RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=0ae785da5d
Way back in October 2012, climate alarmist and activist Michael Mann brought a libel suit against Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg for allegedly defamatory blog posts that the two had written a few months previously. The case has gone through an incredible history of procedural twists and turns since then, a few of which I have covered in prior blog posts, for example here on March 20, 2014, and here on March 26, 2021. The trial finally started on January 16.

Probably most readers here are familiar with the case to at least some degree, and many may even be following the trial. (The court has a live feed available to the public. Follow this link at WattsUpWithThat if you want to tune in during the coming week.). I have watched some substantial chunks of the trial during its first two weeks.

Mann is best known as the creator of the famous “Hockey Stick” graph, purporting to be a world temperature reconstruction of the past thousand or so years, with essentially level temperatures until the 20th century, and then sharply rising temperatures in the 20th century era of human use of fossil fuels. Mann published versions of the figure in Nature magazine, originally in 1998; and the UN’s IPCC quickly (in 2001) seized on the Hockey Stick as its iconic demonstration that human use of fossil fuels was causing global warming. In the blog posts that are the subject of the case, Steyn and Simberg called Mann’s graph false and deceptive. (Steyn referred to Mann’s figure as “the fraudulent climate-change ‘hockey stick’ graph” while Simberg called out “[Mann’s] and others’ hockey stick deceptions.”) (Note: in multiple prior blog posts, I have also called Mann’s Hockey Stick graph fraudulent, for example here in August 2019.)

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/01/26/the-end-of-the-world-is-not-around-the-corner/

The end of the world is in sight. Hell on Earth is around the corner. Or at least that’s the impression you get from the overheated predictions that are continually made about the climate these days.

Today, we’re told the world is no longer reckoning with mere climate change, but with ‘climate catastrophe’. Not global warming, but ‘global boiling’. A ‘mass extinction event’ is upon us, says Greta Thunberg. ‘I am talking about the slaughter, death and starvation of six billion people this century’, warns Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, who dubiously claims that he has ‘the science’ to back this up. The ‘collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon’, insists David Attenborough. Scarier still, the narrow window for saving humanity from eco-armaggeddon is apparently always just about to close shut. Or so scientists and activists say.

These kinds of predictions come cloaked in the authority of science. They’re given a huge amount of weight by well-credentialed academics and venerable institutions. But that is no guarantee that they will come true. To put it lightly.

Indeed, predictions of environmental doom have been made before – and they have been very, very wrong before. According to some of the earliest luminaries of the modern environmental movement, we should probably all be dead already. It seems we’ve actually been living in the End Times for a very long time now.

The scientific consensus around global warming didn’t fully emerge until the 1980s. Nevertheless, environmental scientists have always been convinced that changes in the climate could pose an existential threat to humanity. Ironically, in the 1960s and 1970s, some scientists were more concerned about the alleged threat of global cooling than they were about warming. ‘Are we heading for an ice age?’, the Sunday Telegraph asked in 1979.

The potential for the world’s ecosystems to collapse has long kept environmentalists awake at night.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/23/unpacking-climate-lies/

Much of the U.S. was frosted and frozen by bitter winter weather last week. But this is just further proof of manmade global warming, the media claim. Because even as America freezes, “most of the rest of the world is feeling unusually warm weather,” which is merely a “contradiction” that “fits snugly in explanations of what climate change is doing to Earth,” says the Associated Press.

Of course what doesn’t fit “snugly” is ignored. And there’s plenty of that.

For instance, we’ve been assured for decades by all the right people that Arctic ice will disappear due to man’s wanton combustion of fossil fuels. At a United Nations climate conference in 2009, Al Gore, always a gushing font of climate disinformation, said polar scientists had told him, according to CBS News, “that the latest data ‘suggest a 75% chance the entire polar ice cap will melt in summer within the next five to seven years.’”

A couple of months earlier, the BBC reported that “the Arctic Ocean could be largely ice-free and open to shipping during the summer in as little as 10 years’ time,” basing this statement on the word of Peter Wadhams, a University of Cambridge “top polar scientist.”

But the reality is that in the middle of January 2024, “Arctic sea ice for this date stands at its highest level in 21 years,” says Climate Change Dispatch.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/green-rolling-blackouts-crushed-canada-during-a-winter-storm/?utm_source=

When Albertans most needed their energy, wind and solar ensured there wasn’t enough to go around.

Centrally planned “green” solar and wind power are simply not reliable when they’re needed the most. A recent wave of blackouts and brownouts in the Canadian province of Alberta proves it.

“With temperatures near minus 45 [Celsius, minus 49 Fahrenheit] over the weekend even colder in some parts of Alberta and virtually no wind or solar showing up on the grid, Alberta issued an electricity advisory asking its residents to conserve electricity to avoid brownouts,” Ontario energy minister Todd Smith said in a Facebook video. Smith happened to be in Edmonton, Alberta, to announce a deal between the provinces to construct a small modular nuclear reactor.

The Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO), which manages the province’s grid, began a series of declared states of emergency last Friday. The grid fluctuated throughout the crisis until this past Monday. Energy supply repeatedly collapsed and residents were repeatedly asked to conserve electricity by shutting off essential services.

The province has massively invested in green energy. Three quarters of Canada’s new wind and solar generation is based there. But fewer than 1 percent of both Alberta’s 4,481 potential megawatts of wind power and 1,650 of solar power could operate when the province most needed electricity. Essentially all of the province’s solar- and wind-power plants were offline. Greatly increased energy demand for electric heat pumps, cars, and even phone batteries, which work far less efficiently in cold weather, ensured disaster.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/19/climate-change-puts-bidens-ev-mandate-on-thin-ice/

The polar vortex gripping the nation has exposed a fatal flaw in President Joe Biden’s push to force Americans into electric cars. EVs don’t work well in the cold.

Several news stories out of Chicago this week report how EV owners have been struggling to keep their cars charged as extreme cold saps their batteries of energy, extends charging times, and forces owners to wait for hours to get an open charger.

“Several motorists told local news outlets that they had been stranded at charging stations in the cold with cars with dead batteries, while successful charging was taking far longer than usual. They also claimed that many of the charging stations were not functioning,” Newsweek reports.

One motorist reported that he’d seen “at least 10 cars being towed away after their battery died, with too much energy being expended keeping the car warm while drivers waited.”

Another told CBS News Chicago that a charge that should take 45 minutes was taking two hours. “I’ve been here for over five hours at this point and I still have not gotten to charge my car,” he said.

How many of these suckers, do you think, are going to buy another EV after going through this nightmare? How many buyers are going to dive into the EV pool when they read stories like this?

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/16/john-kerry-goodbye-good-riddance/

In a city overflowing with useless people, agencies and institutions, one of its most worthless figures is (finally) leaving his government post. While John Kerry is not quite going away, he is closer to the exit than the entrance. This is good for the country.

At some point this spring, Kerry will leave his billet as the administration’s climate envoy (see what we mean by “useless”?). He will reportedly join the re-election campaign of President Joe Biden, who was for decades useless but eventually became destructive, as the last three years have shown. If voters act rationally, Kerry, an insufferable hypocrite, will disappear from public life for good by the middle of November.

Ever an imperious scold, a male Karen before that term became widely used, Kerry has spent much of his adult life, more than four decades, implementing the Democratic Party dream, which is to convert our civil society to a political society. It’s a point we’ve made before that can’t be made enough:

The left, which has marched through our institutions, won’t rest until the civil society we have flourished in has been replaced with a political society. It craves a societal breakdown, to bury the political and social norms that stand in its path to unchallengeable power.

Most recently Kerry has served as the administration’s climate czar. It was the perfect post for a gasbag, providing its occupant endless opportunities to lecture climate crisis skeptics, whom Kerry surely regards as “stupid.”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-1-12-updates-on-the-march-to-the-great-green-energy-future

The cries of climate alarm get ever louder and more urgent. (E.g., New York Times, January 9, “It’s confirmed: 2023 was the planet’s warmest year on record and perhaps in the last 100,000 years. By far.”). We’re all about to boil! Something must be done!

OK, but then there is the proposed solution: Order up by government fiat that our current fully working and inexpensive energy system must be replaced with a never-demonstrated pipe dream conjured up by political science and gender studies majors who know nothing about how an energy system works. We’re far enough into this by now that some of the pieces are starting to blow up in dramatic fashion. Are we allowed to notice?

Here in New York, we got into this game mainly with two pieces of legislation, both enacted in 2018 — at the state level, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act; and in the City, Local Law 97. With both laws the pols set the deadlines for compliance at dates seemingly far in the future, expecting that they would no longer be around to be held accountable. The first of those two laws ordered up state-wide mandates for “decarbonizing” the economy, starting with a requirement for 70% of electricity from “renewables” by 2030; and the second set limits for carbon emissions for buildings in New York City, some of which have just kicked in effective January 1, 2024. Sure enough, the Mayor at the time of enactment is gone, almost the entire City Council is gone (term limits), and the Governor at the time is also gone.

So where are we?

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/11/the-cost-of-the-climate-cabal/

A year ago while in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum, the administration’s climate functionary John Kerry said that “money, money, money, money, money, money, money” was needed for climate programs. That string of words actually corresponds with a sum, and it’s $150 trillion.

Go ahead, try to comprehend that number. It’s about 51/2 times the size of the U.S. economy, more than four times larger than the (always-growing) federal debt, and 150% of the world’s GDP. Or, according to Eric Worrall at the Watts Up With That? climate site, “if you spent $130 million every day since the death of Jesus Christ, just about now you would be approaching $100 trillion.”

That it will be spent over the next 26 years doesn’t mean that it’s not a significant, and economy-breaking, amount.

The immense size of the “need” matters little to the Davos crony crowd, which will meet for the 54th time next week. The gathering of the rich and powerful will spend its week schmoozing, trading favors and backslapping to become richer and more powerful. And of course talking about how much the world needs them and their special skills to solve the climate crisis they have fabricated, and how much of other people’s money they need to get the job done.

But let’s say the climate cabal gets the $150 trillion (after all, it’s only about $5 trillion a year) from taxpayers. What can we expect in return?

Economic struggles. Energy shortages. And zero impact on the climate.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/05/climate-crimes-and-misdemeanors/

There is no evidence, only speculation, that human emissions of greenhouse gases are overheating Earth. Despite this, there’s a growing movement to prosecute and incarcerate those who violate the rules set down by the climate zealots. It’s as if the Spanish Inquisition has changed the definition of heresy so that those who have a healthy skepticism of the global warming claims are now the targets of the office of the tribunal.

In jolly old England, “​​property owners who don’t comply with new energy rules may face prison,” says the London Telegraph. “Ministers want to grant powers to create new criminal offenses and increase penalties as part of efforts to hit net zero targets,” the Telegraph continues. “​​Under the proposals, people who fall foul of regulations to reduce their energy consumption could face up to a year in prison and fines of up to” nearly $19,000 in U.S. dollars.
Three guest authors writing in CarbonBrief about “climate misinformation” said that justice for those who dare challenge the global warming narrative includes “bringing in a correction or a collaborative approach after the misinformation has been received, or even putting in place punishments, such as fines or imprisonment.”
Then there’s England’s lunatic Guardian newspaper. One of its climate correspondents has suggested “financial penalties or prison time” for oil company executives for their “40 years of lying about climate change,” as well as “the propagandists they’ve employed and the politicians they’ve funded” who so far “have largely escaped blame.”
The United Nations has wondered if “international criminal law” should “be used against those who promote this dangerous trend” of spreading “climate denial.”

Of course this nonsense isn’t new.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/04/collapse-of-used-ev-market-spells-doom-for-bidens-electric-car-dreams/

“The electric things have their life too. Paltry as those lives are.” – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Just as President Joe Biden starts showering hundreds of billions more of taxpayers’ money to “electrify” the nation’s fleet of automobiles, the bottom is falling out of the EV market.

The latest indication is the sharp drop in prices for used EVs.

A report from iSeeCars.com, a search engine for auto buyers, found that the average price for all cars declined 5% in 2023 compared with 2022.

But the resale price EVs plunged 33%.

While a used EV sold for an average of $52,821 in 2022, it went for less than $35,000 in 2023, which means they can be had for just slightly more than the average price for all cars.

Even with this dramatic decline in prices, it took 40% longer to sell an EV in 2023 than it did the year before. Used gas-powered cars, in contrast, sold 10% faster than they did in 2022.

“This combination of lower prices and slower sales suggests EVs have hit a market demand threshold that will be difficult to break through,” said Karl Brauer, iSeeCars executive analyst.

Why is the used EV market in trouble? Bloomberg speculates that “Buyers are shunning them due to a lack of subsidies, a desire to wait for better technology, and continued shortfalls in charging infrastructures.”