RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/02/phony_justice_through_phony_climate_policy.html

Would you be surprised to learn that of the five goals pronounced in the so-called “Green New Deal,” three of them focus on some form of social or economic “justice?” Or that the two that don’t instead use language right out of the UN’s globalist playbook? Well, they do, and, if you’ve been paying attention, you shouldn’t be all that surprised.

Indeed, the convergence of climate “science” and social “justice” is nothing new. Some argue that it dates back to 1972, when an unlikely blend of legitimate environmental activists, dyed-in-the-wool Marxists, and assorted anti-establishment 60’s leftovers met in Stockholm, Sweden to discuss the planet’s ills. And from that marriage of global environmental and social-justice concerns was born the IPCC’s parent organization – the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and its socialist-environmentalist manifesto – the Stockholm Declaration.

Others point to the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro (a.k.a. the Earth Summit). There, the event’s Secretary-general, Maurice Strong, told the opening session that industrialized countries had “developed and benefited from the unsustainable patterns of production and consumption which have produced our present dilemma.” Yes, this was the gathering which spawned the infamous Agenda 21 [PDF], a global contract that pledged governments around the world to a UN plan to change the way people “live, eat, learn and communicate” all in the name of “saving the earth” from mankind’s mistakes, particularly global warming. (See IPCC: International Pack of Climate Crooks for details).

But these were non-binding international agreements typically not worth the paper they were then written on, not proposed legislation for a sovereign nation which would immediately impact the lives and wellbeing of hundreds of millions of citizens.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/the-green-new-deal-versus-rural-america/

Customers outside dense urban areas will get stuck with huge electric bills.

The Green New Deal is the shiny new object in Washington. Rolled out last week by Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Senator Ed Markey (D., Mass.), the proposal is a grab-bag of policies that covers everything from creating “high-quality union jobs” to universal health care. It has been endorsed by nine Democratic contenders for the White House and nearly 70 members of the House of Representatives.

The fundamental charge of the Green New Deal is the “green” part: The U.S. is supposed to get to “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers.” Achieving such a goal (and doing it in just ten years) would require overhauling nearly every piece of energy infrastructure in the country. That’s where the Green New Deal parts company with the real New Deal — and, in fact, contradicts the achievements of the legislators who helped ensure rural electrification, and by doing so, helped set the table for America’s emergence as an economic superpower after World War II.

Two pieces of New Deal legislation changed the shape and structure of America’s energy sector: The Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 busted the big electric utilities that had a stranglehold on America’s electric grid, and the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 provided low-cost federally backed loans to electric cooperatives and other entities, which allowed them to build their own electric grids and be independent of the big utilities. Those laws helped slash electricity costs for rural customers and led to a broad dissemination of economic and political power across the country that was critical to the development of western and southern states. And that leads to my thesis: If the Green New Deal becomes a reality, it will dramatically increase electricity costs and concentrate economic and political power in big business and in Washington. In short, the biggest costs of the all-renewable-energy push will be paid not by urban liberals such as Ocasio-Cortez, who are pushing the Green New Deal, but by rural Americans who probably voted for Donald Trump.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/the_question_of_sea_level_rise_.html

Sea level has risen about 400 feet since the last glacial maximum of ~18,000 years ago. [see fig. below]

Currently, sea level is rising at the rate of 1-2mm per year — and has been rising at that rate for the past several centuries.

At that rate, SL will be about six inches higher by 2100 — a long way from Al Gore’s 2006 estimate of a 20-foot rise.

By choosing a short interval, 1910-1942, of certified warming, I can show the lack of any acceleration [see below]. SLR does not depend on ocean temperature — or CO2.

Every one of the individual records of SLR shows this constancy of SLR.

But water expands when heated; so why doesn’t SLR accelerate as temperature rises? I assume that evaporation of sea water offsets the expansion, with increased humidity and precipitation. I fully expect to see more ice deposited on the Antarctic continent — probably too hard to measure accurately.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/al_gore_comes_out_in_favor_of_ocasiocortezs_green_new_deal.html

Noted environmentalist but failed science prognosticator and multi, multi, multi-millionaire Al Gore, whose lavish homes fit the lifestyle of a Democrat former senator, former Democrat vice president, failed Democrat presidential candidate, Academy Award-winner, Grammy-winner, Nobel Peace Prize-winner, and all-around hypocrite chimes in on fellow (yeah, yeah, she’s a woman) Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.)’s equally non-scientific scheme to ruin the USA while getting rich — probably — and more famous in the process.

The Green New Deal resolution marks the beginning of a crucial dialogue on climate legislation in the U.S. Mother Nature has awakened so many Americans to the urgent threat of the climate crisis, and this proposal responds to the growing concern and demand for action. The goals are ambitious and comprehensive — now the work begins to decide the best ways to achieve them, with specific policy solutions tied to timelines. It is critical that this process unfolds in close dialogue with the frontline communities that bear the disproportionate impacts today, as this resolution acknowledges. Policymakers and Presidential candidates would be wise to embrace a Green New Deal and commit to the hard work of seeing it through.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/the_19781997_warming_trend_is_an_artifact_of_instrumentation.html

Now we tackle, using newly available data, what may have caused the fictitious temperature trend in the latter decades of the 20th century.

We first look at Ocean data. There was a great shift, after 1980, in the way Sea Surface Temperatures [SSTs] were measured; [REF. see Goretzki and Kennedy et al. JGR 2011 Fig. 2] “Sources of SST data:” Note the drastic changes between 1980 and 2000 as global floating drifter buoys geographic changes increasingly replaced opportunities for sampling SST with buckets.

Data taken from floating drifter buoys increased from zero to 60% between 1980 and 2000. But such buoys are heated directly by the sun with the unheated engine inlet water in lower ocean layers; this combination leads to a spurious rise in Sea Surface Temperature [SST] when the data are mixed together.

In merging them, we must note that buoy data are global, while bucket and inlet temperatures are (perforce) confined to (mostly commercial) shipping routes. Nor do we know the ocean depths that buckets sample; inlet depths depend on ship type and degree of loading.

Disentangling this mess requires data details that are not available. About all we might demonstrate, is the possibility of a distinct diurnal variation in the buoy temperatures.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/freezing_out_the_climate_charlatans.html

As I started writing this on the balmy, increasingly socialist left coast on January 27th, the U.S. media were full of dire predictions of a catastrophic cold snap in the Midwest and New England. The same day, in Brussels, 70,000 people (35,000 of them clueless schoolchildren) demonstrated with slogans like “Winter is not coming anymore,” “Nature grows, capitalism blows” and “Stop denying the earth is dying.”

Alas, Winter did come to both the Midwest and Europe and did so with a vengeance. At least 21 people have died of hypothermia in the U.S. so far, and at least 10 in Poland. Temperatures dipped to a hellish minus 23 degrees Fahrenheit (-30.5 Celsius) in Chicago, and minus 14 degrees Celsius (7 F) in Poland. Eleven U.S. states recorded temperatures lower than –14 F, or below those measured north of the Arctic Circle in Barrow, Alaska.

More to the point, as Powerlineblog’s John Hinderaker tells us in a perceptive piece, the deep freeze affecting his home state of Minnesota has much to tell us about the futility of green energy as the putative panacea of global warming doom. It turns out that as Minnesotans were freezing, renewable energy was nowhere to be found. The wind wasn’t blowing and in the entire MISO area (15 states in the Midwest and the South) it generated a measly 4% of the energy and operated at a miserable 24% of installed capacity, prompting Hinderaker to ask pointedly “why do we need wind farms”? Why indeed? To answer this question, it is worth delving into some of the other figures Hinderaker provides.

https://www.city-journal.org/cuomo-green-new-deal-wind-energy-new-york

In his State of the State speech earlier this month, New York governor Andrew Cuomo declared that he was launching “the next phase of the Green New Deal.” New York, Cuomo said, will mandate that the state’s utilities produce 100 percent “carbon-neutral” electricity by 2040. As a step toward that goal, Cuomo announced plans to deploy 9,000 megawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2035, a move he touts as “the most aggressive offshore wind goal in U.S. history.”

Cuomo’s move is the latest version of what appears to be a competition among east coast states to see which one can set the most ambitious offshore wind-energy goals. New Jersey has a goal of 3,500 megawatts, Massachusetts plans for 1,600, and Rhode Island is aiming for 1,000. Building offshore wind projects is contentious—the battle over the 468-megawatt Cape Wind project in Massachusetts, which was finally scuttled in 2015, lasted more than a decade—and expensive. That’s why relatively little offshore wind capacity has been built around the world.

Cuomo and his renewable-energy allies are aiming to take their projects offshore because of fierce local upstate opposition to proposed onshore wind projects. But even if Cuomo’s target of 9,000 megawatts of new offshore wind gets built over the next 16 years (and I’m willing to bet that it won’t be), nearly half of that capacity will be needed merely to replace the zero-carbon electricity now being produced by the Indian Point nuclear plant. For years, Cuomo pushed for the premature closure of the 2,069-megawatt nuclear facility in Westchester County. Two years ago, the governor announced that the plant will be permanently shuttered by 2021.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-may-be-the-worst-regulation-ever-11548890635

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has created what may be the most bewildering, least cost-effective regulation ever. In July 2016, Congress passed a law mandating that all food containing genetic material that has been modified with recombinant DNA or “gene-splicing” techniques bear labels clearly identifying it as “bioengineered.” The statute acknowledged that bioengineered food is neither more nor less safe than other food, but the new rule—the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard, or NBFDS—won’t help consumers understand that. It will only leave them confused.

Under the NBFDS, two identical bottles of corn oil on a supermarket shelf could be labeled differently—one as bioengineered, one not—even though both were derived from the same field and are identical in processing and quality. Both labels would comply with the regulation because the new rule doesn’t require a label “if the food does not contain detectable genetically modified material.” The NBFDS allows manufacturers to make voluntary disclosures on such products, but not that they “may contain” bioengineered ingredients.

The word “detectable” poses its own problems. Technologies will evolve and become ever more sensitive, so that a single molecule of “genetically modified material” would make a food bioengineered. This is an invitation to meritless litigation over what is “detectable.”

Under the 2016 statute, labels are mandatory only if the food must also bear labels administered by FDA or USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service. Complying with the rule will require such detailed knowledge of the existing universe of food regulations that food lawyers will end up cross-eyed or wealthy—or both. Consider this gem: “Seafood, except Siluriformes (catfishes), and meats such as venison and rabbit are subject to the [Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act] (but not the Federal Meat Inspection Act). Thus, a multi-ingredient food product that contains one of these as the first ingredient would be subject to the NBFDS. A multi-ingredient product that contained one of these as the second most predominant ingredient or lower, could also require disclosure, unless the product is otherwise exempt (for example, due to the predominance of another ingredient such as chicken or beef).”