RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://nypost.com/2021/11/30/the-comic-cries-of-climate-apocalypse-50-years-of-spurious-scaremongering/

The recent UN climate summit in Glasgow was predictably branded our “last chance” to tackle the “climate catastrophe” and “save humanity.” Like many others, US climate envoy John Kerry warned us that we have only nine years left to avert most of “catastrophic” global warming.

But almost every climate summit has been branded the last chance. Setting artificial deadlines to get attention is one of the most common environmental tactics. We have actually been told for the past half-century that time has just about run out.

This message is not only spectacularly wrong but leads to panic and poor policies.

Two years ago, Britain’s Prince Charles announced that we had just 18 months left to fix climate change. This wasn’t his first attempt at deadline-setting. Ten years earlier, he told an audience that he “had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world.”

In 2004, a major UK newspaper told us that without drastic action, climate change would destroy civilization by 2020. By that time, it foretold, major European cities would be sunk beneath rising seas, Britain would be plunged into a “Siberian” climate as the Gulf Stream shut down and mega-droughts and famines would lead to widespread rioting and nuclear war. Not quite what happened last year.

And these predictions have been failing for decades. In 1989, the head of the UN’s Environment Program declared we had just three years to “win — or lose — the climate struggle.” In 1982, the UN was predicting planetary “devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust” by the year 2000. Indeed, at the very first UN environment summit in Stockholm in 1972, almost 50 years ago, the organizer and later first UN Environment Program director warned that we had just 10 years to avoid catastrophe.

In 1972, the world was also rocked by the first global environmental scare, the so-called “Limits to Growth” report. The authors predicted with great confidence that most natural resources would run out within a few decades while pollution would overpower humanity. At the time, Time magazine described the future as a desolate world with few gaunt survivors tilling freeway center strips, hoping to raise a subsistence crop. Life magazine expected “urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution” by the mid-1980s.

The scares were, of course, spectacularly misguided on both counts. They got it wrong because they overlooked the greatest resource of all, human ingenuity. We don’t just use up resources but innovate ever-smarter ways of making resources more available. At the same time, technology solves many of the most persistent pollution problems, as did the catalytic converter. This is why air pollution in rich countries has been declining for decades.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/30/those-ugly-climate-models/

The narrative that man is cooking his planet like an overdone Thanksgiving turkey has survived only because the media have propped it up. But we’re confident that eventually the story will collapse. The evidence does not favor the climate alarmists.

A most-recent example that should help tilt the scales back toward sanity: Researchers have found that warming in the Arctic Ocean is not a recent event that coincides with post-war industrial acceleration and the growth of automobile ownership. It began at the outset of the previous century.

According to a University of Cambridge study, the warming arrived “decades earlier than records suggest,” and is “due to warmer water flowing into the delicate polar ecosystem from the Atlantic Ocean,” says Science Daily

“The results, reported in the journal Science Advances, provide the first historical perspective on Atlantification of the Arctic Ocean and reveal a connection with the North Atlantic that is much stronger than previously thought.”

In other words, there are climate and environmental influences that still aren’t fully understood.

Yet all we hear is that we have to trust the scientists, who have reached a consensus that man’s fossil-fuel burning habit is bringing planetary disaster. No dissent from this declaration is permitted. Those who refuse to pledge allegiance to the accepted story are branded as undesirables.

This is where we are in 2021, and where we’ve been for a couple of decades – in the world of climate studies, junk science has overtaken honest and open inquiry.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/the_profound_junk_science_of_climate.html

Climate change prophecy hangs its hat on computer climate models. The models have gigantic problems. According to Kevin Trenberth, once in charge of modeling at the National Center for Atmospheric research, [none of the] “models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate” [of the Earth]. The models can’t properly model the Earth’s climate, but we are supposed to believe that if carbon dioxide has a certain effect in the imaginary Earths of the many models it will have the same effect on the real earth.

The climate models are an exemplary representation of confirmation bias, the psychological tendency to suspend one’s critical facilities in favor of welcoming what one expects or desires. Climate scientists can manipulate numerous adjustable parameters in the models that can be changed to tune a model to give a “good” result. Technically, a good result would be that the climate model output can match past climate history. But that good result competes with another kind of good result. That other good result is a prediction of a climate catastrophe. That sort of “good” result has elevated the social and financial status of climate science into the stratosphere.

Once money and status started flowing into climate science because of the disaster its denizens were predicting, there was no going back. Imagine that a climate scientist discovers gigantic flaws in the models and the associated science. Do not imagine that his discovery would be treated respectfully and evaluated on its merits. That would open the door to reversing everything that has been so wonderful for climate scientists.  Who would continue to throw billions of dollars a year at climate scientists if there were no disasters to be prevented? No, the discoverer of any flaw would be demonized and attacked as a pawn of evil interests. Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer come to mind. There are many more skeptical scientists keeping quiet in varying degrees.

Testing a model against past history and assuming that it will then predict the future is a methodology that invites failure. The failure starts when the modeler adds more adjustable parameters to enhance the model. At some point one should ask if we are fitting a model or doing simple curve fitting. If the model has degenerated into curve fitting, it very likely won’t have serious predictive capability.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/manchin-urges-biden-to-restore-keystone-xl-pipeline/

Senator Joe Manchin (D., W. Va.) on Tuesday called on President Biden to reinstate the Keystone XL pipeline as the U.S. struggles with gas shortages and skyrocketing prices.

“I continue to call on President Biden to responsibly increase energy production here at home and to reverse course to allow the Keystone XL pipeline to be built which would have provided our country with up to 900,000 barrels of oil per day from Canada, one of our closest allies,” the moderate senator said in a statement.

“To be clear, this is about American energy independence and the fact that hard-working Americans should not depend on foreign actors, like OPEC+, for our energy security and instead focus on the real challenges facing our country’s future,” Manchin said, referring to the group of major oil-producing countries.

The statement came after the Biden administration announced plans to release 50 million barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve to combat soaring gas prices.

Manchin, who is the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has previously advocated against Biden’s decision to revoke a permit for the pipeline. In February, he said that pipelines nationwide “continue to be the safest mode to transport our oil and natural gas resources, and they support thousands of high-paying, American union jobs.″

However, Biden has suggested that the U.S. end its dependence on fossil fuel and has committed to forging a path for the U.S. to have a carbon-free electric grid by 2035 and net zero emissions by 2050.

“This is the decade that will determine the answer. This decade,” Biden said during an international climate summit earlier this month. “The science is clear: We only have a brief window left before us to raise our ambitions and to raise — to meet the task that’s rapidly narrowing.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/global_warming_scaremongers_refuted_as_arctic_ice_growing_on_track_to_be_the_most_ice_in_2_decades.html

The scariest scenario of the global warming doomsayers has been the idea that the melting Arctic ice cap would put coastal cities underwater. For example:

‘Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice,’ reported the BBC back in 2007. ‘Their latest modelling indicates that northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.’

Professor Wieslaw Maslowski from the Department of Oceanography of the US Navy predicted an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the summer of 2013.

Maslowski added that his prediction was on the conservative side, too: “Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007. So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.”

There are plenty more such forecasts:

‘Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice,’ reported the BBC back in 2007. ‘Their latest modelling indicates that northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.’

Professor Wieslaw Maslowski from the Department of Oceanography of the US Navy predicted an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the summer of 2013.

Maslowski added that his prediction was on the conservative side, too: “Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007. So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.”

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2021/11/21/hot_talk_cold_science_and_the_dangers_of_centralized_planning_in_the_name_of_climate_change_804467.html

When former President Barack Obama says “We are nowhere near where we need to be” in terms of climate change, he’s not  talking about reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The stated goals of the U.N. Paris Agreement that Obama, and other world leaders, embrace are properly viewed as a proxy for a larger agenda aimed at dismantling American independence and freedom.

After all, the U.S. already leads the world in reducing Co2 emissions thanks in large part to hydraulic fracturing that accelerated during Donald Trump’s presidency. Forbes reports on the emissions reductions that occurred much to the consternation of the news media and its cheerleading for U.N. directives that raise energy costs without impacting climate.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration has collected data that shows how innovative drilling techniques has unleashed natural gas, which in turn has been driving down emissions. This trendline has continued into the Biden presidency in part because natural gas has replaced coal and in part because of COVID-19 restrictions on travel and other activities.

So, if Obama isn’t talking about emissions, what did he actually mean while addressing the U.N’s latest climate change conference in Glasgow, Scotland earlier this month? The answer comes in the form of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill that President Biden signed into law on Monday, and other anti-energy initiatives, ostensibly advanced in the name of climate change. The directives and mandates included in the legislation make it evident that what Obama really meant during his talk at the U.N. is that centralized planners in Europe and America are “nowhere near” where they would like to be as it relates to implementing coercive policy measures.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=7336059e81

As noted in my post this past Sunday, no amount of fake happy talk in the so-called “Glasgow Climate Pact” can obscure the obvious fact that nobody agreed to anything. To read the text of the “pact,” everybody claims to think that this whole “decarbonization” thing to “save the planet” is real. We’re all going to do something really, really significant, but it will be next year, or maybe the year after that. And meanwhile, nobody has made any remotely serious effort to cost this thing out. Are we talking about a ten percent increase in the cost of energy for this decarbonization project, or will it be a doubling, or maybe a tripling — or maybe even a multiplication by ten?

With tens of trillions of dollars at stake in the world economy, let alone the majority of humanity at risk of energy poverty, you would think that we would be far down the road toward detailed engineering studies of what the decarbonized energy world will look like and exactly how much it will cost. But it is exactly the opposite. Everywhere — or at least everywhere in the Western countries — government functionaries with degrees in English or Political Science (or maybe Gender Studies) issue edicts that carbon emissions will be reduced “50% by 2030” or “90% by 2050,” without any knowledge or understanding of how that may be accomplished.

So, as the costs of attempting to “transition” away from fossil fuels start to hit home, will anybody actually go through with the project? I think that the chance of that is about zero. China and India show how it works. To judge by their actions (rather than their words), they have long since figured out that solar and wind energy can’t succeed in running a modern economy, so they mouth empty platitudes to placate the Western zealots, make unenforceable promises that only come due after everyone is dead, and forge ahead with massive development of coal power. And even more telling are recent developments in Western jurisdictions. When the first hint arrives that fossil fuel restrictions are going to impose cost increases large enough for meaningful numbers of voters to notice, even the bluest of blue U.S. states take about three minutes to abandon their “decarbonization” promises.

For the latest from India, check out this piece from Reuters today headlined “India’s Jindal plans to start building Botswana coal mine in 2022.” Recall first that at the just-ended COP26 in Glasgow, India supposedly “pledged” to achieve “net zero” carbon emissions by 2070. You would not be wrong to infer that the year 2070 was selected to be safely after all current world leaders are long since at least retired, and most likely dead. Today’s Reuters piece, on the other hand, gives the here and now:

India’s Jindal Steel & Power Limited . . . will start building a coal mine in Botswana’s southeastern Mmamabula coalfields in 2022, aiming to supply the export market and a planned coal power plant, a company official said. The Indian industrial giant aims for the mine to produce 4.5 million tonnes of coal per year.

It’s a big project, but a tiny part of the proven coal resources of the African country of Botswana:

Despite the global shift from coal, Botswana is pushing ahead with developing its estimated 212 billion tonnes of coal resources.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2021/11/cop-plop-and-flop/

At least some of the media are making hay over the hypocrisy of the global elite arriving at Glasgow via 400 private jets to lecture us about CO2 emissions. The jets created such a shortage of parking slots that some were obliged to fly the extra 50-70km to Prestwick and Edinburgh just to park.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s $US180 billion man, flew in with his $US65 million Gulfstream to rendezvous with Prince Charles, who also arrived by private jet. Bezos had been partying in Turkey with Bill Gates on a rented super yacht, the Lana ($A3 million a week hire), with a few 150km side trips by helicopter. 

Within several hours last Sunday week leaders from Niger, Nigeria, Togo, Mauritania and Kenya came in by private jets. World leaders do need secure transport, but as one blogger commented, “The fools could just stay home and shut up.”

The best one-liner about Glasgow to date is from an ex-No 10 Downing special adviser Steve Hilton writing in the Daily Mail: “A gigantic flatulent mess of incoherence and sanctimony”. One such specimen: ex-President Obama jetting in to tell teen demonstrators, “You need to help educate your parents and grandparents, your uncles and aunts, your teachers, your employers.” Sure, Barack, that makes sense.

But my tale today is not about the presidents and billionaires but the 40,000 bureaucrats, activists, grifters and useful idiots now jamming Glasgow accommodation and gabfests. They’re being told by the ridiculous Prince Charles that this is the “last chance saloon” to save the planet and humanity, as they were told at the first Conference of Parties at Berlin in 1995 and every other one of the annual gabfests since.