RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/05/why-is-joe-biden-embracing-europes-failed-green-socialism/

These are the worst of times for Europe when it comes to energy. Not only are its green schemes failing to produce enough energy, but because of environmental laws, taxes and regulations, conventional energy prices are shooting through the roof. Inexplicably, President Joe Biden wants to recreate the same failed policies here.

Europe faces a winter of energy discontent, thanks to its absurd green programs that have created sudden extreme shortages and sharply higher prices for natural gas around the world. Officials thought they could cut carbon dioxide emissions to zero simply by building more wind farms and regulating fossil fuels out of existence.

Wrong. Sure, they built wind farms and shut down coal and nuclear plants, but they didn’t think of the simplest question: What if the wind doesn’t blow, or the sun doesn’t shine? As cold weather looms, Europe has had an unusually windless period, triggering severe deficits.

To make up for the shortfalls, Europe has gone back to the natural gas market. But who supplies its natural gas these days? Russia, which has cut supplies to Europe mainly, it seems, just to watch it squirm.

Things are so bad that Germany has returned to evil coal for fuel, only to be told by providers that, sorry, prices are sky high and supplies are tight. After closing all its nuclear power plants, which supplied CO2-free energy, foolish Germany has no choice. Nor does the rest of Europe, suffering the same self-inflicted green maladies.

“Europe’s increasingly expensive gas and electricity prices are sending a strong signal to manufacturers to consider temporary plant closures and to home and office owners to turn down thermostats to conserve fuel this winter,” wrote Reuters last week. “Front-month gas futures are now more than six times more expensive than at this point last year, as the region struggles to import enough gas to refill its depleted storage ahead of the winter peak heating season.”

“Europe’s climate follies created fuel shortages and price spikes rippling through global energy markets,” CFACT, a climate think tank, tweeted in response to Europe’s energy shock. “Demand for natural gas has soared due to waning wind production, the shutdown of coal and nuclear plants, and lower Russian gas deliveries.”

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2021/09/going-batty-over-climate-change/

We live in an age where Climate Change™ has replaced God as the explanation for everything. The list of phenomena it allegedly causes grows ever longer. More and more young people seem to be coming down with climate anxiety and ecological distress. In a recent survey led by Bath University, UK, over half of ten thousand respondents between 16 and 25 believe they are doomed and have no future.

The twenty-sixth United Nations annual climate Conference of the Parties (COP) is only weeks away.  After a quarter of a century of concern and another two billion people on the planet, is it too late to save us from a french-fry fate? Given the sombre mood, an attempt to link climate change with the COVID pandemic was inevitable. As if on cue, a “short communication” appeared in May this year in Science of The Total Environment, Volume 767:

“Shifts in global bat diversity suggest a possible role of climate change in the emergence of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2”.

The three authors: Robert M Beyer and Andrea Manica (Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom) and Camilo Mora (Department of Geography and Environment, University of Hawai’I, Manoa). Beyer has since taken up a European research fellowship at the alarmist Potsdam Institute for Climate Hysteria Impact Research. They argue that bats are the likely zoonotic origin of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2. The local number of coronaviruses is said to correlate with “bat species richness”, with climate change shifting the global distribution of bats. This “bat richness” has strongly increased the likelihood of SARS-CoV-1 and 2 outbreaks; hence climate change may have been an important factor in these outbreaks.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2021/09/going-batty-over-climate-change/

We live in an age where Climate Change™ has replaced God as the explanation for everything. The list of phenomena it allegedly causes grows ever longer. More and more young people seem to be coming down with climate anxiety and ecological distress. In a recent survey led by Bath University, UK, over half of ten thousand respondents between 16 and 25 believe they are doomed and have no future.

The twenty-sixth United Nations annual climate Conference of the Parties (COP) is only weeks away.  After a quarter of a century of concern and another two billion people on the planet, is it too late to save us from a french-fry fate? Given the sombre mood, an attempt to link climate change with the COVID pandemic was inevitable. As if on cue, a “short communication” appeared in May this year in Science of The Total Environment, Volume 767:

“Shifts in global bat diversity suggest a possible role of climate change in the emergence of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2”.

The three authors: Robert M Beyer and Andrea Manica (Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom) and Camilo Mora (Department of Geography and Environment, University of Hawai’I, Manoa). Beyer has since taken up a European research fellowship at the alarmist Potsdam Institute for Climate Hysteria Impact Research. They argue that bats are the likely zoonotic origin of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2. The local number of coronaviruses is said to correlate with “bat species richness”, with climate change shifting the global distribution of bats. This “bat richness” has strongly increased the likelihood of SARS-CoV-1 and 2 outbreaks; hence climate change may have been an important factor in these outbreaks.

Here we show that the southern Chinese Yunnan province and neighbouring regions in Myanmar and Laos form a global hotspot of climate change-driven increase in bat richness. This region coincides with the likely spatial origin of bat-borne ancestors of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2. Accounting for an estimated increase in the order of 100 bat-borne CoVs across the region, climate change may have played a key role in the evolution or transmission of the two SARS CoVs. (R M Beyer, A Manica and C Mora, 2021)

A simultaneous media release showed how keen the authors are on climate change playing a bigger role in the COVID drama. Surely it too should be addressed “as part of COVID-19 economic recovery programmes.” 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/09/the_science_of_climate_change.html

The science surrounding COVID has been hijacked for political purposes. People recovered from the disease are pushed to get vaccinated, even though they have a natural immunity that is stronger than vaccine immunity. People are required to wear masks even though masks are essentially useless for preventing infection. People that die are reported as dying of COVID even though they died of something else. The government demands that children be vaccinated even though they are naturally resistant to the disease and suffer disturbing side effects from the vaccine. Schools are closed for no good reason.

The “science” of climate change is also BS. That should be easier to accept after seeing what the government did to COVID science. Why do politicians want to hype a nonexistent climate crisis? In a word: power. By claiming that there is an urgent climate crisis the politicians can spend billions to fight the imaginary foe. Those billions create political allies and reward friends. H.L. Mencken put it nicely in 1918:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

The parade of imaginary environmental catastrophes during the last 70 years is very long. Here are some books predicting this or that environmental disaster: Our Plundered Planet (1948), Road to Survival (1948), Silent Spring (1962), Famine 1975! (1967), The Population Bomb (1968), The Limits to Growth (1972), An Inconvenient Truth (2006), This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. Climate (2014), The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019).

Richard Lindzen, one of the most accomplished climate scientists in the world by virtue of his discoveries, does not have to kowtow to the global warming mob. In an essay he pointed out that scientific data that challenges the global warming hypothesis are simply changed. He cites examples of how environmental extremists have infiltrated scientific organizations.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-world-doomed-gdp-warming-earth-11632338084?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Editor’s note: As November’s global climate conference in Glasgow draws near, important facts about climate change don’t always make it into the dominant media coverage. We’re here to help. Each Thursday contributor Bjorn Lomborg will provide some important background so readers can have a better understanding of the true effects of climate change and the real costs of climate policy.

Young people across the world are terrified of climate change, according to a forthcoming Lancet study. More than 45% of people 16 to 25 in the 10 countries surveyed are so worried that it affects their daily life and functioning. Almost half of young Americans believe “humanity is doomed,” and two-thirds think “the future is frightening.” But while climate change is a problem, panic is unwarranted.

The data show that humanity has overcome much larger threats over the past century. In 1900, if humanity had gotten rid of air pollution—mostly indoor pollution caused by smoky fuels like wood and dung—the benefit would have been equivalent to global gross domestic product rising 23%. To a young audience, that might look like an insufficient measure of well-being, but higher GDP means better health, lower mortality, greater access to education and in general a better standard of living. By 2050 the problem of air pollution will be mostly solved. And that’s only one of the many issues humanity has shorn down over the last 100 years, according to data 21 top economists and I gathered.

The challenge climate change poses, both to the environment and society, looks rather small compared to those humanity has already met. Noble Prize-winning climate economist William Nordhaus has shown that a 6.3-degree Fahrenheit rise in world temperatures by 2100—which is probable if policy makers do little to stop climate change—would cost only 2.8% of global GDP a year. The United Nations’ latest estimate puts it even lower at 2.6% of GDP for a 6.6-degree Fahrenheit increase.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/afghanistan-climate-change-west-failures/

The West’s humiliation in Afghanistan has an older brother: climate change.

As siblings, the two share characteristics, most obviously an inability to confront unwelcome facts. In Afghanistan, there was a large constituency led by the Pentagon invested in the mantra of proclaiming progress in the fight against the Taliban. Climate has its own industrial complex of NGOs, climate scientists, renewable energy lobbyists profiting from the energy transition, eager helpers in the media, and politicians posing as world saviors.

Energy experts tell us renewable energy is cheaper than building new fossil fuel power stations. If they’re right, why did China build the equivalent of more than one large coal plant a week last year? Its slave labor camps help produce materials for Chinese solar panels, which make them the cheapest in the world. This led the Biden administration to ban their importation. In 10 years, India — a country more susceptible to Western fads — increased the amount of electricity it generated from coal nearly six times faster than from wind and solar. In 2020, fossil fuels accounted for almost 90 percent of India’s primary energy consumption.

These facts help explain the biggest fact of all. The first 20 years after the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change saw carbon dioxide emissions rise 60 percent. From 2012 to 2019, they rose a further 5.4 percent. However this is dressed up, it’s failure. Meanwhile, the West’s energy emissions have been more or less flat for nearly three decades and on a downward trend since 2007. Emissions from the Rest of the World account for all the growth in global emissions, suddenly accelerating in 2002 from an average of around 1 percent a year to nearly 5 percent a year in the 12 years until 2014.

As a matter of simple arithmetic, the West’s declining share of global emissions means that whatever it does or doesn’t do is of diminishing relevance to the future of climate change. The West’s solipsism of ‘we’ — as in ‘we must act’ — is a profound self-deception.

This delusion is mirrored in the West’s climate diplomacy. At the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, Western nations made their most determined attempt to include the powerhouse economies of the rest of the world in a legally binding global emissions reduction regime. It failed. China and India, joined by South Africa and Brazil, said no. Without a global emissions regime, unilateral emissions cuts are senseless. The Senate understood this in 1997 when Joe Biden, John Kerry and 93 other senators voted unanimously to adopt the Byrd-Hagel resolution, effectively vetoing American participation in the Kyoto Protocol on the grounds that it excluded the majority of the world.