RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-natural-disasters-ahr-river-flood-germany-wildfire-risks-11628177742?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. That old quip, often attributed to Mark Twain or his friend Charles Dudley Warner, now guides most news coverage of severe weather. The media say that natural disasters are a result of climate change and we need to adopt radical policies to combat them.

But this framing tells only a small part of what is scientifically known. Take the recent flooding in Germany and Belgium, which many, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, are blaming on climate change. Yet a new study of more than 10,000 rivers around the world shows that most rivers now flood less. What used to be a 50-year flood in the 1970s happens every 152 years today, likely due to urbanization, flood-control measures, and changes in climate.

Some rivers still flood, and reporters flock there, but more scare stories don’t mean more global flooding. The river Ahr, where most of the German flood deaths occurred, had a spectacular flow on July 14, 2021, but it was lower than deadly flows in 1804 and 1910. The real cause of increased fatalities from riverine flooding in Germany and many other places is more people building settlements on flood plains, leaving the water no place to go. Instead of more solar panels and wind turbines to combat climate change, riverside communities need better water management. And foremost, they need a well-functioning warning system so they can evacuate before disaster strikes.

Here, Germany has failed spectacularly. Following the deadly European floods in 2002, Germany built an extensive warning system, but during a test last September most warning measures, including sirens and text alerts, didn’t work. The European Flood Awareness System predicted the floods nine days in advance and formally warned the German government four days in advance, yet most people on the ground were left unaware. Hannah Cloke, the hydrologist who set up the system, called it “a monumental failure.”

But of course, blaming the deadly floods on climate change instead of taking responsibility for the missed early warnings is convenient for politicians like Ms. Merkel, who, during a visit to Schuld, a devastated village on the Ahr, said, ”We must get faster in the battle against climate change.”

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2021/08/clean-green-and-absolutely-sustainable/

One of history’s most valuable lessons is that much of what is widely believed at any one time will later be viewed as nonsense, and it is vanishingly unlikely that this does not still apply.  On the contrary, our current system of education is now actively pursuing an indoctrination in postmodern thought which seeks to deny, demean and dismiss the all-too-brief ascendancy of reason and evidence as embodied in the scientific method.  The impetus for this is simple. Reason and evidence threaten established careers, status and beliefs held dear in academia, and it is they who determine the content of education.

Resistance to this corruption of science is fading in favour of the notion of an innate, intuitively understood ‘higher’ morality.  Only the uncompromising clarity of the consequences of errors and false beliefs leaves engineering as one of the last remaining redoubts of simple evidence based truth.

A primacy of reason and evidence over authority and faith has been the essential foundation for the extraordinary advance in the human condition arising from Western Civilisation over the past few centuries.  However, this is now under existential threat by a rising surge of totalitarian ideology.  In a time of unprecedented prosperity, ease, and comfort, it appears a substantial slice of the populace is unhappy and seeking some greater meaning and purpose in life, albeit something which also requires minimal personal cost and effort. Public virtue signalling by conspicuously approving or disapproving ideas of negligible personal consequence has become epidemic, and there is a rich smorgasbord of such concerns from which to choose.  Environmental threats, various social inequalities and sexual aberrations, especially relating to gender, are currently the fashion.

The idea of an imminent and dire threat to the global climate from fossil fuel emissions and the necessity of a complete shift to wind and solar power is especially favoured. Although there is strong evidence to indicate the threat is far more uncertain and less severe than is being claimed and the limitations of the so-called renewable energy are manifold, reason and evidence rarely ever seem able to induce a committed believer to reconsider their faith. 

Fortunately, in this instance there is another option, and it offers a no-regrets solution that conforms far better to the unfolding reality.  It also affords the added bonus of avoiding a detour into the dustbin of history for those who cannot wake up and catch up.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2021/07/how-warmists-package-panic/

That the latest World Weather Attribution (WWA) post, Rapid attribution analysis of the extraordinary heatwave on the Pacific Coast of the US and Canada June 2021, has twenty-one contributors from prestigious research groups around the world gave it even more piquancy. What a treat! I had not been so flummoxed since reading Alan Sokal’s  scholarly hoax over two decades ago: “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”. 

The WWA post, alas, is neither hoax nor parody, but the real deal: a collaboration — in record time, no less — “to assess to what extent human-induced climate change made this heatwave hotter and more likely”. Whether “human-induced climate change” – whatever that is – was present at all was not on the menu.

So it’s down the rabbit hole of questionable-cause logical fallacies in search of an answer: post hoc ergo propter hoc: ‘after this, therefore because of this’; “since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X”; or if you prefer, cum hoc ergo propter hoc: ‘with this, therefore because of this’.

A rooster crowing before sunrise does not mean it caused the sun to rise. A lot of cocks crowing before a big conference, however, could cause an increase in the flow of money into the Green Climate Fund. Cock-a-doodle-do. Whatever the case, we clearly need a New Law of Climate Change:

Climate alarmism (CA) increases exponentially as time, T, to the next United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP) or atmospheric Armageddon (AA) declines to zero; where CA is measured by the frequency of MSM and social media amplification occurring in a specific period of observation, P.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/07/15/another-global-warming-fact-alarmists-want-buried/

The entire climate change movement has been shady from its beginnings. Data have been hidden, truth has been sacrificed to politics, and hypocrisy and personal interests among its “leaders” have produced a giant credibility deficit. The more we learn, the worse the alarmists look.

Take, for instance, a new report that shows greenhouse gas emissions are not an American or Western problem. They are primarily a Chinese problem. A study from Sun Yat-sen University in China found that more than half of the world’s urban greenhouse gas emissions are generated in only 25 big cities, and 23 of them are located in China.

In other words, if the entire developed world cut its greenhouse gas emissions as activists, politicians, journalists, and celebrities have demanded, nothing would change regarding the climate. (This assumes human carbon dioxide emissions are responsible for warming the planet, which is a load of speculation that’s yet to be proved.)

The paper’s findings remind us of the great plastic scare that’s “inspired” lawmakers to outlaw single-use plastic bags, plastic straws, plastic utensils, and other modern products, in a mass pretense of doing something when in reality they’re doing nothing but inconveniencing people.

The data show ​​90% of ocean plastic pours into the sea from “the top 10 rivers with the highest loads” of plastic debris, according to the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. None are in the U.S., which contributes only about 1% percent of all plastic debris found at sea. Eight of them though are in Asia, while two are in Africa.

While it provides useful information, the Sun Yat-sen study isn’t a shocking revelation. We’ve known for at least a decade that while agitators campaigned to force developed economies to eliminate fossil fuel use, China and India have been busy building hundreds of coal plants in an effort to spread the First World prosperity that the climate alarmists have enjoyed their entire lives. Late last year, the Canadian Energy Centre, affiliated with the Alberta government, reported that as of 2020, 350 coal-fired power plants were under construction worldwide. Seven were in South Korea, another 13 in Japan. But China and India were building 184 and 52 plants, respectively. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/06/bidens-energy-secretary-blames-surfside-collapse-daniel-greenfield/

This is what happens when you have a cult of self-interested hacks like Granholm in charge of policy and narrative.

Granholm, as I detailed earlier, has a ton of conflicts of interest. She presided over the massive looting of Michigan taxpayers by Big Green.

That’s why she is where she is. Her latest performance is as shameless as it is outrageous. 

CNN and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm were ripped by viewers on Tuesday for suggesting that climate change could have been a factor in the tragic building collapse in Surfside, Florida. 

“Given what we know about the changing climate, given that you’ve seen an increase in so called extraordinary tides, and the impact that that can have in areas like south Florida, do you think that climate would have played a role in that building’s collapse?” anchor Erica Hill asked. The segment was accompanied by the chyron, “Could Climate Crisis Have Contributed to Building Collapse?”

“Well, obviously we don’t know fully,” Granholm replied.

We do know fully that Granholm and CNN are defaulting to global warming as the culprit for anything that can’t be blamed on racism or gun violence. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/28/putting-climate-models-on-trial/

It’s hot. A number of North American cities have set record-high temperatures. But this is summer and that’s not indisputable evidence that man’s use of fossil fuels is overheating the planet. No matter what the Democrats say, how much the media nag, and how loudly zealots screech, the issue is not settled. There’s still enough doubt about the entire enterprise to fill the yawning gap between Earth and some far-away galaxy.

If climate models were on trial – and they should be – that doubt would be magnified by a new post from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder, which confirms “models may overestimate warming.”

“Today’s climate models are showing more warmth than their predecessors, forecasting an even hotter future for the same rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide. But a paper published this week highlights how models may err on the side of too much warming: Earth’s warming clouds cool the surface more than anticipated, the German-led team reported in Nature Climate Change,” says CIRES.

Jennifer Kay, a CIRES fellow and an associate professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at Colorado University, says “the increase in climate sensitivity from the last generation of climate models should be taken with a huge grain of salt.”

https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/25/censuring-china-would-help-the-earth-far-more-than-banning-steak-gasoline-and-cow-flatulence/

Every hindrance on industry made in the name of the Earth is a lie if it does not include similar restrictions on imports from countries without laws like ours.

Bashing America is popular on the radical left, but it betrays just how much they really don’t know about the rest of the world. For leftists concerned about the environment, incessantly focusing on the United States is an especially big mental failure. While American stewardship of our land, water, and air have gradually improved over the last 50 years, real degradation of the natural environment has been increasing overseas.

Politicians on the left preach piously about the need to protect the Earth while decrying any sort of restriction on trade with the world’s greatest polluter, China. Anyone who cares about good stewardship of the Earth should consider that trade with China is the United States’ most anti-environmental activity. If you want to be green, you must call for tariffs on China.

Communism’s Anti-Environmental Legacy

China is by far the world’s biggest user of coal, and unlike the west, they make little attempt to clean up the byproducts. They burned more coal than ever in 2020 and so far in 2021, they are on pace to use even more. Pollution in their major cities, where mask-wearing was a thing long before anyone heard of COVID-19, is telling.

Their uncaring attitude even extends to space, like earlier this year when bits of a Chinese rocket were left to fall wherever they might. Even when China pretends to be green, the efforts are an obvious sham. The Chinese Communist Party cares as little for the Earth as they do its inhabitants.

The exact statistics from Beijing cannot be fully trusted, but their environmental record is in line with other Marxist regimes. As China does, the Soviet Union put a premium on rapid industrialization. While an advanced economy offers a better standard of living, the Soviets allowed a possibly worthy end to justify a host of atrocious means. In addition to executions, gulags, and famines, they also wrecked the environment, leaving behind a legacy of pollution Russia is still battling today.

China’s actions are similar. In their drive to rival the United States in economic output and industrial strength, they have committed atrocities against their own people and against the world. Mao Tse-Tung’s Great Leap Forward and its “backyard furnace” program are well-known examples. Instructing every communal farm to build a furnace to increase steel production, the CCP mainly succeeded in forcing farmers with no knowledge of steelmaking to melt down their iron and fuel forges by cutting down trees, only to result in inferior steel of no use to anyone.

China, Not the U.S., Needs Environmental Reform

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2021/06/24/happy_birthday_global_warming

This month, climate change celebrates its 33rd birthday. On June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified that the greenhouse effect had been detected. “Global Warming Has Begun,” The New York Times declared the next day. Indeed, it had. A year older than Alexander the Great when he died, climate change took less than one-third of a century to conquer the West.

Four days earlier, the Toronto G7 had agreed that global climate change required “priority attention.” Before the month was out, the Toronto climate conference declared that humanity was conducting an uncontrolled experiment “whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war.” In September, Margaret Thatcher gave her famous speech to the Royal Society, warning of a global heat trap. “We are told,” although she didn’t say by whom, “that a warming of one degree centigrade per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope,” an estimate that turned out to be a wild exaggeration. Observed warming since then has been closer to one-tenth of one degree centigrade per decade. Two months later, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) held its inaugural meeting in Geneva.

The tendency to catastrophism was present at the outset of global warming. The previous year, at a secretive meeting of scientists that included the IPCC’s first chair, it had been recognized that traditional cost-benefit analysis was inappropriate, on account of the “risk of major transformations of the world of future generations.” The logic of this argument requires that climate change be presented as potentially catastrophic—otherwise, the cure would appear worse than the putative disease.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/fake_science_covid_and_global_warming.html

The scientists guiding our COVID response have been exposed as driven by politics, not science. Dr. Fauci says that attacks on him are attacks on science. We are supposed to believe that persons that cloak themselves with science are infallible and honest. Really?

If one of their fellow scientists departs from orthodoxy, scientists sign petitions denouncing him.  That happened to Dr. Harvey Risch of Yale because he dared to suggest that hydroxychloroquine might be useful for treating COVID.  

Given the COVID example, it is now not so incredible to think that the scientists promoting global warming have ulterior motives. The Texas A&M University atmospheric sciences faculty sign a loyalty oath to global warming. The editor of the academic journal Remote Sensing was forced to resign because he published a perfectly legitimate paper critical of climate models. Cancel culture is strong among the global warming scientists. Every effort is made to cancel dissenters. There is no such thing as an early career scientist skeptical concerning global warming. He could never get a job, even if somehow he could get his Ph.D.  This is not because the science is solid. It’s because orthodoxy is ruthlessly enforced to protect the career interests of the global warming establishment.

In case you are wondering, the name “global warming” was changed to “climate change” because the globe wasn’t warming. The climate is always changing, so the advocates can claim that normal variation is proof of climate change.

Global warming has been thoroughly exposed as a fraud by many authors including highly qualified atmospheric scientists. Yet global warming is still a canonic belief in influential circles. The president wants to greatly expand the development of wind and solar energy in order to prevent global warming. Even if one accepts the junk science of global warming, according to the tenets of global warming theory, wind and solar are completely ineffective for preventing the imaginary crisis,. Straight forward computation shows that wind and solar, exclusive of subsidies, cost 5-10 times more than the natural gas energy they displace. Only gas usage is displaced. The gas generating plants must remain, fully staffed, ready to spring into operation when sun or wind is deficient.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/the_utter_uselessness_of_climate_change_science_.html

As I have learned the hard way, the science behind climate change has no more predictive real-world value than the science behind COVID.  When put to the test, scientists cannot tell you what will happen next year, let alone next century, but that does not stop them from pretending they can.

Three years ago, my new neighbor here on Lake Erie asked if I wanted to go in with him on a seawall.  Having spent thirty summers on the Rust Belt Riviera, I politely declined.  As I explained, on only one occasion during those years had waves lapped against even the base of my heavily vegetated ten-foot bank.  Besides, walls cost a lot of money.

Although I have never trusted it, the science of climate change was on my side.  In 2002, National Geographic published a scary, much cited article titled “Down the Drain: The Incredible Shrinking Great Lakes.”  Someone seems to have pulled the plug on this article, as I learned about it only from reading a 2012 National Geographic article by Lisa Borre that identified the culprit for this shrinkage as climate change, “Warming Lakes: Climate Change and Variability Drive Low Water Levels on the Great Lakes.”

According to Ms. Barre, “Down the Drain” documented “declining lake levels and the potential economic and ecological consequences for the region.”  Ten years later, Barre tells us, “[t]he story continues to unfold, as water levels remain lower than normal.”  Barre’s article features several alarming images of stranded boats and sandy stretches where water once flowed.  On a dozen occasions in the article, Barre cites “climate change” as the likely explanation for the shrinking lakes.

A lengthy 2013 article by Dan Egan of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on the shrinking Great Lakes affirmed that the debate was over.  “This is not a story about climate change,” Egan wrote.  “It is a story about climate changed.”

Citing various climate scientists, Egan described the reason for the shrinking trend this way: “[w]ith little to no protective ice cap, chilled air whooshing over relatively warm water leads to more cold-weather evaporation.  The result of this thermal avalanche triggered by just a tiny bump in air temperatures: the surface of the lake is literally going poof into the sky.”