Displaying posts categorized under

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

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.

The Green Paradigm is Shifting Fast We no longer can afford our Disneyfied ideals about nature. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-green-paradigm-is-shifting-fast/

In just a few weeks, Donald Trump has started shifting a number of establishment paradigms, including the idealistic “rules-based” foreign policy, and the ghoulish transgender treatments and surgeries. However, the most dangerous for our economy and its future is the so-called “green energy” policies based on “climate change” ideology.

On November 5, voters sent the message that they’re sick of high gas prices, government diktats about what kind of cars they have to drive, billions in subsidies to “green renewable” energy industries, and EVs, and hectoring virtue-signaling from snooty elites about “settled science” and climate change “deniers.” The winds of change have set the “green” paradigm tottering.

What happened? Recently the Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swaim wrote,  “The possibility that an entire academic discipline, climate science, could have gone badly amiss by groupthink and self-flattery wasn’t thought possible. In many quarters this orthodoxy still reigns unquestioned.” But this statement begs the question that the more accurate name for “climate change,” ––Anthropogenic Catastrophic Global Warming (ACGW)–– reflects true science, which has “gone wildly amiss” because of “groupthink and “self-flattery” and other human frailties.

In fact, the real problem is the claim that, as the honest name above says, CO2 emissions from humans will eventually heat the atmosphere to the point that it becomes uninhabitable. But this is not a scientific fact established by the empirically based scientific method, but a dicey hypothesis. We simply do not have a thorough enough understanding of the complexity of global climate over time and space. For example, we don’t know precisely how water vapor in the atmosphere, the biggest greenhouse gas, interacts with CO2, or how it contributes to cyclic cooling and warming.

These gaps in our models and computer simulations have been exposed by many physicists, to whom we should listen rather than “climate scientists.” For example, MIT professor of atmospheric science Richard Lindzen, and Princeton emeritus professor of physics William Happer, wrote  in 2021, “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.”

The New York Times Spreads Misinformation About Extreme Weather Deaths By David Seidemann

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/02/the-new-york-times-spreads-misinformation-about-extreme-weather-deaths/

If one views warming as an existential threat, it’s easy to assume that extreme heat is deadlier than extreme cold. The data say otherwise.

For many, the New York Times and the various federal and international agencies that it often cites are trusted sources for information on climate change. But on one of the risks of climate change — deaths by extreme weather — that trust is misplaced. The following examples from the last two years illustrate that, often enough, those sources spread false or misleading information on that issue.

The science regarding worldwide deaths from extreme weather is clear: Deaths caused by extreme cold are between nine and 17 times higher than those caused by extreme heat, according to peer-reviewed studies published in The Lancet in 2024, 2021, and 2015. The Times, however, has reported otherwise: “Heat waves cause more deaths globally than all other natural disasters combined.” The Times claim is unsourced, so its justification is unclear, but it clearly contradicts the scientific evidence — something that the paper usually notes is a trait of misinformation.

In another example, this Times article reports a conclusion of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a U.N. agency, that extreme heat is the deadliest of all weather events. Although that claim appears to be backed by scientific research cited in a WMO report linked to the article, it isn’t. Remarkably, the very Lancet study that the WMO report cites (in footnote 5), as evidence that extreme heat is the world’s No. 1 weather-related killer, concludes that extreme cold is ten times deadlier. Both the WMO staff and a Times reporter missed the contradiction between their claim and the evidence — resulting in both sources spreading misinformation.

Similarly, both this Times article and the Environmental Protection Agency web page that it links to missed the contradiction between the evidence cited and their assertion that heat is the leading weather-related killer in the United States. Death certificate data posted on the EPA’s website show that far more people died directly from extreme cold nationally (19,000 between 1979 to 2018) than from extreme heat (11,000 between 1979 to 2018). (The EPA pages that I cite — including the one that the Times article linked to — are archived versions that were available when the Times article was published.)

The Frights of Climate Catastrophe in the Disco Era In the 1970s, the looming ice age was the climate crisis du jour—proof that today’s “settled science” may not be so settled after all. By Anthony J. Sadar

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/31/the-frights-of-climate-catastrophe-in-the-disco-era/

Y.M.C.A. is back and badder than ever. The Trump team helped to resurrect this 1978 disco icon. Yet some in the media are not hitting the dance floor and the sphere of “settled science” is trying to bury the cultural climate of the 1970s.

Today’s popular narrative about climate change contends that the public and scientists in the 1970s were not all that concerned about global cooling during that decade can be categorized as disinformation, or at least misinformation.

I was an undergraduate student of meteorology at Penn State in the mid-70s and even with published papers to the contrary, there was a real concern about the emergence of a new ice age. (Beyond Penn State, some non-science students were warned that soon polar bears might be roaming New York City. That turned out to be true, but thankfully the bears have been confined to the Central Park Zoo.)

Perhaps a majority of scientists weren’t overly worried that the downward global temperature trend since the 1940s would continue; however, I don’t recall much angst over imminent global warming either.

Also, cover stories in Time, Newsweek, and other popular magazines sensitized people to a worldwide cooling trend. And the public was primed for disastrous chilling with books confidently stating, “A handful of scientists denied evidence that the Earth’s climate was cooling until the 1970s, when bizarre weather throughout the world forced them to reconsider their views” (from The Cooling by Lowell Ponte, 1976). The book’s cover pondered, “Has the next ice age already begun? Can we survive it?”

Or, from Our Changing Weather: Forecast of Disaster? by Claude Rose in 1977: “Northern hemisphere temperatures have been falling steadily since the 1940s. Glaciers are advancing once again. Scientists no longer debate the coming of a new ice age: the question now is when?” The front cover of this book teased, “Will our fuel run out? Will our food be destroyed? Will we freeze?”

It’s Time To Purge The Climate Scam From The Federal Websites Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2025-1-28-its-time-to-purge-the-climate-scam-from-the-federal-websites

On November 12, 2024 — a week after the election — I had a post titled “Ideas For An Incoming Trump Administration: Climate And Energy Edition.” The first subject covered in that post was “Communications.” I stated there:

[C]hanging the communications of the prior administration should be an easy and obvious first priority. However, the Trump people notably did a poor job on this subject the first time out. The subject of climate and energy is pervasive through the websites of dozens of federal agencies.

I had followed the EPA website in particular during the first Trump term, and it had been little changed even a year after Trump took office.

This time around, Trump and his people are doing a far better job of hitting the ground running on many issues. That is notably true in the area of climate and energy communications: a week in, there are already some meaningful changes at the websites of various agencies. However, changing communications on these issues is not a small task; the government websites during the Biden era had pervasive climate propaganda in thousands of locations.

So, a week into the new administration, here are some of the things that have either changed or not so far.

Department of Energy

My November post noted that there was a big section, dominating the Department’s website, titled “Combating the Climate Crisis.” Today, if you go to the Department’s opening web page, it’s quite different. The front page headline is “Restoring Energy Dominance,” followed by “President Trump’s Day One Actions will Return the Department to Regular Order.” Here’s how it starts:

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), effective today, is ending the Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) pause and returning to regular order following direction given by President Donald J. Trump to “unleash American Energy Dominance.”

Trump takes on the climatecrats No one should mourn America’s withdrawal from the ridiculous Paris Agreement. Matt Ridley

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/21/trump-takes-on-the-climatecrats/

Donald Trump has pulled America out of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement for the second time. The new US president signed an executive order following his inauguration yesterday, reversing the decision of his predecessor, Joe Biden, to drag the US back into the agreement in 2021. Bizarrely, like some dodgy insurance scam, the rules of the climatocracy say it takes a year to withdraw from the deal, so not until next winter will America be free of its obligations to reduce its emissions.

In truth, those ‘obligations’ are more like empty promises. The scandalous, nonsensical truth about the Paris Agreement is that it obliges literally nothing. It requires governments to, every five years, submit pieces of paper called ‘Intended Nationally Determined Contributions’ (INDCs), which can consist of saying you plan to go on doing what you are doing to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. Or even to do less than you were doing before. Most countries can then ignore the INDCs and do whatever they feel like anyway. There is almost no monitoring involved, let alone reprimanding, indicting or punishing. Only Britain has made its INDCs legally binding.

India’s latest Paris promise, made in 2023, consists of slightly relaxing, rather than tightening, its previous target for decarbonising. China has promised to continue to increase its emissions until 2030. Even if all the INDCs made under the Paris Agreement were kept to, climate economist Bjorn Lomborg has calculated that the global impact would be to reduce temperatures by less than 0.05 degrees Celsius by 2100. That is so minuscule it would be impossible to measure. Can you honestly say that, 75 years hence, your grandchildren could tell the difference between a day that’s 15.21 degrees and one that’s 15.26 degrees?

The Paris Agreement grew out of the chaos of COP15, the UN’s climate-change conference in Copenhagen in 2009, when the climatecrats decided that empty promises were not enough. They felt they must instead have the power to impose enforceable, mandatory emissions targets for all nations. Again and again, in the years leading up to the Paris meeting, the UN, the EU and US used the words ‘legally binding’ to describe what they planned. Nothing less would do.

At COP17 in Durban, South Africa in 2011, world leaders signed up to a promise to have a legally binding treaty in force by 2020. Greenpeace repeatedly insisted it must be a binding rather than a ‘voluntary approach’. The EU agreed. Ahead of the conference, its spokesman said: ‘The Paris Agreement must be an international legally binding agreement.’ Then French foreign minister Laurent Fabius said that John Kerry, then US secretary of state, was simply ‘confused’ when he worried whether a legally binding treaty was possible.

More Cold Truth About Global Warming

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/20/more-cold-truth-about-global-warming/

Donald Trump’s inauguration was moved inside due to the bitter cold weather in Washington. Of course the same people who swear the Arctic blast was caused by global warming are part of the axis of fanatics that claims that humans’ fossil fuel habits caused 2024 to be the hottest year or record. There’s so much wrong with the klimate klowns’ klaims.

The temperature in the capital at today’s swearing-in at noon is predicted to be 22 degrees, cold but far from the coldest ever, which was 5 degrees when Ronald Regan took office in 1985 – four years after the warmest day in inauguration history reached 55 degrees – and the same temperature as John F. Kennedy’s 1961 ceremony, which was preceded by 8 inches of snow the evening before.

As expected, the “experts” who are reverently quoted by Democratic politicians and their comrades in the media are blaming “human-caused climate change” for today’s conditions.

Apparently those other frigid Inauguration Days and the related cold snaps were natural occurrences – as were Inauguration Days of 16, 25 and 26 degrees when the ceremony was held in March, and maybe even the coldest day ever recorded in the continental U.S., when the temperature hit 70 below in Montana on Jan. 20, 1954 – but this time, by golly, it’s man’s fault.

We don’t need to get into the science that debunks the man-made global warming assertions because any cool-headed observation of the facts we just listed makes it wholly unnecessary.