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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

A Nuclear Milestone for Climate Federal go-ahead for Florida reactors could start a chain reaction.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-nuclear-milestone-for-climate-11576196316?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

You probably haven’t heard about a recent regulatory decision that will reduce carbon emissions because it doesn’t follow the green template of controlling private industry and suppressing economic growth.

Last week the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for the first time extended a nuclear plant’s license so it can operate for 80 years. The decision for the Turkey Point reactors in south Florida could encourage other plant owners to apply for renewals and extend the viability of the leading carbon-free energy source.

A majority of the 58 nuclear plants now supplying power to U.S. homes and businesses were built in the 1970s and 1980s, when they were licensed for 40 years. Most plants have applied for and received 20-year extensions to bring their life spans to 60 years. Yet antinuclear activists use the license renewal periods to pressure plants to close, and until the Turkey Point decision it was an open question whether the NRC would approve second 20-year extensions.

The federal go-ahead for Turkey Point comes at an important time for America’s maturing nuclear fleet. The 2010s saw a wave of plant closures, and according to the Nuclear Energy Institute half of U.S. plants would shut down by 2040 without a second extension. Nine are seeking one so far.

Greta Thunberg Is the Perfect Hero for an Unserious Time By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/greta-thunberg-is-the-perfect-hero-for-an-unserious-time/

Histrionic, beset by apocalyptic fantasies, and easily exploitable

Who better than a finger-wagging teen bereft of accomplishment, or any comprehension of basic economics or history, to be Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2019? Greta Thunberg’s canonization is a perfect expression of media activism in a deeply unserious time.

Has there ever been a less consequential person picked to be Person of the Year? I doubt it. I mean, Wallis Simpson, 1936’s Person of the Year, got King Edward VIII to abdicate the throne. Thunberg can’t even get you to abdicate your air-conditioning.

These days we celebrate vacuous fire and brimstone. “Greta Thunberg” — the idea, not the girl — is concoction of activists who have increasingly taken to using children as a shield from critical analysis or debate. She’s the vessel of the environmentalist’s fraudulent apocalypticism-as-argument. Her style is emotion and indignation, histrionics and fantasy. She is a teenager, after all.

How dare you attack a poor defenseless child who suffers from Asperger syndrome!

You’ll notice that, on one hand, Thunberg’s champions demand that the world take her Malthusian crusade seriously, and on the other, they feign indignation when you actually do. The argument that young people, because they will inherit the future, are also best equipped to comprehend it is as puerile as any of Greta’s positions.

Perhaps a better question is, What kind of parents, editors, producers, or U.N. officials would thrust a vulnerable child with Asperger, no less, into a complex and contentious debate? I have great sympathy for her. It’s her ideological handlers who have stolen her childhood.

Divesting Endowments From Fossil Fuels or Common Sense? Students debate the politicization of universities’ investments.

What Divestment Misses

Calls for university endowments to divest from fossil fuels are constant on American college campuses, but are they wise? Divestment is too blunt an instrument for complicated questions. The inconvenient truth is that affordable energy and petrochemicals are the foundation of countless everyday consumer items that improve the quality of life for people across the world. The oil and gas companies that student activists want to punish are the same ones that have powered social and economic progress.

Even more inconvenient, oil and gas companies are among the largest investors in renewable energy and technology. Companies such as Shell, Exxon Mobil and Chevron are all key sponsors of the MIT Energy Initiative. It’s not obvious that shaming these companies will help advance green energy. Nor will it secure “climate justice,” the social-justice-infused environmentalism that typically dominates campus divestment campaigns. Getting rid of oil and gas would disproportionately hurt the poor and working class.

Educational institutions should debate, discuss and forge solutions to complex problems. With the benefit of multiple perspectives from different disciplines, as well as the intellectual authority and prestige of academic professionalism, universities can make a difference through ideas and research, not partisan endowment politics.

— Shantanu Jakhete, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, mechanical engineering

While Snow Falls on California, Pelosi Fights Global Warming in Spain The rain in Spain falls on Pelosi’s brain.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/while-snow-falls-california-pelosi-fights-global-daniel-greenfield/

New Jersey is getting hammered with 12 inches of snow with 200 schools shut down. Upstate New York expects to be hit with 2 feet of snow. Most of Michigan may soon be snowed under. North Carolina has winter storm warnings in effect. As does Arizona. In Southern California, Disneyland had to close early to beat a winter storm, and even a fire in Santa Barbara was doused with Thanksgiving snow.

But California’s favorite daughter, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, jetted off to Spain to fight global warming.  

It was easier for her delegation, which included Democrats from New Jersey, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Illinois, and Michigan, to talk global warming in Madrid where temperatures hovered in the mild 50s. The rain in Spain fell lightly on the plains nearMadrid and mainly on the soggy swamps of Pelosi’s brain.

“By coming here we want to say to everyone we are still in, the United States is still in,” Speaker Pelosi told reporters.

With Greens’ policies, no wonder Australia’s on fire By Viv Forbes

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/with_greens_policies_no_wonder_australias_on_fire.html

No one should be surprised that our bush is ablaze and our cities are smothered in smoke.

For decades now, we have been locking up land, banning burn-offs, and encouraging eucalypt fire-trees.  On a hot day, the blue haze on distant timbered hills is highly flammable eucalypt oil vapor, waiting for a spark.

The Australian landscape of open forests and treeless grasslands was developed and maintained under an aboriginal regime of continual small fires.  This was followed by planned cool-season burn-offs by European graziers.

But a few decades ago, this safe black-and-white fire regime was replaced by green-worshipers who continually expanded the area of locked up protected parks (now over 11% of Australia). Then they peppered private land with protected-vegetation fire havens and hampered undergrowth clean-ups and burn-offs.

This created many tinderboxes of eucalypt fire-trees waiting for a spark.  The spark could be a fearful landowner seeking fire protection with a risky/belated back-burn, a thrill-seeking arsonist, a dry-lightning strike, a careless cigarette butt, a power-line problem, or high-flying burning embers — and an unstoppable firestorm is inevitable.

Centralized management of bush-fires and National Parks has failed totally.

Locals and neighbors are better at managing fires and park land.  Posturing politicians and uniformed fire generals should confine themselves to posing for photos, baking scones, and boiling billy tea for firefighters.

And Greens should serve on the fire front.

Climate Science Proves Scams Don’t Die of Exposure Tony Thomas

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/11/ten-years-after-climategate/

It’s the tenth anniversary next week of the 2009 Climategate email dump that exposed top climate scientists’ chicanery and subversion of science – and did so in their own words and out of their own mouths, or keyboards. I’ll list a few emails-of-infamy shortly, but first some background.

For the three years before Climategate, the climate crowd was ascendant with its pseudo-narrative of “settled science”. Al Gore’s error-riddled propaganda movie Inconvenient Truth of 2006 had swept the Western world and its readily-traduced schoolkids. In 2007 Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shared the Nobel Peace Prize. In late 2008 Barack Obama won the White House, proclaiming in his modest way, “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

The Climategate emails hit the blogosphere just a month before the Copenhagen summit was scheduled to lock Western countries into Kyoto Mark 2, a legally-binding commitment to renewables from 2012. Climategate destroyed warmists’ moral high ground and reinforced the natural reluctance of most governments to up-end their economies with emission controls. The  Copenhagen circus fell apart, resolving merely to “take note” of the exhortations to action by Obama and like-minded leaders.

The mainstream media strove to ignore and bury the Climategate  revelations. The climate establishment ran half a dozen inquiries with limited briefs and ludicrous lack of rigour, all of which purported to clear the climate scientists of wrong-doing.[1] But even today, ten years after, scientists faithful to their calling and disciplines can only shudder at what Climategate revealed. Those who subverted the scientific method were not fringe players but at the pinnacle. They were doing the archetypal studies “proving” catastrophic human-caused catastrophic warming (CAGW) and shaping the content and messaging in the six-yearly reports of the IPCC.

THE UN IS HOLDING ITS 25TH CLIMATE CONFERENCE-PLEASE LET THERE NOT BE ANOTHER ONE

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/12/06/the-u-n-is-holding-its-25th-climate-conference-please-dont-let-there-be-a-26th/

Has there ever been a bigger assembly of scolds and nattering nabobs of nonsense than those gathered at the United Nations Conference Of The Parties 25 this week in Madrid? Spare us another of these hootenannies of insufferable elitism.

Before the party even started, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres showed up in Spain to tell us “the point of no return is no longer over the horizon,” and “is in sight and hurtling toward us.”

How long have we been hearing this? Prince Charles has been predicting imminent doomsday for more than a decade, as has Al Gore. Before the conference began, Vice was trying to convince the world that “The Collapse of Civilization May Have Already Begun,” while Extinction Rebellion has been barking madly that “billions will die” and “life on Earth is dying” because of man’s use of fossil fuels.

Despite decades of warnings that the end “is in sight,” as the Competitive Enterprise Institute recently assured us, “none of the apocalyptic predictions” of environmental disaster “with due dates as of today have come true.”

As the conference’s nominal host, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez took up the cudgel because there can be no meeting of the climate clan without an othering of the “deniers.” “Luckily,” said Sánchez, “only a handful of fanatics deny the evidence.” What evidence would that be, Sr. Prime Minister?

Of course he can’t point to any evidence, because there is none.

A warming planet? Nothing in the record before 1979, when satellites began measuring thermal emissions in the atmosphere, is reliable. The satellite data show some warming, but nothing outside natural variations.

Receding glaciers and melting ice? “Polar ice sheets have not declined at all since NASA satellite instruments began precisely measuring them 35 years ago,” says James Taylor, who has written extensively about climate over the years. Meanwhile, “the Antarctic Ice Sheet has been growing at a steady and substantial pace ever since NASA satellites first began measuring the Antarctic ice sheet in 1979.” So about those glaciers? The global retreat that the alarmists can’t stop talking about is not new. It began before the Civil War was fought, “at the end of the Little Ice Age.” 

Increasing sea level? The oceans have been rising for 10,000 years. NASA says the rate of increase has been about 3.3 millimeters a year, not quite 0.13 of inch, for decades. Hardly cause for alarm.

More hurricanes? We repeat ourselves: “Global major hurricane frequency has been trending downward since 1980, while cyclone energy is roughly the same as it was in 1972.”

Growing wildfires? The media have been fixated on California’s fires, so let’s look there. And what do we find? Cal Fire, a government agency, has compiled data which show a steep drop-off in acres burned since 2008. The claim goes up in smoke.

Global warming, global cooling, climate change, climate emergency, climate catastrophe, climate collapse or existential threat? By Jack Hellner

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/global_warming_global_cooling_climate_change_climate_emergency_climate_catastrophe_climate_collapse_or_existential_threat.html

What wets your whistle? It’s another day and another dire warning from the UN. Of course, almost 100% of the media repeats these dire warnings in order to indoctrinate the public, especially the young, with no questions asked as the media pretends they are fact checkers. 

What is always missing from these articles and warnings is factual historical data. There are no statistics to show how little the temperature has changed the last 140 years, only made up numbers about the future. There are no statistics to show how little the sea levels have changed the last 140 years, only threats about the future. There are also no statistics on hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards or drought the last 149 years, only made up numbers about the supposed threat. 

Somehow, these supposedly educated journalists never point out how wrong previous predictions have been, but the solution is always to transfer freedom and trillions of dollars to bureaucrats and politicians throughout the World. 

Today we only have a few years left and the cost has gone up substantially. Is it any wonder that the birth rate is so low when most of the people pushing the climate catastrophe crap also support abortion on demand at any stage of the pregnancy and we are told that humans are destroying the Earth and they are going to die soon anyway so why bring children into the World?

U.N. Chief Warns “Point of No Return” on Climate Change “Is in Sight”

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres isn’t mincing words when it comes to issuing a dire warning about the global climate crisis, saying that the effort to stop climate change has been “utterly inadequate.”

No one should want their children to live in this ‘bleak’ future

The Climate Cult’s ‘Grave New World’ Thaddeus McCotter

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/01/the-climate-cults-grave-new-world/

A new and dire manifesto demands population control that would dictate who gets to eat, have heat, and procreate to save the world with “social integrity”—whatever that means, other than nothing good.

As a proud debunker of the apocalyptic climate scam, it’s only natural that the climate cult has a plethora of biodegradable slings and arrows to hurl at my person. Among their most common claims is that I use “straw man” arguments to describe the climate cult’s destructive agenda. Yet, no sooner is this straw man accusation leveled that some new fanaticism unwittingly provides me vindication.

For example: “Earth Needs Fewer People to Beat the Climate Crisis, Scientists Say” by Eric Roston in the “Climate Changed” (get it?) section of Bloomberg News (which I believe was founded by a billionaire former Republican mayor who oddly expects Democratic presidential primary voters to embrace his candidacy rather than confiscate his property).

In an “emergency declaration,” more than 11,000 of the climate cult’s high priests of politicized science pledged your lives, your fortunes, your sacred honor, and your genitalia to impose immediate, radical changes in how human beings acquire energy and food, and reproduce.

After noting that 40 years ago “scientists from 50 nations converged on Geneva to discuss what was then called the ‘CO2-climate problem’” and “predicted global warming would eventually become a major environmental challenge,” (but failing to note the earlier false alarms that the planet was heading into a “another ice age”) apparently “the scientists got to work, building a strategy on how to attack the problem and laying the groundwork for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s preeminent body of climate scientists. Their goal was to get ahead of the problem before it was too late.”

The left’s climate change hypocrisy By Gregory Wrightstone

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/the_lefts_climate_change_hypocrisy.html

The United Nations is at it again — trafficking in climate change alarmism to promote their globalist political agendas. On November 26, 2019, the U.N. released another doom-and-gloom report, claiming that “drastic action” is the only way to avoid the catastrophic consequences that will result from climate change. Translation: bow down to our collectivist, progressive political demands, or else. But here’s the problem — even progressives themselves can’t keep up with their own inane demands. And now, more than ever, they’re revealing the full extent of their climate-change hypocrisy.

It’s a tale we’ve heard time and time again, and this latest report is just more of the same. Coral reefs will collapse, coastal cities will flood, and temperatures will become unbearable. Unless, of course, your nation adopts our ever-increasingly radical policy proposals. Only this time around, the proposal has descended from blatant radicalism to complete insanity.

According to the United Nations, countries will have to quintuple their commitments made under the Paris Climate Agreement. Yes, you heard that right. Under the new compact, each nation would have to reconfigure its already unattainable climate-change goals by multiplying them fivefold. Then and only then will the world finally be safe from the unseen calamity of climate change!

Aren’t we tired of this foolishness yet? Keep in mind, this report is coming from the U.N., the same people who, just a few years ago, proclaimed the Paris Climate Accords to be the gold standard for action against global warming. These are the same collectivists that had the gall to criticize President Trump for his decision to withdrawal from the accords — for putting American interests ahead of the United Nations’ progressive agenda. “Abandoning the Paris agreement is cruel to future generations, leaving the world less safe and productive,” decried Andrew Steer, the president of World Resources Institute.