RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/07/the_next_ice_age.html

While most people still worry about global warming, I am more concerned about the next Ice Age. A glaciation would present a serious problem for survival of our present civilization, akin to a nuclear winter that many worried about 30 years ago.

Photo credit: Wellcome Images via Wikimedia Commons

Nuclear winter is all fantasy, of course; but ice ages are for real.

Natural warming of the Earth reached a peak 65 million years ago. The climate has been generally cooling ever since. Antarctic ice sheets started growing 25 million years ago. In the last 2.5 million years, the Earth entered the period of Ice Ages [the geological name is The Pleistocene] and has been experiencing periodic glaciations where much of the land was covered by miles-thick ice sheets.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/watching_weather_waves_but_missing_climate_tides.html

The climate alarm media, the bureaucracy and the Green Energy industry follow an agenda which is served by inflating any short-term weather event into a climate calamity. They should take a long-term view.

Earth’s climate is never still – it is always changing, with long-term trends, medium-term reversals and minor oscillations. Humanity is best served by those who use good science to study geology, astronomy and climate history searching for clues to climate drivers and the underlying natural cycles and trends hidden in short-term weather fluctuations.

For the last 10,000 years Earth has basked in the Holocene Interglacial which is the latest of many warm cycles within the Pleistocene Ice Age. There are small warm and cool cycles within the Holocene. Today we enjoy the Modern Warm Cycle (which started about calendar 1900) following the Little Ice Age which bottomed in about 1750.

What does the future hold? The past gives clues to the future.

In every warm era, glaciers retreat, ice sheets melt and sea levels rise. Coastal land, ports and settlements are lost under the rising seas but tundra, grasslands and forests expand. Some corals manage to grow as fast as the seas rise, but others are drowned in deep water. The warmth drives more carbon dioxide from the seas, plants thrive, deserts shrink and humans are well fed.

Then solar intensity wanes, solar orbits change, less solar energy is received by the big northern lands, and the warm Earth radiates more heat to space. It starts cooling.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/acting-epa-chief-promises-to-continue-regulation-slashing-mission/

Good news, America, the anti-Trump media may have succeeded in wearing down Scott Pruitt but the agency he headed will continue President Trump’s objective of rolling back regulations.

Reuters reports that the goals at the Environmental Protection Agency remain unchanged:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s acting chief said on Wednesday he would carry out the Trump administration’s push to cut regulations on industry, while also seeking to improve air and water quality, echoing the policies of former head Scott Pruitt who stepped down last week.

The people who were so fervent about ousting Pruitt may now be in a “be careful what you wish for” situation.

Unlike Pruitt, Wheeler been known to shun the spotlight. But some environmentalists say his experience means he can carry out Trump’s deregulation policy more effectively.

Wheeler has plenty of bureaucratic experience, which is something Democrats usually value as part of their top-down lust for governing. Of course, the problem is that he isn’t on the side that wants the EPA to be the most powerful un-elected force in the United States government. Republicans tend to view the EPA’s mission in terms of keeping the air and water clean while Democrats treat is as the missionary arm of the Climate Change Church.

Rolling back EPA regulations is no easy task. The agency was practically weaponized during the Obama years. The president who was the best friend to Big Green added almost four thousand EPA regulations to the books during his two terms in office. One would almost have to create a separate agency just to deal with getting those off of the books. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pruitt-leaves-a-proud-legacy-at-the-epa-1531347048

Scott Pruitt wasn’t chased out of the EPA because of his ethical lapses but because he was derailing the environmental left’s radical effort to tighten its grip on the U.S. economy. Mr. Pruitt was implementing President Trump’s executive order to scuttle Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which would have forced sharp cutbacks in the use of fossil fuels, at great cost to consumers and with little purpose.

Under President Obama, the EPA’s bureaucrats became the shock troops of a new “green revolution”—quite different from the one that revolutionized agriculture. Mr. Trump chose Mr. Pruitt to lead the counterrevolution. Accordingly, Mr. Pruitt scotched the agency’s encouragement of “sue and settle” litigation that effectively gave outside lobbyists the power to set EPA policies.

Further horror of horrors, the president pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, ending the longstanding collaboration between the EPA and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Governments throughout the world have already spent hundreds of billions of dollars to meet U.N. goals for reducing emissions of carbon dioxide. Last July, Danish scholar Bjorn Lomborg predicted the cost of implementing the Paris Climate Accord would hit $2 trillion by 2030.

CO2 is a natural component of the air we breathe and without it there would be no life on earth. The U.N.’s alarms about a CO2 “greenhouse” causing global warming are based on dubious computer models. As the Cato Institute’s Pat Michaels and Ryan Maue observed on this page last month, global surface temperature hasn’t risen significantly since 2000.

The stakes are high. Government restrictions on carbon emissions have spawned a large renewable-energy industry specializing in solar panels and windmills. In places where those industries have best thrived, such as Germany and Australia, the result has been unreliable power at sharply higher cost. Germans pay roughly three times what Americans pay for electricity, according to the International Energy Agency.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/watching_weather_waves_missing_climate_tides.html

The climate alarm media, the bureaucracy, and the Green Energy industry follow an agenda served by inflating any short-term weather event into a climate calamity. They should take a long-term view.

Earth’s climate is never still – it is always changing, with long-term trends, medium-term reversals, and minor oscillations. Humanity is best served by those who use good science to study geology, astronomy, and climate history searching for clues to climate drivers and the underlying natural cycles and trends hidden in short-term weather fluctuations.

For the last 10,000 years Earth has basked in the Holocene Interglacial, which is the latest of many warm cycles within the Pleistocene Ice Age. There are small warm and cool cycles within the Holocene. Today we enjoy the Modern Warm Cycle (which started about calendar 1900), following the Little Ice Age, which bottomed in about 1750.

What does the future hold? The past gives clues to the future.

In every warm era, glaciers retreat, ice sheets melt, and sea levels rise. Coastal land, ports, and settlements are lost under the rising seas, but tundra, grasslands, and forests expand. Some corals manage to grow as fast as the seas rise, but others are drowned in deep water. The warmth drives more carbon dioxide from the seas, plants thrive, deserts shrink, and humans are well fed.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/uns_green_climate_fund_boondoggle_falling_apart_thanks_to_president_trump.html

Yesterday, a board meeting of the U.N. Green Climate Fund collapsed in bitterness, failing to approve any funding, and its executive director abruptly resigned. Like so many other global warmist gatherings of well paid officials in luxurious and exotic locales, this one was supposed to share the joy of distributing other people’s money and being praised for it. But President Trump turned off the spigot from the United States Treasury, and nobody else was willing to step up and replace the American cash with his own.

Megan Darby reports in Climate Change News:

Howard Bamsey resigned as executive director of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) with immediate effect on Wednesday, in a bombshell finish to a fraught board meeting.

The Australian cited “pressing personal reasons” in his resignation letter, adding that it was best he leave before the next round of fundraising started.

It came as the four-day meeting in Songdo, South Korea collapsed with no decisions on 11 funding bids worth nearly $1 billion, or on how to top up the flagship climate finance initiative’s dwindling resources.

The resources are dwindling because of President Trump’s pullout from the Paris Climate Accord and his suspension of 2 billion taxpayer dollars slated for the fund:

As well as the US withholding $2bn of its pledge, the pot has lost some $1bn in value due to exchange rate fluctuations since 2014, officials reported.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-climate-shakedown-flops-1530315398

The first wave of lawsuits to make oil companies atone for their alleged climate sins was beaten back this week by federal Judge William Alsup. One hope is that this victory for judicial sanity will stop the tide of litigation from spreading across the country.

The cities of San Francisco and Oakland sued BP, Chevron , ConocoPhillips , Exxon Mobil , and Royal Dutch Shell , demanding billions of dollars to remedy future environmental damage caused by fossil fuels. The Supreme Court ruled in AEP v. Connecticut (2011) that regulating emissions is the Environmental Protection Agency’s bailiwick. But the cities tried to circumvent the ruling by arguing that the mere production and sale of oil is a public nuisance.

Judge Alsup, a Bill Clinton appointee, rightly refrained from trying to regulate global carbon emissions from the bench. The problem of climate change “deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a district judge or jury in a public nuisance case. While it remains true that our federal courts have authority to fashion common law remedies for claims based on global warming, courts must also respect and defer to the other co-equal branches of government,” he wrote.

The judge also ridiculed the notion that fossil fuels are a public nuisance and even suggested that they have been a boon for humanity. “Our industrial revolution and the development of our modern world has literally been fueled by oil and coal. Without those fuels, virtually all of our monumental progress would have been impossible,” he noted. Fetch the smelling salts for Tom Steyer.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270586/media-censorship-reaches-live-theater-matthew-vadum

A far-left activist group called Amazon Watch helped to kill an honest review of a play that shows how radical environmentalists performed a major hatchet-job on oil giant Chevron, according to the play’s co-author.

The play, called The $18-Billion Prize, was written by Phelim McAleer and Jonathan Leaf. This example of “documentary theater” recounts aspects of the company’s famous battle with radical environmentalists over alleged pollution in the Amazon region of Ecuador. It is based on actual trial testimony from a six-week corruption trial centering on the activities of one lawyer-gangster known as Steven Donziger. In that trial the court found that an $18 billion judgment obtained against Chevron was based on bribery and blackmail of judges in Ecuador.

This wasn’t McAleer’s first attempt at documentary theater. Last year his stage work, Ferguson, about the August 2014 shooting of black teenager Michael Brown who was killed as he tried to slaughter white police officer Darren Wilson with his own gun in Ferguson, Missouri, was performed in New York City. An earlier version was performed in 2015 in California.

Ferguson may have been a play but it wasn’t fiction. The script was put together from grand jury testimony from the investigation into Brown’s death. Wilson was ultimately exonerated but not until his name was blackened by then-Attorney General Eric Holder’s minions and the mainstream media which lied about the facts of the case at nearly every turn. The fabrications live on in the “hands up, don’t shoot” meme, which was based on a now-proven lie that Brown was shot without provocation. The meme also helped the violent, racist Black Lives Matter cult expand beyond its organizers’ wildest dreams.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/an_update_on_surfacebased_temperature_data.html

It is helpful to update and evaluate temperature data occasionally. Accordingly, I have done so in the chart below, using data maintained by the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (part of NASA). The data is actually collected by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It extends from 1880 and is typically cited as providing the most reliable surface temperature anomalies available, and is available here, While it has serious flaws, it is the best available, and has been cited by NASA and quoted in the Washington Post as demonstrating 2016 to be the warmest year on record, with each of the first six months setting new records (see red below). But, notice the heating had begun in late 2015, a period that also coincided with one of the strongest El Ninos on record, and arguably explains the spike in temperatures in early 2016. By 2017, temperature anomalies had dropped significantly, with the first five months being about average over the last six years. In total, temperature anomalies where below year-previous levels for a total of 20 consecutive months, from October 2016 through May of 2018.

Those who failed to emphasize the importance of El Nino in heat spikes were guilty of serious malfeasance. But, that has been the story of climate “science” at least since Michael Mann and others spliced several sets of data together, much of it “proxy” data tree rings, ice samples, etc. in order to get a long time series that would show a “hockey stick” effect in recent years. Climategate demonstrated the full depth of corruption, with emails revealing collusion among many involved.

A 123-page paper by Christopher Booker, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), explains how a few strong personalities formulated and perpetuated what amounts to a hoax. The first of these was a Swedish meteorologist, Professor Bert Bolin (1925-2007). Bolin presented his views in 1979 at a first-ever meeting of the “World Climate Conference,” sponsored by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a 191-member country agency of the UN headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. Six years later, Bolin presented a longer paper for a 1985 conference in Villach, Austria, in which he concluded that “human-induced climate change” called for urgent action at the “highest level.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/cooler_heads_need_to_prevail_on_texas_climate_predictions.html

For all its positive attributes, the great state of Texas has one major failing: the inability of its mainstream media to rationally discuss climate change. Unfortunately, Texas media are being used to implement the shock doctrine approach to environmental policy.

Back in 2014, one of us (S.R.) discussed this topic specifically in the context of the severe drought that was underway in north Texas. Readers may remember that at the time, Wichita Falls was ground zero for the drought, and its municipal drinking water reservoirs were being drawn down. Residents were understandably concerned.

However, what emerged during this drought was some potentially problematic policy advice from the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas. As S.R. wrote in response at the time:

The point of all this data is that we need to be cautious with precipitation and drought statistics in Texas. Anecdotal writing is more popular in the media today than ever. Sometimes this writing style can be useful, but very often it distorts reality by over-generalizing from an isolated case, in shock doctrine style[.] …

The worst drought conditions in the state from a couple years ago are easing. Although east Texas is almost out of drought, everywhere else is still in a significant drought – but if trends continue, the pressure may lift over the next couple years. Now simply isn’t the time to create comprehensive and far-reaching water policy in shock doctrine style. Following the advice of Rahm Emanuel to “never let a good crisis go to waste” will not lead Texas in the direction it needs to go, particularly when I see statements by the George W. Bush Institute such as “the trick is finding the right balance between planning and property rights.”

Discussions over property rights are never best conducted when a crisis is at hand. Wait until the drought crisis settles down – which it undoubtedly will – and then begin examining proposals over this very contentious topic (especially in Texas, where property rights issues are taken more seriously than almost anywhere else)[.] …

Patience is needed in the Lone Star State on water policy. Avoid the shock doctrine.