RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/global-warming#.XbGKGtFqQQM.email

We’ve all come across the images of polar bears drifting on ice floes: emblematic victims of the global warming that’s melting the polar ice caps, symbols of the threat to the earth posed by our ceaseless energy production—above all, the carbon dioxide that factories and automobiles emit. We hear louder and louder demands to impose limits, to change our wasteful ways, so as to save not only the bears but also the planet and ourselves.

In political discourse and in the media, major storms and floods typically get presented as signs of impending doom, accompanied by invocations to the environment and calls to respect Mother Nature. Only catastrophes seem to grab our attention, though, and it’s rarely mentioned that warming would also bring some benefits, such as expanded production of grains in previously frozen regions of Canada and Russia. Nor do we hear that people die more often of cold weather than of hot weather. Isolated voices criticize the alarm over global warming, considering it a pseudoscientific thesis, the true aim of which is to thwart economic modernization and free-market growth and to extend the power of states over individual choices.

Not being a climatologist myself, I’ve always had trouble deciding between these arguments. And then I met Judith Curry at her home in Reno, Nevada. Curry is a true climatologist. She once headed the department of earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, until she gave up on the academy so that she could express herself independently. “Independence of mind and climatology have become incompatible,” she says. Do you mean that global warming isn’t real? I ask. “There is warming, but we don’t really understand its causes,” she says. “The human factor and carbon dioxide, in particular, contribute to warming, but how much is the subject of intense scientific debate.”

Curry is a scholar, not a pundit. Unlike many political and journalistic oracles, she never opines without proof. And she has data at her command. She tells me, for example, that between 1910 and 1940, the planet warmed during a climatic episode that resembles our own, down to the degree. The warming can’t be blamed on industry, she argues, because back then, most of the carbon-dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels were small. In fact, Curry says, “almost half of the warming observed in the twentieth century came about in the first half of the century, before carbon-dioxide emissions became large.” Natural factors thus had to be the cause. None of the climate models used by scientists now working for the United Nations can explain this older trend. Nor can these models explain why the climate suddenly cooled between 1950 and 1970, giving rise to widespread warnings about the onset of a new ice age. I recall magazine covers of the late 1960s or early 1970s depicting the planet in the grip of an annihilating deep freeze. According to a group of scientists, we faced an apocalyptic environmental scenario—but the opposite of the current one.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/10/ozone_hole_shrinking_nasa_announces.html

NASA recently announced that evidence indicates that the planet’s ozone hole over Antarctica is closing and now the smallest it’s been since it was discovered three decades ago.  By 1990, the ozone hole had enlarged to 8 million square miles (twice the size of the USA).  The cause of this opening has been blamed on chlorofluorocarbons, which most countries outlawed.  The shrinking hole should be significantly reduced and stable by 2040–50 and eliminated by 2100.

Sounds as though the climate change (or global warming) enthusiasts have to adjust their strategy for arousing fear among the industrialized nations regarding potential planetary damage from human behavior.  It now appears that the polar bear population is stable.  Climate change advocates now must deal with this good news, which messes up some of the scare tactics they have employed for several decades.

However, this good news was delivered with a negative caveat.  For three decades, we have been told that the ozone hole was a threat to the planet and life, as it allows more solar radiation (UV) through to the Earth’s ground.  This will increase the risk of DNA mutations, they argue.  Ozone is a multiple oxygen molecule that also is a greenhouse gas.  Therefore, it can raise the heat retained in the atmosphere.  The hole allows some heat to escape and helps cool the planet.  Though these amounts are small, they work against global warming.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/extinction-rebellion-climate-change-protests-european-cities/

European cities are the model for extremists’ latest stunts, with commuter trains stopped during rush hour and thousands arrested.

London — I have seen what may be the future of climate-change protest. It isn’t pretty, and be prepared because it may be coming to American cities near you faster than you think.

I just spent several days in London reporting on the Brexit debate. While thousands of protesters who want to remain in the European Union did surround Parliament this past Saturday, they remained peaceful and law-abiding.

One could not say the same for those who participated in protests in the days before. Much of London was shut down by agitators from Extinction Rebellion (XR), a radical anti-climate-change group that has spent the last two weeks disrupting cities from London to Berlin to Amsterdam. In London, some 1,800 protestors have been arrested.

XR’s London action began when some of its members sprayed beetroot juice on delegates to a fossil-fuels conference. “Eco-warriors” then used a fire hose to douse the Treasury building with 400 gallons of red paint. Breastfeeding mothers then blocked the entrance to key buildings. A protester dressed as Prime Minister Boris Johnson used scaffolding to climb to the top of Big Ben.

As the protesters moved from stunt to stunt, public support for their actions withered. They hit bottom last Thursday when two activists climbed on top of commuter trains during rush hour and blocked their departure. They unfurled a banner that read “Business as Usual = Death.”

https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/californians-learning-that-solar-panels-dont-work-in-blackouts

Rooftop systems need batteries to operate when grid is down
Millions have lost power in outage to prevent more wildfires

Californians have embraced rooftop solar panels more than anyone in the U.S., but many are learning the hard way the systems won’t keep the lights on during blackouts.

That’s because most panels are designed to supply power to the grid — not directly to houses. During the heat of the day, solar systems can crank out more juice than a home can handle. Conversely, they don’t produce power at all at night.

So systems are tied into the grid, and the vast majority aren’t working this week as PG&E Corp. cuts power to much of Northern California to prevent wildfires.

The only way for most solar panels to work during a blackout is pairing them with batteries. That market is just starting to take off. Sunrun Inc., the largest U.S. rooftop solar company, said hundreds of its customers are making it through the blackouts with batteries.

“It’s the perfect combination for getting through these shutdowns,” Sunrun Chairman Ed Fenster said in an interview. He expects battery sales to boom in the wake of the outages.

And no, trying to run appliances off the power in a Tesla Inc. electric car won’t work, at least without special equipment.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/10/14/scientists-gone-mad/

The men and women of science are supposed to be rational, sober professionals. Yet a few hundred have decided to behave as rabble, having been overtaken by global warming hysteria.

Reuters reported Saturday that “almost 400 scientists have endorsed a civil disobedience campaign aimed at forcing governments to take rapid action to tackle climate change.” The objective is to warn the rest of us “that failure could inflict ‘incalculable human suffering.’”

To say these activist-researchers have broken “with the caution traditionally associated with academia to side with peaceful protesters courting arrest” is almost an understatement. They have chosen to align themselves with the Extinction Rebellion, an organization that’s been described as a “loopy middle-class doomsday cult.”

That description by Sky News reporter Carol Malone is overly generous. The Extinction Rebellion is a criminal enterprise made up of quite clearly disturbed people. Members have been arrested for blocking the entrance of a London airport, and claiming ownership of it for the mob, while dancing in what appears to be a restricted area behind razor wire. One particularly childish and self-indulgent “protester” climbed atop a passenger jet to make his point. Firemen had to remove him with a cherry-picker.

These “rebels” have also used a fire truck to spray fake blood, at one point losing “control of the hose, drenching a bystander and spraying several fellow activists” at the British Treasury building, “as 1,800 liters of an organic liquid containing beetroot spurted out wildly across the street,” the Guardian has reported.

Admittedly these are rather petty crimes, but they’re gateways to the harder stuff.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-10-10-elizabeth-warrens-cruel-plan-for-environmental-justice

Elizabeth Warren wants to be known as the Democratic presidential candidate who has a “Plan” for everything. I count some 50 of these Plans here on her website. They cover everything from “health care is a basic human right,” to “a new farm economy,” to “fighting for an accessible and inclusive America,” to “addressing our maternal mortality epidemic,” to “how we can break up big tech,” to “universal child care,” and on and on and on — and obviously, I was just getting started. Every one of these things is some form of centrally-directed, bureaucrat-run, taxpayer-funded boondoggle of massive government expansion.

Well, now we can make that 51 Plans, because yesterday Warren came out with the latest and greatest of them all, titled “FIGHTING FOR JUSTICE AS WE COMBAT THE CLIMATE CRISIS.”

I know what you are thinking: How could she possibly have missed that one in the first 50? I can’t answer that, but you really need to look at this one if you want to get an appreciation of the levels of utopia that an uber-progressive like Warren thinks can be quickly achieved by government fiat backed by infinite amounts of government money and equally infinite numbers of bureaucrats. And while we’re at it, let’s make it explicit that anyone who opposes any part of this is an evil racist:

From predominantly black neighborhoods in Detroit to Navajo communities in the southwest to Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, industrial pollution has been concentrated in low-income communities for decades – communities that the federal government has tacitly written off as so-called “sacrifice zones.” But it’s not just about poverty, it’s also about race. . . . We didn’t get here by accident. Our crisis of environmental injustice is the result of decades of discrimination and environmental racism compounding in communities that have been overlooked for too long. It is the result of multiple choices that put corporate profits before people, while our government looked the other way.