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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

Army Prioritizes Climate Change as ‘Serious Threat’ to National Security By Caroline Downey

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/army-prioritizes-climate-change-as-serious-threat-to-national-security/

In a memo released Friday, the U.S. Army announced that it now classifies climate change as a “serious threat to U.S. national security interests and defense objectives.” The statement subsequently signaled the military’s intention to prioritize combatting climate change with new risk analyses, threat projections, installation and natural-resource planning, supply-chain procurement considerations, and general strategy.

The statement added that the effects of climate change can induce “humanitarian disasters, undermine weak governments and contribute to long-term social and economic disruptions.”

“The Army has a lot to be proud of, yet there is a lot of work to continue to operate efficiently across extreme weather and climate conditions,” the memo read.

To prepare for and mitigate the fallout from the Earth’s warming, the Army plans to conduct “in-depth assessments of likely climate change effects on the Army’s worldwide missions,” while also working to “lead the way in technology development for tactical vehicles that balances increased capability with decreased climate impacts.”

The Army’s policy change comes after the Biden administration signaled its commitment to fighting the climate crisis as a national-security threat. In April, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III called climate change an “existential threat.”

Climate Lawsuits Take a Hit The Supreme Court makes it harder for cities to duck federal courts.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-lawsuits-take-a-hit-11621288621?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

State and local governments have been trying to extract tens of billions of dollars from fossil-fuel producers for contributing to climate change. But a 7-1 majority of the Supreme Court on Monday decided an important procedural question in BP v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore that could put a lid on these suits.

Baltimore has sued some two dozen fossil-fuel companies for creating a “public nuisance.” It argues that the production, sale and promotion of carbon energy has increased greenhouse gas emissions, thereby contributing to climate change that will cause “property damage, economic injuries and impacts to public health.” To describe its argument as a legal stretch is an understatement.

A similar effort by states to shake down fossil-fuel power generators already failed in federal court (AEP v. Connecticut) in 2011. The Supreme Court ruled that corporations can’t be sued for their greenhouse emissions under federal common law since the Clean Air Act delegates the regulation of CO2 emissions to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Baltimore and other cities are now trying to sneak lawsuits through state courts where judges aren’t bound by AEP. The Supreme Court on Monday made this end-run much harder by ruling on a complicated procedural question regarding federal appellate court review of federal judges’ remand orders to state courts.

Facebook’s ‘Fact Checks’ Suppress Debate The social-media site seeks to discredit a review of my book on climate science. By Steven E. Koonin

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-fact-checks-suppress-debate-11621194172?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

This paper published Mark Mills’s review of “Unsettled,” my book on climate science, on April 25. Eight days later, 11 self-appointed “fact checkers” weighed in with a 4,500-word critique on the website ClimateFeedback.org. Facebook is waving that fact check as a giant red flag whenever the review appears in anyone’s feed.

By branding Mr. Mills’s review with “very low scientific credibility,” the company directs its billions of users to a website that claims to discredit the review and, by direct implication, my book. This action adds to the growing suppression of open discussion of climate complexities.

ClimateFeedback bills itself as “a worldwide network of scientists sorting fact from fiction in climate change media coverage.” Its modus operandi is to label necessarily brief media statements as misleading or inaccurate, often because they lack context. While acknowledging that “global crop yields are rising,” for instance, they add the untestable claim that yields might have been greater absent human-caused climate change. The gang of enforcers who “fact checked” Mr. Mills’s review included professors from Stanford, UCLA and MIT.

The oddest element of Facebook’s action is that the “fact check” doesn’t challenge anything I wrote in “Unsettled,” but rather provides “context” for Mr. Mills’s statements.

Questioning ‘the Science’ on Climate Change Robert Murray

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/05/questioning-the-science-on-climate-change/

What is it about “climate change” that makes it so different from every other issue? It divides families, friendships and political parties, it has brought about media and campus censorship and classroom propaganda. Minds close over, spooked. To question any aspect is the eighth deadly sin. “Deniers” are sub-human.

About anything else, research that suggests that a looming catastrophe might not be as bad as at first predicted would be welcome news indeed. Some of the issues in question are highly technical, but most are not that difficult.

This is a layman’s attempt—not even particularly sceptical—to explain them and suggest a way ahead. The nub of it is the long-term impact of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There are respectable scientific arguments about it, as with many a complex problem, but politics, misconceptions and side issues are more and more clouding things over.

The “official” science comes from the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The main criticism is that it over-estimates future global warming—an argument easy to state but technical in detail and now smothered in irrelevance. In other words, some experts think “the science” is wrong.

So far, after thirty years of operation, the global warming the IPCC has predicted has been at the lower end of the “scenarios” of its mathematical modelling. There are respectable arguments—as there have been from the start—that the IPCC’s theories do not work out in practice.

The IPCC is effectively a global climate science monopoly, with unique power to estimate long-term climate trends and ways to mitigate them, such as the Paris Accords. It has access to a budget of billions, while sceptical scientists have barely peanuts for research and publicity. In Australia they are volunteers.

The Green New Deal’s Shock Troops

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/14/the-green-new-deals-shock-troops/

The news didn’t last long in the cycle. But it deserved more attention. Americans don’t need an army of indoctrinated global warming zealots lecturing, hectoring, and harassing them over their insignificant carbon dioxide emissions. They should be aware of what their “superiors” in Washington want to unleash on them.

As reported May 5 by Fox News, “Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other progressive lawmakers are calling for the creation of a 1.5 million-strong group of civilians to work on federally funded projects addressing climate change as part of their sweeping Green New Deal legislation.”

This $10 billion show, which President Joe Biden wants as part of his “infrastructure” plan, would be called the Civilian Climate Corps, its foot soldiers trained to work with community groups on projects intended to “reduce carbon emissions, enable a transition to renewable energy, build healthier and more resilient communities, implement conservation projects with proven climate benefits, and help communities recover from climate disasters.”

We can imagine the “training” the members will receive. They won’t be learning the Boy Scouts’ oath, studying the great works of this nation’s founders, or pledging to uphold the Constitution. They’ll be told that human activity is overheating the planet. That American and Western lifestyles are unsustainable and must be reeled in by government. That environmental injustices have to be rectified by policies that will hurt the middle and lower classes. That the only way to stop the march of global warming will be the enactment of the Democrats’ socialist wish-list legislative agenda.

New Scientific Scandal Shaking The Climate Alarm Industry Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-5-9-new-scientific-scandal-shakin

As readers at this site are well aware, the field of climate “science” and alarmism is subject to an extraordinary degree of orthodoxy enforcement, where all information supporting the official narrative gets enthusiastically promoted, while all information disagreeing with the official narrative gets suppressed or attacked. For just one recent example of the latter, see the Wall Street Journal editorial in the current weekend edition reporting on a bogus Facebook “fact check” of the Journal’s recent review of Steven Koonin’s new book “Unsettled.”

In this context, an article just out on May 6 in the journal Science is truly remarkable. The article is titled “Does ocean acidification alter fish behavior? Fraud allegations create a sea of doubt.” It has the byline of Martin Enserink, Science’s international news editor. Science has a long history of publishing every sort of climate alarmism, and of being an unreceptive forum for anything expressing any sort of skepticism, let alone alleging fraud in claims of climate alarm. Something serious must be going on here.

To get the significance of the recent developments, it is important to understand where assertions of “ocean acidification” fit into the field of climate alarm. The use of fossil fuels by humans generates CO2 that goes into the atmosphere. CO2 is a “greenhouse gas,” and many models project that increasing levels of CO2 will warm the atmosphere in some significant amount. Activists then assert many harmful effects from the hypothetical warming — not just hot days and heat waves, but everything from melting ice, rising seas, droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, you name it. All of these asserted effects arise from the initial step of atmospheric warming.

But what if the warming doesn’t happen, or turns out to be far less than the fear-mongers have projected? That’s where “ocean acidification” comes in. “Ocean acidification” is the one allegedly harmful effect of rising atmospheric CO2 that does not stem initially from warming temperatures. Instead, the idea is that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere will somewhat increase the level of CO2 dissolved in the oceans, which in turn will lower the pH of the oceans. How much? Some projections suggest at the extreme end that average ocean pH may go down from a current 8.1 or so, all the way to maybe about 7.75 by 2100. If you know anything about this subject, or maybe took high school chemistry, you will know that pH of 7 is neutral, lower than 7 is acidic, and above 7 is basic. Thus a pH of 8.1 is not acidic at all, but rather (a little) basic; and a pH of 7.75 is somewhat less basic. The fact that anyone would try to apply the scary term of “ocean acidification” to this small projected shift toward neutrality already shows you that somebody is trying to manipulate the ignorant.

And besides, what’s wrong with a pH of 7.75? After all, pH of 7 is completely neutral — even if ocean pH went all the way down to that level (and not even the worst alarmists are claiming that it will), how could that possibly be harmful to any living thing?

Automakers Cave To Biden’s Electric Car Dreams, And Ignore Their Own Customers

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/07/automakers-cave-to-bidens-electric-car-dreams-and-ignore-their-own-customers/

When President Joe Biden declared that he wants all cars sold to be “zero-emission” by 2035, carmakers didn’t raise a peep of protest. Worse, they are starting to fall in line with promises to go all-electric, even though the vast majority of consumers don’t want these cars.

General Motors made a big splash earlier this year when it promised to sell only electric cars by 2035.

“General Motors is joining governments and companies around the globe working to establish a safer, greener and better world,” CEO Mary Barra said days after Biden was sworn in. “We encourage others to follow suit.”

Honda later announced plans to make only battery-powered cars by 2040. Volvo said it will go all-electric by 2030. Ford said in February that it would invest at least $22 billion worldwide in the next few years to build electric vehicles.

These announcements were all greeted with Hosannas from the left (even though the overall environmental benefits of “zero-emission” cars is far from clear). But there’s one thing missing from all this cheering. The consumer.

These companies are throwing billions of dollars into researching and developing a product that consumers overwhelmingly reject.

Despite massive taxpayer rebates to electric car buyers, a multitude of subsidized recharging stations, and the constant talk about how electric automobiles will save the planet, sales of plug-ins accounted for a tiny 2% of all cars sold in the U.S. last year. Domestic sales of Chevy’s gas-guzzling Silverado pickups alone last year doubled the combined sales of electric cars from all makers.

Has Climate Change Become a Tool of Social Control? By Rupert Darwall

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2021/04/27/has_climate_change_become_a_tool_of_social_control_774643.html

A puzzle of contemporary society is the broad acceptance by young people – Millennials and Generation Z – of their lot. True, they haven’t been conscripted to fight an inglorious war as the early Baby Boomers were in Vietnam. But in many other respects, they have strong grounds for feeling shortchanged. Economies in the developed world haven’t boomed, as they did in the decades immediately after the Second World War. The expansion that started in the 1980s sputtered after the dotcom bust at the turn of the century. The economy glowed only thanks to a central bank-stoked housing boom that led to the economic equivalent of a cardiac arrest in the 2007-08 financial crisis.

 “The one experience Millennial Americans all share is that our early adult years have been dominated by an economy that has failed us over and over again,” writes Joseph Sternberg in The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials’ Economic Future. The jobs market has been hollowed out as routine jobs are automated. Research shows that it pays to be old – the earnings gap between older and younger male workers widened from 11% in 1970 to an astonishing 41% in 2011. Declining rates of homeownership put the primary vehicle of wealth accumulation increasingly beyond reach of Generation Rent, burdened with $1.4 trillion of student debt. Earlier generations experienced recessions, but none since the Great Depression matches the Great Recession, notes Sternberg. “The economic recoveries weren’t as slow. The underlying transformation in the labor market wasn’t as dramatic. And the previous generations weren’t so indebted, so house-poor, so haunted by the prospect of substantial tax bills to come.”

Add the pandemic to that list. For Gen Z, it is even more of a disaster. Most Millennials – the youngest now in their mid-twenties – had some chance to get onto what remains of the jobs ladder. Students are finding their college years turned into a virtual experience of remote learning and social isolation, their introduction to adulthood suspended indefinitely. Has any generation been treated so shabbily by its elders? Covid-19’s steep age gradient means that young people are least at risk from serious illness but are punished most by lockdowns and social distancing. There is low-level, covert non-compliance, but signs of a youth rebellion are few. Mask mandates are broadly obeyed. The justification for lockdowns is unchallenged except by a handful of crotchety old Boomers. Street protests in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd had the imprimatur of public-health officials and the approval of cultural and political elites, which perhaps offers a clue.

Biden’s ‘Green New Deal’: Glitter, nonsense, and deception We need to rein in extreme, unattainable policies and seek realistic solutions by Andrew I. Fillat and Henry I. Miller

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/bidens-green-new-deal-glitter-nonse

Having spent our adult lives involved with and supporting science and technology, it is frustrating and infuriating to endure uninformed politicians, pundits, and ideologues bloviating about the climate, to say nothing of the pointless dithering about whether we should be referring to climate change or to the climate crisis. But the genuine catastrophe-in-waiting is that the policies they advocate will irreparably damage the economy while leaving the climate essentially unaffected.

The United States’s small global share of greenhouse gas emissions, which is about 15% and declining due to the increased use of natural gas, means that domestic improvements can have only a minimal effect. The underlying premise of the Biden administration’s energy policy is that by the U.S. setting an example of enlightenment and probity, other nations, especially China and India, will elevate altruism above compelling self-interests and follow suit.

Thereby, the advocates of radical climate policies, whether President Joe Biden’s or the more extreme Green New Deal progressives, are prepared to exact an enormous price from the public in pursuit of what amounts to quixotic virtue signaling, a case of tilting at windmills, so to speak.

Many aspects of the Left’s climate policies are steeped in delusion and misleading propaganda. Advocates focus on largely discredited apocalyptic projections about the extent and impact of climate change and offer only favored options for a shift to renewable and clean energy that fly in the face of evidence.

Data from many sources show clearly that solar and wind, the green energy sources in vogue, have costs and disadvantages that are conveniently hidden, while the only readily available new source of clean energy, nuclear power, is demonized. We will summarize below our two lengthy analyses of these issues that appeared here and here.

Biden’s Catastrophic Global Warming Policies If you thought last year was bad, wait until these proposed policies tear through the economy. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/bidens-catastrophic-global-warming-policies-bruce-thornton/

At the “virtual world summit” President Biden announced that he’s committing this country to cut CO2 emissions to half of 2005 levels by 2030. Just trying to reach this ambitious goal will require severely damaging the economy in order to achieve something that won’t stop the alleged catastrophic effects of a rise in temperature that may or may not happen.

If you thought last year’s debacle wrought by self-proclaimed “experts” was bad, just wait until these proposed policies tear through the economy. Once more, the party that “follows the science” will wreak havoc by mistaking a dubious hypothesis for a scientific fact.

As the Wall Street Journal writes, previous such policies have done little to stop what are in fact relatively slight increases in global temperatures. For one obvious thing, whatever suicidal Western nations do, China and India, the world’s first and third biggest emitters, will undo. Even “climate czar” John Kerry admitted that whatever reductions in emissions we accomplish, it will have little impact on warming unless China and India reduce theirs­­––something both countries refuse to do, having made it clear that they will not follow the West into economic suicide.

But didn’t China sign the Paris Accord? Yet under that “parchment barrier,” China is not obligated even to start reducing its emissions until 2030, the same year our emissions are supposed to be drastically reduced. Can nobody in the current administration calculate the huge economic advantage that will accrue to China in ten years? Meanwhile, the communist regime continues to build dirty coal-fired energy plants. And, does anybody believe China’s empty promises, given their record of violating the terms of every agreement it signs with the West, such as WTO and WHO?

Furthermore, that’s just one roadblock. The policies necessary to reduce emissions by the Paris Accord’s 26-28% that Biden and the green lobby want, will be devastating to the economy. As the Journal reports, replacing carbon-based energy with so-called “renewables” would alone ruin the economy, while only lowering global temperatures by a scant 0.17% Celsius, nowhere near the 1.5 degrees that will supposedly stop the predicted global catastrophe. In any case, most of the reduction that occurred during the Obama years was due to natural gas replacing coal––a dividend of the fracking revolution, not Obama’s onerous regulations. So, of course, Biden has banned fracking on public lands, stopped the Keystone pipeline, and continued the animus against nuclear power.