RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/western-worlds-energy-folly-in-a-new-york-nutshell-europe-renewables-grid-reliability-green-fossil-fuels-emissions-wind-solar-11666374183?mod=opinion_trending_now_opn_pos3

The latest report from New York state’s grid operator is a master class in everything wrong with the Western world’s approach to climate change.

That is: everything wrong with an approach that consists of throwing money at green business interests in defiance of any practical consideration. If you think something else is going on, such as abating climate change, think again.

To meet a legislated goal of emissions-free electricity by 2040, New York will need up to 45 gigawatts of what it delicately calls DEFRs, or dispatchable emissions-free resources. Not only is that more than the state’s total current generating capacity of 37 gigawatts, these DEFRs, which are carbon-free like wind and solar yet not interruptible like wind and solar, don’t exist and have no prospect of existing in the next decade. Starting very much sooner than 2040, New York’s real choice will be Third World electricity reliability vs. paying fossil-fuel operators large fees to keep their plants up and running in a highly inefficient part-time fashion.

Many involved in the state’s energy “transition” might question whether purging the last 10% or 5% of fossil fuels from the system is worth the exorbitant cost. Don’t expect anyone to admit the bigger problem: The transition won’t likely do much to reduce global emissions.

This is the great unmentionable. When New Yorkers use less coal, oil or gasoline because of environmental mandates, the market price transmits the benefit to other global users, who then use more. Even more unspeakable is the corollary: Emission-spewing activities simply relocate from one part of the world to another. China’s emissions growth, from half the U.S.’s to almost 300% of the U.S.’s in 30 years, is partly the product of a transplant of emissions from the U.S. and Europe.

If pressed, Biden officials will privately revert to gobbledygook about carbon taxes that appear immaculately without anyone having to advocate them. The media fill the gap with wishful thinking and Soviet econometrics, confusing inputs with outputs. Yes, world-wide investment in renewables in the past two years has exceeded investment in fossil fuels. Supposedly this proves fossil fuels are on their way out. No, it proves fossil fuels are a better deal, consuming less investment to meet their share of the world’s growing power needs.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/lincolnbrown/2022/10/21/climate-protesters-glue-themselves-to-a-floor-hilarity-ensues-n1638863

“Failing to plan is planning to fail.” I forget where I first saw that line. I think it was on a sign on a wall in some place I worked in college, and variations of it have appeared in countless places over the years. As ubiquitous and pedantic as it may be, the saying is true, as a group of climate protesters in Germany have discovered. And they paid the price for not thinking ahead.

On Wednesday, nine climate activists calling themselves members of Scientist Rebellion broke into the Autostadt Museum, in Wolfsburg, Germany, across the street from the Volkswagen plant. According to the Daily Mail, They proceeded to super glue their hands to the floor of the Porsche exhibit because you know, all of the cool activists are gluing themselves to things these days.

One may assume that they would sit until Volkswagen agreed to lobby for decarbonization in the transportation industry and the German government agreed to lower the speed limit. The Blaze stated that the protesters said that Volkswagen supported their right to protest, but that apparently was as far as the company was willing to go.

For a group of people who call themselves scientists, how is it that they forgot about that little thing called biology? The human body needs to eat, drink, and, of course, relieve itself. But there they sat, amid a leftist version of the game Twister (Right hand, glue!), and as the old song goes, eat, nor drink, nor potty had they none.

They griped that they had not been given bowls into which they could urinate and defecate, and they could not order the food they wanted since people were allowed to leave the museum but not return. They had to rely on whatever Volkswagen provided. Furthermore, Volkswagen had the audacity to turn the heat and lights off. Volkswagen owns the building, and Volkswagen pays the bills. Volkswagen gets to turn the lights off if it wants.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/10/how_much_more_evidence_does_the_press_need_that_global_warming_is_otherwise_known_as_the_weather.html

For 150 years, there has been exponential growth in the use of coal, oil, crude oil, gasoline, propane, and heating oil. There has been a massive increase in the use of cars, trucks, CO2, methane, the population, and numerous other things we are told cause an existential threat of rapid warming of the Earth. 

If all of the things that we are told cause warming actually did that, we would not see the record cold temperatures throughout  significant portions of the U.S. in October 2022.

Such as here:

Cold blast to bring record-breaking temperatures to large part of U.S. this week

The chilly temps could affect more than 60 million people as far west as Colorado and south into Florida, according to the National Weather Service.

High temperatures in Midwestern, Northeastern and even Southeastern states are expected to be 10 to 25 degrees below average, with low temperatures near freezing possible as far south in cities like Atlanta and Jackson, Mississippi.

How many pieces of scientific data are necessary that show the climate has always changed cyclically and naturally before this fraud ends, or before the media asks questions and does research instead of just repeating talking points?

John Kerry, Al Gore, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others should be asked the simple question: How do we have record cold temperatures after 150 years of the exponential growth of natural resources if that causes warming? 

If there is no correlation, there is no causation. 

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2022/10/garbage-in-climate-science-out/

EXCERPT

“The world has less than a decade to change course to avoid irreversible ecological catastrophe, the UN warned today.” — The Guardian, Nov 28, 2007

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” — Yogi Berra

If your model’s initial assumptions are incorrect, how can you rely on it to make any prediction worth the effort of consulting? Not that peddling shoddy science bothers the swollen ranks of climateers. And why should they fret? Climate fear is a growth industry, meaning careers will advance so long as their rubbish in/garbage out findings are questioned.

Global extinction due to global warming has been predicted more times than the Labor Party has claimed it can cool the planet with a new tax.  But where do these predictions come from? If you thought it was just calculated from the simple, well known relationship between CO2 and solar energy absorption, you would only expect to see about 0.5o C increase from pre-industrial temperatures as a result of CO2 doubling, due to the logarithmic nature of the relationship. [1]

The runaway 3-6o C and higher temperature increase model predictions depend on coupled feedbacks from many other factors, including water vapour (the most important greenhouse gas), albedo (the proportion of energy reflected from the surface – e.g. more/less ice or clouds, more/less reflection) and aerosols, just to mention a few, which theoretically may amplify the small incremental CO2 heating effect.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/10/floods_and_droughts_are_nothing_new.html

There is nothing unusual about today’s floods, fires, droughts, homelessness, and hunger — they have always been part of the human story.  But satellite technology allows us to track them better, and our worldwide media revel in disaster reporting, bringing tearfully tragic scenes into every living room, every night.

Population growth means that more people are affected by weather extremes, but there is no evidence that floods and droughts are getting worse.

Written flood records go back to biblical times, and geological records go back for epochs.  Every floodplain today is a testament to previous floods.  The width of today’s floodplains and the depth of their alluvial soils show that there have been really huge floods in times past — and almost every society has stories of great floods.

Droughts (and the starvation they often cause) are also written into our history of famines, wars, and migrations.  They are also recorded in massive deposits of barren, wind-blown sandstone and loess.  Much of Earth’s surface was smothered by desert sands or vast ice sheets in times past.

El Niño droughts have been recognized as far back as 1525, but the famines of 1877–78 changed history in China and India, where people starved; granaries were looted; dynasties fell; cannibalism became common; and people ate roots, bark and carrion.

The first Europeans to explore Australia recorded smoke from hundreds of small bushfires and noted the beautiful grasslands and open forests created by earlier fires.  Observant ones also noted with awe the nests of flood rubbish caught high up in big gum trees.

The 1812–1820 El Niño droughts caused wars and migrations in Africa, and the 1844/46 El Niño drought changed the history of Australia.  Gregory Blaxland found a way across the Blue Mountains to discover the vast inland grasslands, while Charles Sturt suffered incredible hardships looking for “the Inland Sea” in central Australia during a drought.

Australia was later scarred by the Federation drought and the Millennium drought.

The 1852 flood in the Murrumbidgee River swept away the town of Gundagai, and the 1893 Bremer River Flood destroyed the Victoria Bridge and the Indooroopilly Bridge.  At least 60 people were killed when a flash flood destroyed the township of Clermont in 1916.  That whole town was relocated.

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3688593-proposed-climate-rule-is-bigger-badder-deal-than-manchin-schumer-climate-bill%ef%bf%bc/

In his Florida v. Davos speech at last month’s National Conservatism conference, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) made important observations about the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investing movement. He called it out as an attempt to use corporate and economic power to impose on society an ideological agenda that could not win at the ballot box. 

“Corporatism is not the same as free enterprise,” DeSantis argued. 

He warned of the danger from the growth of the administrative state, which he called the logical outcome of Congress abdicating its responsibility to hold the bureaucracy to account and letting it do much of the heavy legislating. 

In an opinion piece five days earlier, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg lambasted such Republican critics of ESG. “Critics call it ‘woke capitalism,’” he wrote. “There’s just one problem. They don’t seem to understand capitalism. And flogging ESG is not only a terrible economic mistake. It will be a political loser too.” 

Bloomberg’s forecast will be tested when Florida voters decide whether to reelect DeSantis on Nov. 8. 

The battle has been joined and that is good news, because it signals a much-needed debate on ESG and its climate-policy component. 

Although Democrats hail passage of the Schumer-Manchin Inflation Reduction Act, far more consequential is the Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed climate-risk disclosure rule, currently being finalized. It will operate at the nexus of the administrative state, Wall Street and politically motivated institutional investors. The Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, part of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), has 273 signatories with $61.3 trillion in assets under management.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/14/were-in-the-climate-army-now/

During the Global War on Terror, when the United States was engaged battling terrorists and insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Left routinely lied to young voters that President George W. Bush in particular, and Republicans in general, were going to reinstitute the draft and send them to these active military theaters. The Left’s message was less than subtle: vote for Democrats or else the GOP will make sure you’re drafted and/or dead.

I was reminded of this in the heat of the 2020 election, when one of the Democrats’ smears was that an unstable President Trump was going to involve us in a war—likely a nuclear one. As during the Bush Administration, the scurrilous charge targeted young voters. What was different was that Trump was far less interventionist, and utilized American military power with significantly less frequency than did his predecessors. If one understands the Left’s tactics, Trump’s disinclination to use military power was not only insufficient to stop their “he’ll get us in a war” lie; it was, in fact, their reason for spreading it. (To those who contest this assessment of the Left’s tactics, does “Russiagate” ring a bell?)

Heading into the 2022 midterm elections, the Democrats and their media cohorts are now using the prospect of nuclear war to try and prop up Joe Biden’s sagging poll numbers, which threaten to drag his party’s federal and state candidates down to defeat. To wit, Biden opined to a gaggle of fat cat Democrats:

[For the] first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, we have a direct threat of the use [of a] nuclear weapon if, in fact, things continue down the path they are going. We’ve got a guy [Putin] I know fairly well. He’s not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming.

Yes, if the Democrats’ stoking of “civil war” rhetoric isn’t enough to get their voters to the polls for the 2022 midterm elections, why not toss in the prospect of nuclear annihilation—along a path they and their minions have helped cement—even as they taunt the enemy to try to look like a tough guy? 

What could possibly go wrong?

Eco-vandals threw tomato soup on one of Van Gogh’s priceless “Sunflowers” paintings at Britain’s National Museum on Thursday, the latest in a long string of attacks on Western Civilization’s treasures.

The reason for the Van Gogh attack? Two members of Just Stop Oil attempted to destroy the artwork and glued themselves to the wall because they’re anti-oil and “Sunflowers” is an oil painting.

Get it?

Yeah, me neither.

The enemies of civilization are idiot vandal-savants with moral pretentious, dressed up like dues collectors from 1984′s Junior Anti-Sex League.

Here’s what passes for their thinking:

Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” had nothing to do with climate change, [Just Stop Oil spokesweasel Mel Carrington] said. It was simply “an iconic painting, by an iconic painter” and an attack on it would generate headlines. But the choice of soup was more symbolic, Carrington said: In Britain, many householders were struggling to pay fuel and food bills because of soaring inflation, and some could not even afford to heat up a can of soup. The government should be helping ordinary people deal with “the cost of living crisis,” rather than enabling fossil fuel extraction, she added.

Fortunately, the only damage done was “some minor damage to the frame,” according to an email released by the National Gallery. The painting itself sits safely behind glass.

I’ve been to the National Museum. I’ve seen “Sunflowers.” I’ve seen the protective glass. I’d rather have seen Van Gogh unencumbered, but I understand that the West’s treasures must be protected from the two-legged animals behind groups like Just Stop Oil.

Witness now your so-called moral betters, overgrown children still in need of a spanking:

Unavoidably, our “protestors” got what they wanted — the world talking about them.

But maybe not in the way they intended, if these selections from my Twitter timeline are any indication.

Enjoy.

Commander Salamander is one of my favorite milbloggers — one of my favorite bloggers, period. His suggestion is exactly what we ought to do, with the glued-down protestors as much on display as the art for visitors to the National Gallery.

I have to get a little more serious with this next one.

Please burn this line into your brain: “The vandalism or destruction of art is always an authoritarian act.”

Even some lefties can’t get behind this particularly stupid and futile act.

girl i’m down with the cause but van gogh was a broke mentally ill painter considered a failure until his death like what does he have to do with this https://t.co/cNpgoBKPd7

— matt (@mattxiv) October 14, 2022

Here’s another.

Kurt Schlichter has had quite enough, as you’ll see below. But it was one of the replies (also below) that really caught my eye.

Tom Clancy did just that to the environmental wackos who tried to wipe out humanity in Rainbow Six, and it’s an admirable solution. I’d also recommend no insect repellent, clothes, or food. Enjoy your nature, kids!

Oh, and ignore that comment from Ian Miles Cheong about the painting being “destroyed.” Ian provides good links and some solid content, but sometimes he plays a little fast and loose with the facts.

That’s enough for today, and I’m going to try not to lose any sleep wondering where Western Civilization’s children-with-daddy-issues will strike next.