RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/green-parties-facing-reality-check/

How pleasant it is to watch an idea fall apart. Especially when it is an idea held by people you don’t particularly care for. In recent years all of the democracies have been plagued by green parties. The kindest interpretation of them is that they provide a wake-up call of some sort: a reminder that we should be kind to our planet, that sort of thing. But in every country they got too free a ride. They ended up preaching catastrophism to a supplicant media. And they ended up demanding that we all get off fossil fuels yesterday without any satisfactory explanation of how we were meant to keep the lights on today. That pleasant period for them came to a halt this year, when that old friend of conservatives — reality — kicked in.

When Vladimir Putin chose to invade Ukraine in February, one of the things that was finally brought to greater public attention was Europe’s reliance on Russian gas. In recent years countries such as Germany were very happy to rely on Russian gas for their energy needs. At the same time they were thrilled to be able to cover themselves in a green veneer by shutting down their nuclear and coal-fired power stations.

Four years ago, at the United Nations General Assembly, the then-president Donald Trump spoke about the dangers of such reliance. As he put it:

Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course. Here in the western hemisphere, we are committed to maintaining our independence from the encroachment of expansionist foreign powers.

But the Germans, and everybody else, knew better.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/09/science_returns_to_the_middle_

Touring Britain’s Cotswolds region in Gloucestershire, England and beyond can be downright inspirational.  Castles long ago conquered, now in ruins, recall a cold, hard past — a past that relied on the sun and wood for heat, coupled with wind and water for power.  And mostly only feudal lords and royal gentry could comfortably afford even paltry luxuries on a regular basis. 

Today it’s back to the future of medieval times with a vengeance and a modern twist.  Not only are we moving back to sunbeam collectors and windmills to power our twenty-first century homes and industry, we are redefining what it is to be human.  Not likely that even the sixteenth-century founder of human anatomy, Andreas Vesalius, thought of recategorizing humans into more than two sexes. 

The foundations of science painstakingly developed since the dawn of humanity have been denied.  The onset of human consciousness established that men were men and women were women by rudimentary deduction. The medieval mindset was too primitive to contemplate that men could somehow menstruate or become pregnant.  After all, with no observance of male lady parts, the nascent scientific method including observation, hypothesis, and testing, was a nonstarter. 

Apparently, contemporary intellectuals know better.  You need not believe your own two eyes or observe an actual condition to affirm its reality.  So, anatomical males can be deemed females and pigs can fly. 

The new science aristocracy has produced not only ethereal new horizons of “science,” but also new fears to enslave serfdom and reenact sumptuary laws to dampen modern pleasures.

In Michael Crichton’s 2004 bestselling novel, State of Fear, a skeptical climate science character named Professor Hoffman said “I study the ecology of thought… and how it has led to a State of Fear.”  The professor went on to explain that the government practices “social control [which is] best managed through fear.” 

Part of the control derives from claimed certainty in dubious climate modeling results and presentation of select disastrous weather conditions as the new norm to frighten the great unwashed into living less comfortably. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/01/more-bad-news-for-the-eco-radicals/

For the first time in more than 80 years, the Atlantic Ocean hasn’t produced a named storm between July 3 and Aug. 31. So the Climatistas will have to celebrate Labor Day this year for its Marxist roots rather than the weather destruction they’re constantly rooting for so they can blame it on man.

The Atlantic’s failure to form a tempest is a rarity. It “has had no #hurricanes yet this year,” Colorado State University meteorologist Philip Klotzbach tweeted Thursday. 2022’s calm spell happens to be only the seventh time since 1950 that the Atlantic “has gone through August without a #hurricane. Other years are: 1967, 1984, 1988, 2001, 2002, 2013.”

In a separate tweet, Klotzbach acknowledged something that Democrats, the know-it-all media, and the agenda-driven extremists will likely never admit: “Forecasting the weather and climate keeps you humble!”

The Atlantic storms will eventually arrive. And the alarmists will blame them on human greenhouse gas emissions. It’s the blueprint. But for now, their taste for disaster has to go unsated as their narrative fails again.

Of course this is merely a single point of reality. There are others.

For instance, Arctic ice is at a decade-high level. Wasn’t supposed to disappear altogether by now due to our miserable fossil fuel addiction?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-tiny-park-sacfrifice-climate-gods-wagner-battery-park-city-new-york-sea-level-crisis-manhattan-trees-nature-destruction-11661974838?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

New York

The bulldozers will come for downtown Manhattan’s Robert F. Wagner Park as soon as next week. In the name of climate change “resiliency,” local authorities have ordered the 3.5-acre park overlooking the Statue of Liberty to be razed and raised, lest it flood from “rising seas” or “storm surges” projected several decades down the road.

Contractors hired by the state-appointed Battery Park City Authority will bring in chain saws for the park’s 112 mature trees. They’ll use shovels to rip up grass where local children now play. They’ll use jackhammers and pickaxes on the park’s benches, walkways and pavilion. Two years and $221 million later, the Authority assures us, there’ll be a new park, albeit with less green space, more commercial space from which to extract rents, and new and improved trees. (They’ll resist salt water, supposedly.)

All this effort will be made for a park that suffered no serious damage during 2012’s superstorm Sandy, the worst storm in New York’s history. Battery Park City was the only neighborhood in Manhattan south of 39th Street that kept its lights on during and after the storm.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/climate-change-forecasts-larry-elder/

“‘The trouble with almost all environmental problems,’ says Paul R. Ehrlich, the population biologist, ‘is that by the time we have enough evidence to convince people, you’re dead. … We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.'” — The New York Times, 1969.

“No real action has been taken to save the environment, (Ehrlich) maintains. And it does need saving. Ehrlich predicts that the oceans will be as dead as Lake Erie in less than a decade.” — Redlands Daily Facts, 1970.

“Scientist Predicts a New Ice Age by 21st Century: Air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century. … If the current rate of increase in electric power generation continues, the demands for cooling water will boil dry the entire flow of the rivers and streams of continental United States. … By the next century ‘the consumption of oxygen in combustion processes, world-wide, will surpass all of the processes which return oxygen to the atmosphere.'” — The Boston Globe, 1970

“The world could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts. … ‘In the next 50 years,’ the fine dust man constantly puts into the atmosphere by fossil fuel-burning could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees. If sustained ‘over several years’ –‘five to 10,’ he estimated — ‘such a temperature decrease could be sufficient to trigger an ice age!’ — Washington Post, Times Herald, 1971.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2022/08/how-the-elites-will-keep-their-lights-on/

What would it take to end our nation’s climate madness? I used to think a few cold showers and the gas running out while the soufflé was in the oven would be enough to induce our Green-washed ruling class to take a more sceptical attitude to “renewable energy”. Now I wonder. These are the people, unassailable in towering banks or parliamentary offices, who run the country, who influence things, make them happen. Right now what they are making happen is the certainty of power shortages as a result of their quasi-superstitious fear of conventional energy generation.

This class determines its political projects and the rest of us pay for them through taxes or surcharges. They may occasionally burble about “the welfare of all Australians” but in effect, they are not interested in us lesser mortals and don’t care if our lives are a struggle, as they’ve shown by pursuing the policies that have given us shamefully rising power prices we scrimp to pay but the nobs can easily afford, and if themselves “renewables” investors, make money out of.

But once their own comfortable existence is even remotely discommoded, they demand that something be done. We saw this in Melbourne when the depredations of youthful ethnic gangs in poorer suburbs were met by lofty ruling-class denials that any gangs existed except in the “racist” minds of the householders complaining. When the gangs struck out into the districts inhabited by the people who run things, all of a sudden it turned out that, yes, they were real, they were a social problem and the police snapped into action like magic.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/08/are-green-pet-projects-delaying-the-next

Biden’s latest green boondoggle funnels money to known energy losers, while curbing the technologies that could prove truly transformative.

Joe Biden’s latest spending binge doubles down on decades of failed government policies, propping up the wind and solar industries while entirely ignoring vast areas ripe for potential energy breakthroughs.

Biden’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act pledged to invest $369 billion in so-called “green” energy sources such as wind and solar power over the next decade, giving a windfall of cash to energy types favored by environmentalists. The IRA aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent by 2030.

America already poured almost $450 billion, even more than the amount provided by Biden’s legislation, into “green” energy between 2010 and 2019. Yet solar and wind power provided only 1.5 and 3.4 percent, respectively, of the energy produced in the U.S. in 2021, according to the Energy Information Administration. The use of solar and wind power has either temporarily increased carbon dioxide emissions or, at best, been responsible for about 1 percent of the decline in emissions, a process much more attributable to the switch from coal power to natural gas.

Pumping vast sums of money into solar and wind isn’t a new phenomenon. In fact, it has been going on for almost half a century, as government favoritism towards these technologies goes right back to the origins of the technologies. (In 1974, an economical solar-power device was the object that drove the plot in the then-near-future James Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun.) The solar-energy backers were wrong, and their boondoggle has cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. Today, solar and wind power get, respectively, 250 and 160 times the subsidies per unit of energy generated that nuclear-fission power does, according to Forbes.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/08/global_warming_is_the_greatest_scientific_fraud_in_history.html

Guy K. Mitchell, Jr. is the author of a new book titled Global Warming: The Great Deception — The Triumph of Dollars and Politics over Science and Why You Should Care.  Published on Amazon.com on January 4, 2022.

A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.

—Albert Einstein

In 1912, amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson claimed to have discovered the “missing link” between ape and man, known as “The Piltdown Man.”  He had found part of a human-like skull in Pleistocene gravel beds near Piltdown village in Sussex, England.  Dawson submitted the find to Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of geology at the Natural History Museum.  Smith Woodward made a reconstruction of skull fragments, and the archaeologists hypothesized that the find indicated evidence of a human ancestor living 500,000 years ago.  They announced their discovery at a Geological Society meeting in 1912.  For the most part, their story was accepted as fact.  However, subsequent chemical testing showed that the skull and jaw fragments actually came from two different species, a human and an ape.

The conclusion: Piltdown Man was an audacious fake and sophisticated scientific fraud.  Forty-one years elapsed between the discovery of the “Piltdown Man” and the determination that it was a fraud.

In 1988, the United Nations formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (U.N. IPCC).  In its seminal report in 1990, the U.N. IPCC stated that “at the then current rate of world emissions of CO2, the global mean temperature would likely increase by 1°C by 2025.”  This statement formed the basis for the hypothesis that anthropogenic (man-made) global warming resulted from the increased concentration of CO2 in the Earth’s lower atmosphere resulting from man-made activities.  Central to the hypothesis was that the temperature of the lower troposphere would increase as the concentration of CO2 in the troposphere increased.  Therefore, in its 1990 report, the U.N. IPCC established a direct linkage between the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and the temperature of the lower troposphere.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=3677406bfa

My last post on Tuesday reported on the Soho Forum climate change debate that had taken place the previous day. Debater Andrew Dessler, arguing in favor of rapid reductions in human greenhouse gas emissions by the method of vastly increasing electricity production from wind and solar generators, had heavily relied on the assertion that wind and solar are now the cheapest ways to generate electricity. An important slide in his presentation showed comparative costs of generation from various sources, with wind and solar clearly shown as least expensive. At the bottom of the slide, the acronym “LCOE” was legible.

LCOE stands for Levelized Cost of Electricity. I first encountered this term a couple of years ago, and thought that I should get on top of it to understand its significance. It took me about a half hour to figure out that this metric was completely inapplicable and invalid for purposes of comparing the costs of using dispatchable versus non-dispatchable generators as the predominant sources to power an electrical grid that works. The reasons are not complicated, but do take some minutes of thought if the matter has not previously been explained to you. In Tuesday’s post, I asked as to Dessler’s reliance on this LCOE metric:

[I]s he aware of this [inapplicability of LCOE] and therefore intentionally trying to deceive the audience? Or, alternatively, is he innumerate, and does not understand how this works quantitatively?

Some commenters on the post were quite harsh in their judgments of Dessler. They argued for the inference of intentional deception, on the basis that no one claiming expertise in this field could really be so obtuse as to think LCOE was a valid metric for the purpose for which Dessler was using it.

So today I thought to look at how others go about comparing the costs of generation of electricity from wind and solar versus dispatchable sources like fossil fuels or nuclear. I can’t say that I was surprised to learn that LCOE is everywhere as the metric of choice for the comparison. Moreover, it is almost impossible to find any discussion of why LCOE is completely misleading when comparing the cost of a grid powered predominantly by dispatchable sources to the cost of a grid powered predominantly by intermittent wind and solar sources backed up by storage.