RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/27/from-saving-species-to-empowering

In 1973, the Endangered Species Act passed the U.S. Senate with at vote of 92-0 and the House by a vote of 394-4. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Now, 45 years on, we know that, regardless of the good intentions of the act’s sponsors, the law can be abused by bureaucrats and their extreme environmentalist allies.

The ESA was born out of legitimate concern over occasional disappearances of lineages of living things. No one anticipated the ESA would play a major role in American life, destroying countless jobs and giving federal bureaucrats control over large swaths of the economy. It never occurred to politicians and activists that the law could be used to prevent activities that might indirectly harm obscure groups of plants and animals, even those that don’t qualify as species or even subspecies.

In the era in which the ESA was born, people were aware of the extinction of the passenger pigeon and the dodo and the near-extinction of the American buffalo, and threats to iconic animals such as American alligators and bald eagles. Activists and the media presented these cases as cautionary tales, magnifying extinction fears into threats to wide categories of life.

For example, to obtain a ban on DDT—a ban that, by promoting the spread of malaria, has killed tens of millions of people worldwide—environmentalists pushed the idea that the continued use of this pesticide would extinguish many bird species and result in the “Silent Spring” referenced in the title of Rachel Carson’s classic book. Critical to the debate was an Agriculture Department study seeming to show that DDT caused thin eggshells. The scientist behind the study later admitted that the birds had been fed a low-calcium diet.

Carson’s argument was one of a series of hoaxes that launched the modern environmental extremist movement. At the first Earth Day in 1970, participants complained that corporations poisoned people with sweeteners containing sodium cyclamate (which, in fact, is safe), that a U.S. Army nerve gas experiment had killed thousands of sheep in Utah in 1968 (it didn’t), and that pollution was rapidly pushing the world into a new Ice Age, as future feminist icon Betty Friedan had warned in Harper’s magazine.

Real environmental threats existed but were insufficient to spur the political actions environmentalists wanted. So they made stuff up.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/endangered-species-scare-1532646111

By now you may have seen the photos of baby owls that will ostensibly be extinct once Donald Trump finishes demolishing protections for endangered species. Such dystopian predictions warrant a more rational look at the Trump Administration’s efforts to update a 1970s law that isn’t accomplishing what its supporters claim.

The Interior and Commerce departments are accepting feedback on proposals to clarify regulations related to the Endangered Species Act, which Congress hasn’t updated in more than 25 years. The law is a golden idol of the environmental left, though its goal is species recovery and less than 2% of listed species are delisted.

Wyoming Governor Matt Mead noted recently that it “took five lawsuits and fifteen years to delist a recovered gray wolf population in Wyoming,” while the Canada lynx listed some 18 years ago still has “no discernible path to recovery.” Private land owners have little incentive to help because spotting an endangered species is a death sentence for the productive use of their property.

Interior’s sensible principle seems to be that the law should be more predictable, including harmonizing the standards for listing and delisting. The current process makes it easy to list a species but hard to remove it even when the evidence of recovery is compelling. Also welcome is a proposal that wildlife classified as “threatened” won’t receive full treatment as “endangered,” which has defeated the purpose of a distinction that is supposed to allow for proactive rehabilitation.

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2018/07/extinction-honest-science/

Warmists’ predictions of climate doom haven’t come to pass or anything like it, but give them credit for agility and perseverance in always concocting a fresh scare. The latest meme to keep grants flowing and careers on track: the purported mass die-off of species large and small.

With no significant warming for 20 years, the climate alarmists need better scares. The temperature rise of about 0.8 degC in more than 100 years is not only non-scary, it’s been immensely beneficial for feeding the globe’s burgeoning population. Now the “extreme weather” furphy is at work, with any storm or flood attributed by Al Gore and the Climate Council to fossil fuel emissions. There’s the purported “ocean acidification” but I’m yet to see evidence that it has hurt a solitary crab, let alone a species.

As for sea-level rises, well, check my birthplace, Fremantle, butting the Indian Ocean: its tide gauge shows 12 cms rise in the past 120 years – compare that with 20cm for the length of my hand. To cap it off, the warmists, including the green-colonised CSIRO, have had to recognize that extra CO2 in the 30 years to 2010 has greened the earth to the extent of two and a half Australias in area.[1]

There are two handy scares still slithering around: “The Anthropocene” and “The Sixth Mass Extinction”. Both are fakes. Both are foisted on kids by green/Left educators. Both require as supposed remedies a supra-national enforcement agency run by the Left/liberal crowd, along with a roll-back of capitalist progress.

Here’s an example. I was in Chicago in 2013 and visited its great natural history centre the Field Museum (named after a 19th century $US9m donor Marshall Field). In the “Evolving Planet” gallery for kids, there was a chart, “The Geologic Time Scale” showing the classic geologic ages (Silurian, Devonian etc) with markers for the first five extinctions. At the top it read “Today” with a picture of a metropolis, and an arrow labeled “Sixth Mass Extinction”. A red-neon “Extinction Clock” ticked over each time another species supposedly becomes extinct. In the hour or two since the gallery opened, the counter had added another 22 supposed extinctions. The count was based not on reality but fanciful modeling 30 years ago by Harvard professor and environmental activist Dr E.O Wilson, who claimed that 30,000 species were going extinct per year. The true number of known extinctions per year among the planet’s reputed 10 million-or-so species and averaged over the past 500 years is about two, according to the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Yet climate activists want to compare this alleged“Sixth Extinction” with the end-Permian “great dying” (250 million years ago) and end-Cretaceous dinosaur die-off (66 million years ago).

As for the“Anthropocene”, it refers to the present geological era in which humans supposedly dominate the planetary processes and destroy other life forms. The label was first seriously proposed in 2001 by co-Nobelist Paul Crutzen, of ozone-hole fame. It supposedly succeeds our 11,500 year old Holocene, the brief warm spell that has fostered our agriculture and civilisation. No such era and label as “Anthropocene” has been endorsed by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the global naming authority. An ICS working group (AWG) endorsed the concept in 2016, positing a start date of 1950. Most geologic eras last about three million years, so the ICS is in no hurry to make a ruling.

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

Too many “scientists” have too much grant money and too much computer time on their hands, thanks to the tens of billions of dollars in grant money ($32.5 billion from 1989 to 2015, according to the Science and Public Policy Institute) that the federal government has been dispensing for “climate change research.” Put together a proposal to find a new scary correlation, and odds are you’ll be bringing in the federal cash, to the delight of your university (that gets to appropriate a third or so of the grant for “overhead”). That’s why we have hundreds and hundreds of bad things that global warming (or climate change) supposedly will cause.

The San Francisco Chronicle has the latest claim, one that bears the imprimatur of Stanford University.

More people are likely to take their own lives as the planet warms, say researchers at Stanford University and UC Berkeley in a study published Monday that suggests yet another worrisome impact of climate change.

The multidisciplinary research team looked at nearly 1 million suicides in North America and found that hotter temperatures correlate with higher suicide rates. The warming projected through 2050, the group figures, could increase suicide rates by 1.4 percent in the U.S. and 2.3 percent in Mexico over that time, resulting in 21,000 additional deaths in the two nations.

The role of heat, the authors said, may be just as significant as other, more well-known drivers of suicide, like economic hardship, which also pushes rates up, and suicide prevention programs and gun control legislation, which tend to push rates down.

I certainly feel despair when it gets too hot. That’s why I moved to coastal California, where it rarely gets into the nineties. But if this holds water, we ought to see that suicide rates pretty closely correlate with average temperatures. A look at suicide rates by country reveals no such relationship. Here are the top 20 countries:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/flint-michigan-water-no-lead-poisoning/

The city’s kids made photogenic victims, but thankfully the scare was overblown.

The numbers are in on the lead contamination of Flint, Michigan’s water in 2014–15, and it’s time for a sigh of relief. Medically speaking, the lead in the water turned out to be a non-event.

The increase in lead content in children’s blood after the water debacle was small. Tiny, in fact. How tiny? It was basically statistical noise: 0.11 micrograms per deciliter, which is within the range of normal fluctuation. Two experts explain in the New York Times:

A similar increase of 0.12 micrograms per deciliter occurred randomly in 2010-11. It is not possible, statistically speaking, to distinguish the increase that occurred at the height of the contamination crisis from other random variations over the previous decade.

Lead is dangerous and it’s proper to be vigilant about it. In terms of municipal management, or politics, the lead saga in Flint shouldn’t be overlooked. Any negligence should be adequately punished. If you behave in a grossly careless way and somehow no one gets hurt, you were still grossly careless.

Yet in terms of lead in the water in the Flint, the inescapable takeaway from the Times op-ed by professors Hernán Gómez, the lead author of the study “Blood Lead Levels of Children in Flint, Michigan: 2006–2016,” and Kim Dietrich, the principal investigator of the Cincinnati Lead Study, is that the children of Flint dodged a bullet when the city water supply was switched from the Detroit River to the Flint River in 2014. (In 2014–15 there was an outbreak of the bacteria-based Legionnaires’ disease in Flint that caused the deaths of 12 people, but ten of the 12 were linked to a single hospital called McLaren Flint.)

https://pjmedia.com/trending/yes-heat-waves-are-a-part-of-nature/

As often happens when extreme weather hits, the media is featuring excited claims that the July heat wave is due to man-made climate change. But it isn’t. These events are easily explained as natural phenomena, yet a major practice used by those exploiting climate and environment for a political agenda involves claiming natural events are unnatural.

The Guardian is a familiar source of these stories. In “Heatwave sees record high temperatures around world this week” (July 13), the Guardian’s global environment editor Jonathan Watts writes:

Record high temperatures have been set across much of the world this week as an unusually prolonged and broad heatwave intensifies concerns about climate change.

On June 28, the Washington, D.C.-based group Public Citizen, through two members of the Public Citizen’s Climate and Energy Program,issued a “NOTE TO REPORTERS AND EDITORIAL BOARDS” with this headline:

As Extreme Heat Warnings Sound in New York This Weekend, Remember to Connect the Dots Between Extreme Heat and Climate Change

The sub-headline was even more definitive:

Extreme Heat and Record-Breaking Heat Are Linked to Climate Change

There is no doubt that some places have seen record high temperatures of late. For example, Glasgow just had its hottest day on record, hitting 89.4°F (31.9°C). But consider how short the historical record is: about 120 years.

That’s 0.000000026% of the Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history.

There were many times when the planet, Glasgow included, has been far hotter (and colder) than today. Consider the situation in the continental United States on July 1 and 2, as illustrated in the following figure: CONTINUE AT SITE

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