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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

A Carefully Miseducated Generation of Climate Warriors Dave Pellowe

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/03/a-carefully-miseducated-generation-of-climate-warriors/

School students are being recruited and organised to strike from school tomorrow, 15 March. The website, schoolstrike4climate.com claims the purpose is “to tell our politicians to take our futures seriously and treat climate change for what it is – a crisis.”

After careful analysis of historical trends and with far more reliability than a United Nations’ “scientific consensus”, I’m prepared to boldly predict the political climate will not be warmed or cooled one-tenth of a degree by kids striking. Like all prophets of the apocalypse, the stamping and tramping of their furious little feet will have little impact in and on the real world. The Labor-Greens coalition will still be environmental extremists denying developing nations cheap, reliable electricity and aspiring to deliver Australians intermittent electricity at any cost. The Coalition will still present as lukewarm environmental realists while wooing voters from the centre-left with half measures of the Greens’ full-strength moonbattery.

Real grownups will observe there’s a reason schoolkids aren’t allowed to get married, sign contracts, fight for their nation, get a driver’s licence, drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, or vote on matters of national importance. Their developing brains aren’t mature enough to weigh the balance of evidence, consider all the consequences and make objectively rational decisions. They can barely cross the road safely or wear clothes properly. They are important, but they are children – undeveloped clumps of cells, if you prefer.

On Climate, the Kids Are All Wrong And a band of ignorant brats shall lead them: Some things have hardly changed since 1212. By Paul H. Tice

https://www.wsj.com/articles/on-climate-the-kids-are-all-wrong-11552430379

In the summer of 1212, thousands of divinely inspired young people from across Catholic France and Germany took off to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims. None made it to the Holy Land. Many died along the way or were sold into slavery. As military campaigns go, the Children’s Crusade was a disaster. Yet environmental activists and politicians are adopting the same “a child shall lead them” strategy to push their climate change agenda and its latest incarnation, the Green New Deal.

Youth-oriented climate groups have proliferated in the past few years, helped by logistical support from the United Nations. With earnest names such as iMatter Youth Movement, Zero Hour and Youth vs. Apocalypse, these outfits publicly lecture world leaders and march for the cause. This Friday has been designated “a global day of action” on which thousands of students world-wide are expected to strike—otherwise known as cutting class.

A few of these youth groups are highly litigious, bringing lawsuits on the novel theory of “intergenerational equity.” Most cases have been dismissed, although some continue to work their way through the courts, including Juliana v. U.S., filed in 2015 by Our Children’s Trust.

Video Greenpeace Founding Member: ‘The Whole Climate Crisis Is Not Only Fake News, It’s Fake Science’ By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/video/greenpeace-co-founder-the-whole-climate-crisis-is-not-only-fake-news-its-fake-science/

On Tuesday morning, Patrick Moore, a founding member of the environmentalist organization Greenpeace, slammed climate alarmists for promoting a fake emergency. President Donald Trump tweeted his remarks shortly after he made them.

“In fact, the whole climate crisis as they call it is not only fake news, it’s fake science. There is no climate crisis,” Moore, author of the book Confessions of a Greenpeace Drop-Out: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist, told “Fox & Friends” Tuesday morning.

“There is weather and climate all around the world. And, in fact, carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life,” Moore said. “That’s where the carbon comes from in carbon-based life, which is all life on land and in the sea. And not only that, a little bit of warming would not be a bad thing for myself being a Canadian and the people in Russia wouldn’t mind a little couple of degrees warmer either.”

The Greenpeace founding member did not deny that climate change is real, but he insisted that it is not a crisis.

“Yes, of course, climate change is real. It’s been happening since the beginning of time. But it’s not dangerous and it’s not made by people,” Moore insisted. CONTINUE AT SITE

Kamala Harris: ‘It Is a Fact That We Can Change Human Behaviors’ on Climate Change By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/video/kamala-harris-it-is-a-fact-that-we-can-change-human-behaviors-on-climate-change/

On Sunday, 2020 presidential hopeful Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) again revealed her tyrannical desire to use government to “change human behaviors” on climate change. Since Harris has endorsed the shoddy and absurd Green New Deal concocted by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), this is a truly radical declaration.

“It is a fact that we can change human behaviors without much change to our lifestyle and we can save the future generations of our country and this world,” Harris said in a video first published by The Hill. She argued that government is the problem — and the solution.

“There has been a failure to do that because this administration and the people who are part of it are in the pockets of big oil and are denying what we know is a reality around greenhouse gas emissions and what we need to do to curb those, what we need to do to focus on the fact that water is a precious resource,” Harris said, citing the climate change theories that warn of dire destruction based on climate models that fail to predict the future.

Why Do Renewable Energy Sources Need Government Subsidies? Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-3-8-why-do-renewable-energy-sourc

If you read the progressive press, or even a little of it, with an interest in matters of energy policy, then surely you know by now that it has become cheaper to produce electricity using the wind and sun than using fossil fuels. You know that because you have read it over and over again, in authoritative articles written by, and quoting, people who seem to know what they are talking about, and with no one ever raising any skeptical questions.

Here are some of the articles that may be among what you have read on this subject:

There was the Financial Times on November 8, 2018, in a piece titled “New wind and solar generation costs fall below existing coal plants.” The Financial Times — now there are people who really know what they are talking about. The article mainly relies on a study then just out from investment bank Lazard, reporting on what is called the “Levelized Cost of Energy” for various sources of generation: “The cost of new wind and solar power generation has fallen below the cost of running existing coal-fired plants in many parts of the US . . . New estimates published on Thursday by Lazard, the investment bank, show that it can often be profitable for US generation companies to shut working coal plants and replace their output with wind and solar power.”

Or perhaps you read the piece from CBS News on November 16, mostly relying on the same Lazard study, and titled “It’s now cheaper to build a new wind farm than to keep a coal plant running.” “The cost of building a new utility-scale solar or wind farm has now dropped below the cost of operating an existing coal plant, according to an analysis by the investment bank Lazard. . . . ‘There are some scenarios, in some parts of the U.S., where it is cheaper to build and operate wind and solar than keep a coal plant running,’ said a Lazard banker who was involved in the report.”

Climate Change Theory: What’s Wrong with it? By William Lippincott

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/03/climate_change_theory_whats_wrong_with_it.html

Dr. William Lippincott is a retired environment scientist. His inferences are based on extensive literature research on the mechanisms of climate variability, a task open to any student of the scientific method.

How climate alarmism is being sold in a distinctly unscientific manner.
I can’t believe I’m still writing about climate change. I’d have stopped long ago were it not for persistent calls to blow up the U.S. economy in order to save the planet. The cult-like demand for action permeates every part of public life, government, media, academia, even K-12. Rep. Among the draconian policy solutions, Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal would have enormous negative impact on our economy.

For the record, climate does vary — think ice ages. And a combination of natural climate variability and measurement problems make the likelihood of singling out a human fingerprint very low. I look here at how climate alarmism is being sold in a distinctly unscientific manner.

The term ‘science’ properly refers to the scientific method, which is a system of inference designed to weed out incorrect ideas in favor of those supported by experiment and observation. The crux of the scientific method is rejection of theory rather than proof of it. From Bacon to Hopper and Feinman, it has been well understood that scientific theory must be “falsifiable,” that is, subject to test and rejection. Falsifiability depends on narrow and specific conditions imposed by theory. If the conditions fail, the theory is wrong.

San Bernardino County Says No to Big Renewables By Robert Bryce

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/renewable-energy-land-use-san-bernardino-county/

The biggest county in America doesn’t want big solar or wind projects.

It may be the largest county in America by land area, but San Bernardino County, Calif., has decided it doesn’t have enough room for big wind or big solar projects. On February 28, the county’s board of supervisors approved a measure that bans large renewable-energy projects on more than 1 million acres of private land.

The move provides yet another example of how the energy sprawl that inevitably comes with large-scale renewable-energy deployment is colliding with the interests of rural landowners and local governments that don’t want “green” projects in their neighborhoods. Of course, there’s no small irony that that collision is happening in California, which passed a law last year that requires utilities to be getting 60 percent of their electricity from renewables by 2030.

As Los Angeles Times reporter Sammy Roth drily noted, achieving those renewable-energy goals “will require cooperation from local governments — and big solar and wind farms, like many infrastructure projects, are often unpopular at the local level.” All across the country rural landowners and governments have been rejecting or restricting renewable projects, and they’re doing so at the very same time that left-leaning politicians and some of the country’s biggest environmental groups are claiming that the U.S. must quit using hydrocarbons and nuclear energy, and instead rely solely on renewable energy for our electricity.

In January, some 600 environmental groups, including 350.org, Food & Water Watch, Friends of the Earth, and the Environmental Working Group, submitted a letter to the U.S. House of Representatives, which said that the U.S. must shift to “100 percent renewable power generation by 2035 or earlier.” It continued, saying any “definition of renewable energy must . . . exclude all combustion-based power generation, nuclear, biomass energy, large-scale hydro, and waste-to-energy technologies.” For good measure, it said this new hypothetical electric grid must have the “ability to incorporate battery storage and distributed energy systems that are democratically governed.”

Dr. Happer will set them free By David Archibald

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/03/dr_happer_will_set_them_free.html

President Trump has finally appointed someone to cure the U.S.’s disease of global warming hysteria

It was easy enough to predict that Trump would appoint Dr. William Happer to set up a Presidential Committee on Climate Science.

Two years have passed and have been lost. The first years of the Trump administration were hobbled by poor Cabinet picks, a proportion of whom conspired against him and others who were just hopeless. Scott Pruitt at the EPA should have got on with Dr Happer’s appointment straight away but instead spent $3.5 million on his own security detail. In the meantime, the climate juggernaut rolled on, producing 1,500 pages of alarmist nonsense in an official government report.

You can tell how important Dr Happer is by the forces that have been marshaled against him. The three major lefty media organizations — CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times — all came out to say Dr. Happer’s efforts would be wasted. The Democrats are alarmed, calling Dr Happer’s proposed panel “dangerous.”

Schumer Calls for Bipartisan Panel to Craft Climate Change Legislation By Bridget Johnson

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/schumer-calls-for-bipartisan-panel-to-craft-climate-change-legislation/

WASHINGTON — Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) introduced a resolution today urging colleagues to create a panel on climate change like the one created by Democrats in the House.

The move comes after Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) vowed Tuesday to get Dems on the record soon on the Green New Deal plan to drastically cut emissions.

“The Green New Deal continues to be an interesting discussion for, particularly, Republicans and we will, of course, give our Democratic friends who’ve been advocating this proposal an opportunity to debate it and vote on it on the Senate floor sometime in the next couple of weeks,” McConnell said.

Schumer decried that today as a “political stunt” but said McConnell’s move has unintended consequences: “For the first time in a long time the Senate is finally debating the issue of climate change — and it’s about time, if you ask me.”

“Climate change is an urgent crisis, an existential threat to our country and our planet. The last four years have been the warmest four years on record. Sea levels are rising. Marine life and fishing communities are being destroyed. Wildfires have roared across the West and more powerful hurricanes have buffeted our coastlines. Over the next few decades, climate change will affect every part of American life: our health, our economy, our national security, even our geography,” Schumer said. CONTINUE AT SITE

New peer-reviewed study reveals majority of scientists are skeptical of ‘global warming crisis’By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/03/new_peerreviewed_study_reveals_majority_of_scientists_are_skeptical_of_global_warming_crisis.html

Without the claimed “scientific consensus” on global warming or climate change, the Green New Deal becomes just another progressive con game, but with the highest stakes ever.

Writing in Forbes, James Taylor shows that the supposed 97% “scientific consensus” on global warming is false:

Don’t look now, but maybe a scientific consensus exists concerning global warming after all. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.

The survey results show geoscientists (also known as earth scientists) and engineers hold similar views as meteorologists. Two recent surveys of meteorologists (summarized here and here) revealed similar skepticism of alarmist global warming claims.