades: the hug-a-husky purpose of governments; the corporate social responsibility of international conglomerates; the cause to unite nations.

Two key factors account for its ascendency: the long-standing demoralisation of capitalism, and the emergence of essentially technocratic governments after the end of the Cold War. In the anti-modern narrative of environmentalism, these managerial elites found their raison d’etre: to manage the risks and the threats produced by industrial modernity. It even provided them with an ultimate aim: to manage us out of environmental disaster.

But environmentalism has always been more than just a story appended to ‘third way’ governing. It is itself essentially technocratic. It invests authority in ‘the science’ and the expert at the expense of the demos.

Bill Gates Had a Plan to Stop Global Warming—Until Science Got in the Way By Stacey Lennox

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stacey-lennox/2020/12/29/bill-gates-had-a-plan-to-stop-global-warming-until-science-got-in-the-way-n1289724

For some reason, the corporate media and global foundations believe Bill Gates has the answer for everything. They listen to him talk about epidemiology and vaccines. I am not sure becoming a billionaire by stealing someone else’s operating system and requiring outside help to build it makes you an expert in either of these areas, especially after you’ve put out a product as bad as Windows Vista.

But that is not all. In addition to yammering about COVID-19 and how we need to change the world as a result of a pandemic that was less than the Chinese Communist Party would have us believe, now Gates believes he can block out the sun—to save the world from global warming, of course. Is there nothing he can’t do? According  to Reuters:

Harvard University scientists plan to fly a test balloon above Sweden next year to help advance research into dimming sunlight to cool the Earth, alarming environmentalists opposed to solar geoengineering.

Open-air research into spraying tiny, sun-reflecting particles into the stratosphere, to offset global warming, has been stalled for years by controversies – including that it could discourage needed cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

In a small step, the Swedish Space Corporation agreed this week to help Harvard researchers launch a balloon near the Arctic town of Kiruna next June. It would carry a gondola with 600 kg of scientific equipment 20 km (12 miles) high.

The Harvard Project is called the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPex). To most of us, it sounds like a project that will severely tick off the stratosphere. And opponents of the project fear it will. They fear these projects will lead to attempts to engineer climate with artificial sunshade. The sunshade would essentially consist of blowing a bunch of dust into the stratosphere.

China’s Green NGO Climate Propaganda Enablers Climate change is a national security threat—but not in the way the national security elite assumes. By Rupert Darwall

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/28/chinas-green-ngo-climate-propaganda-enablers/

Shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed, Greenpeace opened an office in Moscow. It enjoyed the patronage of a leading member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and enjoyed Kremlin funding, laundered through a state-owned record company. The green activist group made clear that it would have nothing to do with environmental groups in the Baltic republics. Recycling standard Soviet propaganda, Greenpeace denounced them as little more than separatist organizations.

This was by no means a one-off. The inconvenient truth: the environmental movement fought on the wrong side of the Cold War. In the early 1980s, it used the “nuclear winter” scare to try to stop Ronald Reagan’s nuclear build-up and undermine the West’s ability to negotiate the arms agreement that effectively ended the Cold War. It turns out that nuclear winter had been concocted by the KGB and transmitted to America by executives of the Rockefeller Family Fund. A nuclear winter conference held in 1983 was supported by 31 environmental groups, including the Environmental Defense Fund, Friends of the Earth, and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

This pattern, wherein the West’s enemies use the environmental movement—whether NGOs like Greenpeace, foundations, or “concerned scientists,” to undermine Western interests—is now being repeated, this time in respect to China. A report by Patricia Adams for the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation released earlier this month lays bare the role of the green movement in acting as China’s propagandists.

Since Xi Jinping became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party eight years ago, almost everyone who believed China’s Communist regime would become more benign internally and less threatening externally has revised his opinion—everyone, that is, apart from climate activists.

Biden’s Climate All Stars Jennifer Granholm subsidized green-job business losers in Michigan.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-climate-all-stars-11609104094?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Joe Biden has unveiled what he called his climate cabinet appointees, and progressives are calling it an “all star” list. That depends on your point of view. One of the stars is former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm to lead the Department of Energy, and the choice suggests a return to climate corporate subsidies.

DOE’s main duties are to oversee nuclear sites, set efficiency standards and dole out government largesse. But her credential for Mr. Biden may be that, during her governorship from 2003 to 2011, Ms. Granholm handed out hundreds of millions of dollars to politically favored startups to create “green jobs.” Many of her bets failed.

Take fledgling electric-car battery manufacturer A123 Systems, which was awarded a $249 million DOE grant plus $125 million in state tax credits. Plagued by manufacturing problems, A123 went bankrupt in 2012. China’s Wanxiang Group bought most of its assets.

A123’s customer, Fisker Automotive, also went bust in 2013 after receiving a $192 million DOE loan with the goal of manufacturing a hybrid at a plant located in Mr. Biden’s senatorial backyard. Fisker was backed by prominent liberal investors including Al Gore. “Lobbying by all local politicians is said to have won the day for the Wilmington plant,” the Washington Post reported in 2013.

China’s Green NGO Climate Propaganda Enablers Climate change is a national security threat – but not in the way the national security elite assumes. By Rupert Darwall

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2020/12/21/chinas_green_ngo_climate_propaganda_enablers_654042.html

Shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed, Greenpeace opened an office in Moscow. It enjoyed the patronage of a leading member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and enjoyed Kremlin funding, laundered through a state-owned record company. The green activist group made clear that it would have nothing to do with environmental groups in the Baltic republics. Recycling standard Soviet propaganda, Greenpeace denounced them as little more than separatist organizations.

This was by no means a one-off. The inconvenient truth: the environmental movement fought on the wrong side of the Cold War. In the early 1980s, it used the “nuclear winter” scare to try to stop Ronald Reagan’s nuclear build-up and undermine the West’s ability to negotiate the arms agreement that effectively ended the Cold War. It turns out that nuclear winter had been concocted by the KGB and transmitted to America by executives of the Rockefeller Family Fund. A nuclear winter conference held in 1983 was supported by 31 environmental groups, including the Environmental Defense Fund, Friends of the Earth, and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

This pattern, wherein the West’s enemies use the environmental movement – whether NGOs like Greenpeace, foundations, or “concerned scientists,” to undermine Western interests – is now being repeated, this time in respect to China. A report by Patricia Adams for the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation released earlier this month lays bare the role of the green movement in acting as China’s propagandists.

Where Is The Criticism Of China From Environmentalists? Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-12-14-where-is-the-criticism-of-chi

You undoubtedly are aware that the international environmental movement has almost entirely been taken over and consumed by the climate change scare; and you also cannot help but be aware of the constant drumbeat of attacks by environmentalists on the U.S. government, particularly under President Trump, for its failure to reduce carbon emissions sufficiently to “save the planet.” At the same time, you are a reader of the Manhattan Contrarian. Therefore, you know that China is not only not reducing its own carbon emissions, but instead has well more than tripled them over the past twenty years (during which period U.S. emissions have declined modestly by about 15%); and today China is in the midst of a new round of massive expansion of its fossil fuel energy generation capacity, particularly with respect to the most carbon-intensive fuel, coal.

As quoted by me in a post just a couple of days ago, from the Global Energy Monitor, June 2020:

China currently has 249.6 gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired capacity under development (97.8 GW under construction and 151.8 GW in planning), a 21% increase over end-2019 (205.9 GW). The amount of capacity under development (249.6 GW) is larger than the [entire] coal fleets of the United States (246.2 GW) or India (229.0 GW).

So then surely the major environmental organizations must be coming down hard on China? Wrong. Indeed, many of them are full of praise for China for its “climate leadership.” Sure, China gives plenty of empty lip service to Western climate orthodoxy; but could these environmentalists really be so dense as to be fooled by that, even as information as to China’s soaring emissions and hundreds of new coal plants is readily available (if not widely publicized by the CCP)?

Lancing the Lancet’s global-warming pustule By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/12/05/lancing-the-lancets-global-warming-pustule/
“With respect, The Lancet should study more science and economics, however unfashionable, and peddle less totalitarian politics, however fashionable and profitable – and deadly.”

The Lancet, once a respected medico-scientific journal and now just another me-too mouthpiece for theusual suspects, ran an editorial this week on climate change – on which subject it has neither expertise nor a missio canonica to pronounce. Here is a letter to the editor in response:

Sir, – Your notion of a “climate crisis” (editorial, December 2), though fashionable among the classe politique, is misplaced. That notion sprang from an elementary error of physics perpetrated in the 1980s by climate scientists who had borrowed feedback formulism from control theory, another branch of physics, without quite understanding it. Interdisciplinary compartmentalization delayed its identification until now.

After correcting the error, anthropogenic global warming will be only one-third of current midrange projections, well within natural variability and net-beneficial to life and health. CO2 fertilization (for CO2 is plant food) has assisted in steadily increasing crop yields – this year’s global harvest has set yet another record – and in improving drought resistance (Hao et al., 2014) and greening the planet.

Your suggestion that warmer worldwide weather has caused net loss of life, particularly among the world’s fast-declining population of poor people, is fashionable but misplaced. Cold is a bigger killer than warmth. Research conducted three years ago for the European Commission found that, for this reason, even if there were 5.4 C° global warming from 2020-2080, there would be 100,000 more Europeans than with no warming at all.

The Folly of Renewable Energy The West needs to go nuclear By Matt Ridley

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/12/17/the-folly-of-renewable-energy/

If you judge by the images used to illustrate reports about energy, the world now runs mainly on wind and solar power. It comes as a shock to look up the numbers. In 2019 wind and solar between them supplied just 1.5 percent of the world’s energy consumption. Hydro supplied 2.6 percent, nuclear 1.7 percent, and all the rest — 94 percent — came from burning things: coal, oil, gas, wood, and biofuels.

As Mark Twain might say, reports of an energy transition away from combustion as a source of energy are greatly exaggerated. True, carbon-dioxide emissions are rising more slowly than energy consumption, but that is mainly because gas is displacing coal. The rise of renewables has so far not even compensated for the recent decline of nuclear — a decline renewables have contributed to causing because intermittent renewable energy hits the profitability of nuclear power hardest. Nuclear cannot be easily switched on and off.

So the thermodynamic explanation of the world economy remains the same as it has since the industrial revolution liberated us from reliance mainly on the (renewable) muscles of people, horses, and oxen or the vagaries of (renewable) trade winds. We use the heat of flames to do useful things, such as move stuff around, light and heat our homes, manufacture goods, grow crops with tractors, power the Internet.

The main change in recent years has been that energy is increasingly centrally planned. Instead of a market deciding between fuels, the government picks favorites to subsidize, and then subsidizes the old ones, too, when it finds it has poisoned the market against them. Throughout the Western world energy markets are coerced. The development pipeline, corporate rhetoric, and fuel-market shares are all determined by policy.

This has some perverse consequences. Lobbied by firms such as General Electric, Sylvania, and Philips, governments all over the world forced consumers to give up incandescent light bulbs in favor of expensive compact fluorescent bulbs, ostensibly to save energy. All this achieved was a delay in the voluntary replacement of both by a much more efficient, safe, and reliable form of lighting: LEDs.