Displaying posts categorized under

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

People Don’t Want to be Cold By Shoshana Bryen

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/people_dont_want_to_be_cold.htm

The climate summit was expensive, energy-burning theater. One hundred eighteen private jets flew into the airport, President Joe Biden’s motorcade had 24 vehicles, including SUVs and vans, and Greta Thunberg was angry. Demonstrators denounced Israel, which recycles and reuses 90 percent of its waste water, while ignoring the Palestinian pastime of burning tires containing multiple carcinogens.

Sustainability, less, new technologies, clean technologies, and more less (yes, more less) were the watchwords. Use less, do with less. The President should have touted America’s successes in reducing emissions: From 2005 to 2018, total U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions fell 12% while global energy-related emissions increased nearly 24%. Since 2005, national greenhouse gas emissions fell by 10%, and power sector emissions by 27% — as the US economy grew by 25%. He should have compared that to China’s announcement of 30 new, polluting coal-fired power plants and China being the world’s biggest polluter. Xi Jinping, naturally enough, was a no-show.

The president should have stood up for his people. Our people.

Vladimir Putin of energy exporting Russia and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) of energy exporting Saudi Arabia were also no shows, but for different reasons.

It is November and Europe is getting cold. Low energy supplies, mortgaged to Russian control of the Nord Stream II gas pipeline (given the go-ahead by Biden), and shortages of wind power are jacking up energy prices and making leaders there nervous.

It is November in the United States as well. Gasoline prices have been rising steadily and they are about to be joined by heating oil and gas heat. President Biden should be rethinking permits for the Keystone Pipeline and his decisions on fracking. Instead, the president asked – demanded – that OPEC pump more oil. Yes, dirty, polluting oil. And shipping it halfway around the world in diesel or coal powered ships to American ports with offloading problems. OPEC has said no.

Our World Gone (Climate) Mad

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/09/our-world-gone-climate-mad/

Each day the media are filled with “news” stories blaming various events and conditions on “climate change,” which are of course code words for “humans are overheating their planet.” Never do these reports offer evidence that mankind’s carbon dioxide emissions are to blame. That the press feels there’s no reason to back its claims with facts indicates that a large segment of the West has bought fully and uncritically into the narrative.

Some days it seems as if it’s useless to continue to fight the fight against global warming. Politicians, “journalists,” activists, activist scientists, celebrities, and a substantial portion of the public tell us that human activity is causing Earth to warm and there’s no more to the story than that. Skepticism is equated with denial. Questions are verboten. Aligning with the alarmists’ account is the only acceptable response.

This is how batty our world has become: According to a local newspaper, a British Columbia doctor diagnosed a patient to be suffering from “climate change.” Which might be the case, since the global and local climates are always in a state of change, and can at times be severe enough to cause injuries and death, though risk of climate-related fatalities has fallen 99% over the last 100 years.

But was the good doctor referring to natural climate cycles? Or was his diagnosis intended as a complaint about modern living that requires the consumption of fossil fuels? No one would go wrong by guessing the latter.

While much of the First World is suffering from climate derangement syndrome, the global warming scare offers great opportunities for graft, corruption, and greater political power to “leaders” who know better but use the ginned-up crisis to harden the bubbles they live in.

Leave it to Greta Thunberg, maybe the most well-known victim of CDS, to expose the charade. The perpetual protester noticed that the still-in-progress United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, “has turned into a (public relations) event, where leaders are giving beautiful speeches and announcing fancy commitments and targets, while behind the curtains governments of the global north countries are still refusing to take any drastic climate action.”

“The Boy Who Cried Wolf” Sydney Williams

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

The moral of Aesop’s fable of the boy who cried wolf is that false cries for help mean real calls for help will be ignored. A climate apocalypse has been forecast for years, sometimes by the well-intentioned but naïve looking to do good, but often by the cynical seeking political or personal advantage.

Two years ago, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, recognizing that global temperatures are indeed rising, compiled a list of dire climate predictions that did not happen. Here is a sample: In 1969, the Nobel winning German scientist, Paul Ehrlich predicted that everybody would “disappear in a cloud of blue steam.” In 1974 Time Magazine warned that “space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast.” The New York Times in 1978 reported that an “international team of specialists” feared the world would experience a never-ending “cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere.” Over the next ten years, Cassandras changed their forecasts from cooling to warming: An Associated Press headline from 1989 read, quoting UN officials: “Rising seas could obliterate nations.” And who could forget Al Gore’s 2006 movie, An Inconvenient Truth, in which he predicted that Artic ice would be gone in seven years. Today, doomsayers blame every forest fire, drought and hurricane on anthropological-caused climate change.

I am not a climate change denier. In fact, I know of no one who is. The term is used by climate disciples to belittle heretics who dare question the dogma that man alone is at fault for a warming planet. They are ruthless in their treatment of those skeptical of their professed causes of a changing climate. In National Geographic’s film Before the Flood, Bjørn Lomborg is listed as one of the ten most prominent “climate deniers.” Mr. Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and, in my opinion, the most reasonable voice on the subject. He begins every interview by repeating that he believes the Earth is warming. His sin is that he uses empirical evidence, logic and common sense to demonstrate that claimed apocalyptic consequences are more hyperbole than factual, which he explains in his 2020 book False Alarm. Fostering panic over climate change gets Progressives elected, sells books and movies and abets corporate welfare for renewable sources of energy. But for the rest of us, it does more harm than good.

Not A Joke: Taliban Asks for International Aid to Help It Fight…Climate Change By Robert Spencer

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/11/02/not-a-joke-taliban-asks-for-international-aid-to-help-it-fightclimate-change-n1529075

Kyle Shideler, the Director/Senior Analyst for Homeland Security & Counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy, said it best: “They may have a 7th-century law code, but they grift with the best of the 21st century.” The Taliban does indeed appear to have caught on to one of the most lucrative gravy trains of the first part of the 21st century and are eager to get in on the loot; the jihad terror group has issued a call for aid from international organizations to help it fight the scourge of climate change.

Apparently, the Taliban would have us believe that in between executing allies of the United States, confiscating guns, setting women on fire and making sure they don’t work or go to school, and persecuting Shi’ite Hazaras, their jihadis just really want to spend some time working on clean energy programs and making Afghanistan green.

Showing a fine grasp of how the game is played, Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen explained: “Afghanistan has a fragile climate. There is need for tremendous work.” Accordingly, “some climate change projects which have already been approved and were funded by Green Climate Fund, UNDP, Afghan Aid, should fully resume work.”

Would environmentalists be safe working in Afghanistan? Why, sure! The Taliban, said Shaheen, would make sure of that: “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is committed to providing security and a safe environment for the work of NGOs and charity organizations.”

Of course. This is the group, mind you, that abducted and murdered five aid workers from Save the Children in April 2015. In May 2019, Taliban jihadis murdered five aid workers from the American organization Counterpart International because, they said, Counterpart was promoting women being in the proximity of men in public. Then in June 2020, the UN accused the Taliban of “deliberate attacks” against health care workers.

China Has No Interest in Climate Change by Con Coughlin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17912/china-climate-change

Beijing remains committed to opening hundreds more coal-fired power plants in the coming years, with the result that China’s new coal plants will more than offset all the closures of other coal-fired stations that have taken place in the rest of the world during the past year.

Beijing’s unwillingness to make any significant contribution to attempts at the COP26 conference to reduce global emissions has raised legitimate concerns that China is seeking to gain an economic advantage over its Western rivals as they struggle with the challenge of meeting net zero targets.

There is a growing body opinion on both sides of the Atlantic that dramatic reductions in carbon omission could wreak economic havoc for Western economies if the pursuit of “green” economies is pursued at the expense of maintaining energy supplies. In Europe, for example, the race to abandon traditional fossil fuels as a major source of energy has led to increased reliance on energy supplies from Russia through its controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Mr Xi’s refusal to engage seriously with the COP26 climate change agenda also makes a mockery of the Biden administration’s contention that the best way to improve Beijing’s conduct is through deeper diplomatic cooperation.

Beijing’s main motivation is to undermine Western capitalism, not support it, which is why he has no intention of supporting the West’s ill-considered dash for net zero carbon emissions.

Nothing better summarises Chinese President Xi Jinping’s attitude to the West’s obsession with tackling climate change than the old Chinese saying, “Hide a knife behind a smile.”

As world leaders gathered for the COP26 summit in Glasgow, Western leaders were desperately trying to reach a deal on cutting carbon emissions, which United Nations climate experts claim is a major cause of climate change.

The Glasgow Festival of Globalist Virtue-Signaling Lots of moral preening and apocalyptic rhetoric on the agenda. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/glasgow-festival-globalist-virtue-signaling-bruce-thornton/

The Biden administration is attending the UN’s 26th “Conference of Parties,” the annual summit on what used to be called “Global Warming,” but is now dubbed “Climate Change.” Thirty thousand government officials, including heads of state posing for photo-ops, and government clerks enjoying taxpayer funded junkets, along with noisy activists, NGOs, and “green energy” corporate grifters hunting for more subsidies––all are spewing tons of CO2 into the atmosphere to attend the summit, leaving behind a King Kong-sized carbon footprint.

As with the other COP meetings, however, there will be lots of moral preening, apocalyptic rhetoric, and grand promises, but little of practical utility will be accomplished.

American progressives love such climate pow-wows, which indulge their various ideological shibboleths and demonstrate their superior morality and dedication to “science.” Leftist “Greens,” or “watermelons”––Green on the outside, Red on the inside–– find environmentalism in general a convenient weapon for discrediting free-market capitalism and especially the U.S. for daring to kick a communist superpower into the dustbin of history. Democrats, who like socialists “never let a good crisis go to waste,” find the lurid apocalyptic fantasies of “global warming” a good pretext for redistributing more taxpayer money to political clients. Thus the corporate clean-energy rackets and race-baiters will get money from programs like those in the proposed $550 billion “climate reform” legislation for researching and mitigating the “disparate impact” of climate change on “communities of color.”

And of course, Dems find anthropogenic, catastrophic global warming (ACGW) an opportunity for smearing their political enemies as “deniers,” “kooks,” and disbelievers in science who “cling to guns and religion” and, don’t forget, are “racists” and “xenophobes” to boot. Then there’s the hated Donald Trump, who pulled out of the Paris Accords that grew out of a previous COP agreement. This for the Dems was a heinous act of blasphemy that besmirched Barack Obama’s globalist triumph in signing the agreement, and is yet another sign of their enemies’ stubborn resistance to the global ruling class’s “rules-based international order.”

Speaking of Obama, Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation recalled in an interview that at the 2009 COP Obama “pledged that the world’s wealthiest nations would give $100 billion per year by 2020 to the world’s poorest counties to help them fight climate change.” Groves continued, ‘“Here we are in 2021, [and] there has never been $100 billion put together, much less $100 billion per year,’” adding that there is ‘“not $100 billion in any green climate fund, nor any real prospect of there being $100 billion.’” And even if there were such a fund, what nation would hold dead-beats accountable when they refused to contribute?

COP26 And The Hubris Of Our Political Overlords Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-10-31-cop26-and-the-hubris-of-our-political-overlords

So we look upon our world leaders and laugh at their foolishness and hubris. It’s all we can do.

There is a very reasonable argument to be made that the climate-related Conferences of Parties (COPs) that occur annually under UN auspices are terrible things. They cost (i.e., waste) enormous resources, and they have the potential to do great damage to the world economy and the well-being of the people. Fair enough. But on balance, my view is that it’s a good thing we have them. I can think of no other comparable activities that put on such dramatic and widely-viewed display the immeasurable foolishness and hubris of our political overlords.

By the time you read this, COP26 will likely have opened in Glasgow, Scotland. Thousands will be in attendance. Most every country of the world has sent at least some high-level delegation, and the majority are sending the President or Prime Minister. U.S. President Joe Biden will be there in person, along with PM Boris Johnson of the UK, President Emanuel Macron of France, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, and comparable heads of state from across Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Oceania, and North and South America. U.S. climate envoy John Kerry used his usual portentous tone to set the stage (as quoted by the BBC):

America’s climate envoy John Kerry says the COP26 climate change summit in Glasgow is the “last best hope for the world to get its act together”.

The idea is that hundreds of global leaders, not a one of whom has much if any idea how the world’s energy systems work, will come together to agree and order that those systems must be completely discarded and replaced. Currently, all the world economies run mostly on fossil fuel energy; but these political leaders are oh so much smarter than that, so they will order that use of such energy must be reduced and then ended, and associated carbon emissions will of course decline commensurately. These people equally have no idea how or whether the newly-ordered alternative energy systems might work, or how much the new systems might cost when fully implemented. Those things, you see, are mere engineering details, too insignificant to warrant the attention of great potentates. What they do know is, as the magnificent Barack Obama put it in 2008, “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal. . . .”

‘Bags of wind at Glasgow’s pantomime’ VIDEO

https://quadrant.org.au/bags-of-wind-at-glasgows-pantomime/

As world leaders, their retinues, activists, renewables rent-seekers, mendicant Third World corruptocrats and jet-setting green hysterics gather to posture and preen for their COP26 media courtiers, we’ll endure hours of news footage and a broad acreage of cookie-cutter prose about the so-called ‘climate crisis’.

Above, GBNews‘ Neil Oliver provides the advance antidote for Glasgow’s green gush of mush.

The Climate Summit to Nowhere From awful timing to unrealistic goals, COP26 has it all.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-climate-summit-to-nowhere-glasgow-cop26-joe-biden-11635543010?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

World leaders converge on Glasgow for a climate summit this weekend, and don’t laugh. This may be the worst-timed summit in history, but the delegates can still do substantial damage to the global economy, though none of it will matter to the climate.

It’s incongruous bordering on the bizarre to organize a summit like this while Europe is battening down for a winter fuel crisis, President Biden is begging OPEC to produce more oil, China is firing up its coal-fueled power plants amid an electricity shortage, and climate-change plans wilt as soon as they’re exposed to the sunlight of democratic politics.

No matter. This summit is called COP26 because there have already been 25. No less than the United Nations admitted this week that nations have made little progress on their previous climate pledges. But rather than adjust to this political reality, the delegates will make even more unrealistic promises.

The summit’s two main priorities are a pledge to reach “net zero” greenhouse-gas emissions by some future date, perhaps 2050, and to convince developed countries to pay poor countries to sign up for more CO2 reductions. Neither will amount to much.

“The Climate Is Changing, And Human Activities Are The Cause”: How, Exactly, Do We Know That? Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-10-28-the-climate-is-warming-and-human-activities-are-the-cause-how-exactly-do-we-know-that

“The climate is changing, and we are the cause.” That is a statement that is so often-repeated and affirmed that it goes way beyond mere conventional wisdom. Probably, you encounter some version or another of that statement multiple times per week; maybe dozens of times. Everybody knows that it is true! And to express disagreement with that statement, probably more so than with any other element of current progressive orthodoxy, is a sure way to get yourself labeled a “science denier,” fired from an academic job, or even banished from the internet.

The UN IPCC’s recent Sixth Assessment Report on the climate is chock full of one version after another of the iconic statement, in each instance of course emphasizing that the human-caused climate changes are deleterious and even catastrophic. Examples:

Human influence has likely increased the chance of compound extreme events since the 1950s. This includes increases in the frequency of concurrent heatwaves and droughts on the global scale (high confidence); fire weather in some regions of all inhabited continents (medium confidence); and compound flooding in some locations (medium confidence). (Page A.3.5)

Event attribution studies and physical understanding indicate that human-induced climate change increases heavy precipitation associated with tropical cyclones (high confidence) but data limitations inhibit clear detection of past trends on the global scale. (Page A.3.4, Box TS.10)

Some recent hot extreme events would have been extremely unlikely to occur without human influence on the climate system. (Page A.3.4, Box TX.10)

So, over and over, it’s that we have “high confidence” that human influence is the cause, or that events would have been “extremely unlikely” without human influence. But how, really, do we know that? What is the proof?

This seems to me to be rather an important question. After all, various world leaders are proposing to spend some tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars to undo what are viewed as the most important human influences on the climate (use of fossil fuels). Billions of people are to be kept in, or cast into, energy poverty to appease the climate change gods. Political leaders from every country in the world are about to convene in Scotland to agree to a set of mandates that will transform most everyone’s life. You would think that nobody would even start down this road without definitive proof that we know the cause of the problem and that the proposed solutions are sure to work.