RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

We live in strange times. We don’t think through the consequences of ending “endless wars.” We don’t debate what it means for our children and grandchildren to add trillions of dollars to a national debt that already, as a percent of GDP, is the highest since the Second World War. We permit hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many of whom are infected with COVID-19, to enter our country illegally through our southern border, while limiting the number of legal immigrants. We have replaced free-thinking skeptics with acolytes for big government. The dark arm of progressivism is aimed at increasing the power of government and decreasing the role of the individual. When it comes to climate change, progressives borrow from George W. Bush: Either you are with us, or you are against us. There is no room for debate.   

In part, this is because of the leisure time we have gained through economic success. The technological advances and the increased wealth of our nation and its people – results of free market capitalism operating under the rule of law – would be unimaginable to our grandparents. Included in our well-being is the environment, which is far healthier than it was twenty, fifty and a hundred years ago. It was individuals, not government agencies, that led that change – through eleemosynary organizations like the Sierra Club and Audubon Societies. New York City began to migrate from coal to oil in the 1930s and Los Angeles recognized the problem of smog in the 1940s, both long before the advent of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in December 1970. Government regulations have hastened the move to a healthier environment, but they were not the instigator. It is the wealth produced through capitalism, operating in a society that encourages individual initiative, which has afforded us the ability to focus on climate. It is ignorance of that past that helps feed the myth that it is government, not free market capitalism, that has been the principal force for the good of our environment. In seeking political power, progressives pander to the electorate on soft issues – “wokeness,” inclusion, identity, equity, critical race theory and hurtful words – while they fail to encourage those traits that historically led to success: merit, aspiration, competition, diligence and hard work.

On August 10, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report on climate and projections for the future. How many people have read its 4,000 pages? Not many, I suspect. I, for one, have not. According to summaries, the Earth has experienced a two-degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature since industrialization began about two hundred years ago. We know man has been responsible for some of that increase, but the exact level remains in question. Nevertheless, a recent lead editorial in my local paper, The Day, expressed no doubt as to the cause: “Humans have heated the planet about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the dawn of the industrial age.” The next day Steven Koonin, director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “As is now customary, the report emphasizes climate change in recent decades but obscures, or fails to mention, historical precedents that weaken the case that humanity’s influence on the climate has been catastrophic.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/20/where-the-sun-dont-shine-climate-alarmists-thinking/

We’re building,” reads the headline of an op-ed written by Sen. Bernie Sanders for the British Guardian, “Congress’ strongest-ever climate bill.” Why? “Because the planet is in peril.” If so, it’s not because of human greenhouse gas production, says one group of researchers.

But scientific findings are no deterrent to predatory politicians. Backed by nothing more than a bloated certitude, the Vermont socialist declares “the planet will face enormous and irreversible damage” if “the United States, China and the rest of the world do not act extremely aggressively to cut carbon emissions.”

Man-made carbon dioxide emissions – the political left’s go-to whipping boy. Human CO2 emissions, in the febrile minds of Sanders and other members of the climate doomsday cult, is responsible for a nearly uncountable number of ills: hotter temperatures, more potent storms, wildfires, melting ice caps and glaciers, armed conflict, migration, poverty, famine, drought, floods, species extinction, weeds, pests … and a host of conditions and events so absurd no half-rational person would ever think of them.

Virulent though it might be, Trump Derangement Syndrome is hardly the mental health menace that Carbon Obsession Disorder has been for decades

Occasionally alarmists will point out that methane is a greenhouse gas. Yet their fixation has long been on CO2. But let’s be clear: Other factors impact climate and temperature, and few can match the power of the sun (which Democrats should be confident in, since they worship at the altar of the solar panel). According to the researchers who recently published a peer-reviewed paper in ​​Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, the most recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, whose value we’ve assessed, “is grounded in narrow and incomplete data about the sun’s total solar irradiance.”

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/08/17/does_climate_change_cause_extreme_weather_now_heres_a_scorcher_of_a_reality_check_789878.html

The Pacific Northwest was hit with a record-shattering heat wave in June, with temperatures over 35 degrees higher than normal in some places. On June 28, Portland, Ore., reached 116 degrees. Late last week the region suffered another blast of hot weather, with a high in Portland of 103 degrees. The New York Times didn’t hesitate to pronounce the region’s bouts of extreme weather proof that the climate wasn’t just changing, but catastrophically so.

To make that claim, the Times relied on a “consortium of climate experts” that calls itself World Weather Attribution, a group organized not just to attribute extreme weather events to climate change, but to do so quickly. Within days of the June heat wave, the researchers released an analysis, declaring that the torrid spell “was virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.”

World Weather Attribution and its alarming report were trumpeted by Time magazine, touted by the NOAA website  Climate.gov , and featured by CBS News, CNBC, Scientific American, CNN, the Washington Post, USAToday, and the New York Times, among others.

The group’s claim that global warming was to blame was perhaps less significant than the speed with which that conclusion was provided to the media. Previous efforts to tie extreme weather events to climate change hadn’t had the impact scientists had hoped for, according to Time, because it “wasn’t producing results fast enough to get attention from people outside the climate science world.”

“Being able to confidently say that a given weather disaster was caused by climate change while said event still has the world’s attention,” Time explained, approvingly, “can be an enormously useful tool to convince leaders, lawmakers and others that climate change is a threat that must be addressed.” In other words, the value of rapid attribution is primarily political, not scientific.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/why_all_the_climate_crisis_mumbojumbo_doesnt_add_up.html

Fear is a great motivator, but it comes with a catch.  It tends to inhibit good decision-making.  Demagogues love it because it works so well.  Right now, the Northern Hemisphere is having serious heat waves in many locations.  Oy, vey!  But wait…let me look at this here calendar.  Oh, gee — it’s the middle of August.  Just a coincidence, I guess.

We used to learn in school that there were these things called ice ages.  The last one, the Pleistocene, ended about 10,000 years ago, and it lasted only about 2.5 million years, give or take.  At its peak, 30% of the Earth’s surface was covered with ice.  The oceans were way lower, too. 

The jury is still out on why ice ages happen and why they end.  Back in the 1970s, it was established that the sun goes through a 22-year intensity cycle…sort of.  The hockey stick guy, Michael Mann, wrote an article for Scientific American explaining that his bungled warming prediction was the result of forgetting to include the solar cycle in the data used for his computer model.  I commented online that that was a pretty amateurish mistake for someone who gets paid to be a scientist.  They then yanked my commenting privilege, thus demonstrating the corruption of science by politics.  I didn’t renew my subscription after having one for 30 years, and they spent a bunch of money junk-mailing me to send them the next check.

There’s also this pesky thing called tectonics, in which the Earth’s land masses move around slowly, sometimes bumping into each other, causing large-scale buckling such as the Himalayas.  One of the tip-offs for the establishment of this concept is the uncanny way that South America fits right into the west coast of Africa, just like a part of a giant jigsaw puzzle.

Somehow, it seems, change is now a bad thing, although it’s always been inevitable.  Oh, yeah — there are the demagogues and engineered ignorance, courtesy of your local union-thug teachers.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-8-12-the-idiots-answer-to-global-warming-hydrogen

Hydrogen! It’s the obvious and perfect answer to global warming caused by human CO2 emissions. Instead of burning hydrocarbons (fossil fuels) we can leave out the carbon part, burn just the hydrogen, and emit nothing but pure water vapor. H2 + O = H2O! Thus, no more CO2 emissions . Why didn’t anyone think of this before now?

Actually, the geniuses are way ahead of you on this one. President George W. Bush was touting the coming “hydrogen economy” as far back as 2003. (“In his 2003 State of the Union Address, President Bush launched his Hydrogen Fuel Initiative. The goal of this initiative is to work in partnership with the private sector to accelerate the research and development required for a hydrogen economy.”). Barack Obama was not one to get left behind on an issue like this. In the run-up to the Paris Climate Conference in 2015 Obama’s Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz announced, “[F]uel cell technologies [i.e., hydrogen-fueled motors] are paving the way to competitiveness in the global clean energy market and to new jobs and business creation across the country.” Then there’s the biggest hydrogen enthusiast of all, PM Boris Johnson of the UK, who promises that his country is at the dawn of the “hydrogen economy.” (“Towards the end of 2020, Prime Minister Boris Johnson released details of a 10-point plan for a so-called ‘green industrial revolution.’. . . This year will also see the government publish a Hydrogen Strategy that will “outline plans” to develop a hydrogen economy in the U.K.”)

And let us not forget California. If you look at my post from two days ago about California’s plans for “zero carbon” electricity, you will find a chart showing that by 2045 they plan to have some 40 GW of what they call “Zero Carbon Firm” resources. What does that mean? In the print below the chart, they reveal it: “hydrogen fuel cells.” (Their current amount of hydrogen fuel cells contributing to the grid is 0.)

So basically, hydrogen is the perfect answer to our problems, right? Wrong. Only an idiot could think that hydrogen offers any material useful contribution to the world’s energy supply.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/progressives-green-energy-boondoggle-based-fantasy-bruce-thornton/

Last Thursday Joe Biden posed for a photo op with representatives from automobile manufacturers. They gathered there to mark the Biden administration’s plan to raise the miles-per-gallon standard that gasoline powered vehicles must achieve––52 MPG by 2026. The compensation for automakers will comprise more regulatory credits for carmakers and subsidies for electric vehicle (EV) consumers, which will lead to higher prices for trucks and SUVs to offset their losses on EVs. This means consumers of those popular vehicles will be subsidizing EV drivers. And more taxpayer money will go to increasing available electricity, providing more and faster charging stations, and improving battery capacity.

As the Wall Street Journal editorialized, “Behold Big Business colluding with Big Government to grab subsidies and raise consumer prices,” a form of “corporate socialism, or state capitalism.” This unholy alliance calls to mind the “military-industrial complex” Dwight Eisenhower warned about in 1961, a warning still pertinent today.

At least during the Cold War a nuclear-armed Soviet Union posed an existential threat that justified cooperation between politics and the armaments industries. Today, the purveyors of anthropogenic, catastrophic global warming (ACGW) ––the more accurate label masked by the euphemism “climate change”–– are using a dubious theory riddled with uncertainty to justify such crony capitalist policies. The challenges to ACGW in the last few decades have exposed those uncertainties and the dubious “science” proponents claim to be “settled,” and so can justify spending trillions  of taxpayer dollars,

For example, MIT professor of atmospheric science Richard Lindzen, and Princeton emeritus professor of physics William Happer have written, “We are both scientists who can attest that the research literature does not support the claim of a climate emergency. Nor will there be one. None of the lurid predictions — dangerously accelerating sea-level rise, increasingly extreme weather, more deadly forest fires, unprecedented warming, etc. — are any more accurate than the fire-and-brimstone sermons used to stoke fanaticism in medieval crusaders.” So too physicist Steven E. Koonin, who writes in his new book Unsettled. What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, “The science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have on it.”

On top of the contested rationale for pouring billions of tax-payer dollars into one industry, the logistics of enlarging electricity production for “green” technology like wind turbines, solar panels, and half-ton batteries for EVs, not to mention expanding exponentially the electrical grid, are formidable, as Mark Mills has reported:

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/climate_scientists_admit_exaggerated_warming_.html

Last week, a group of scientists sent shock waves through the climate-science community. They boldly pointed out that current climate models exaggerate greenhouse warming.

In other words, they confirmed what climate skeptics have been arguing all along: that most computer climate models forecast unrealistic warming — warming not observed anywhere in the real world.

Could this be a turning point for climate science? Has the hitherto staunch resistance to any kind of scrutiny regarding the dangerous warming narrative come to an end?

Scientific Method

Science is not a body of facts. It is a method of finding facts — a method that is inherently skeptical. Not cynically skeptical, but humbly skeptical. It insists, as the motto of the Royal Society, nullius in verba, roughly translated “take nobody’s word for it,” that a scientist’s every claim be tested — over and over and over. Thus, as the philosopher of science Robert K. Merton put it in 1938, “Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/08/10/apocalypse-porn/

There’s a new trend online. Forget blacking out your Instagram page to show how much you care for black lives. Never mind bigging up your pronouns. That’s so last month. Right now it’s all about apocalypse porn. Across social media, the caring set are sharing images of the ‘hellfires’ in Greece and the aftermath of the floods in Europe and the wildfire currently raging in Northern California, all with the same message: this is climate change. This is the world our greedy, destructive species has created. This is the hell that awaits us all if we don’t stop taking cheap flights to Malaga and drinking from plastic straws. ‘Welcome to global warming!’, as one observer of the Greek fires quipped.

Apocalypse porn is everywhere. You can’t open a newspaper or switch on a tablet right now without being confronted with images of fire and floods. Plagues of locusts can’t be far behind. The front page of this morning’s Guardian is devoted to an image of an elderly Greek woman in a state of distress as an ‘inferno’ nears her home on the island of Evia. (Funny, I don’t remember the Guardian rallying behind the elderly Greeks who were pummelled by the distinctly manmade horror of EU austerity, but let’s not dwell on bygones.) Footage of Greeks sailing away from a raging fire has been shared hundreds of thousands of times. ‘Very apocalyptic’, said one journalist. Not just apocalyptic, but really apocalyptic. We’re beyond Revelations – this is worse.

The recent European floods are spoken of as warnings to mankind, as if Nature were a sentient force reprimanding us for our hubris and folly. Footage of flooded German and Belgian towns was marshalled by armies of virtue-signallers to the cause of ‘raising awareness’ about man’s self-made apocalypse. ‘How many dead will we accept [before we act]?’, asked one Belgian scientist. Change your ways or people will die. Images of flooded Tube stations in London were instantly held up as glimpses of the future, warnings from the generation of the 2050s who will live short, hot, suffering lives if we don’t achieve Net Zero in the next five years. It all echoed leading green thinker Mark Lynas’s medieval sermon several years back – that if humanity doesn’t change its ways, then ‘Poseidon [will be] angered… his wrath will know no bounds’.