RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-media-vs-climate-science-11618355224?mod=opinion_featst_pos3

Joe Biden has put a presidential imprimatur on climate change being an existential threat, and he doesn’t mean in the Jean-Paul Sartre sense of man’s search for meaning in an uncomforting universe.

He means the end of humanity, a claim nowhere found in climate science.

This is odd because the real news today is elsewhere. Its movement may be ocean-liner-like, the news may be five years old before the New York Times notices it, but the climate community has been backing away from a worst-case scenario peddled to the public for years as “business as usual.”

A drumroll moment was Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peter’s 2020 article in the journal Nature partly headlined: “Stop using the worst-case scenario for climate warming as the most likely outcome.”

This followed the 2017 paper by Justin Ritchie and Hadi Dowlatabadi asking why climate scenarios posit implausible increases in coal burning a century from now. And I could go on. Roger Pielke Jr. and colleagues show how the RCP 8.5 scenario was born to give modelers a high-emissions scenario to play with, and how it came to be embraced despite being at odds with every real-world indicator concerning the expected course of future emissions.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kamalas-theory-of-everything-11618440600?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

President Biden has handed Vice President Kamala Harris the job of fixing the mess at the U.S.-Mexico border, and she’s no fool. Rather than taking charge of the actual border, she is at pains to say she has been tapped for something far more grand (and vague): to be the Administration’s point person for addressing the “root causes” of emigration from these countries and providing “hope” for the region.

And so on Wednesday she brought together experts on the Northern Triangle nations of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, the home countries of so many migrants. Here’s how the Vice President summed up the issue before her discussion:

“We are looking at issues that have been a long time in the making.  We are looking at issues that relate to the need for economic development, a need for resilience around extreme climate; looking at the fact that this is, in large part—these Northern Triangle countries—a large part of their economic base was agriculture, and then what the severe climate experiences have done in dampening and really harming their ability to have that economic driver in their countries.”

If we understand this word salad, Ms. Harris seems to be saying that the development problem in these countries is that climate change is making agriculture impossible. This in turn is one of the root causes sending people to our Southern border.

Climate has become this Administration’s theory of everything.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-4-11-lessons-in-woke-science-cov

Over time, I have had many posts on the scientific method.  You posit a falsifiable hypothesis. Then you collect and examine the evidence. If the evidence contradicts your hypothesis you must abandon it and move on. Really, that’s the whole thing.

Then there is woke “science,” most visible these days in the arenas of response to the Covid-19 virus and of climate change. Here the principles are a little different. In woke “science” there is no falsifiable hypothesis. In place of that, we have the official orthodox consensus view. The official orthodox consensus view has been arrived at by all the smartest people, because it just seems like it must be right. The official orthodox consensus view must not be contradicted, particularly by the little people like you. Based on the official orthodox consensus view, those in power can take away all your freedom (Covid) and/or transform the entire economy (climate). After all, it’s the “science.”

But what if evidence seems to contradict the official orthodox consensus view? I’m sorry, but as I said the official orthodox consensus view must not be contradicted. Today’s news brings a couple of extreme examples of that, one on the virus front, and the other relating to climate. Both of these are from Europe, so you may not have seen them.

On the virus front, we consider the case of Germany. For some reason, Germany has been relatively lightly hit by the virus, at least so far. According to the latest from Worldometers, Germany has had 940 deaths per million population to date. This compares, for example to 2,593 deaths per million in Czechia (worst of all countries), 1,864 in the UK, and 1,732 in the U.S. But starting in about mid-March, Germany has seen a renewed “surge” of cases. Why? Some might say that the virus is just going to get you sooner or later. But on March 23 German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a new three-week “lockdown” of the strictest variety, which included the forced closing of most stores from April 1 – 5. And with that three-week period about to expire, the website No Tricks Zone (German speakers) reports today that even further extensions are under consideration:

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/04/12/national-geographics-pollution-of-scientific-discourse/

For more than a century, National Geographic has produced a high-quality magazine that is well-grounded in science, history and culture. Lately, however, the editors have allowed agenda-driven articles based on flawed research to slip in between the covers.

Take, for example, the latest piece by science writer Elizabeth Royte, which focused on the work of Jonathan Lundgren, who is portrayed as a hard-working scientist-farmer. He claims that widely used, state-of-the-art neonicotinoid insecticides “may be a threat to mammals,” as well as to bees (an allegation that has been thoroughly debunked). Considering that Royte’s article was a collaboration with the activists at the Food & Environment Reporting Network, it probably shouldn’t be surprising that Lundgren was selected as the story’s hero.

Lundgren became a martyr to the activist community following his departure from a research position at the U.S. Department of Agriculture after bending ethical rules in support of his personal agenda. Now that he’s a private citizen, his crusade against modern pesticides has accelerated.

Lundgren had already established himself as a leading critic of neonicotinoids, the most popular insecticide on the market today. At first, he argued that these chemicals were bad for bees, and so farmers ought to be required to only use “organic” pesticides. Now he’s expanding the claim to also cover all mammals, presumably including humans, based on the “singular experiment” described in the Nat Geo article.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/04/12/are-you-ready-for-bidens-ban-on-gas-powered-cars/

“The late great conservative icon M. Stanton Evans put it best: “Liberals don’t care what you do,” he quipped, “as long as it’s compulsory.”

In the next couple of months, the Environmental Protection Agency will issue new fuel economy standards that could be impossible for carmakers to meet – without going electric. That, at least, is what President Joe Biden’s EPA Administrator Michael Regan is indicating.

In an interview with Bloomberg last week, Regan talked about imposing rules that meet
“the urgency of the climate crisis,” and “did not rule out future emissions requirements that create a de facto ban on new conventional, gasoline-powered automobiles, like an explicit phase-out ordered by California Gov. Gavin Newsom.”

Regan could, for example, require automakers to sell cars that get an average of 70 mpg – something that only electric cars could meet. The most fuel-efficient hybrid on the market tops out at 59 mpg. The most efficient gas-powered car – the tiny Mitsubishi Mirage – gets 39 mpg.

The prospect of a Biden ban on gas-powered vehicles shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. As we noted last year, Biden promised voters he would do just this – impose regulations on automakers that they could only meet by selling electric cars.

As a matter of fact, he promised that on his first day in office, he’d develop “rigorous new fuel economy standards aimed at ensuring 100% of new sales for light- and medium-duty vehicles will be zero emissions.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/do-greens-want-the-world-to-be-like-the-blackout-state/?utm_source=

Electricity is essential to modernity. Prosperity depends on it. So does longevity and health. If you doubt that, ask those in impoverished nations who still don’t have access to reliable electrical power! Indeed, if we could create a continental power grid in Africa — regardless of the means — it would ameliorate so much human misery.

So, why are the world’s cities turning their lights off this weekend — as if electrification is a bad thing? To mark “Earth Hour,” of course. From the Yahoo News story:

Cities around the world were turning off their lights Saturday for Earth Hour, with this year’s event highlighting the link between the destruction of nature and increasing outbreaks of diseases like Covid-19.

Starting off the event, at 8:30 pm the skylines of Asian metropolises from Singapore to Hong Kong went dark, as did landmarks including Sydney Opera House.

The annual event calls for action on climate change and the environment, and this year, organisers said they want to highlight the link between the destruction of the natural world and the increasing incidence of diseases — such as Covid-19 — making the leap from animals to humans.

Good grief, what nonsense. Last year, California went through the wrenching experience of enforced blackouts, in part, because of the formerly Golden State’s stupid environmental policies. Do we really want more of that? Moreover, there is no proof that climate change had anything whatsoever to do with COVID.

https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2021/03/21/nuclear_energy_is_a_reliable_source_that_also_shrinks_emissions_769131.html

If the near total collapse of the Texas energy grid on the morning of February 15th demonstrates anything, it proves the importance of reliable energy production. In short, federal and statepolicies that pick winners and losers among clean energy sources steered both public funding and private investment away from reliable sources. Hopefully, policymakers will learn their lesson from the events in Texas and wake up to the reality that energy security requires a diversity of reliable sources; chief among them is nuclear power.

While the cold snap froze wind turbines and forced many thermal plants offline, nuclear energy production remained remarkably reliable. In fact, reports show that only one half of a single two-reactor facility was forced offline by the cold. What’s more, this outage was an oddity among nuclear plants and was the direct result of bad management and lack of preparation. The outage at the South Texas Nuclear Power Station — one of Texas’ four nuclear plants — accounted for a mere 1,280 of the nearly 30,000 lost megawatts of production that left the state less than five minutes from a catastrophic failure.

While issues of management, preparation, and weatherization are ultimately to blame for the disaster, had the State of Texas invested more heavily in nuclear energy, the impact of the freezing temperatures may very well have been less devastating. 

Nuclear power is particularly well situated to become even more important in the coming decades. The Biden administration’s push for a “carbon pollution-free electricity sector no later than 2035,” practically necessitates increased investment in nuclear energy if we are to maintain a secure, reliable energy grid. The International Atomic Energy Agency explained it best:

“As they can operate at full capacity nearly uninterrupted, nuclear power plants can provide a continuous and reliable supply of energy. This is in contrast to variable renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind, which require back-up power during their output gaps, such as when the sun sets or the wind stops blowing. Nuclear power plants can also operate flexibly to meet fluctuations in energy demand and provide stability to electrical grids, particularly those with high shares of variable renewable sources.”