RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/earth_to_climate_alarmists_warming_is_good.html

In terms of global food security, it is cold we should fear, not heat.

It’s cold tonight, and I sit at my desk, wishing it were warmer.  Even with central heat and air, winter is a difficult time.  My sinuses are inflamed, my knuckles are dry and red, and my joints are sore with the cold.  Every year I dread it more.  And now environmentalists like Jeff Bezos want to make it colder.

It’s no accident that Shakespeare wrote of “the winter of our discontent” (Richard III) and of “the icy fang / And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind” (As You Like It).  Shakespeare, who lived through some of the coldest decades of the Little Ice Age, found nothing to like about winter.  Nor did Dickens, who wrote often of “the winter of despair,” or, in a line about the short days of winter that applies to today’s liberals, “Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.”  Turn off the lights — you’re burning too much fossil fuel!

The fact is that cold is more damaging than heat.  Long, cold winters followed by cold, damp springs and summers diminish crop yields, leading to global hunger.  If the Earth were a few degrees warmer, that heat would expand corn and wheat belts to the north.  In terms of global food security, it is cold we should fear, not heat.

In the Little Ice Age, roughly from the 14th through the mid-19th century, global cooling limited food production, resulting in widespread hunger, disease, and economic stagnation.  In northern Europe, for instance, population growth was stagnant until the 19th century, and for most people, there was little improvement in daily life until after 1800.  In Britain, for example, population has soared from 10 million in 1800 to over 66 million today.  That would not have been possible in a period of cooler temperatures.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/02/28/the-academic-blacklist-climate-alarmists-dont-want-you-to-know-about/

The global warming faithful are always quick with the talking points about a “scientific consensus” that doesn’t exist, and the tale that 97% of scientists say man is causing the planet to overheat. But we’ll never hear them discuss publicly how researchers who don’t agree with the narrative have been blacklisted.

What are they afraid of?

Of course the climate alarmists will never admit such a list even exists. But Roger Pielke Jr., who teaches science, environment, and technology policy at the University of Colorado, says it does.

“A climate advocacy group called Skeptical Science hosts a list of academics that it has labeled ‘climate misinformers,’” Pielke recently wrote in Forbes. “The list includes 17 academics and is intended as a blacklist.” 

Pielke says we know this through a Skeptical Science blogger “named Dana Nuccitelli.” According to Pielke, Nuccitelli believes that Judith Curry should be “unhirable in academia” based on her statements about global warming.

Nuccitelli tweeted that “Curry’s words, as documented … are what make her ‘unhirable.’” Both the blog and Nuccitelli of course deny there’s a blacklist.

The “unhirable” Curry is no crank. She is the former chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and is a fellow of both the American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society. She stepped down from her position at Georgia Tech at the insistence of an administrator, she told Pielke. The Earth and Atmospheric Sciences dean had heard from “several activist climate scientists who had a very direct pipeline to” the dean’s office, and had expressed their “extreme displeasure” over Curry’s presence at the school, she said.

https://www.city-journal.org/needless-panic-over-disposable-plastic

New York City and other municipalities have banned plastic straws as part of a broader effort against plastic consumer products.

Why do our political leaders want to take away our plastic bags and straws? This question is even more puzzling than a related one that I’ve been studying for decades: Why do they want us to recycle our garbage?

The two obsessions have some common roots, but the moral panic over plastic is especially perverse. The recycling movement had a superficial logic, at least at the outset. Municipal officials expected to save money by recycling trash instead of burying or burning it. Now that recycling has turned out to be ruinously expensive while achieving little or no environmental benefit, some local officials—the pragmatic ones, anyway—are once again sending trash straight to landfills and incinerators.

The plastic panic has never made any sense, and it’s intensifying even as evidence mounts that it’s not only a waste of money but also harmful to the environment, not to mention humans. It’s been a movement in search of a rationale for half a century.

https://www.cfact.org/2020/02/24/could-global-cooling-silently-become-a-reality/

Trying to imply that cooling is right around the corner when we’re watching record-breaking warm ocean temperatures to me seems a big stretch, but current facts and the history around the five previous ice ages that came and melted before fossil fuels became recognizable words may be worthy of reviewing.

The real climate crisis may not be global warming, but global cooling, and it may have already started. These events may not be an anomaly, but a predecessor of things to come:

Planting was one month late due to cold Spring weather across the Great Plains of North America in both 2018 and 2019.

In 2019 Spring was wet and cold and ~40% of the huge USA corn crop was not planted.

Summer 2019 was cold, and snow came early in the Fall, and the crop was a failure across much of the Great Plains.

There were good harvests in the USA Southeast and South in 2019, and lots of grain in storage so prices did not escalate – but there were big crop losses across the Great Plains. Also, lots of that grain will be feed grade only, if they do get it off the fields.

The sun activity which is not controlled by humanity or by social media may be formulating a different forecast for the world. Even NASA has imagined a “Little Ice Age” in the future, because of solar activity that rises and falls in 11-year cycles; and the newest one begins this year, 2020.

Cool temperatures shorten growing seasons. Cool temperatures also reduce evaporation from the seas, resulting in less precipitation over land. The result is fewer months to grow crops, colder temperatures during the growing season, and less rainfall to hydrate the crops. Crop failures and famine predictably follow.

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

Over the period from November 2018 to March 2019, I wrote a series of posts on the subject of the true costs of trying to get electricity from intermittent wind and solar sources. On November 29, 2018 it was “How Much Do The Climate Crusaders Plan To Increase Your Costs Of Electricity? — Part III” On February 5, 2019 it was “Eulogy For Roger Andrews.” (Andrews was a guy who made many detailed calculations of how intermittent renewables function to drive up the cost of electricity as their penetration of the electricity market increases. Unfortunately, Andrews had died just before that post.) And on March 8, 2019 it was “Why Do Renewable Energy Sources Need Government Subsidies?”

The gist of all this was that you can’t realistically evaluate the cost of getting electricity using the intermittent renewable sources just by looking at the cost of making a kilowatt-hour of electricity when the source happens to be working at its best. Sure, a solar panel may generate some very cheap kilowatt-hours around noon on a sunny June 21. But now that you’ve invested a few billion in solar panels, what is the plan to provide the electricity people need on an overcast December 21, when the panels may work at only 3% of capacity during the day and nothing at night? If your plan is a backup system of fossil fuel facilities, now you are paying for both the solar panels and the fossil fuel plants, so you’ve close-to-doubled the cost of electricity no matter how cheap the power from the solar panels may be on the June day; plus your fossil fuel plants will still be running most of the time, and your emissions reductions will be minimal. If you want serious emissions reductions, you will need to push past 50% and on to 100% of your power from renewables, so you will need to phase out the fossil fuel plants. And replace them with — what?? And at what cost?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/greta_and_pals_need_to_protest_in_front_of_the_chinese_embassy.html

This is great news unless you are a leftist who wants to blame the U.S. first and last.

Check this out:

According to a report released on Tuesday by the International Energy Agency (IEA), “The United States saw the largest decline in energy-related CO2 emissions in 2019 on a country basis.”

It sounds as if we’re doing just fine after we dropped out of the Paris Climate Change Accords.

I wonder how China is doing!

Our success cleaning up the environment is not surprising.

First, we are a free and democratic society that demands clean air and clear water.

Second, the international environmental movement hates capitalism more than clean air.  These people are really leftists using climate change or global warming to promote their anti-U.S. agenda.

So can someone ask Miss Greta a question?  Why aren’t you marching in front of the Chinese embassy?  That’s where the disregard for the environment is! 

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2020/02/shed-no-tears-for-rajendra-pachauri/

It’s a worthy saying, “Do not speak ill of the dead”, but I’ll make an exception for Dr Rajendra Pachauri. The chair of the IPCC for 13 years, to 2015, died at 79 last Thursday, January 13, of heart problems. He bugged out of the IPCC abruptly when a 29-year-old woman employed at his TERI think-tank called the cops about his sexual harassment for 15 months since almost the day she arrived there. He then used the labyrinths of the Indian court systems to stall the prosecutors for five years and ruin the life of his courageous young victim. A TERI panel affirmed her complaint, in which she  deposed:

I feel broken and scarred in body and mind due to Dr. Pachauri’s behaviour and actions. I get frequent panic attacks due to the constant harassment and being made to feel like an object of vulgar desire from this man, who is old enough to be my grandfather.

Apart from taking sexual advantage of his top-dog status at TERI and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Pachauri was a perjurer, an habitual liar and fantasist about the IPCC, a hypocrite, corrupt, and a non-scientist prepared to defame real scientists to cover his own and the IPCC’s gross bumbling. All round, he was an exemplar of the carpet-baggers aboard the catastrophic-warming bandwagon, currently on a roll involving $US1.5 trillion global spending a year. This essay documents the above.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/12/why-the-green-new-deal-would-destroy-the-environment/

A few minutes of serious thought from self-described environmentalists would prompt a realization that if the Green New Deal, a program championed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, were implemented, it would create an environmental disaster.

In recent decades, policymakers have forced public utilities to generate increasingly more electricity from fashionable “renewable energy” sources, especially wind and solar, and pushed automakers to manufacture more electric vehicles. Their chief goal is to eliminate reliable, affordable, generally clean fossil fuels, including natural gas, even though they generate most of America’s electricity and power most U.S. transportation.

Environmentalists claim to worry that carbon dioxide from these fuels will cause devastating global warming. Many would also eliminate nuclear power, which they say is inherently unsafe.

As I argue in a new Heartland Institute policy study, however, environmentalists have paid too little attention to the serious harm Green New Deal policies would inflict on the environment — including scenic lands, wildlife habitats, and threatened and endangered species. Implementing the Green New Deal would undermine the very values environmentalists have espoused for decades.

America faces a dilemma. Will it focus on real environmental problems that do measurable harm to human and ecological wellbeing, or will it mandate policies to head off climate disasters that are based on warming predictions have been repeatedly proven wrong by real-world empirical observations? Will it recognize that harnessing intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar energy requires enormous amounts of raw materials and mining, resulting in massive land-use impacts and human rights abuses, and is anything but clean, green, renewable, and sustainable? Or will it ignore all this?