RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/government_by_equiry_great_way_to_burn_forests.html

Politicians hide behind enquiries — their magic answer to all problems, especially bushfires.

Announcing enquiries give the impression of decisive action.  They generate fees for armies of barristers, lawyers, and bureaucrats, and they provide momentary excitement for the media.

The proposed 2020 Australian Bushfires corrobboree will provide an opportunity to grandstand for the Climate Rebellion Mob, who will get starring roles on ABC/Fairfax.  Big business will probably propose a carbon tax to fight bushfires, while foresters and land owners will hardly be heard.

When the final report is ultimately delivered, the media will be off trumpeting some new climate “emergency” to scare the public.  The expensive new report will be quietly filed with all the others.

We’ve had at least 57 bushfire enquiries since 1939 — about one every two years.  Anyone who bothers to read them will soon deduce what should be done.  Nothing much has changed except that there are more people living in fire-prone zones with no protection, and more forest and private land was locked up with heavy fuel loads.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/14/environmentalists-caused-australias-fires-not-climate-change/

Is this kind of conflagration too convenient to ever try to prevent, insofar as such generates righteous ‘Thunbergian’ green thunder across the world, solving nothing, but further empowering the bureaucrats?

These greenies and the government don’t want to burn s— off. We’re going to lose all our houses and properties because of you useless pieces of garbage will not burn off when its supposed to, through the winter time like we used to do years ago out in the farms up in the mountains; burn all the undergrowth off so everything was safe. But you p—–, you want to have a really good look at this, look at the state you’ve caused here. You are the biggest bunch of useless loser pieces of garbage God ever had the misfortune to blow life into.”

– Australian resident of New South Wales, January 7, 2020

Environmentalist regulations are the reason for this year’s devastating wildfires in Australia. These misguided measures prevented landowners from burning off dry brush. For decades, every year during the Australian winter, across the continent, brushfires were deliberately set to safely burn the undergrowth. Even in pre-colonial times, the aborigines set brushfires to prevent tinder from accumulating.

If you want to watch an authentic, eyewitness account of what really happened—quoted above—you’ll find it 2:56 minutes into “The Truth About the Australian Bushfires,” a January 7 video by the inimitable Paul Joseph Watson. (But watch out. Most of the profanity is edited out of the above transcription.)

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-1-7-climate-change-advocacy-application-of-science-or-religious-cult

Each day you listen to unceasing climate change advocacy, always claiming the mantle of “science.” But you can’t help noticing the steady drumbeat of the standard narratives used by religious cults. The end of days is nigh. You have grievously sinned. Your sin is taking you down the road to damnation. Yet salvation is at hand. But only if you and all humanity immediately repent and follow the gospel of your new climate change priests. If not, the apocalypse of judgment day shall soon be upon you.

Of course these narratives pervade the rhetoric of the fanatics seeking to be messianic leaders of the climate movement, from the Greta Thunbergs to the Al Gores. But over in the more sober organs of elite thought leadership, surely the climate advocacy must be based on actual science. Right?

If you are struggling with that question, perhaps you should take a look at some of the recent coverage of the wildfires in Australia that has appeared in our elite media. Today I will pick on a couple of my usual suspects, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Both of those have featured multiple pieces over the past several days the gist of which is that Australia’s wildfires are the punishment for its grievous sins of failure to follow the true climate change gospel.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/09/politics/trump-proposal-national-environmental-policy-act/index.html

The Trump administration plans to rewrite decades-old regulations to make it easier to build major infrastructure such as pipelines, which would have the effect of relaxing government efforts to fight the climate crisis.

President Donald Trump announced Thursday morning the changes to National Environmental Policy Act rules, which requires federal agencies to assess the environmental impact of projects such as the construction of mines, highways, water infrastructure and gas pipelines.
Trump and administration officials said the changes are necessary to speed up approval for needed infrastructure projects.
“These endless delays waste money, keep projects from breaking ground and deny jobs to our nation’s incredible workers. From day one, my administration has made fixing this regulatory nightmare a top priority,” Trump said at the White House.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler said NEPA rules are a “Frankenstein of a regulatory regime” and “welfare project” for trial attorneys.
The proposal would set time limits on environmental assessments and changes what impacts must be considered, two significant moves that could make it easier to approve projects.
Agencies will no longer have to consider “cumulative” effects of new infrastructure under the new rule, which courts have interpreted as a mandate to study effects of emitting more greenhouse gas emissions, according to The New York Times and The Washington Post, which reported the proposals earlier Thursday. That includes the impacts of climate change, including rising sea levels.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/greta-thunberg-is-a-joke/

Far from being the historic figure she and Time magazine imagine her to be, the climate-change spokeschild is attracting mockery.

‘Poll Finds Most People Would Rather Be Annihilated By Giant Tidal Wave Than Continue To Be Lectured By Climate Change Activists,” the Babylon Bee reported in December, adding in an attached news story that one man’s response to hearing “just 30 seconds of a Greta Thunberg lecture” was to scrawl on the survey form, “Come, sweet death.”

The Bee was, as usual, ahead of the pack, but these days it’s becoming common for even left-leaning comics to mock Thunberg. “Iconic”? “Courageous”? Nah. Just tiresome. Far from being a visionary difference-maker who put it all on the line for her righteous cause, Thunberg is increasingly being derided as just another hyperemotional, tantrum-prone, attention-seeking teen brat.

Joan of Arc became Veruca Salt.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2020/01/alarmed-and-dangerous/

Can we all agree that it is getting hotter? Facts matter and there is no point in agreeing on something that is wrong. However, the evidence seems clear to me. We now have 41 years of satellite data. I think we can rely on Roy Spencer and John Christy at the University of Alabama in ensuring that the NASA satellite measuring program under their purview is throwing up honest data.

That data from the end of 1978 until the end of 2019 shows a trend warming of 0.013 degrees per year; in total 0.54 degrees over the forty-one years. At this rate the temperature would rise by 1.33 over a century. This would represent an acceleration in warming when compared with HADCRUT 4 data (land and ocean) which shows a trend of just 0.90 degrees over the whole period from 1850 to the near end of 2019.

But a degree of caution is warranted in saying that the last forty-one years is a guide to the future. I looked at the forty-one years from the end of 1899 to the end of 1940 (when the global temperature had a local peak) and found using HADRUT data that the temperature had risen by 0.40 degrees. This provided no guide at all to the next forty-one years, when the recorded temperature actually fell by 0.17 degrees. At the same time, to be clear, ‘up’ is the dominant theme since 1850.

Why there is warming is a separate question. Some look to the activity of the sun. I don’t know, I haven’t read anything convincing. Are the larger conglomerations of cities having heat-island effects? I assume so. A scientist friend of mine hypothesizes that world-wide large-scale irrigation may be contributing to water vapor in the atmosphere and thus may be part of the explanation. Again, I don’t know – which is what I would like a lot more people, more qualified than I, to be saying rather than stymieing debate by pretending that everything is certain and settled.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/01/07/climate-hysteria-is-a-backdoor-for-imposing-personal-interests-on-the-public/

The “fight” against global warming is not a selfless movement wholly focused on saving our world but a means for activists to impose their personal desires on the rest of us. They want to shut down farms, stop homebuilding, dictate what we can eat, and are eager to financially reward politically favored groups.

Our first stop on this tour of private crusades is in the United Kingdom, where Ian Boyd, a former chief scientific adviser for the government, is claiming, according to a recent British Guardian report, that “half of the nation’s farmland needs to be transformed into woodlands and natural habitat to fight the climate crisis and restore wildlife.”

“We need a large, radical transformation and we need to do it quickly, in the next decade” said the good professor.

Continued Boyd: “If anybody asked me: ‘If there is one thing I can do to help save the planet, what would it be?’ I would say just eat a lot less meat. It’s the easiest thing to do. I’ve done it.”

And we are therefore supposed to be impressed by his commitment and inspired to follow the great man.

Of course he’s not making the sacrifice alone. Others have chosen to cut back or eliminate their meat intake in the name of saving us from global warming. None were easily found at the last United Nations climate conference in Madrid, where “U.N. bureaucrats chow(ed) down on burgers – while attacking meat.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-martyrdom-of-saint-greta-of-sweden/

So Meat Loaf caused a little kerfuffle this weekend by saying he thought Greta Thunberg had been “brainwashed.”

I don’t know that should be a surprise, but it got me thinking about her again. I have a lot of sympathy for the kid.

For me, it started with seeing her picture. She’s small, slight, even scrawny; her head looks out of proportion to her body. She’s now 17 (as of 3 January) but she still looks childlike, prepubertal, younger than her 14-year-old sister. Frankly, she looks like she’s been in a concentration camp: malnourished over the long term.

Sure enough, reading a little about her, we find that she’s an Asperger’s child (I guess this month that’s now called “high-functioning autism”), she has obsessive-compulsive disorder, she stopped eating for months and still refuses to eat anything but certain specific things, in particular, a dish of pancakes filled with rice — but her OCD keeps her from eating if there’s a sticker or label on the package. She suffers from “selective mutism”, which means basically that there are situations in which she’s unable to speak.

She’s said that this means she only “speaks when she thinks it’s necessary.” This includes speaking to the UN General Assembly, but in interviews, her mother often speaks for her.

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/issues-2020-economic-consequences-fracking-ban-recession

“”A fracking ban, regardless of motivation, is anchored in magical thinking that non-hydrocarbon energy sources could fill a massive global energy shortfall if the U.S. exited the world stage as a major supplier of oil and natural gas. Both fuels will be critical for the global economy for decades to come. The key issue is not whether wind and solar can supply more energy—they can and will—but whether a future American administration would reverse the progress of the last decade in lowering energy prices and enhancing geopolitical stability.”

Reality

The extraction of oil and gas through the techniques of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (colloquially, “fracking”) has catapulted the United States into leadership of the world’s energy markets. Since 2007, fracking has doubled U.S. oil production and increased gas production by 60%. Instead of a major importer, America is rapidly becoming the largest exporter of oil and is expected to supply the majority of net new energy traded on global markets over the next two decades.

If the U.S. imposed a fracking ban, the supply disruption would trigger the biggest oil and natural gas price spikes in history—almost certainly by more than 200%—which would, in turn, tip the world into recession. Even the expectation that a ban could be enacted would destabilize markets. U.S. imports and the trade imbalance would soar, as would consumers’ spending on energy. To keep the lights on, America would have to nearly double the quantity of coal burned, as well as import up to 1 million barrels of oil per day for dual-fueled power plants that would lose access to natural gas.