RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/doctors-join-the-climate-lobby-medical-journal-editorial-bmj-11631048529?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Medical journals are supposed to be forums for doctors to publish research and debate ideas. But like traditional media outlets, many are finding it harder to control their political bias. Now some 200 journal editors are showing their political hand on climate change in an apocalyptic and misleading joint editorial this week that could have been ghost-written by Greta Thunberg.

The groupthink in these journals suppressed debate over important questions during the Covid pandemic, including the origins of the virus and the costs of lockdowns. Now these same experts want to tell everyone what to do about climate, which they know less about than geologists do about cancer.

“No temperature rise is ‘safe,’’’ the editorial says. “Higher temperatures have brought increased dehydration and renal function loss, dermatological malignancies, tropical infections, adverse mental health outcomes, pregnancy complications, allergies, and cardiovascular and pulmonary morbidity and mortality.”

The editorial cites a recent British Medical Journal meta-analysis of studies that examine links between extreme weather and health outcomes. But most findings haven’t been replicated, many conflict, and correlation doesn’t prove causation. Obesity has increased at the same time temperatures have. That doesn’t mean heat is making people fatter.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/07/theres-nothing-the-u-s-can-do-to-affect-global-temperature/

Despite zero evidence that human greenhouse gas emissions are harming Earth, the Democrats, cheered by the media, continue to enact energy policies they say are necessary for saving our world. But all they’re doing is increasing energy scarcity, which forces prices higher, and ignoring facts that don’t fit their narrative.

America’s worst energy policy offender is California, where the ever-eager-to-mandate-and-forbid ruling class is outlawing automobiles that burn fossil fuels, halting electricity generation from conventional sources, and executing a war on gas stations.

It’s all so entirely pointless. California’s humanity produces only about 1% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. If the state fell into the ocean tomorrow, as some have predicted it will (it won’t), the world thermometer wouldn’t be moved one bit.

The story is the same for the entire country.

“Here’s the most important fact about the Green New Deal: It wouldn’t work,” says the Heritage Foundation’s Nicolas Loris. “Ultimately, fully implementing the Green New Deal would have no meaningful impact on global temperatures.”

Yet if enacted, the law would nevertheless “bring huge changes to our country,” Loris continues, as it “is a wish list for big government spending, expansive government control, and massive amounts of wealth distribution.” It would also allow progressives to implement their twisted definition of “social justice.”

“This deal would fundamentally change how people produce and consume energy, harvest crops, raise livestock, build homes, drive cars, travel long distances, and manufacture goods,” says Loris. But “even if Americans were on board with this radical change in behavior and lifestyle, it wouldn’t change our climate.” 

How can he make such a statement? Because his colleague Kevin Dayaratna ran the numbers – and put them before Congress during a 2017 House committee hearing.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/climate_crisis_more_dangerous_than_terrorism_get_real_biden.html

The resurgence of Taliban is now expected to pose a serious threat to U.S. and global security.  Thirteen U.S. servicemen and nearly 200 Afghans were already killed in blasts outside Kabul Airport on August 26, 2021.  Yet President Biden says the biggest threat to the U.S. is a climate that has been undergoing naturally driven makeovers for eons.

“This is not a joke,” said Biden.  “You know what the Joint Chiefs told us the greatest physical threat facing America was?  Global warming.”

During Biden’s presidential campaign, John Kerry said, “America will soon have a government that treats the climate crisis as the urgent national security threat it is.”  And here we are.

In April, U.S. secretary of defense Lloyd Austin termed climate change an existential threat, saying, “From coast to coast and across the world, the climate crisis has caused substantial damage and put people in danger.”

Categorizing climate change as a more serious threat than, say, terrorism or a hostile China is a public policy blunder that at least equals the botched Afghanistan withdrawal and exposes an ignorance of science.  The Biden administration’s statements are void of numbers, data, and statistics.  This is because the metrics of key climate parameters stand in stark contrast to the claims.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hurricane-ida-henri-climate-change-united-nations-un-galsgow-conference-natural-disaster-infrastructure-carbon-emissions-11630704844?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Editor’s note: As November’s global climate conference in Glasgow draws near, important facts about climate change don’t always make it into the dominant media coverage. We’re here to help. Each week contributor Bjorn Lomborg will provide some important background so readers can have a better understanding of the true effects of climate change and the real costs of climate policy.

Hurricane season has arrived in the Atlantic Ocean. Already this summer Hurricanes Henri and Ida have caused headline-generating damage and flooding in the Gulf states, the Southeast and the Middle Atlantic states. Yet despite what you may have heard, Atlantic hurricanes are not becoming more frequent. In fact, the frequency of hurricanes making landfall in the continental U.S. has declined slightly since 1900.

Airplanes and satellites have dramatically increased the number of storms that scientists can spot at sea today, making the frequency of landfall hurricanes—which were reliably documented even in 1900—a better statistic than the total number of Atlantic hurricanes.

And there aren’t more powerful hurricanes either. The frequency Category 3 and above hurricanes making landfall since 1900 is also trending slightly down. A July Nature paper finds that the increases in strong hurricanes you’ve heard so much about are “not part of a century-scale increase, but a recovery from a deep minimum in the 1960s–1980s.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/media-climate-change-truth-degrees-warming-disaster-hurricanes-flooding-adaptation-infrastructure-united-nations-11630703058?mod=hp_opin_pos_3#cxrecs_s

If “news” is about how today differs from yesterday, the press missed a lot of news in the long-awaited new report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that was issued a few weeks ago.

After 41 years of promoting a fuzzy and unsatisfying estimate of how much warming might result from a doubling of atmospheric CO2, the world’s climate science arbiter has finally offered the first real improvement in the history of modern climate science.

Through five previous U.N. assessment plus their predecessor, the 1979 Charney Report, the likely worst-case was a rise of 4.5 degrees Celsius. This came from averaging the result of inconsistent computer climate simulations about which the IPCC knew only one thing: They couldn’t all be right and perhaps none were.

Using real-world data, the new report now says the worst case is a 4-degree rise. More important, with much greater confidence than before, disastrous outcomes above 5 degrees are now found to be very unlikely.

In another departure, the U.N. panel now says the dire emissions scenario it promoted for two decades should be regarded as highly unlikely, with more plausible projections at least a third lower.

The report also notes, as the press never does, the full impact of these emissions won’t be manifested until decades, even a century, later. The ultimate likely worst-case effect of a doubling of CO2 might be 4 degrees, but the best estimate of the “transient climate response” this century is about 2.7 degrees, or 1.6 degrees on top of the warming experienced since the start of the industrial age.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=a7306c1128

It’s easy to look at “climate change” litigation in the U.S. and conclude that a good percentage of our environmental bureaucrats and judges who get involved in these things are crazy. Thus many courts around the country (mostly state courts) have allowed lawsuits seeking damages against oil companies over greenhouse gas emissions from their products to proceed at least beyond the preliminary stages. And the EPA, early in the Obama administration (2009) issued what is called the “Endangerment Finding,” declaring CO2 and other GHGs to be a “danger to public health and welfare” — a ridiculous determination that the Trump administration nevertheless did not attempt to undo, and which substantially ties the government’s hands in contesting wacky climate-related cases. Not that the Biden Administration can be counted on to contest these cases at all, no matter how preposterous.

But we do have in the U.S. this thing called the doctrine of “non-justiciability.” That is the doctrine under which our courts steer clear of cases that ask courts to rule broadly on matters of public policy that are more legitimately the province of the legislatures. At the federal level, the non-justiciability doctrine arises out of the separation of powers embodied in the Constitution’s structure, as well as by the language of Article 3 Section 2, which describes the jurisdiction of the federal courts only in terms of “Cases” and “Controversies.” The doctrine has been around for a long time, and is well-established in many precedents. As discussed in my most recent post, it was the non-justiciability doctrine that sank the Juliana case, which sought to get a court to order the end of the use of fossil fuels in the U.S. on the basis of the Due Process clause of the Fifth Amendment and the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Even two of three Obama-appointed judges on the Ninth Circuit panel agreed with that rationale. Had the case reached the Supreme Court, the 6-3 “conservative” majority, in my judgment, would be highly likely to apply the “non-justiciable” rationale to privately-brought litigation that seeks a fundamental restructuring of the economy through court order. (A different issue is whether the Supreme Court, in the presence of the Endangerment Finding, would try to overrule a restructuring of the economy via EPA or other bureaucratic regulation that claimed some statutory basis, however flimsy.)

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/31/global-warming-narrative-takes-another-hit/

We have been constantly told for what seems like as long as we can remember that Antarctica is shrinking because man’s carbon dioxide emissions are overheating our planet. While fearmongering has made its way around the world countless times, the truth is still pulling on its boots.

So what is the truth? It’s quite straightforward: Antarctic sea ice has been growing.

According to the Japan Meteorological Agency, the continent’s annual maximum sea ice has grown for three straight years. The annual mean is increasing, and the annual minimum has also expanded for three consecutive years. The long-term trend lines for the annual maximum and mean, starting in 1979, are noticeably moving upward, while the trend line for the annual minimum is ascending, as well, though much more modestly.

Doesn’t fit the doomsday narrative, does it?

Please don’t think this is an isolated and therefore meaningless example. There are many other facts that show the global warming fears are overblown.

For instance, two years ago, we showed that predictions claiming that the Great Lakes were drying up due to man-made global warming were, if we might use a term favored by the current occupant of the White House, malarkey.

Moving up to today, we’re reading that “many parts of Europe have not had much of a real summer, having seen much cool and wet weather this year,” and that there’s August snow in Austria, which is not just “one-day freak weather event” but the beginning of a snowy period and a usually cool cycle.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hurricane-ida-climate-resilience-lesson-new-orleans-louisiana-11630358067?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

“Government can’t command the tides, but it can protect people from them.”

The pictures of Hurricane Ida’s wreckage across Louisiana are grim, and the storm isn’t over. But the good news is that New Orleans appears to have weathered the tempest as well as could be expected thanks to its post-Katrina flood-protection investments. This is a reminder of how hardening infrastructure against unpredictable Mother Nature pays off.

Ida slammed into Louisiana’s Port Fourchon on Sunday as a Category 4 storm with wind speeds of 150 miles an hour and one to two inches of rain an hour. Its winds tie it as the fifth strongest storm to hit the U.S. mainland. Such heavy winds and precipitation will inevitably cause flooding and damage buildings.

But the bigger worry going into Ida was that a catastrophic storm surge would breach New Orleans’s levees and submerge the city as happened 16 years ago to the day during Hurricane Katrina. Clocking in as a lower-grade Category 3 storm when it made landfall, Katrina killed some 2,000 people and caused an estimated $125 billion in damage. New Orleans took years to recover.

Yet Louisiana and the feds have since spent $14.5 billion on bolstering flood walls, levees and drainage systems. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reinforced pumping stations to withstand 205 mile-per-hour winds and established redundant power systems to operate them if the electric grid fails, as it did Sunday.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

We live in strange times. We don’t think through the consequences of ending “endless wars.” We don’t debate what it means for our children and grandchildren to add trillions of dollars to a national debt that already, as a percent of GDP, is the highest since the Second World War. We permit hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many of whom are infected with COVID-19, to enter our country illegally through our southern border, while limiting the number of legal immigrants. We have replaced free-thinking skeptics with acolytes for big government. The dark arm of progressivism is aimed at increasing the power of government and decreasing the role of the individual. When it comes to climate change, progressives borrow from George W. Bush: Either you are with us, or you are against us. There is no room for debate.   

In part, this is because of the leisure time we have gained through economic success. The technological advances and the increased wealth of our nation and its people – results of free market capitalism operating under the rule of law – would be unimaginable to our grandparents. Included in our well-being is the environment, which is far healthier than it was twenty, fifty and a hundred years ago. It was individuals, not government agencies, that led that change – through eleemosynary organizations like the Sierra Club and Audubon Societies. New York City began to migrate from coal to oil in the 1930s and Los Angeles recognized the problem of smog in the 1940s, both long before the advent of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in December 1970. Government regulations have hastened the move to a healthier environment, but they were not the instigator. It is the wealth produced through capitalism, operating in a society that encourages individual initiative, which has afforded us the ability to focus on climate. It is ignorance of that past that helps feed the myth that it is government, not free market capitalism, that has been the principal force for the good of our environment. In seeking political power, progressives pander to the electorate on soft issues – “wokeness,” inclusion, identity, equity, critical race theory and hurtful words – while they fail to encourage those traits that historically led to success: merit, aspiration, competition, diligence and hard work.

On August 10, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report on climate and projections for the future. How many people have read its 4,000 pages? Not many, I suspect. I, for one, have not. According to summaries, the Earth has experienced a two-degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature since industrialization began about two hundred years ago. We know man has been responsible for some of that increase, but the exact level remains in question. Nevertheless, a recent lead editorial in my local paper, The Day, expressed no doubt as to the cause: “Humans have heated the planet about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the dawn of the industrial age.” The next day Steven Koonin, director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “As is now customary, the report emphasizes climate change in recent decades but obscures, or fails to mention, historical precedents that weaken the case that humanity’s influence on the climate has been catastrophic.”