RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2023/05/climate-modelling-rubbish-in-rubbish-out/

“The rest is history: the history of how dodgy “post-normal” science joined up with a pseudo-scientific “precautionary principle” to corrupt the UN, IPCC and WMO and, despite the “vast uncertainties”, ultimately created the NetZero decarbonising monster that is disrupting countries — and energy markets — everywhere on the bogus pretext of “fighting climate change”.

Complexity and perplexity go together like a horse and carriage, or in this case, the climate and a modeller. When probability claims masquerade as genuine predictions and international agencies and governments promote alarmism at every opportunity and confirmation bias distorts the search for truth, the outcome is today’s witch’s brew of “climate change” hyperbole and “save-the-planet” activism that is now disrupting every aspect of life.    

Consider the World Meteorological Organization’s press release of May 17, 2023: Global temperatures set to reach new records in the next five years. It warned that:

Global temperatures are likely to surge to record levels in the next five years, fuelled by heat-trapping greenhouse gases and a naturally occurring El Niño event, according to a new update issued by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). 

There is a 66% likelihood that the annual average near-surface global temperature between 2023 and 2027 will be more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for at least one year.  There is a 98% likelihood that at least one of the next five years, and the five-year period as a whole, will be the warmest on record.

A temporary reprieve from a french-fry fate is possible. But hold the champagne. The world is still going to exceed 1.5°C “with increasing frequency”. Unless we prostrate ourselves with more fervour at the altar of NetZero it could become permanent. Whatever happens, like Rick and Ilsa in Casablanca, we will always have Paris. 

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/05/the-ethical-inferiority-of-renewables/

Imagine for a moment that you’re a “believer in climate change action”, perhaps even a Teal candidate recently elected to Parliament on the strength of your concern, and that of your electorate, about carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. You fly (on a fossil-fuelled aircraft) to one of the world’s most impoverished countries—the Democratic Republic of Congo, let us say—and then drive (almost certainly not in an electric vehicle) carefully and slowly over rough, muddy, unsealed roads to an impoverished shanty town.

Alighting from the air-conditioned car into the tropical heat, you look a destitute couple in the eye and, through a Congolese interpreter, tell them: “I’m sorry, but you and your children—as well as billions of other impoverished people—cannot have what I’ve taken for granted since the day I was born: fossil-fuelled development and its immeasurable benefits such as clean drinking water, an effective sewerage system, decent accommodation, sufficient nourishing food, modern medical attention, local, national and global transport and communications and much else besides. You cannot have these essentials because they’re fossil-fuelled; I advocate the rapid elimination of fossil fuels, and my influential friends and I mean to get our way.” You then return to the airport, fly home and demand “climate action now!”

If that remains your position, you’re not alone: among the most despicable moral failings of the zealots of decarbonisation, environmental, social and governance principles (so-called ESG, which one astute critic has defined as “Economic Suicide Guaranteed”), “net zero” and the like, is an indifference to the point of callousness that elevates a “first world” ideology above all else—including the welfare of the world’s poorest people. Bluntly, climate activists are at best shallow, parochial and self-centred, and at worst, greedy narcissists.

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2023/05/24/another_green_energy_assault_on_the_west_901421.html

In March, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL) introduced legislation, called the SITE Act, which will allow thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines to be sited over state and local objections, and allow developers to take privately owned lands through eminent domain.  The stated goal is to enable the development of vast quantities of heavily subsidized wind and solar power in rural areas and transmit it to cities where the electricity is needed to meet unrealistic and costly electrification mandates, such as those in California and New York.

The New York Times, for one, is celebrating.  Forcing rural states, which many Times readers deride as “flyover country,” to supply the electricity needs of coastal urban ones is seen by the Times as rural states’ obligation.  In a May 4, 2023, editorial, the Times wrote, “To tap the potential of renewable energy, the United States needs to dramatically expand the electric grid between places with abundant wind and sunshine and places where people live and work.”  Authority for siting new transmission lines would be under the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which already has authority over siting of new natural gas pipelines.  

That same editorial also stated, “The federal government — the mechanism Americans have created to act in the interest of people in America as a whole — is where those decisions should be made.”  Given the actions taken in the past by the Bureau of Land Management, which has prevented ranchers from grazing on millions of acres of federally owned lands; the Forest Service, which last year began a prescribed burn on a windy day, despite please not to, and caused the largest wild fire in New Mexico’s history; and the Environmental Protection Agency, which considers every stream, pond, and arroyo to be a regulated wetland, many in rural states would likely disagree.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/a_strong_el_nio_in_2023_not_likely.html

Global warming completely stopped in 2018.  Temperatures will likely remain steady until 2025 and may decline slightly by 2030.  A strong El Niño in 2023 is unlikely.  I’ll explain all of my predictions — after we hear from the experts.

NOAA recently predicted a 55% chance of a strong El Niño in late 2023.  The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) threw more fuel on the fire when it announced, “There is a 98% likelihood that at least one of the next five years, and the five-year period as a whole, will be the warmest on record.”  Obviously, the MSM had a field day with this.  Take for example this headline from USA Today: “Scientists warn an El Niño is likely coming that could bring scorching heat to Earth.”

Rather than taking the well worn path of pointing out flaws in the predictions of NOAA, the IPCC, or the WMO, I’ll instead show how the sun is likely responsible for almost every detail in global temperatures over the last 125 years, and that it is also responsible for triggering strong El Niños.

Two empirical, or black-box, models were created to predict global temperature.  The first model uses solar magnetic field data from the Wilcox Solar Observatory (WSO).  The second model uses sunspot data from WDC-SILSO, the Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels.  Both predictions will be compared to global temperature anomaly data from NOAA.

Solar magnetic field data collection began in 1976.  The complete WSO dataset can be viewed in a single graphic, often referred to as a butterfly diagram.  It looks complicated, but it’s really not.  It’s just a plot of solar magnetic field intensity over time as a function of the sun’s latitude.  The two colors represent north and south polarity magnetism.  Unlike the Earth, where magnetic north has conveniently stayed in the Northern Hemisphere for the last 780,000 years, the sun’s magnetic field changes polarity every 11 years.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/23/the-corruption-of-climate-science/

“We need to criticize the people who got us here,” says Alex Epstein, founder of the Center for Industrial Progress and author of Fossil Future. “We can’t keep treating these designated experts as real experts. They are not real experts, they are destroyers. They are anti-energy, non-experts. And that needs to be made clear.”

Epstein is right, and his advice has never been more urgent—or as difficult to make people understand. It is no exaggeration that every major institution in America has now committed itself to the elimination of affordable and abundant energy. If it isn’t stopped, this commitment, motivated by misguided concern for the planet but also by a lust for power and money and enabled by moral cowardice and intellectual negligence, will destroy Western civilization.

For over 50 years, with increasing frequency, corrupted, careerist scientists have produced biased studies that, amplified by agenda-driven corporate and political special interests, constitute a “consensus” that is supposedly “beyond debate.” We are in a “climate crisis.” To cope with this climate emergency, all measures are justifiable.

This is overblown, one-sided, distorted, and manipulative propaganda. It is the language of authoritarians and corporatists bent on achieving even more centralized political power and economic wealth. It is a scam, perhaps the most audacious, all-encompassing fraud in human history. It is a scam that explicitly targets and crushes the middle class in developed nations and the entire aspiring populations in developing nations, at the same time as its messaging is designed to secure their fervent acquiescence.

What is actually beyond debate is not that we are in a climate crisis but that if we don’t stop destroying our conventional energy economy, we are going to be in a civilizational crisis.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/catherinesalgado/2023/05/22/no-correlation-steve-milloy-slams-climate-alarmists-extreme-weather-claims-n1697219

As usual, climate alarmists need to chill out. Junk Science’s Steve Milloy slammed recent scare-mongering that man-made climate change is supposedly causing increasing extreme weather events. “There is no correlation between emissions and any type of extreme weather event,” Milloy said in exclusive comments to PJ Media.

Braindead climate crazies made news Sunday when they dyed Rome’s iconic Trevi Fountain black to protest fossil fuels and “catastrophic” flooding in Italy, which the climate alarmists attribute to climate change. But some experts are calling their bluff, insisting that extreme weather events are not worsening and climate change is not spurring them. That includes Steve Milloy, who has been a leading truth-teller critiquing climate dogmatism for over 20 years.

“There is no correlation between emissions and any type of extreme weather event. So the activist effort to link ‘climate change’ with extreme weather is simply without a basis in fact,” Milloy told me. “Activists like to dramatize their concern for the environment, but it’s always evident they have spent little time learning anything about it.”

Climate change “experts” have been wildly and consistently wrong in their predictions for 50 years now. In fact, just recently, data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — confirmed by NASA satellite data — provided evidence that there has not been any global warming for the past eight years. Furthermore, evidence showed that major hurricanes dropped to a near-record low in 2022. Things just aren’t adding up the way climate doomsayers claim.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-city-workers-lawsuit-pension-fund-investment-climate-politics-bill-de-blasio-ae9ba435?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

New York City leaders have boasted about using worker retirement savings to advance their climate agenda. They may come to regret it after several city workers this month sued their pension funds for putting climate over financial returns.

This could be a significant test of politicized investment by public pensions. New York law and regulation impose strict fiduciary duties on trustees of such funds. Plans are required to invest “for the exclusive benefit of the participants and beneficiaries” and with “care, skill, prudence and diligence.” State courts have ruled that trustees owe a “duty of undivided and undiluted loyalty” to retirees and workers.

Yet three big public pensions—the New York City Employees’ Retirement System, Teachers’ Retirement System of the City of New York, and Board of Education Retirement System of the City of New York—have instead made investment decisions based on climate goals. The three plans manage about $150 billion.

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio led this climate socialism in 2018 when he declared that city pension plans would have to divest fossil-fuel-related assets within five years to show the city is “leading the fight against climate change.” The mayor, city officials and union representatives control the boards of the three pension funds, which complied with his orders.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/catherinesalgado/2023/05/21/fountain-of-lies-climate-crazies-dye-trevi-fountain-black-n1697023

Talk about brain-washed. Climate alarmist activists dyed the waters of Rome’s famous Trevi Fountain black Sunday in the latest idiotic climate demonstration targeting priceless art and architecture.

“Climate activists with the group Last Generation dumped diluted vegetable charcoal into the water of Rome’s famed Trevi Fountain in Italy on Sunday, turning the water black,” UPI reported on May 21. Can we acknowledge that these people are suffering from a sort of mental illness that drives them to target the most beautiful, beloved, and brilliant achievements of mankind? And all based on a lie. The climate apocalypse is not nigh.

Climate change “experts” have been wildly and consistently wrong in their predictions for 50 years now. Just recently, data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — confirmed by NASA satellite data — showed that there has not been global warming for the past eight years. In other words, the whole world isn’t about to experience deadly flooding because of global warming, even if part of Italy is sadly being flooded. So not only did the climate activists create a mess other people have to clean up and spoiled a lot of tourists’ experiences, but they also did it for a cause that is based on lies.

The protest was supposedly a reaction to “catastrophic” floods in Italy that have left at least 13 people dead and thousands homeless. Is there any evidence these floods are caused by climate change? I’d be interested to see objective evidence instead of the usual climate doom screeching all the media outlets are putting out about the flooding.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/22/will-we-wake-up-when-were-hungry/

It’s safe to say that at no time in human history have more people been better fed than are in our current era. So of course the left has to make sure that doesn’t continue.

John Kerry, the man who has almost perfected the art of looking down his nose at the commoners so very far beneath him, told a group of co-elitists at a recent climate summit that, in the words of a Reuters reporter, “c​​utting greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural production is essential to the global fight against climate change.”

In Kerry’s own words, he claimed “we can’t get to net zero, we don’t get this job done, unless agriculture is front and center as part of the solution.”

The special presidential envoy for climate, a job he is perfectly suited for as it requires no accomplishments, only a membership in a “​​select group of human beings” and an enormously inflated sense of self, then confused matters by declaring that “a 2-degree future could result in another 600 million people not getting enough to eat.”

“You can’t continue to warm the planet while also expecting to feed it.”

So let’s see if we have this right: The way to feed more people is to slash agriculture production?

The eco-zealots who have stoked the climate scare aren’t open to genetically modified farming, which can increase the yields of some crop varieties by a factor of 10. Kerry and the climate cabal are simply not interested in any sort of innovation that would boost not only crop harvests but the nutrition density of our foods

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-epa-threatens-to-turn-out-the-lights-electricity-generation-energy-grid-natural-gas-coal-co2-a5ca4d77?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Imagine flipping a light switch and not knowing if the lights will come on. Normally unthinkable. But the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed power-plant rules would destabilize the energy grid, resulting in less-reliable electric service.

The EPA’s aggressive standards require all coal-fired power plants to use a new and still-tricky technology called carbon capture and storage, or CCS, to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 90% by 2035, or begin co-firing with natural gas. In addition, natural-gas-fired plants must capture 90% of emissions by 2035 using CCS or switch almost entirely to hydrogen by 2038. The only other option for both: shut down.

These nascent technologies simply won’t get the job done in the next few years. CCS is used at only one commercial power plant in North America. The only U.S. coal plant to implement CCS successfully closed in 2020 for economic reasons.

CCS holds great promise, but there are significant operational and economic hurdles to its widespread deployment. The Biden administration recently acknowledged that building and using CCS faces many of the same permitting and regulatory problems plaguing other energy infrastructure