RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/12/gore

When asked Sunday about his 2006 prediction that we would reach the point of no return in 10 years if we didn’t cut human greenhouse gas emissions, climate alarmist in chief Al Gore implied that his forecast was exactly right.

“Some changes unfortunately have already been locked in place,” he told ABC’s Jonathan Karl.

“Sea level increases are going to continue no matter what we do now. But, we can prevent much larger sea level increases. Much more rapid increases in temperature. The heat wave was in Europe. Now it’s in Arctic. We’re seeing huge melting of the ice there. So, the warnings of the scientists 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, unfortunately were accurate.”

Despite all this gloom, he’s found “good news” in the Democratic presidential field, in which “virtually all of the candidates are agreed that this is either the top issue or one of the top two issues.”

So what has Gore been predicting for the planet? In his horror movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” he claimed:

Sea levels could rise as much as 20 feet. He didn’t provide a timeline, which was shrewd on his part. But even if he had said 20 inches, over 20 years, he’d still have been wrong. Sea level has been growing for about 10,000 years, and, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, continues to rise about one-eighth of an inch per year.

Storms are going to grow stronger. There’s no evidence they are stronger nor more frequent.

Mt. Kilimanjaro was losing its snow cap due to global warming. By April 2018, the mountain glaciers were taking their greatest snowfall in years. Two months later, Kilimanjaro was “covered by snow” for “an unusually long stint. But it’s possible that all the snow and ice will be gone soon. Kilimanjaro is a stratovolcano, with a dormant cone that could erupt.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/06/a-cold-dark-

The Democrats’ Green New Deal legislation was hailed as a smart, forward-looking effort to rid the world of this meddlesome carbon dioxide that is overheating the planet. But it is simply a costly and overburdening fantasy, as Sweden is learning with its own attempt to “curb global warming.”

The Sierra Club called Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s GND “a big, bold transformation of the economy to tackle the twin crises of inequality and climate change.” (Give the gang credit for obliquely admitting the “fight” against global warming is driven by a desire to take over the economy.)

Sen. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat and ancient gladiator, has compared the GND to defeating the Nazis and putting men on the moon.

Both Democratic Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Amy Klobuchar found it to be “aspirational.”

Al Gore, famous for being a vice president and climate Paul Revere, who should be infamous for lying about global warming, has said he is “strongly in favor of” the GND.

More reasonable thinkers less concerned about appearing hip than getting to the truth have determined the GND would cost up to $93 trillion over its first decade. That’s quite a bit of money for a problem that might not exist.

And, as Sweden is learning, there are not only excessive costs incurred by “going green,” there are practical problems, as well, in particular energy shortages.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/opinion-post/climate-

“There is a notable disparity between the sea-rise data sets favoured by catastropharian climateers and actual observations. What those numbers highlight most of all is the distorting green lens through which one-eyed advocates choose to see that which exists only in their doom-laden imaginations.”

The splendiferous east coast of Tasmania never ceases to please with all its myriad landscapes. So it was a little discombobulating to recently pass a sign planted hard against the flow of traffic following the serpentine track that threads the coastal communities, proclaiming ‘Climate Change Is Killing the Planet’. As it was only about eight degrees at the time, I was reasonably confident I would make my destination before something akin to the fate of the death star transpired and, thankfully, I was right.

It did however get me to thinking how corrupt the science of the carbon cycle has truly become in the hyperbolic atmosphere of climate politics. You would likely need a temperature increase in excess of 100 degrees in order to extinguish all life, including prokaryotes, from the biosphere — and even then creatures at depth, both aquatic and terrestrial, would probably find safe harbour. Not to disappoint my sign-erecting fellow Taswegian, but his or her prophecy can’t possibly be achieved through carbon emissions alone. Furthermore, the complete death of the planet, depending on how you might define that, may require extinguishing all its iron and siliceous substrate into stardust, a mighty feat even for that arch villain, CO2.

Wishing to stay open minded about what 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide had inflicted on the planet, I was intrigued when it was announced recently that what has been a great example of citizen science orchestrated under the banner of the Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre (ACECRC) was to be more or less abandoned, possibly due to being unhelpful to the narrative that accompanies climate change dogma. Known as TASMARC (Tasmanian Shoreline Monitoring & Archiving Project), this admirable public access project,
with dedicated volunteers at the dune face of data collection, commenced tracking the gradient of 16 beaches around the Apple Isle in 2005, the object being to measure ‘the shoreline and the way it is responding to storm events and sea-level rise.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/washington-d-c-conference-exposes-climate-delusion/

The new president of The Heartland Institute, Frank Lasee, was not exaggerating when he described the 13th International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC13) as “the most important climate change and energy event of the year.”

Speaking about the July 25 conference held at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., Lasee explained, “ICCC13 demonstrated that the Climate Delusion is not based on sound science or economics. It is wasting trillions of dollars and threatening our way of life, while propping up the drive for world socialism.”

This was a common theme throughout ICCC13. The Climate Delusion, relying on bad science and misguided economics, is damaging America and threatening the world.

The conference sold out with over 300 attendees, launched with a translated video address by Dominik Kolorz, a Polish trade union activist and the chairman of the Śląsko-Dąbrowski Solidarity, the largest regional union structure in Poland. Kolorz could not be at the conference because he had to support union workers in a protest against the closing of furnaces in one of the largest employers in Śląsko, a major steel plant, due to misguided European Union climate policy. “You can see that the effects of climate policy, already noticeable, can be very dramatic in a social context,” said Kolorz. “We do not deny that we are in a period of global warming. But … there is no scientific consensus, in our opinion, about human responsibility for climate change…”

Kolorz expressed strong concern about the long-term consequences of UN climate policy, stating, “what the European Union proposes to us in the frame of climate policy is…a liquidation of industry operating in Poland. It’s not just about banning the coal. It’s not only the elimination of conventional energy, but it is really about the decarbonizing of the industry in Poland but also in Europe, we would deal with the liquidation of the metallurgical, steel and cement industries…What can happen in Poland if we stick to the dogma of the climate policy—we will lose about half a million jobs in the next 20 years.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/fossil-fuel-divestment-versus-institutional-neutrality-a-north-carolina-test-case/

An important test of “institutional neutrality” — a pillar of campus free speech — is now playing out in North Carolina, where the University of North Carolina Asheville (UNCA) recently chose to divest a portion of its endowment from companies selling “fossil fuels” (coal, oil, and natural gas).

Institutional neutrality means that universities should avoid taking official political stands at the institutional level, such as divestment from fossil fuels, since such actions tend to pressure faculty and students holding contrary views into silence. This is particularly true for public universities such as UNCA, for they belong to every citizen of the state.

What makes the UNCA test case especially important is that two years ago North Carolina passed HB 527, one of the first comprehensive campus free-speech laws in the country. HB 527 not only affirms institutional neutrality as a foundational principle of campus free speech at UNC schools, it mandates that an annual report by a committee of the UNC Board of Governors (which oversees the entire state university system) weigh in on any “difficulties, controversies, or successes in maintaining a posture of administrative and institutional neutrality with regard to political or social issues.”

The question now is how the annual report, due in September, will handle this decision by a public university to throw in its lot with the fossil-fuel-divestment movement. More broadly, the question is whether the UNC Board of Governors will act to halt and reverse this clear violation of institutional neutrality by UNC Asheville. Students and administrators at UNCA intend their move to pressure the entire UNC system to divest. That means the UNC Board of Governors’ response to UNCA’s divestment bandwagon will have an enormous impact on the survival of institutional neutrality at every public campus in the state.

Students and faculty at public universities have every right to take whatever stand they like on issues like fossil-fuel divestment, climate change, and the Green New Deal. It is precisely the neutrality of public universities at the official institutional level that supports and guarantees the ability of individual faculty and students to freely speak their minds on these issues. Public universities shouldn’t have an official political line. We wouldn’t tolerate a public university endorsing Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, or Donald Trump for president. Nor should a public university throw its official institutional weight behind a thoroughly political movement whose aims are the subject of active, widespread, and unresolved public debate, particularly when state law cites the principle of institutional neutrality as an essential component of campus free speech.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/07/29/will-the-global-warming-hysterics-never-tire-of-being-wrong/

Prince Charles’ recent pronouncement that we have only 18 months to save the planet from man-made global warming was followed up by a BBC report telling an identical tale. (Is there something in the Thames?) Nothing new here, though. The same wild, irresponsible guesses have been made for decades, and so far none has been right.

“Now it seems, there’s a growing consensus that the next 18 months will be critical in dealing with the global heating crisis, among other environmental challenges,” BBC environment correspondent Matt McGrath wrote last week with great certitude.

“Observers recognize that the decisive, political steps to enable the cuts in carbon to take place will have to happen before the end of next year.”

The year 2020, McGrath continued, “is a firm deadline” because “one of the world’s top climate scientists … eloquently addressed” the danger in 2017.

We’ve had “firm” deadlines before. Nothing happened. But we’re supposed to believe this one is really “firm.” That it can’t be ignored. Forget all those previous predictions of doom, they tell us, because this time they have it right. And maybe the window is not even 18 months. Those grand ruminators at Think Progress are sure we have only 14 months.

While the alarmists are busy today foretelling the coming climate disaster, they’ve conveniently forgotten the encyclopedic catalog of failed predictions. They just delete them from memory much the way that Moscow erased historical figures whose existence reflected poorly on the Soviet way, or displeased the thugs in power.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-7-24-the-real-data-on-energy-usage

Undoubtedly you read at least some organs of the mainstream media. Perhaps your go-to source is the New York Times, or maybe the Washington Post, or Bloomberg News, or The Economist, or maybe Reuters. And therefore you have the strong impression that the world is well on its way to a huge energy transition, away from the dirty fossil fuels of the past, and toward the low carbon and renewable energy of the future. Or maybe you steer clear of all of those propagandists, but you still have the same impression. Perhaps you are getting this impression from the politicians running places like New York, or California, or Germany, or Denmark, or South Australia, or Spain, or any of many other holier-than-thou jurisdictions that have announced the imminent end of their fossil fuel use. Anyway, with so many people so loudly proclaiming the approaching end of fossil fuels, surely by now fossil fuel use must have begun its rapid drop toward oblivion.

But where can you get actual information on world energy consumption of each type, and of how it is changing over time? One quite comprehensive source is the Statistical Review of World Energy, put out each year by the BP oil company. The 2019 version, covering statistics through 2018, just came out on June 11. It was covered at Watts Up With That by Larry Hamlin on July 23.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York waitress-turned-congresswoman, has a grand scheme to make the US carbon-free by 2030 — a project so costly and so far removed from reality that it has naturally drawn the gushing support of left-leaning editorialists and green-brained columnists. There is quite a bit more to it however than simply making the weather behave itself.”

Small children are prone  to say things that are very true but best not voiced in polite company. There’s been a similar embarrassment described in the Washington Post last week. It involves the chief of staff to one of the so-called fresh faces of the Democrat Party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, known for headline writers’ convenience as “AOC”. The 29-year-old New York bartender last year became the youngest-ever US congresswoman and maybe also the most socialist.  

The progressive media has built her up in half a year to household-name status. She was on the cover of Time as “The Phenom” and twinned in a Vanity Fair cover story in June with veteran Democrat Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker. Vanity Fair saw AOC as a “beacon of hope” and “youthful, charismatic and uncompromising”.

She continues in the spotlight with the “Justice Democrats Squad” of four black/brown congresswomen claiming last week to be victims of Trump’s racist rhetoric. Actually the Squad itself in recent weeks had been hurling racist insults at less-left Democrat colleagues, even including whistle-clean Nancy Pelosi.

AOC espouses a Green New Deal involving a hundred-trillion dollar mobilization of the US nation to go fully green by 2030. Her ten-year emissions makeover outclasses any two of Stalin’s five-year-plans. Adding to the Soviet ambience, AOC says her Deal would be implemented by groups including “worker cooperatives”. You might think, “Why waste time and ink on this?” Why, because left Democrats and the US media are mainstreaming her.  Five Democrat presidential candidates sponsored her Deal (including Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren) and AOC claims a total of nine candidates back it.