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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

The push-back against Net Zero It appears that more people are beginning to notice some inconvenient truths Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-push-back-against-net-zero?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The Tories’ pushback on Net Zero is causing horror among climate activists in Britain. Prime Minster Rishi Sunak has announced a carbon trading scheme that lowers the price on carbon emissions, linked to a planned expansion of oil and gas drilling in the North Sea to “max out” Britain’s underwater energy reserves. He has also announced that he is on the side of motorists complaining about city anti-car schemes. 

This has freaked out climate activists who are claiming that it drives a coach and horses though the “climate emergency” agenda.

But it’s these activists who are doing the real damage to their cause through producing ever more ludicrous and hysterical exaggeration by any standards — and straight out garbage by the standards of science. 

A prime example is the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres. As The Guardian reports:

“Humanity is in the hot seat,” Guterres told a press conference on Thursday. “For vast parts of North America, Asia, Africa and Europe, it is a cruel summer. For the entire planet, it is a disaster. And for scientists, it is unequivocal – humans are to blame.

“All this is entirely consistent with predictions and repeated warnings. The only surprise is the speed of the change. Climate change is here, it is terrifying, and it is just the beginning. The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.”

“Global boiling”? This while Dr Eli David tells us:

Antarctica plunges to -83.2C (-117.8F) — earth’s lowest temperature since since 2017. 

This while Tony Heller of Climate Reality tells us:  

Arctic sea ice extent is the highest in nineteen years and in the normal range since 1981

and also tells us:

Temperatures at the North Pole have been below the 1958-2002 average almost every day for the past three months, and will drop below freezing in about two weeks.  May was the coldest on record there.

Climate Change Hasn’t Set the World on Fire It turns out the percentage of the globe that burns each year has been declining since 2001. By Bjorn Lomborg

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-hasnt-set-the-world-on-fire-global-warming-burn-record-low-713ad3a6?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

One of the most common tropes in our increasingly alarmist climate debate is that global warming has set the world on fire. But it hasn’t. For more than two decades, satellites have recorded fires across the planet’s surface. The data are unequivocal: Since the early 2000s, when 3% of the world’s land caught fire, the area burned annually has trended downward.

In 2022, the last year for which there are complete data, the world hit a new record-low of 2.2% burned area. Yet you’ll struggle to find that reported anywhere.

Instead, the media acts as if the world is ablaze. In late 2021, the New York Times employed more than 40 staff on a project called “Postcards from a World on Fire,” headed by a photorealistic animation of the world in flames. Its explicit goal was to convince readers of the climate crisis’ immediacy through a series of stories of climate-change-related devastation across the world, including the 2019-20 wildfires in Australia.

This summer, the focus has been on Canada’s wildfires, the smoke from which covered large parts of the Northeastern U.S. Both the Canadian prime minister and the White House have blamed climate change.

Yet the latest report by the United Nations’ climate panel doesn’t attribute the area burned globally by wildfires to climate change. Instead, it vaguely suggests the weather conditions that promote wildfires are becoming more common in some places. Still, the report finds that the change in these weather conditions won’t be detectable above the natural noise even by the end of the century.

Dark Green Lunacy as a Cardinal Virtue Peter Smith

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2023/07/dark-green-lunacy-as-a-cardinal-virtue/

“We are not dealing with rational people. Explain until the cows come home that achieving net zero is impossible. Explain that wind, solar and batteries cannot replace a coal power station. Marshall your data, your facts. It will be to no avail. The inmates are running the show.”

John Clauser is an American physicist and the 2022 (joint) Nobel Prize winner. As we’ve heard, he was cancelled from addressing the IMF about “climate change.” Well, that’s understandable. I mean, he’s not a qualified climate scientist or anything. He’s not in the same league as, say, Greta Thunberg or Al Gore, John Kerry, António Guterres or Tim ‘dams won’t fill’ Flannery. Apparently, he knows a thing or two about quantum entanglement. This is where two particles interreact and separate but then, like identical twins, behave as though they are one, doing exactly the same things no matter how distant apart; apropos their direction of spin. Strange business.

Stranger still are climate-change ministers mirroring sub-atomic life; interacting at United Nations COP meetings before going home and spinning as one. Spruiking net zero, with the same cunning plans to get there. To wit, taxing emissions, banning the sale of ICE cars, and ordering by proxy thousands of turbine blades, solar panels and batteries from China. Might this similarity have piqued Clauser’s interest in climate science? Perhaps not.

Clauser has recently been elected to serve on the board of directors of the CO2 Coalition. Best to go to the source itself for reliable information on the Coalition; hence the link I’ve provided. Because, according to Wikipedia, “it spreads misinformation about climate change.” Misinformation, hmm? More like disinformation, if you ask me. Don’t let them off the hook. The Coalition sets out deliberately, with nothing less than malice aforethought towards the IPCC, to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. What perfidy is that?

Back to Clauser. Maybe he knows a little more about climate science than you would think. More than does your average quantum physicist; if you can describe quantum physicists as average. Anyway he has a theory. In a nutshell, he believes that cumulous clouds keep the earth’s temperature fairly stable. He reckons that when sunlight reaches the earth it evaporates sea water – covering two-thirds of the earth’s surface – producing cumulous clouds which reflect back 90 percent of the sunlight which hits them. It’s akin to a thermostat controlling the temperature. The warmer it gets, the more evaporation, the more cumulous clouds, the more sunlight reflected back. Viola! He further reckons that the radiative heat transfer rate associated with atmospheric CO2 is “nearly two orders of magnitude smaller than the effective stabilisation of the input-power provided by the cloud-based thermostat.” Thus he believes that the effect of CO2 is diddly squat, to put it in precise scientific language. If I remember rightly, Richard Lindzen also refers to clouds reflecting back sunlight. It seems worthwhile investigating. That is, if you had an interest in discovering the truth and weren’t as mad as a hatter.

In the Name of Climate Change: Travel Restrictions and the Great Reset By Janet Levy

If you experienced unprecedented delays during air travel this summer, the airlines likely blamed it on the weather.  You might have been surprised, for bad weather wasn’t reported in the news.  But here is what should surprise and shock you even more.  The real reason – a shortage of pilots and air traffic controllers (ATCs) – is linked to the Great Reset, the agenda to control people and restrict freedom conceived by the global elite and being implemented through leftist groups and their sympathizers.

It is now well known that Klaus Schwab, chief of the elitist World Economic Forum (WEF), set the Great Reset in motion during the pandemic, calling it an opportunity to “reflect, reimagine, and reset the world.” The COVID lockdown also connects to the story of the recent flight delays, because it was during the pandemic that travel restrictions were imposed worldwide and pilots and ATCs were laid off.  At London’s Heathrow, alone, for example, traffic plunged more than 75% – from 80 million passengers daily to about one million.  The ostensible reason for limiting travel was to curb contagion and virus mutation.  But a sinister agenda was afoot.

The travel restrictions, quarantines, vaccine passports, social distancing, the lockdown itself, and other measures were not so much for disease control as for imposing the dystopian New World Order.  COVID was a smokescreen.  In the name of a recovery plan, radical steps were initiated to restructure the world economy and usher in an extreme environmentalist and statist framework of governance as the new norm

You’ll Have Blackouts And You WIll Love Them-Generators are on the White House Hit List

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/07/21/youll-have-blackouts-and-you-will-love-them/

The old joke in which one fellow asks what the socialists used for lighting before candles and the other fellow answers “electricity” could use some updating. Substitute “socialists” for “U.S. Democrats.” But it won’t be just the Democrats using candles, it’s going to be all of us.

When the power goes out, most of us just have to wait until it’s restored to get back to our normal lives. In the meantime, as we wander through a dark house flipping useless switches out of habit, we make sure we don’t open the refrigerator and we put off anything we had planned that requires us to burn electricity. The more-prepared among us, though, buy fossil-fuel-powered generators to avoid interruptions

Their future, though, is in doubt. The Biden administration wants those generators to go the way of the incandescent light bulb.

“Just months after a Biden-appointed regulator teased a ban on gas stoves, the administration is working to enact a rule that would prohibit the manufacturing of nearly all portable gas generators on the U.S. market,” the Washington Free Beacon reported earlier this week.

This proposed rule would limit the amount of carbon monoxide a product can release, establishing a benchmark beyond the reach of all but a few current generators. The Free Beacon says the Consumer Product Safety Commission admits “that 95% of portable gas generators on the market cannot comply with its new standard.”

Should the rule become “law,” industry officials expect a shortage of generators will follow, as manufacturers would have only have six months to develop a compliant design. Under normal conditions, that would take years, according to the Portable Generator Manufacturers’ Association.

While some homeowners use standby generators, which have more permanence about them, to provide power when the lights go out, portables are used as well, with “far more people” choosing them because of price. What the cost-conscious consumers didn’t know when they made their purchases is that one day they would be punished for their choice. But those who have standby generators shouldn’t feel too smug. The Democrats will eventually come after those, too.

Chasing a Green Chimera, Biden Has Put America in the Red Dragon’s Grasp By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/07/chasing_a_green_chimera_biden_has_put_america_in_the_red_dragons_grasp.html

No country would ever depend on an out-and-out rival for something as vital as energy.  Yet the Biden administration, through its zealous, misguided pursuit of “net-zero emissions,” is fast-tracking America’s dependence on Communist China for the minerals and components that back-end green technology.  The administration also is curbing the mining industry, again allowing China to monopolize America and the world in minerals and ores.

This strategic disaster is a complete reversal of what President Donald Trump had achieved.  Under him, the U.S. — long dependent on OPEC for oil — became a net exporter of natural gas and crude oil for the first time in more than 50 years.  Exploration of oil and natural gas boosted the economy, lowered energy prices, and bolstered national security by increasing our energy independence.

Biden, on assuming office, pledged to eliminate the fossil fuel industry and pursue a radical climate agenda to replace carbon energy with renewables.  He has since called for replacing 50% of carbon-fueled automobiles with electric vehicles (E.V.s) by 2030, creating a carbon-free electric grid by 2035, and having a carbon-free economy by 2050.  This push toward unstable solar and wind power will markedly increase dependence on China, which dominates the market in materials required for E.V.s, batteries, and other renewables.

As a report from the Institute for Energy Research (IER) states, “green energy runs through communist China.”  It notes that even if China were a trustworthy trading partner, near-total dependence on one country would still disadvantage America greatly.

While Biden pursues a chimerical goal, increasing energy prices in America despite rich domestic resources of oil, natural gas, and coal, China and India are building coal plants to grow their economies with readily accessible electricity.  The green agenda, for whatever it’s worth, is also defeated by the massive amounts of carbon energy required to manufacture wind turbines and solar panels and the unrecyclable material with which they will clog landfills at the end of their useful lives.  Manufacturing E.V.s requires six times more minerals than gas-powered cars; wind farms require nine times more minerals than gas-fired plants.  Add to that the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the import of required materials.

WH Does Damage Control After Kamala Harris Claims ‘Reducing Population’ is Critical for ‘Climate Change’: Sarah Arnold

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2023/07/16/wh-does-damage-control-after-kamala-harris-claims-reducing-population-is-critical-for-climate-change-n2625782

The White House scrambled to clean up the mess the Biden Administration left after Vice President Kamala Harris claimed “reducing the population” is needed to combat so-called “climate change.” 

“When we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce population, more of our children can breath clean air and drink clean water,” Harris initially said. 

However, the White House “corrected” the transcript of the speech, claiming Harris meant to say “pollution,” despite the vice president not addressing the “error” while speaking. 

Democrats have a long reputation for sounding the alarm on so-called “climate change,” panicking Americans by saying a black hole will soon swallow up the Earth unless we all stop eating meat and driving gas-powered cars. 

In 2019, the biggest progressive liberal of them all, Bernie Sanders, was asked by a school teacher whether it would even be possible to fight global warming given that “the world’s population has doubled over the last 50 years.”

“Absolutely, yes,” Sanders blurted out. 

In the hot seat: EV owners warned extreme summer heat could melt travel plans

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/jul/14/hot-seat-electric-vehicle-owners-warned-extreme-su/

Electric vehicles meant to help curb climate change are susceptible to the very problem they seek to treat: extreme heat.

As the planet experiences its hottest days on record and heat waves blanket tens of millions of Americans, EV owners are advised to avoid long-term damage to the batteries powering their cars.

The warnings augment the unique challenges of EVs compared with traditional gas-guzzlers, including the lack of public charging stations, reliance on China for critical lithium used in batteries, electric grid reliability and high sticker prices.

The industry is concerned about the feasibility of President Biden’s proposal to phase out sales of new gas-powered cars and force automakers to focus primarily on EV sales by 2030.

“Just in time for [the Environmental Protection Agency’s] regulatory push on electric vehicles, this week’s heat wave in the Southwest is bad news for EVs,” Western Energy Alliance, a lobbying group for oil and natural gas, said in a Twitter post.

Have We Reached Peak Virtue Signaling With EVs?

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/07/14/have-we-reached-peak-virtue-signaling-with-evs/

The cars that were going to save our world from the scourge of carbon-based global warming are, says one media outlet, “​​piling up on dealer lots” because they can’t be sold. Maybe we’re finally at the point where most if not all of those who are desperate to demonstrate their green cred already have an EV and don’t need another battery-powered adult toy.

Even though “the auto industry is beginning to crank out more electric vehicles (EVs) to challenge Tesla,” Axios reported Monday, “there’s one big problem: not enough buyers.”

Two days later, Market Watch said that as “EV sales stall … there’s a ‘step back from euphoria.’”

While ​​Tesla Inc. and BYD Co., a Chinese conglomerate, have strong growth numbers, the rest in the industry, which has been incentivized to build, build, build by government mandate, can’t sell their EVs.

Korean luxury brand Genesis “sold only 18 of its nearly $82,000 Electrified G80 sedans in the 30 days leading up to June 29, and had 210 in stock nationwide — a 350-day supply,” Axios says.

Meanwhile, “Audi’s Q4 e-tron and Q8 e-tron and the GMC Hummer EV SUV, also have bloated inventories well above 100 days,” and “the Kia EV6, Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Nissan Ariya are also stacking up.” Even “the once-hot Ford Mustang Mach-E now has a 117-day supply.” 

Axios is blaming the high price of EVs for the lack of sales, but that doesn’t explain why Tesla and BYD continue to sell electric cars. Could be there’s another factor.

Nobel Laureate: “Climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience”

https://gript.ie/nobel-laureate-climate-science-has-metastasized-into-massive-shock-journalistic-pseudoscience/

Dr. John F. Clauser, joint recipient of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, has criticized the climate emergency narrative calling it “a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people.”

Along with two others, Dr Clauser, an experimental and theoretical physicist, was the 2022 recipient of the Nobel Prize for work done in the 1970s that showed “quantum entanglement” allowed particles such as photons, effectively, to interact at great distances, seemingly to require communication exceeding the speed of light. 

He has criticized the awarding of the 2021 Nobel Prize for work in the development of computer models predicting global warming, according to a coalition of scientists and commentators who argue that an informed discussion about CO2 would recognise its importance in sustaining plant life. 

In a statement issued by the CO2 coalition, Nobel Laureate John Clauser Elected to CO2 Coalition Board of Directors – CO2 Coalition Dr. Clauser said that “there is no climate crisis and that increasing CO2 concentrations will benefit the world”

He criticized the prevalent climate models as being unreliable and not accounting for the dramatic temperature-stabilizing feedback of clouds, which he says is more than fifty times as powerful as the radiative forcing effect of CO2.

Dr. Clauser notes that bright white clouds are clearly the most conspicuous feature in satellite photos of the earth.

These clouds are mostly produced by the evaporation of seawater by sunlight. They cover variably one third to two thirds of the earth’s surface.