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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

Brrr… Arctic Sea Ice Melt the Lowest in 15 Years, Antarctic Sea Ice Above Average By Jim Hoft

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/brrr-arctic-sea-ice-melt-lowest-15-years-antactic-sea-ice-average/

Do you remember when AOC said we had only 12 years left on the planet due to “climate change”?

Yeah… She’s an idiot.We’re going to be fine – and we don’t need to destroy the US economy to save the planet.

The Arctic sea ice is the highest it’s been in nine years. It has increased more than 30% from last year.

And Antarctic sea ice is way above normal.

Tony Heller

@Tony__Heller
The Arctic Ocean gained a record amount of sea ice during the first week of September. Most years the Arctic loses ice, but this year ice extent has increased almost 200,000 km. sq. This will not be reported by @CNN @BBCNews or the @nytimes

The World Is Getting Safer From Floods By Bjorn Lomborg

https://www.wsj.com/articles/flood-climate-change-ipcc-united-nations-infrastructure-deaths-cost-severe-weather-11631134276?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

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.

Climate change may raise waters and more Americans than ever live in floodplains, but technology and infrastructure protect them.Climate change may raise waters and more Americans than ever live in floodplains, but technology and infrastructure protect them.

Though the images of abandoned cars in waterlogged East Coast streets might make you think otherwise, the relative toll that floods take on the U.S.—in property and lives—has decreased over time. Flooding costs as a share of gross domestic product declined almost 10-fold since 1903 to 0.05% of GDP, while annual flood death risk—fatalities per million—dropped almost threefold. World-wide data are sparser, but flood research shows costs relative to GDP and deaths relative to population have decreased globally from 1980 to 2010.

Scary headlines about rising flood costs tend to come from misleading statistics of total damages, which say more about U.S. economic growth than they do about climate change. Since the start of the 20th century, the U.S. population has quadrupled and annual GDP has increased 36-fold. There are more people and structures in the U.S. than ever—including in floodplains. A flood that hits, say, Atlanta, will encounter far more people and buildings today than 30 years ago. The number of exposed housing units in the city’s floodplain went up by 58% from 1990 to 2010. At the same time, greater wealth and better technology have made people and property in low-lying areas safer from floods. Only when you look at damages in the context of GDP can you filter out what’s a sign of growing wealth and what indicates flood resiliency or vulnerability.

Doctors Join the Climate Lobby Don’t they know that poverty kills far more people than heat does?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/doctors-join-the-climate-lobby-medical-journal-editorial-bmj-11631048529?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Medical journals are supposed to be forums for doctors to publish research and debate ideas. But like traditional media outlets, many are finding it harder to control their political bias. Now some 200 journal editors are showing their political hand on climate change in an apocalyptic and misleading joint editorial this week that could have been ghost-written by Greta Thunberg.

The groupthink in these journals suppressed debate over important questions during the Covid pandemic, including the origins of the virus and the costs of lockdowns. Now these same experts want to tell everyone what to do about climate, which they know less about than geologists do about cancer.

“No temperature rise is ‘safe,’’’ the editorial says. “Higher temperatures have brought increased dehydration and renal function loss, dermatological malignancies, tropical infections, adverse mental health outcomes, pregnancy complications, allergies, and cardiovascular and pulmonary morbidity and mortality.”

The editorial cites a recent British Medical Journal meta-analysis of studies that examine links between extreme weather and health outcomes. But most findings haven’t been replicated, many conflict, and correlation doesn’t prove causation. Obesity has increased at the same time temperatures have. That doesn’t mean heat is making people fatter.

There’s Nothing The U.S. Can Do To Affect Global Temperature

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/07/theres-nothing-the-u-s-can-do-to-affect-global-temperature/

Despite zero evidence that human greenhouse gas emissions are harming Earth, the Democrats, cheered by the media, continue to enact energy policies they say are necessary for saving our world. But all they’re doing is increasing energy scarcity, which forces prices higher, and ignoring facts that don’t fit their narrative.

America’s worst energy policy offender is California, where the ever-eager-to-mandate-and-forbid ruling class is outlawing automobiles that burn fossil fuels, halting electricity generation from conventional sources, and executing a war on gas stations.

It’s all so entirely pointless. California’s humanity produces only about 1% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. If the state fell into the ocean tomorrow, as some have predicted it will (it won’t), the world thermometer wouldn’t be moved one bit.

The story is the same for the entire country.

“Here’s the most important fact about the Green New Deal: It wouldn’t work,” says the Heritage Foundation’s Nicolas Loris. “Ultimately, fully implementing the Green New Deal would have no meaningful impact on global temperatures.”

Yet if enacted, the law would nevertheless “bring huge changes to our country,” Loris continues, as it “is a wish list for big government spending, expansive government control, and massive amounts of wealth distribution.” It would also allow progressives to implement their twisted definition of “social justice.”

“This deal would fundamentally change how people produce and consume energy, harvest crops, raise livestock, build homes, drive cars, travel long distances, and manufacture goods,” says Loris. But “even if Americans were on board with this radical change in behavior and lifestyle, it wouldn’t change our climate.” 

How can he make such a statement? Because his colleague Kevin Dayaratna ran the numbers – and put them before Congress during a 2017 House committee hearing.

Climate ‘crisis’ more dangerous than terrorism? Get real, Biden By Vijay Jayaraj

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/climate_crisis_more_dangerous_than_terrorism_get_real_biden.html

The resurgence of Taliban is now expected to pose a serious threat to U.S. and global security.  Thirteen U.S. servicemen and nearly 200 Afghans were already killed in blasts outside Kabul Airport on August 26, 2021.  Yet President Biden says the biggest threat to the U.S. is a climate that has been undergoing naturally driven makeovers for eons.

“This is not a joke,” said Biden.  “You know what the Joint Chiefs told us the greatest physical threat facing America was?  Global warming.”

During Biden’s presidential campaign, John Kerry said, “America will soon have a government that treats the climate crisis as the urgent national security threat it is.”  And here we are.

In April, U.S. secretary of defense Lloyd Austin termed climate change an existential threat, saying, “From coast to coast and across the world, the climate crisis has caused substantial damage and put people in danger.”

Categorizing climate change as a more serious threat than, say, terrorism or a hostile China is a public policy blunder that at least equals the botched Afghanistan withdrawal and exposes an ignorance of science.  The Biden administration’s statements are void of numbers, data, and statistics.  This is because the metrics of key climate parameters stand in stark contrast to the claims.

Hurricane Ida Isn’t the Whole Story on Climate The number of landfall hurricanes isn’t rising and the world is getting better at mitigating their destruction. By Bjorn Lomborg

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hurricane-ida-henri-climate-change-united-nations-un-galsgow-conference-natural-disaster-infrastructure-carbon-emissions-11630704844?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 week 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.

Hurricane season has arrived in the Atlantic Ocean. Already this summer Hurricanes Henri and Ida have caused headline-generating damage and flooding in the Gulf states, the Southeast and the Middle Atlantic states. Yet despite what you may have heard, Atlantic hurricanes are not becoming more frequent. In fact, the frequency of hurricanes making landfall in the continental U.S. has declined slightly since 1900.

Airplanes and satellites have dramatically increased the number of storms that scientists can spot at sea today, making the frequency of landfall hurricanes—which were reliably documented even in 1900—a better statistic than the total number of Atlantic hurricanes.

And there aren’t more powerful hurricanes either. The frequency Category 3 and above hurricanes making landfall since 1900 is also trending slightly down. A July Nature paper finds that the increases in strong hurricanes you’ve heard so much about are “not part of a century-scale increase, but a recovery from a deep minimum in the 1960s–1980s.”

Media Can’t Handle the Climate Truth If, after four decades, scientists see less warming and lower emissions, isn’t that good news? By Holman Jenkins Jr.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/media-climate-change-truth-degrees-warming-disaster-hurricanes-flooding-adaptation-infrastructure-united-nations-11630703058?mod=hp_opin_pos_3#cxrecs_s

If “news” is about how today differs from yesterday, the press missed a lot of news in the long-awaited new report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that was issued a few weeks ago.

After 41 years of promoting a fuzzy and unsatisfying estimate of how much warming might result from a doubling of atmospheric CO2, the world’s climate science arbiter has finally offered the first real improvement in the history of modern climate science.

Through five previous U.N. assessment plus their predecessor, the 1979 Charney Report, the likely worst-case was a rise of 4.5 degrees Celsius. This came from averaging the result of inconsistent computer climate simulations about which the IPCC knew only one thing: They couldn’t all be right and perhaps none were.

Using real-world data, the new report now says the worst case is a 4-degree rise. More important, with much greater confidence than before, disastrous outcomes above 5 degrees are now found to be very unlikely.

In another departure, the U.N. panel now says the dire emissions scenario it promoted for two decades should be regarded as highly unlikely, with more plausible projections at least a third lower.

The report also notes, as the press never does, the full impact of these emissions won’t be manifested until decades, even a century, later. The ultimate likely worst-case effect of a doubling of CO2 might be 4 degrees, but the best estimate of the “transient climate response” this century is about 2.7 degrees, or 1.6 degrees on top of the warming experienced since the start of the industrial age.

More On European Climate Change Litigation: These People Are Crazy-Francis Menton

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=a7306c1128

It’s easy to look at “climate change” litigation in the U.S. and conclude that a good percentage of our environmental bureaucrats and judges who get involved in these things are crazy. Thus many courts around the country (mostly state courts) have allowed lawsuits seeking damages against oil companies over greenhouse gas emissions from their products to proceed at least beyond the preliminary stages. And the EPA, early in the Obama administration (2009) issued what is called the “Endangerment Finding,” declaring CO2 and other GHGs to be a “danger to public health and welfare” — a ridiculous determination that the Trump administration nevertheless did not attempt to undo, and which substantially ties the government’s hands in contesting wacky climate-related cases. Not that the Biden Administration can be counted on to contest these cases at all, no matter how preposterous.

But we do have in the U.S. this thing called the doctrine of “non-justiciability.” That is the doctrine under which our courts steer clear of cases that ask courts to rule broadly on matters of public policy that are more legitimately the province of the legislatures. At the federal level, the non-justiciability doctrine arises out of the separation of powers embodied in the Constitution’s structure, as well as by the language of Article 3 Section 2, which describes the jurisdiction of the federal courts only in terms of “Cases” and “Controversies.” The doctrine has been around for a long time, and is well-established in many precedents. As discussed in my most recent post, it was the non-justiciability doctrine that sank the Juliana case, which sought to get a court to order the end of the use of fossil fuels in the U.S. on the basis of the Due Process clause of the Fifth Amendment and the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Even two of three Obama-appointed judges on the Ninth Circuit panel agreed with that rationale. Had the case reached the Supreme Court, the 6-3 “conservative” majority, in my judgment, would be highly likely to apply the “non-justiciable” rationale to privately-brought litigation that seeks a fundamental restructuring of the economy through court order. (A different issue is whether the Supreme Court, in the presence of the Endangerment Finding, would try to overrule a restructuring of the economy via EPA or other bureaucratic regulation that claimed some statutory basis, however flimsy.)

Global Warming Narrative Takes Another Hit

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/31/global-warming-narrative-takes-another-hit/

We have been constantly told for what seems like as long as we can remember that Antarctica is shrinking because man’s carbon dioxide emissions are overheating our planet. While fearmongering has made its way around the world countless times, the truth is still pulling on its boots.

So what is the truth? It’s quite straightforward: Antarctic sea ice has been growing.

According to the Japan Meteorological Agency, the continent’s annual maximum sea ice has grown for three straight years. The annual mean is increasing, and the annual minimum has also expanded for three consecutive years. The long-term trend lines for the annual maximum and mean, starting in 1979, are noticeably moving upward, while the trend line for the annual minimum is ascending, as well, though much more modestly.

Doesn’t fit the doomsday narrative, does it?

Please don’t think this is an isolated and therefore meaningless example. There are many other facts that show the global warming fears are overblown.

For instance, two years ago, we showed that predictions claiming that the Great Lakes were drying up due to man-made global warming were, if we might use a term favored by the current occupant of the White House, malarkey.

Moving up to today, we’re reading that “many parts of Europe have not had much of a real summer, having seen much cool and wet weather this year,” and that there’s August snow in Austria, which is not just “one-day freak weather event” but the beginning of a snowy period and a usually cool cycle.

Hurricane Ida’s Climate Resilience Lesson Spending to protect against extreme weather beats green boondoggles.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hurricane-ida-climate-resilience-lesson-new-orleans-louisiana-11630358067?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

“Government can’t command the tides, but it can protect people from them.”

The pictures of Hurricane Ida’s wreckage across Louisiana are grim, and the storm isn’t over. But the good news is that New Orleans appears to have weathered the tempest as well as could be expected thanks to its post-Katrina flood-protection investments. This is a reminder of how hardening infrastructure against unpredictable Mother Nature pays off.

Ida slammed into Louisiana’s Port Fourchon on Sunday as a Category 4 storm with wind speeds of 150 miles an hour and one to two inches of rain an hour. Its winds tie it as the fifth strongest storm to hit the U.S. mainland. Such heavy winds and precipitation will inevitably cause flooding and damage buildings.

But the bigger worry going into Ida was that a catastrophic storm surge would breach New Orleans’s levees and submerge the city as happened 16 years ago to the day during Hurricane Katrina. Clocking in as a lower-grade Category 3 storm when it made landfall, Katrina killed some 2,000 people and caused an estimated $125 billion in damage. New Orleans took years to recover.

Yet Louisiana and the feds have since spent $14.5 billion on bolstering flood walls, levees and drainage systems. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reinforced pumping stations to withstand 205 mile-per-hour winds and established redundant power systems to operate them if the electric grid fails, as it did Sunday.