RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

As one of his first acts as president, Donald Trump signed presidential memoranda to revive both the KeystoneXL and Dakota Access pipelines by expediting the environmental review process. The Dakota Access pipeline is now in full operation. TransCanada’s annual report gives us an update on the Keystone XL pipeline.

“Keystone XL In February 2017, we filed an application with the Nebraska Public Service Commission (PSC) seeking approval for the Keystone XL pipeline route through that state and received approval for an alternate route on November 20, 2017. On November 24, 2017, we filed a motion with the Nebraska PSC to reconsider its ruling and permit us to file an amended application that would support their decision and would address certain issues related to their selection of the alternative route. On December 19, 2017, the Nebraska PSC denied this motion. On December 27, 2017, opponents of the Keystone XL project, and intervenors in the Keystone XL Nebraska regulatory proceeding, filed an appeal of the November 20, 2017 PSC decision seeking to have that decision overturned. TransCanada supports the decision of the Nebraska PSC and will actively participate in the appeal process to defend that decision. In March 2017, the U.S. Department of State issued a U.S. Presidential Permit authorizing construction of the U.S./Canada border crossing facilities of the Keystone XL project. We discontinued our claim under Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement and withdrew the U.S. Constitutional challenge. Later in March 2017, two lawsuits were filed in Montana District Court challenging the validity of the Presidential Permit. Along with the U.S. Government, we filed motions for dismissal of these law suits which were denied on November 22, 2017. The cases will now proceed to the consideration of summary judgment motions. In July 2017, we launched an open season to solicit additional binding commitments from interested parties for transportation of crude oil on the Keystone pipeline and for the Keystone XL project from Hardisty, Alberta to Cushing, Oklahoma and the U.S. Gulf Coast. The successful open season concluded on October 26, 2017. In January 2018, we secured sufficient commercial support to commence construction preparation for the Keystone XL project. We expect to commence primary construction in 2019 and construction will take approximately two years to complete.”

After seven years of delays under the Obama Administration and the then-secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Keystone XL pipeline has an approved route and a 20-year commitment for the oil it will carry from Canada to Cushing, Oklahoma, from whence it can be distributed wherever needed throughout the United States. TransCanada is negotiating with landowners along the route for the necessary easements. Those easements will put money into American landowner’s pockets.

The anti-nuclear movement spawned today’s radical environmentalism. Using the ‘front group’ tactic beloved of communist agitators, it fed lies to sympathetic reporters and whipped reasonable concerns into hair-trigger sensitivities. Its progeny is your last and ever more outrageous electricity bill.

An essential aspect of the vigilance that sustains liberty is the capacity to learn the lessons of history. What follows describes how radical activists captured the environmental movement as a part of the march through the institutions of Western society. The worldwide campaign against nuclear power became the foundation and testbed for the strategy and tactics of using environmentalism to de-industrialise and demoralise the West. The most recent manifestation of the movement is the climate scare and the push for expensive and unreliable renewable energy.

In 1980, the late John Grover thoroughly documented the anti-nuclear campaign in The Struggle for Power: What We Haven’t Been Told and Why! This account is drawn from his research. Grover was a mining engineer with an eye for the tactics of the Fabians and their more radical fellow travellers. He named some of the people and the main groups involved in the anti-uranium mining and anti-nuclear power movement, both internationally and locally.

The anti-nuclear movement started in the 1950s while American and Russian bomb tests were dispersing plutonium into the atmosphere. This aroused reasonable objections and also a very different kind of resistance to the Western nuclear deterrent and nuclear power in general. The 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty answered the reasonable concerns and was not a problem for the nuclear power industry, but in the 1970s the US created 20,000 government employees dedicated to improving the environment. Nuclear power stations soon became a target due to “thermal pollution” from their cooling systems, this tack being backed up by fear campaigns about the dangers of radiation.

Two sensationalized books appeared in 1969/70, The Careless Atom by Sheldon Novick and Perils of the Peaceful Atom by Richard Curtis, the former garnering generally favourable and accepting reviews that would set the standard for all the media sympathy to come. The books’ appearance also marked the start of the all-out campaign against nuclear energy.

In 1971 Ralph Nader, bankrolled by the Rockefeller Foundation network, began to work with lawyer Anthony Roisman and the Union of Concerned Scientists to combine the efforts of environmental groups and public interest lawyers against atomic power. According to Grover, by 1977 environmental interests funded as many as 600 environmental lawyers in the US with a budget in the order of $45 million, much of it devoted to energy-stopping. They worked on a wide front, using legal action to delay projects, lobbying Congress and government agencies, recruiting churches and distributing publicity material to the general public. They fuelled exaggerated perceptions of the dangers of radiation and the purported incompetence of the industry. A long-established environmental group, the Sierra Club in California, became more extreme during the 1970s and turned against nuclear power. It was highly influential due to its well-connected membership and a budget of three millioncareless atom dollars, a very hefty sum in 1977.

Mr. Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars. Mr. Randall is the NAS’s director of research and a co-author of its new report, “The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science.

Half the results published in peer-reviewed scientific journals are probably wrong. John Ioannidis, now a professor of medicine at Stanford, made headlines with that claim in 2005. Since then, researchers have confirmed his skepticism by trying—and often failing—to reproduce many influential journal articles. Slowly, scientists are internalizing the lessons of this irreproducibility crisis. But what about government, which has been making policy for generations without confirming that the science behind it is valid?

The biggest newsmakers in the crisis have involved psychology. Consider three findings: Striking a “power pose” can improve a person’s hormone balance and increase tolerance for risk. Invoking a negative stereotype, such as by telling black test-takers that an exam measures intelligence, can measurably degrade performance. Playing a sorting game that involves quickly pairing faces (black or white) with bad and good words (“happy” or “death”) can reveal “implicit bias” and predict discrimination.

All three of these results received massive media attention, but independent researchers haven’t been able to reproduce any of them properly. It seems as if there’s no end of “scientific truths” that just aren’t so. For a 2015 article in Science, independent researchers tried to replicate 100 prominent psychology studies and succeeded with only 39% of them.