RUTHFULLY YOURS

Of all known and imagined consequences of climate change, many people fear sea-level rise most. But efforts to determine what causes seas to rise are marred by poor data and disagreements about methodology. The noted oceanographer Walter Munk referred to sea-level rise as an “enigma”; it has also been called a riddle and a puzzle.

It is generally thought that sea-level rise accelerates mainly by thermal expansion of sea water, the so-called steric component. But by studying a very short time interval, it is possible to sidestep most of the complications, like “isostatic adjustment” of the shoreline (as continents rise after the overlying ice has melted) and “subsidence” of the shoreline (as ground water and minerals are extracted).

I chose to assess the sea-level trend from 1915-45, when a genuine, independently confirmed warming of approximately 0.5 degree Celsius occurred. I note particularly that sea-level rise is not affected by the warming; it continues at the same rate, 1.8 millimeters a year, according to a 1990 review by Andrew S. Trupin and John Wahr. I therefore conclude—contrary to the general wisdom—that the temperature of sea water has no direct effect on sea-level rise. That means neither does the atmospheric content of carbon dioxide.

This conclusion is worth highlighting: It shows that sea-level rise does not depend on the use of fossil fuels. The evidence should allay fear that the release of additional CO2 will increase sea-level rise.

The California Energy Commission voted Wednesday in favor of requiring that almost all new homes built in the state are equipped with rooftop solar panels.

The new energy efficiency standards, which are the first of their kind in the country, require that solar panels be included on all single and multi-family homes built after January 1, 2020, unless they rise above three stories.

The new standards, which will also exempt some homes deemed to be too shady, are part of governor Jerry Brown’s broader effort to decrease the state’s carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2030.

Critics of the new initiative allege it will adversely effect the housing market, citing the California Energy Commission estimate that the measure will raise the cost of new homes by an average of nearly $10,000 — a particularly troubling impact in a state plagued by high housing costs.

“With home prices having risen as much as they have, I think home buyers would find it a little distasteful to be forced to pay more for solar systems that they may not want or feel like they can’t afford,” Brent Anderson, a spokesman for homebuilder Meritage Homes Corp, told Bloomberg. “Even though, in the long term, it’s the right answer.”

Proponents view it as an appropriately aggressive measure to combat climate change and cite the state’s finding that it will likely reduce energy costs by $80 per month for the average household.

Here are some articles and stories that are minimally reported, if at all, because they do not fit the agenda that humans, fossil fuels, and CO2 are causing disastrous global warming and climate change.

From the Detroit News:

April on track to be the coldest in 143 years

No, you’re not crazy. It has been the coldest April in more than 140 years.

A year ago today, on April 19, 2017, it was 78 degrees and sunny, while Thursday’s expected high is 48 degrees, said National Weather Service meteorologist Trent Frey.

As of Thursday, the average temperature for April is 38.3 degrees, slightly warmer than April 1874, the coldest on record at 37.6 degrees.

From the Chicago Tribune:

More spring snow in Chicago, and forecasters call April’s start among coldest in 130 years

The first half of April marks the second-coldest start to the month since 1881, about when the weather service started keeping records, said Mott of the weather service.

From Watts Up With That:

Some Major U.S. cities headed for coldest April in recorded history

Some major U.S. are on track to be part of a record cold April. “Some cities in the east are experiencing temperatures a full 10 to 15 degrees F colder than normal, says meteorologist Jaclyn Whittal. Those cities include Buffalo, Chicago and Detroit. Those in the northern tier of the U.S. either graciously accept winter[.]

There are three big drivers of weather for any place on Earth: the latitude, the local environment, and solar system cycles.

The biggest weather factor is latitude – are you in the torrid, temperate, or frigid zone? These climatic zones are defined by the intensity of heat delivered to Earth’s surface by the sun.

In the Torrid Zone, the sun is always high in the sky. It is generally hot, often moist, with low atmospheric pressure, muggy conditions, and abundant rain and storms, some severe. Places close to the Equator get two summers per year (just one long summer) and very little winter. Farther from the equator, there are two seasons: “The Wet” and “The Dry.” The Torrid Zone produces many equatorial rainforests and also contains some deserts. Most people dream of vacations or retirement in the warm zone.

The Temperate Zone is cooler, with more distinct seasons and sometimes severe droughts and floods. The granaries of the world lie within it. But the belt of sub-tropical high-pressure zones also produces most of the world’s great deserts.

The Frigid Zone has low humidity and high atmospheric pressure, with just two seasons (one cool, with a sun that never sets, followed by a long, cold, dark, sunless winter). Only a few foolish people long for expansion of the frigid zone.

The Obama Amnesia afflicting our friends on the Left is particularly acute when it comes to the Environmental Protection Agency. It is as if lead-contamination oozed into our water supply; toxic chemicals that were deemed safe for eight years randomly started killing unsuspecting Americans; and algae blooms from agricultural run-off began popping up in the Great Lakes the very moment Donald Trump took the oath of office on January 20, 2017.

Notoriously profligate Democratic lawmakers who are now suffering from Obama Amnesia are suddenly distraught over allegedly inappropriate expenditures at the EPA. The use of tax dollars to boost the salaries of top staffers or to upgrade official vehicles now keeps these newly frugal stewards of public funds awake at night.

Obama Amnesia was on full display last week during two congressional hearings featuring EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. When the former Oklahoma attorney general took the helm of the EPA last year, he inherited a bloated, political, secretive, and unaccountable agency whose previous administrators’ misconduct was regularly overlooked by the media.

Nobody Cared About Gina McCarthy
Despite a number of scandals, there were no calls by theNew York Times editorial board for Obama EPA chief Gina McCarthy to resign, even after her agency caused the Gold King Mine spill (pictured above), an environmental catastrophe for which she refused to take responsibility.

When her agency was caught breaking the law for its illicit use of social media, or as Congress threatened to impeach her for perjury, no major newspaper demanded that McCarthy step down. While Obama’s EPA refused to ban allegedly dangerous chemicals such as methylene chloride or chlorpyrifos for years, the media and Democratic lawmakers refrained from accusing his administrators of poisoning children or killing people. After EPA employees were caught downloading porn, including child pornography, and McCarthy ignored or excused other egregious misconduct on her watch, it was crickets from our newfound EPA watchdogs in the elite media.

“Most Americans don’t even know that the crisis exists,” explain David Randall and Christopher Welser of the National Association of Scholars. Help has now arrived in The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science: Cause, Consequences and the Road to Reform. The general reader might find the title puzzling but the concept is simple.

If a scientific study is to be legitimate, it must be reproducible because replication allows examination of the data and the possibility of different conclusions. If the study is not reproducible it is not really science, and as the authors show, that type of non-science is now common.

In June of 2016, Oona Lönnstedt and Peter Eklöv of Uppsala University published a paper in Science warning of the dangers of microplastic particles in the ocean. The study got considerable media attention but as it turned out, “Lönnstedt never performed the research that she and Eklöv reported.” So in philosophical terms, it had an existential problem, and veracity is also an issue.

In 2005, Dr. John Ioannidis argued, “shockingly and persuasively,” that most published research findings in his own field of medicine were false. This was due to many factors, including the limitations of statistics, “intellectual prejudices and conflicts of interest,” and researchers striving to produce positive results “in fashionable areas of research.” Based on these factors, the findings in other scientific fields were probably wrong too.

Politicians, bureaucrats, activists, scientists and the media have warned Americans for decades that the Earth is headed toward climate catastrophe. Yet surveys consistently show that less than half of U.S. adults are “deeply concerned” or “very worried” about climate issues. If, as Leonardo DiCaprio insists, climate change is the “most urgent threat facing our entire species,” why do a large percentage of Americans not share his fear? Climate crusaders tend to lay fault with nonbelievers’ intransigence. But this is its own form of denial and masks the real reason: poor salesmanship.

The promotional efforts of the climate catastrophists have lacked clarity, credibility, and empathy. These are the cornerstones of effective persuasion. Successful advocacy campaigns use lucid names to frame and sell their issues—“living wage,” “welfare queen” or “death tax.” Climate can be confounding; it is long-term weather, but environmentalists chide anyone who dares call it that. Since Earth’s climate is always fluctuating, the word “change” muddles it with redundancy. Swapping between “climate change” and “global warming” confuses the public.

A good battle cry can rally the troops, but the Paris Agreement’s aim is “to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.” That is a far cry from “Remember the Alamo!” And Americans are always turned off by the use of metric units. In the U.S., Toyota wisely markets the 2018 Prius’s fuel economy as 52 miles a gallon, not 22 kilometers a liter.

American TV audiences bought Carl Sagan’s explanations of how the universe works because of his obvious scientific expertise. Bold statements about complex systems are always more plausible when they are made by people with impeccable credentials. As a Harvard sophomore, Al Gore received a D in a natural=sciences course. Mr. DiCaprio dropped out of high school in 11th grade.

The rank hypocrisy of many of the environmental movement’s superstars also alienates potential followers. Messrs. Gore and DiCaprio lead lavish, jet-setting lives. It is hard to heed Tom Steyer’s demand to ban offshore oil and gas drilling when Farallon, his hedge fund, invested hundreds of millions of dollars in coal mining. Climate change activists tend to be aggressive advocates, but over-the-top selling doesn’t sway people who are undecided. This is as true for political surrogates attributing society’s ills to the other party’s candidate as it is for green activists linking all manner of extreme weather to climate change.

Earth Day has changed a lot since its inception in 1970, and not for the better. In the spirit of the time, it started as a touchy-feely, consciousness-raising, idealistic experience. Attendees were prototypic tree-huggers.

In recent years, Earth Day has evolved into an occasion for environmental Cassandras to prophesy apocalypse, dish anti-technology dirt, and proselytize.

Now there’s more heaving tomatoes than planting them.

Instead of focusing on how to preserve and protect nature, many of those stumping for Earth Day on Sunday expressed opposition to environment-friendly advances in science and technology, such as agricultural biotechnology and nuclear power. Another pervasive sentiment was disdain for the capitalist system that provides the resources to expend on environmental protection and conservation. (It’s no coincidence that poor countries tend to be the most polluted.)

Rachel Carson, Earth Day’s Patron Saint
School kids are increasingly involved in Earth Day activities, and many are assigned to read Rachel Carson’s best-selling 1962 book Silent Spring, an emotionally charged but deeply flawed excoriation of the widespread spraying of chemical pesticides for the control of insects. As described by Roger Meiners and Andy Morriss in their scholarly yet eminently readable analysis, “Silent Spring at 50: Reflections on an Environmental Classic,” Carson exploited her reputation as a well-known nature writer to advocate and legitimize “positions linked to a darker tradition in American environmental thinking: neo-Malthusian population control and anti-technology efforts.”

Carson’s proselytizing and advocacy led to the virtual banning of DDT and to restrictions on other chemical pesticides even though Silent Spring was replete with gross misrepresentations and scholarship so atrocious that if Carson were an academic, she would be guilty of misconduct.

Carson’s observations about DDT were meticulously rebutted point by point by Dr. J. Gordon Edwards, a professor of entomology at San Jose State University, a longtime member of the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, and a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences.

The UN’s emphasis on per capita emissions tells us next to nothing about planetary survivability but a great deal about the world body’s dishonesty. We’d be well rid of a corrosive organisation that is home to more criminals than Chicago in the 1920s. In per capita terms, of course.

What does two plus two equal? Ask almost anyone and they will quickly answer: four. Or perhaps not so quickly, if you’ve asked a recent arts graduate. But even they will get there, eventually, if born with an adequate finger supply.

Let’s suppose, however, that their answer is the same as four but is expressed in a pointlessly complicated way. “36,527 minus 36,523,” they might reply. Or “the composite number found between the two first-occurring prime numbers”. Or “the square root of sixteen”.

For good reason, you might wonder at the motivation behind this mathematical posturing. Maybe your respondent is seeking to embarrass or confuse you, in which case a beating should be arranged. “How many broken ribs do you have?” you may later ask of that composite-number fellow, as a mathematically-themed part of your payment calculations.

Then again, it could be that concealment is the aim.

Certain people—lawyers, for example, and anyone involved in drafting taxation legislation—delight in disguising simplicity beneath needless complexity. I was once directed to a “ground-based facility” at a concert venue; turns out this was a tent. And every journalist has endured police media conferences featuring lines like: “The vehicle was travelling in a northerly direction when it left the road surface …”

Those last two cases are relatively innocent and easily decoded. Not so the language used by our carbon-panic community, who resort to an extraordinary variety of tricks in order to sell their message of doom. They do this because they cannot otherwise escape one awkward and devastatingly simple fact.

Australia produces just 1.3 per cent of the planet’s alleged global warming gases.

This means that even if Australia were to be removed from the earth in its entirety—every factory, every road, every vehicle, every supermarket, every airport, every head of livestock, every coal mine, every speck of soil and every Australian—it would make no significant difference at all to the planet’s carbon-emissions wellbeing. “If reducing emissions really is necessary to save the planet, our effort, however Herculean, is barely better than futile,” Tony Abbott pointed out last year in his excellent London speech, “because Australia’s total annual emissions are exceeded by just the annual increase in China’s.”