RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/michael_mann_c

Michael Mann, a climatologist at Penn State University, is the creator of the “hockey stick graph” that appears to show global temperatures taking a noticeable swing upward in the era when humanity has been burning fossil fuels and dumping CO2 into the atmosphere. The graph was first published in 1998, prominently featured in the 2001 UN Climate Report, and formed part of Al Gore’s 2006 movie, An Inconvenient Truth.

The graph’s methodology and accuracy have been and continue to be hotly contested, but Mann has taken the tack of suing two of his most prominent critics for defamation or libel. One case, against Mark Steyn, is called by Steyn likely to end up in the Supreme Court. But another case, against Dr. Tim Ball was decided by the Supreme Court of British Columbia, with Mann’s case thrown out, and him ordered to pay the defendant’s legal costs, no doubt a tidy sum of money. News first broke in Wattsupwiththat, via an email Ball sent to Anthony Watt. Later, Principia-Scientific offered extensive details, including much background on the hockey stick.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/keystone-xl-pipeline-approved-by-nebraska-supreme-court/

The Keystone XL Pipeline’s passage through Nebraska was approved Friday by the state Supreme Court, to the dismay of several Indian tribes and environmental groups.

Nebraska’s high court upheld the state Public Service Commission’s approval of the project despite pushback from landowners, the Sierra Club, and Native American tribes who have promised to protest construction. Opponents at one point were arrested after chaining themselves to a truck transporting a pipe.

President Trump pushed for the controversial project, which would transport up to 830,000 barrels of crude oil a day from Canada through Nebraska to the Gulf Coast, after it was shelved by President Obama. Trump signed a permit in March giving TC Energy, the company behind the project, permission to “construct, connect, operate and maintain” the pipeline in the U.S.

The 36-inch pipe would cover 875 miles in Nebraska, Montana, and South Dakota.

The ruling brings a more than decade-long battle between the energy industry and environmental advocates, landowners, and Native American tribes one step closer to a conclusion. But the project still faces a federal lawsuit in Montana that seeks to block construction. Critics hope they can stall it until after the 2020 election, when a Democratic president could take their side and oppose it.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/20/the-truth-about-solar-power-good-for-virtue-signaling-and-not-much-else/

There’s a great future in solar, the fossil-fuel haters have been telling us for some time. They might be right. One day. But they’ve been saying that for quite a while, and the future continues to be out there … somewhere.

Not so long ago, the French even thought paving their highways with solar panels was a good idea. But “Three Years Later,” says a Popular Mechanics headline from late last week, “the French Solar Road Is a Total Flop.”

How can this be? Solar, we’ve long been told, will save us all.

“It’s too noisy, falling apart, and doesn’t even collect enough solar energy,” says PM.

France’s Sun Road, known locally as the Wattway — what, nobody thought of Voltabahn or Wattastrada? — was an “experiment that seemed ingenious in its simplicity: fill a road with photovoltaic panels and let them passively soak up the rays as cars drive harmlessly above.”

However, its “most optimistic supporters have deemed” it a “failure,” says PM. It couldn’t handle the weight of heavy trucks, the surface made so much racket that the speed limit had to be lowered to 43 mph, and it’s failed to deliver the power that had been promised.

Flaws include poor location (“Normandy is not historically known as a sunny area,” says Popular Mechanics, to which we add, no area is sunny at night); storms (the climate alarmists will blame global warming for their existence); and questionable design (solar panels work when best directed toward the sun, not arranged flat on the ground as a road bed).

https://quadrant

As Greta Thunberg makes her way across the Atlantic in a high-tech racing yacht built of petro-chemical derivatives and guided by banks of power-hungry onboard computers, the sort of people who maintain the UN’s climate powwows are more than opportunities for Third World kleptocrats’ brothers-in-law and professional scaremongers to live large on other people’s money are strewing her foamy progress with the rose petals of adoration.

James Delingpole sees the voyage in a rather different light, not to mention Saint Greta of Thunberg’s appearance on the cover of GQ magazine:

…What kind of man would be remotely interested in buying a mag whose main feature entailed a finger-wagging lecture (one we’ve all heard a gazillion times before) about how, like, totally endangered the planet is and how totally it’s all our fault and how we’ve got to abandon all the things we hold dear — meat; air travel; fast cars; designer threads — in order to stop all the baby polar bears melting?

A lecture, furthermore, from a child who hasn’t finished her schooling, whose frontal lobes haven’t formed, who has no sense of humour, whose every utterance is the second-hand opinion of alarmist grown-ups whose doomsday claims she is completely unequipped to assess?

No kind of man that I know of, that’s for sure. Unless you count tofu-eating, milquetoast, pantywaist, beta, snowflake, self-flagellating, Mom’s-basement-dwelling, environmental science graduates as men….

And that is Delingpole just getting started.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/the_climate_change_crisis_racket.html

Do Democrats really believe in the climate crisis they have dubbed an “emergency,” or is it really just a way to make a quick buck?

Beto O’Rourke has suggested spending $5 trillion over the next ten years investing in climate change initiatives primarily for “vulnerable communities.”  Not to be outdone, Kamala Harris was one of the co-sponsors for the “Green New Deal,” which proposes $700 billion a year in spending on a utopian garden future.  Bernie Sanders, also a loud supporter of the GND, proposes going even farther and banning any new developments that would require fossil fuels.  Cory Booker uses climate change to drum up fear, claiming with an re-introduced bill that the environment is racist (yeah, seriously), and although he hasn’t laid out any specific plans, he has insinuated possibly legislating veganism.

All in all, looking at just the remaining 2020 Democratic candidates’ proposals, the total amounts to $180,000,000,000,000 over a period of ten years, with climate change and health care–for-all mandates taking up the majority of this desired spending.  One hundred and eighty trillion dollars.  Just for perspective, that number is:

More than half the combined wealth of all current wealth in the entire world ($241 trillion by this estimate).
All of the stars in our galaxy multiplied by a giga, or ten to the ninth power.
Astrophysicist Greg Laughlin came up with a formula that the Earth itself is worth around 4.25 quadrillion USD, and Democrats want to spend almost 5% of that just on a handful of their policies.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/calling_out_the_climate_hypocrites.html

We all need to “do our part” for the planet…except for the people telling us to sacrifice our way of life, who ceaselessly jet around the globe telling us we’re doomed

Obvious and repulsive hypocrisy on the part of wealthy and connected people telling us we must sacrifice our standard of living — indeed, our very way of life — finally is being called out.  They want us to bear the entire burden, while their jet-setting lifestyles remain untouched.

The alarmists are getting more and more shrill about their predictions of doom due to the increase in an atmospheric trace gas, CO2, purportedly able to act as the control mechanism for world climate.  (Meanwhile, their climate models, the sole basis for their doomsterism, don’t know how to reckon with the influence of clouds, which have an obvious impact on temperature.)

Even as previous deadlines for doom have come and gone, they issue new and shorter deadlines for us to obey by paying more for electricity, junking our cars, and closing down our factories and transportation systems — ultimately roasting in the summer heat and freezing in the winter cold.

Climate hypocrisy is the only conclusion that can be drawn after just this last weekend, when there were two instances of ultra-prominent doom-sayers generating massive CO2 emissions while warning the rest of us to embrace impoverishment in the name of saving the planet.  The world’s media finally are taking

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-8-17-the-greatest-scientific-fraud-of-all-time-part-xxv

I posted Part XXIV of this series just three days ago, on Wednesday August 14. The subject of that post was the “homogenization” of official historical temperature data, by which the keepers of our official temperature records from ground-based thermometers use the excuses of station moves and instrumentation changes to adjust earlier temperatures downward in order to create an artificial warming trend and make recent temperatures appear to be the warmest ever.

But why would anyone engage in such a stupid game? After all, it’s been a good 50 years since the network of ground-based thermometers was recognized as completely inadequate to the task of keeping track of the earth’s changing climate. This network just had too many unfixable issues that meant that its measurement accuracy was not nearly sufficient for the task at hand. The issues include things like poor coverage of most of the earth’s surface (e.g., the whole southern hemisphere), essentially no coverage of the poles or the oceans, urban heat island issues affecting many of the most important stations, poorly tracked station moves and instrumentation changes, and so forth. These many issues are reasons why the decision was made back in the 1970s to spend some serious money to create a far superior methodology to track not just temperature readings at randomly sited ground stations, but instead to track the bulk heat content of the entire lower troposphere. Since 1979 the U.S. government has spent several billion dollars to build, launch and operate a group of satellites with instrumentation called “microwave sounding units,” designed to measure true average worldwide temperatures of the lower troposphere. Thus, since 1979, the network of ground-based thermometers has been made obsolete. We now have the far more accurate satellite temperature record to guide us.

The satellite-based temperature record is calculated and reported each month by a group at the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) headed by Drs. John Christy and Roy Spencer. On August 1, UAH reported what they call the temperature “anomaly” for the lower troposphere for July: +0.38 deg C (measured as a departure from the average temperature from 1981 to 2010). That made July a relatively warm month, but it was down substantially from the anomaly of +0.47 deg C in June, let alone from the record anomaly of +0.88 deg C that occurred three and a half years ago in January 2016. The drop from the January 2016 record anomaly was a full 0.5 deg C, which is a very large drop considering that the record upward departure from the 1981-2010 mean is only +0.88 deg C.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/16/global-temperature-how-can-we-trust-a-statistic-that-might-not-even-exist/

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is quite certain Earth will be in trouble if the global temperature exceeds pre-industrial levels by 1.5 degrees Celsius or more. But how can anyone know? According to university research, “global temperature” is a meaningless concept.

“Discussions on global warming often refer to ‘global temperature.’ Yet the concept is thermodynamically as well as mathematically an impossibility,” says Science Daily, paraphrasing Bjarne Andresen, a professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, one of three authors of a paper questioning the “validity of a ‘global temperature.’”

Science Daily explains how the “global temperature” is determined.

“The temperature obtained by collecting measurements of air temperatures at a large number of measuring stations around the globe, weighing them according to the area they represent, and then calculating the yearly average according to the usual method of adding all values and dividing by the number of points.”

But a “temperature can be defined only for a homogeneous system,” says Andresen. The climate is not regulated by a single temperature. Instead, “differences of temperatures drive the processes and create the storms, sea currents, thunder, etc. which make up the climate”.

While it’s “possible to treat temperature statistically locally,” says Science Daily, “it is meaningless to talk about a global temperature for Earth. The globe consists of a huge number of components which one cannot just add up and average. That would correspond to calculating the average phone number in the phone book. That is meaningless.”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-8-14-the-greatest-scientific-fraud-of-all-time-part-xxiv

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time is the fraud committed by the keepers of official world temperature records, by which they intentionally adjust early year temperature records downward in order to support assertions that dangerous human-caused global warming is occurring and that the most recent year or month is the “hottest ever.” The assertions of dangerous human-caused global warming then form the necessary predicate for tens of billions of dollars of annual spending going to academic institutions; to the “climate science” industry; to wind, solar and other alternative energy projects; to electric cars; and on and on. In terms of real resources diverted from productive to unproductive activities based on falsehoods, this fraud dwarfs any other scientific fraud ever conceived in human history.

This is Part XXIV of my series on this topic. To read Parts I through XXIII, go to this link.

The previous posts in this series have mostly focused on particular weather stations, comparing the currently-reported temperature history for each station with previously-reported data. For example, the very first post in this series, from July 2013, looked at one of my favorite stations, the one located in Central Park in New York City. Somehow, the early-year temperatures reported for the month of July for that very prominent station had been substantially adjusted downward, thus notably enhancing a previously-slight warming trend: