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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

The Fake Climate Consensus By John Stossel

https://pjmedia.com/columns/john-stossel/2023/08/09/the-fake-climate-consensus-n1717386

We are told climate change is a crisis, and that there is an “overwhelming scientific consensus.”

“It’s a manufactured consensus,” says climate scientist Judith Curry in my new video. She says scientists have an incentive to exaggerate risk to pursue “fame and fortune.”

She knows about that because she once spread alarm about climate change.

Media loved her when she published a study that seemed to show a dramatic increase in hurricane intensity.

“We found that the percent of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes had doubled,” says Curry. “This was picked up by the media,” and then climate alarmists realized, “Oh, here is the way to do it. Tie extreme weather events to global warming!”

“So, this hysteria is your fault!” I tell her.

“Not really,” she smiles. “They would have picked up on it anyways.”

But Curry’s “more intense” hurricanes gave them fuel.

“I was adopted by the environmental advocacy groups and the alarmists and I was treated like a rock star,” Curry recounts. “Flown all over the place to meet with politicians.”

The climate witch trials Questioning the climate-change narrative is now the ultimate form of heresy. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/22/the-climate-witch-trials/

This is an extract from Brendan O’Neill’s new book, A Heretic’s Manifesto. You can buy it on Amazon now.

In 1590, in Scotland, an elderly woman named Agnes Sampson was arrested. She was from East Lothian. Earlier in her life she had been a midwife and a healer, but lately she had been living in poverty. She was tried, found guilty and taken to Edinburgh Castle where, on 28 January 1591, she was strangled to death by rope and then burnt at the stake. Her offence? Climate change.

Sampson was charged with stirring up ‘contrary winds’, among other things. Her persecution stemmed from the troubles of King James VI whose attempts to bring his new wife, Anne of Denmark, to Scotland were continually thwarted by hellish weather. ‘Unusual’ winds capsized ships of the royal fleets. Twice did Anne’s ship have to dock in Norway due to the ‘fierce storms’. James, inspired by reports from Denmark of witches being burnt for their supposed part in the frustration of Anne’s journey, became convinced of a witches’ plot in Scotland, too. He pushed the idea of ‘weather magic’, where witches use their demonic power to cause ‘unusual’ storms, hails and fogs to descend on Earth.

The end result was the North Berwick Witch Trials, one of the deadliest episodes of witch-hunting in the history of Great Britain. Taking place a hundred years before the better-known witch-hunts of Salem in Massachusetts, the hysteria in North Berwick involved 150 accusations, copious amounts of torture to extract confessions and 25 deaths. Mrs Sampson’s was just one of those deaths. She and many others had been accused not only of the usual witchy things – mysterious healings, issuing curses and so on – but of something else, too. That they had changed the climate. That they had whipped up destructive weather. That they had deployed their malevolence to the end of ‘conjur[ing]’ terrible storms ‘in cahoots with the devil’. For in the words of Danish admiral Peter Munch, who had been tasked with transporting Anne to Scotland, what his ships had encountered was no normal climatic event – no, ‘there must be more in [this] matter than the common perversity of winds and weather’.

The women of North Berwick can be seen as among the earliest victims of climate-change hysteria, of that urge to pin the blame for anomalous weather on wicked human beings. And they weren’t alone. In Europe between the 1500s and 1700s, climate change was often the charge made against witches.

A Gift to Putin: No Uranium Mining Near the Grand Canyon A new government land grab makes the U.S. more dependent on Russia.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-gift-to-putin-no-uranium-mining-near-the-grand-canyon-6c1916bf?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

With a stroke of his pen, President Biden on Tuesday walled off from development nearly a million acres of land that includes some of America’s richest uranium deposits. This is another monument to the Administration’s destructive energy policy.

The Antiquities Act of 1906 lets Presidents set aside federal land for national monuments to protect historic objects. Barack Obama used the law to remove millions of acres of federal land from oil and gas development. Yet even he resisted progressive calls to set aside uranium-rich land outside the Grand Canyon. Mr. Biden shows no such restraint.

On Tuesday he declared a national monument on 1,562 square miles in Arizona called Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni, meaning “where tribes roam.” The monument will conserve “landscape sacred to Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples and advance President Biden’s historic climate and conservation agenda,” the White House says.

The statement omits that the land also includes America’s only source of high-grade uranium ore that is economically competitive on the global market. The U.S. imports about 95% of uranium used for nuclear power reactors, mostly from Kazakhstan, Canada, Russia and Australia. Russia is the U.S.’s third biggest uranium source.

Mr. Biden banned imports of Russian fossil fuels by executive order last spring, but U.S. nuclear plants continue to rely on Russian uranium for 12% of their fuel supply. The new national monument—the fifth of the Biden Presidency—will make it that much harder for the U.S. to replace Russian uranium. Vladimir Putin sends his thanks.

The unstated purpose of the national monument appears to be to block uranium mining. Arizona Democrat Rep. Raul Grijalva has proposed legislation that would permanently withdraw the Grand Canyon area from new mining claims. Democrats couldn’t pass this through Congress, so Mr. Biden is doing so by decree.

Are Greens Overplaying Their Hand? Craig Rucker

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/08/are-greens-overplaying-their-hand/

The Green movement has a long history of rubbing people the wrong way.  In some cases, it was perhaps for the public good, like starting campaigns to stop littering and save whales.  In other cases, it was just plain patronizing, like telling parents to ditch disposable diapers and keep their thermostats set to 65 degrees in winter.

These days, however, the eco-crowd has taken everything to a whole new level of busybody.

The “climate crisis” is the purported justification cited as to why we all need to change our behaviors – and there can be no deviation. Citizens are expected to acquiesce to their whims simply because they shout “the world will end in five years”, as Greta Thunberg did in 2018. In many respects, Green extremists feel the public should submit to the same way they bowed to two-year COVID masking and lockdown diktats.

But their list of demands has gotten overbearing.  So much so, in fact, that one must believe they will soon overplay their hand and face considerable public backlash. Indeed, they already have in many instances, but it’s worth taking a look at just a few of their recent irksome moves that have made news. 

Ditch gas stoves, water heaters and furnaces – In some cases, like gas stoves, Greens want them banned outright. In other cases, like water heaters and furnaces, they want the appliances regulated under new federal rules for nearly impossible 95% efficiency. Many electric replacements will require expensive rewiring of homes and neighborhoods, and heat pumps that don’t work well in frigid weather.

Ban wood-burning pizza ovens – Politicians in the Big Apple want to force popular restaurants and pizzerias to install outrageously expensive “pollution” controls systems to reduce their “excessive carbon footprint” and reduce air pollution. Environmentalists don’t seem to care this is enormously unpopular with average New Yorkers. They seem intent to push their agenda or the common Joe, even if data suggests each oven would have to bake pizzas 24/7 for nearly 850 years to equal the annual carbon dioxide emissions from the private jets that Biden Climate Emissary John Kerry uses to avoid commercial airlines.

EV Owners Suddenly Realize They’re Being Conned

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/08/why-is-tesla-the-only-ev-maker-getting-sued-for-false-advertising/

Three California residents last week filed a lawsuit against Tesla for what they claim is false advertising over the car’s range. But why stop at Tesla? And why just sue over false claims about range when every other claim about EVs is also a lie?

The lawsuit comes in the wake of a Reuters report contending that Tesla had been goosing the range displayed on its dashboard and created a “diversion team” to deal with all the customer complaints about faulty batteries.

The filing claims that “Had Tesla honestly advertised its electric vehicle ranges, consumers either would not have purchased Tesla model vehicles, or else would have paid substantially less for them.”

But this isn’t new news. There have been several reports over the years about the wildly inflated EV range claims.

A little over a year ago, Forbes published an article detailing how the advertised range of EVs was often way off.

“I’ve been road testing electric cars regularly for more than two years now, and not once has a battery-only vehicle met the claimed capacity for its battery,” wrote senior contributor Neil Winton. “The average shortfall is close to 20%.”

Tesla actually did better in his tests than some of the other EVs.

A report from Car & Driver last August found that only three cars it tested did better than the official EPA range estimate. Tesla’s Model S is supposed to go 348 miles on a charge but only made it 280 miles. Ford’s electric F-150 came up 70 miles short of its reported 300-mile range.

Canceling Skeptical Scientists Is the Real ‘Climate Crisis’ By Tom Harris

https://pjmedia.com/columns/tom-harris/2023/08/05/canceling-skeptical-scientists-is-the-real-climate-crisis-n1716434

“There is no real climate crisis.”

That statement, as well as others against the mainstream climate change narrative of impending doom, led to the cancellation of a speech that was to be given by Nobel Prize laureate Dr. John Clauser to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The censorship has been covered in media worldwide and, besides giving the IMF a huge black eye, is leading many to wonder what has gone wrong with climate science that such a prominent expert would be canceled merely for disagreeing with a scientific hypothesis. Let’s dig into this important news story.

Dr. Clauser is an experimental and theoretical physicist and was the joint recipient of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the foundations of quantum mechanics in the 1970s. He is now on the board of directors at the CO2 Coalition based in Arlington, Va. Dr. William Happer, chair of the board at the CO2 Coalition, said that “His [Dr. Clauser’s] studies of the science of climate provide strong evidence that there is no climate crisis and that increasing CO2 concentrations will benefit the world.”

Dr. Clauser was scheduled to speak to the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office last week under the title: “Let’s talk — How much can we trust IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] climate predictions?” Because the answer Dr. Clauser was obviously going to give was “not much” and because of his other public statements criticizing the models relied upon by the IPCC, someone inside the IMF must have hit the roof. The CO2 coalition reported:

According to an email he received last evening, the Director of the Independent Evaluation Office of the International Monetary Fund, Pablo Moreno, had read the flyer for John’s July 25 zoom talk and summarily and immediately canceled the talk. Technically, it was “postponed.”

In 2021, Dr. Clauser criticized granting of the Nobel Prize for the development of computer models that predicted global warming. These climate models have been shown to be inaccurate and do not take into account the significant feedback of clouds in the climate system.

What NASA and the European Space Agency are admitting but the media are failing to report about our current heat wave Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/07/what_nasa_and_the_european_space_agency_are_admitting_but_the_media_are_failing_to_report_about_our_current_heat_wave.html

The current heat wave is being relentlessly blamed on increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but there is a much more plausible explanation, one that is virtually endorsed by two of the world’s leading scientific organizations.  It turns out that levels of water vapor in the atmosphere have dramatically increased over the last year and a half, and water vapor is well recognized as a greenhouse gas, whose heightened presence leads to higher temperatures, a mechanism that dwarfs any effect CO2 may have.

So why has atmospheric water vapor increased so dramatically?  Because of a historic, gigantic volcanic eruption last year that I — probably along with you — had never heard of.  The mass media ignored it because it took place 490 feet underwater in the South Pacific.  Don’t take it from me; take it from NASA (and please do follow the link to see time-lapse satellite imagery of the underwater eruption and subsequent plume of gases and water injected into the atmosphere):

When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted on Jan. 15, it sent a tsunami racing around the world and set off a sonic boom that circled the globe twice. The underwater eruption in the South Pacific Ocean also blasted an enormous plume of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere — enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. The sheer amount of water vapor could be enough to temporarily affect Earth’s global average temperature.

“We’ve never seen anything like it,” said Luis Millán, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. He led a new study examining the amount of water vapor that the Tonga volcano injected into the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere between about 8 and 33 miles (12 and 53 kilometers) above Earth’s surface.

The push-back against Net Zero It appears that more people are beginning to notice some inconvenient truths Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-push-back-against-net-zero?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The Tories’ pushback on Net Zero is causing horror among climate activists in Britain. Prime Minster Rishi Sunak has announced a carbon trading scheme that lowers the price on carbon emissions, linked to a planned expansion of oil and gas drilling in the North Sea to “max out” Britain’s underwater energy reserves. He has also announced that he is on the side of motorists complaining about city anti-car schemes. 

This has freaked out climate activists who are claiming that it drives a coach and horses though the “climate emergency” agenda.

But it’s these activists who are doing the real damage to their cause through producing ever more ludicrous and hysterical exaggeration by any standards — and straight out garbage by the standards of science. 

A prime example is the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres. As The Guardian reports:

“Humanity is in the hot seat,” Guterres told a press conference on Thursday. “For vast parts of North America, Asia, Africa and Europe, it is a cruel summer. For the entire planet, it is a disaster. And for scientists, it is unequivocal – humans are to blame.

“All this is entirely consistent with predictions and repeated warnings. The only surprise is the speed of the change. Climate change is here, it is terrifying, and it is just the beginning. The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.”

“Global boiling”? This while Dr Eli David tells us:

Antarctica plunges to -83.2C (-117.8F) — earth’s lowest temperature since since 2017. 

This while Tony Heller of Climate Reality tells us:  

Arctic sea ice extent is the highest in nineteen years and in the normal range since 1981

and also tells us:

Temperatures at the North Pole have been below the 1958-2002 average almost every day for the past three months, and will drop below freezing in about two weeks.  May was the coldest on record there.

Climate Change Hasn’t Set the World on Fire It turns out the percentage of the globe that burns each year has been declining since 2001. By Bjorn Lomborg

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-hasnt-set-the-world-on-fire-global-warming-burn-record-low-713ad3a6?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

One of the most common tropes in our increasingly alarmist climate debate is that global warming has set the world on fire. But it hasn’t. For more than two decades, satellites have recorded fires across the planet’s surface. The data are unequivocal: Since the early 2000s, when 3% of the world’s land caught fire, the area burned annually has trended downward.

In 2022, the last year for which there are complete data, the world hit a new record-low of 2.2% burned area. Yet you’ll struggle to find that reported anywhere.

Instead, the media acts as if the world is ablaze. In late 2021, the New York Times employed more than 40 staff on a project called “Postcards from a World on Fire,” headed by a photorealistic animation of the world in flames. Its explicit goal was to convince readers of the climate crisis’ immediacy through a series of stories of climate-change-related devastation across the world, including the 2019-20 wildfires in Australia.

This summer, the focus has been on Canada’s wildfires, the smoke from which covered large parts of the Northeastern U.S. Both the Canadian prime minister and the White House have blamed climate change.

Yet the latest report by the United Nations’ climate panel doesn’t attribute the area burned globally by wildfires to climate change. Instead, it vaguely suggests the weather conditions that promote wildfires are becoming more common in some places. Still, the report finds that the change in these weather conditions won’t be detectable above the natural noise even by the end of the century.

Dark Green Lunacy as a Cardinal Virtue Peter Smith

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2023/07/dark-green-lunacy-as-a-cardinal-virtue/

“We are not dealing with rational people. Explain until the cows come home that achieving net zero is impossible. Explain that wind, solar and batteries cannot replace a coal power station. Marshall your data, your facts. It will be to no avail. The inmates are running the show.”

John Clauser is an American physicist and the 2022 (joint) Nobel Prize winner. As we’ve heard, he was cancelled from addressing the IMF about “climate change.” Well, that’s understandable. I mean, he’s not a qualified climate scientist or anything. He’s not in the same league as, say, Greta Thunberg or Al Gore, John Kerry, António Guterres or Tim ‘dams won’t fill’ Flannery. Apparently, he knows a thing or two about quantum entanglement. This is where two particles interreact and separate but then, like identical twins, behave as though they are one, doing exactly the same things no matter how distant apart; apropos their direction of spin. Strange business.

Stranger still are climate-change ministers mirroring sub-atomic life; interacting at United Nations COP meetings before going home and spinning as one. Spruiking net zero, with the same cunning plans to get there. To wit, taxing emissions, banning the sale of ICE cars, and ordering by proxy thousands of turbine blades, solar panels and batteries from China. Might this similarity have piqued Clauser’s interest in climate science? Perhaps not.

Clauser has recently been elected to serve on the board of directors of the CO2 Coalition. Best to go to the source itself for reliable information on the Coalition; hence the link I’ve provided. Because, according to Wikipedia, “it spreads misinformation about climate change.” Misinformation, hmm? More like disinformation, if you ask me. Don’t let them off the hook. The Coalition sets out deliberately, with nothing less than malice aforethought towards the IPCC, to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. What perfidy is that?

Back to Clauser. Maybe he knows a little more about climate science than you would think. More than does your average quantum physicist; if you can describe quantum physicists as average. Anyway he has a theory. In a nutshell, he believes that cumulous clouds keep the earth’s temperature fairly stable. He reckons that when sunlight reaches the earth it evaporates sea water – covering two-thirds of the earth’s surface – producing cumulous clouds which reflect back 90 percent of the sunlight which hits them. It’s akin to a thermostat controlling the temperature. The warmer it gets, the more evaporation, the more cumulous clouds, the more sunlight reflected back. Viola! He further reckons that the radiative heat transfer rate associated with atmospheric CO2 is “nearly two orders of magnitude smaller than the effective stabilisation of the input-power provided by the cloud-based thermostat.” Thus he believes that the effect of CO2 is diddly squat, to put it in precise scientific language. If I remember rightly, Richard Lindzen also refers to clouds reflecting back sunlight. It seems worthwhile investigating. That is, if you had an interest in discovering the truth and weren’t as mad as a hatter.