RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2024/07/the-road-to-climate-atheism/

The Hon. John Howard was Prime Minister of Australia from 1996 to 2007

I have customarily invoked the word agnostic to describe someone who is uncertain about whether God exists, and the word atheist to someone who denies any such existence. In contemporary times, as the use of the two descriptions has broadened to more than labels about religious belief, I have embraced that trend.

Thus, on the issue of climate change I have described myself as being an agnostic with growing temptations to becoming an atheist. My walk along the road to atheism has gathered pace. The bullying and dismissive tactics of the climate alarmists have played no small part in this process.

The overwhelming bulk of commentators, scientists and others who assert a special understanding of the subject sweep aside dissent with dismissive descriptions such as “denier”. There is mounting impatience with any who dare to challenge what has clearly become the conventional wisdom. Use of the term “denier” is particularly pernicious. For decades that term has been normally understood to describe someone who asserted that the Holocaust has been either grossly exaggerated or, even worse, never occurred.

Academics and others who dare to question the majority view are brutally told that the science has been settled. A growing number have either lost their jobs, been denied promotion, or been subjected to constant harassment and ridicule. Time-honoured notions such as freedom of inquiry and the need to regularly question seemingly settled assumptions have gone by the board.

Climate change zealotry now manifests itself in growing numbers of demonstrations which interrupt citizens going about their lawful business. We are regularly told that we face an existential crisis. Indeed, just about everything in our society is now at a “crisis” point. In the process, we are rapidly losing a sense of proportion. 

If ever an issue in mankind’s existence required rational analysis and cool heads it is climate change.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/07/they_shrieked_about_global_warming_but_now_they_admit_we_were_accidentally_cooling.html

When it comes to climate science, basically, researchers, mainstream media outlets, the UN, and the Democrats simply make things up as they go along to fit the narrative. 

When the earth didn’t warm up as much as they predicted, they changed the terminology from global warming to climate change.

When hundreds of dire predictions never came true, and they had no scientific data to support their policies to destroy industries and our quality and way of life, they just made things up, just like they did with COVID.

Now, take a look at this, from The Washington Post, via Yahoo News:

We’ve been accidentally cooling the planet — and it’s about to stop

It is widely accepted that humans have been heating up the planet for over a century by burning coal, oil and gas. Earth has already warmed by almost 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) since preindustrial times, and the planet is poised to race past the hoped-for limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

But fewer people know that burning fossil fuels doesn’t just cause global warming – it also causes global cooling. It is one of the great ironies of climate change that air pollution, which has killed tens of millions, has also curbed some of the worst effects of a warming planet.

https://www.pacificresearch.org/latest-effort-to-ban-plastic-bags-also-doomed-to-fail/

California’s long statewide nightmare might soon be over. The current generation of plastic bags are in line to be banned just as their predecessors were.

Ten years after Sacramento outlawed single-use plastic bags (with the help of a majority of voters two years later in a referendum), legislators have approved a ban on the multi-use bags that took their place, with each chamber passing a bill that, in identical language, prohibits “a reusable grocery bag sold by a store to a customer at the point of sale” from being “made from plastic film material.”

Stores would be allowed to provide customers who forget to bring their reusable bags – and those who refuse on principle to use them – with paper sacks. But they will have to be, beginning on Jan. 1, 2028, made “from a minimum of 50% postconsumer recycled materials.” The paper bags will have to cost at least 10 cents each.

Neither bill is law yet. But the ban will be in effect after the formalities of the legislative process are completed.

Sen. Catherine Blakespear, the Encinitas Democrat who authored Senate Bill 1053, said the state’s “original ban on plastic bags hasn’t worked out as planned, and sadly, the state’s plastic bag waste has increased dramatically since it went into effect.”

Maybe the volume “increased dramatically” because the thin single-use bags were replaced by heavier multi-use bags, which are at least four times thicker.

“The amount of plastic bag waste discarded per person (by weight) actually increased in the years following the law’s implementation to the highest level on record – proving the ban ineffective at reducing the total amount of plastic waste,” says a report compiled by multiple organizations, one of them the Naderite U.S. Public Interest Group.

Nevertheless, Blakespear said “we need to do better,” because “shockingly, some 18 billion pounds of plastic waste flows into the oceans every year from coastal regions alone. California must do its part to eliminate this scourge that is contaminating our environment.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/07/viv_forbes.html

How low Australia has fallen — our once-great BHP now has a “Vice President for Climate,” the number of Australian students choosing physics at high school is collapsing, and our government opposes nuclear energy while pretending we can build and operate nuclear submarines.

Our Green politicians want: “No Coal, No Gas, No Nuclear” while Our ABC, Our CSIRO and Our Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) are telling us that wind and solar energy plus a bit of standby gas, heaps of batteries, and new power lines can power our homes, industries, and the mass electrification of our vehicle fleet. This sounds like Australia’s very own great leap backwards.

There are two troublesome Green Energy Unions — the Solar Workers down tools every night and cloudy day, and the Turbine Crews stop work if winds are too weak or too strong. And wind droughts can last for days. The reliable Coal and Gas Crews spend sunny days playing cards, but are expected to keep their turbines revving up and down to keep stable power in the lines.

Magical things are also expected from more rooftop solar. AEMO says we need to quadruple rooftop solar by 2050. But panel-power has four huge problems:

Zero solar energy is generated to meet peak demand at breakfast and dinner times.

Piddling solar power is produced from many poorly oriented roof panels or from the weak sunshine anywhere south of Sydney.
If too much solar energy pours into the network (say at noon on a quiet sunny Sunday), the grid becomes unstable. Our green engineers have the solution — be ready to charge people for unwanted power they export to the grid, or just use “smart meters” to turn them off.
More rooftop solar means less income and more instability for power utilities so they have to raise electricity charges. This cost falls heaviest on those with no solar panels, or no homes.

Magical things are also expected from batteries.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-6-25-this-energy-transition-thing-really-is-not-happening

From reading the left-wing media, you know (or think you know) that there is an energy “transition” going on. This is something that must happen as a matter of urgent necessity. Vast government subsidies are being disbursed to assure its rapid success. Fossil fuels are rapidly on the way out, while wind and solar are quickly taking over.

For example, you may well have seen the big piece last August in the New York Times, headline “The Clean Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think.”

Across the country, a profound shift is taking place . . . . The nation that burned coal, oil and gas for more than a century to become the richest economy on the planet, as well as historically the most polluting, is rapidly shifting away from fossil fuels.

But if you read that piece, or any one of dozens of others from the Times or other “mainstream” sources, what you won’t find are meaningful statistics on the extent to which fossil fuel use is declining, if at all, or the extent to which renewables like wind and solar are actually replacing them.

That’s why the Manhattan Contrarian turns instead to dry statistical data to try to get the real story. Several years ago I discovered an annual book of energy data called the Statistical Review of World Energy. At the time, the Statistical Review was produced by the international oil company BP. I first covered one of these Reviews in this post from July 2019. A couple of years ago BP apparently decided to get out of this business, and turned the product over to something called the Energy Institute. EI then produced a Statistical Review in June 2023 (covering 2022), and now is just out on June 20, 2024 with a Statistical Review covering 2023.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/06/26/if-the-nations-power-grid-cant-cope-with-ai-hows-it-supposed-to-handle-millions-of-evs/

The Washington Post ran a lengthy article last week bemoaning the fact that AI (artificial intelligence) is sucking up so much power that it’s already straining the nation’s electric grid and is bad for the environment.  Seriously? So, how will the grid be able to handle the millions of electric cars environmentalists want to force on the road? The answer might shock you.

The Post reports that:

“As the tech giants compete in a global AI arms race, a frenzy of data center construction is sweeping the country. Some computing campuses require as much energy as a modest-sized city, turning tech firms that promised to lead the way into a clean energy future into some of the world’s most insatiable guzzlers of power. Their projected energy needs are so huge, some worry whether there will be enough electricity to meet them from any source.”

The article quotes Tamara Kneese, a project director at Data & Society, saying “Coal plants are being reinvigorated because of the AI boom. This should be alarming to anyone who cares about the environment.”

Yet, at the same time, we keep being reassured that the power grid will have no problem handling the millions of “clean” electric cars that President Joe Biden and his climate-crisis pals want to force onto the market, each of which draws massive amounts of electricity off the grid as they recharge.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/06/25/google-labels-govt-weather-data-unreliable-and-harmful/

Earlier this week, we published an editorial arguing that government data didn’t support various claims about climate change. And we predicted Google would demonetize it. We were right. (See: Heat Wave Sets Off New Round Of ‘Climate Crisis’ Lies.)

Shortly after that article was published, Google’s AdSense informed us that it had “disabled ad serving” on that page because the article contained “unreliable and harmful claims.” (We have one spot on our pages for AdSense ads, mostly to track Google’s efforts to demonetize content. See the list of related editorials below.)

So what was “unreliable” or “harmful” about that editorial? Google doesn’t say. It just says we have to “fix” it if we want their ads to run on that page.

What we can say is that Google has effectively labeled official government data as “unreliable and harmful,” since all the evidence we provided was from official sources.

The editorial pointed out that claims about more frequent heat waves, tornadoes, hurricanes, and wildfires – claims that get repeated ad nauseam by the mainstream press and by climate activists – are not supported by the official data.

We included charts and cited the sources of the data – sources such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Interagency Fire Center, the government-run GlobalChange.gov, etc.

Here’s how Google defines “unreliable and harmful.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/climate-cultists-on-the-loose/

As far back as the 1960s and ‘70s, activists on a mission to save the planet from various environmental cataclysms (none of which ever materialized) have resorted to stoking panic to generate support for their hysterical pronouncements that all life on earth faces imminent extinction. “I don’t want you to be hopeful,” young climate activist icon Greta Thunberg once lectured the one-percenters of the Davos crowd. “I want you to panic.” Fear is a more deep-seated motivation than rational argument, especially if people are no longer falling for the sophistry and manipulated statistics from scientists corrupted by the promises of Green Reset profit and power.

Now that most people aren’t falling for the fear-mongering anymore, climate activists have given up trying to win support by manipulating people emotionally; instead, they have resorted to a counterintuitive strategy of simply antagonizing people – with traffic blockades, the destruction of priceless works of art, and eco-terrorism. The latest climate change protests include such unhinged actions as painting the Stonehenge monument, launching a sex strike, and riding naked through the streets of Madison, Wisconsin.

Last week a pair of environmental protesters from the widely-detested Britain-based Just Stop Oil group spray-painted the famed ancient Stonehenge megaliths orange, before being tackled by tourists. “We have to come together to defend humanity or we risk everything,” said a spokesperson for Just Stop Oil. Blah, blah, blah.