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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

Buttigieg: ‘Eating a Burger, Am I Part of the Problem? In a Certain Way, Yes.’ By Jim Geraghty

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/pete-buttigieg-earting-hamburgers-climate-change/

Pete Buttigieg, this morning: “Right now, we’re in a mode I think we’re thinking about [climate change] mostly through the perspective of guilt. You know, from using a straw, to eating a burger, am I part of the problem? In a certain way, yes, but the most exciting thing is that we can all be part of the solution.”

Is Buttigieg pledging to not eat burgers anymore? No. Is he proposing banning burgers? No. But he’s declaring that people eating burgers is part of the climate change problem. Because every Democrat agrees that climate change is such a pressing problem that it has to be addressed through public policy, it’s fair to wonder if someday a Buttigieg administration might start looking at policies designed to reduce the public’s consumption of meat. In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio instituted “meatless Mondays” in all of the public schools — not that he bothered to ask the kids what they thought. A 2018 study proposed a new “meat tax” designed to reduce consumption. And another National Institutes of Health study concluded, “The public and environmental health benefits of reducing meat consumption create a need for campaigns to raise awareness and contribute to motivation for change.” Hearing a presidential candidate declare that eating burgers is “part of the problem,” it’s fair to ask whether he’ll ever be tempted to try to remedy this perceived problem through federal policy or law.

10 Craziest Things CNN Town Hall Revealed About Democrats’ Economy-Wrecking Climate Extremism By Chrissy Clark

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/05/10-craziest-things-cnn-town-hall-revealed-democrats-economy-wrecking-climate-extremism/

Despite seven hours of conversations, there was no substantive talk. The majority of questions were asked by climate change activists tossing softball questions.

On Wednesday CNN hosted a town hall focused on environmentalism with the 10 Democratic presidential candidates qualified to stand on the September debate stage in Houston. These candidates are Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Julián Castro, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders, Andrew Yang, and Elizabeth Warren.

Despite seven hours of conversations, there was no substantive talk. The majority of questions were asked by climate change activists tossing softball questions at the candidates, or Sanders supporters who wanted to attack other candidates — cough, cough Joe Biden — and their climate platforms.

Among the dull questions and lackluster answers, several moments highlighted Democrats’ full-fledged dive into extremist policies that will wreck the American economy and scientific advancement.

Trump Admin Overturns Lefty Light Bulb Tyranny Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/274847/trump-admin-overturns-lefty-light-bulb-tyranny-daniel-greenfield

Forget, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”.

In the miserable Obama years, you didn’t even have the right to choose your own light bulb. Light bulb experts from organizations dedicated to sending human beings back to the caves to save the planet from the threat of light bulbs determined which light bulbs you could use.

But, in the latest resistance to the ecocracy, the light is back and light bulbs were liberated from the latest set of “standards”.

That’s right.

If you like your decorative globes, candle-shaped lights, three-way light bulbs and reflector bulbs, you can keep them.

The usual ecocratic suspects are fuming over the threat of light bulb freedom.

“The Energy Department flat out got it wrong today. Instead of moving us forward, this rule will keep more energy-wasting bulbs on store shelves,” Jason Hartke, president of the Alliance to Save Energy, said in a statement. “If you wanted folks to pay a lot more than they should on electric bills, this rollback would be a pretty good way of doing it.”

That’s a decision that people get to make. This is America.

People can choose between cheaper light bulbs and lower electricity bills without bureaucrats forcing them to do it. They can also choose life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Even if that involves non-energy efficient light bulbs.

This rule does not prevent consumers from buying the lamps they desire, including efficient options,” the agency wrote in the rule. “The market is successfully transitioning to LEDs regardless of government regulation. Consumers are clearly taking advantage of the energy savings provided by LEDs.”

But it’s not a success unless a lefty regime forces people to do it.

But Noah Horowitz, director of the Center for Energy Efficiency Standards at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), said incandescent bulbs still make up about 45 percent of the market.

Global Warming or Bad Data? Garbage in… by John Steele Gordon

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/climate-global-warming-data-locations/

Al Gore likes to say that the science of climate change is “settled.” But of course, science, almost by definition, is never settled.

And climate science has always suffered from the problem of shaky and missing data. Seventy percent of the globe is covered by ocean, where data is hard to collect. Reliable weather records only go back to about 1850 and, in many parts of the world, are far more recent. Modern recording weather stations date only to the early 20th century.

And many of those stations have a big problem. While they haven’t changed appreciably over the years, the land around them has changed, often profoundly, with the great growth in urban and suburban areas. The weather station that was put, say, in the middle of a Nassau County, Long Island, potato field in 1923 is still in the same spot. But the potatoes are long gone, and now it’s behind a strip mall, twenty feet from the kitchen exhaust fan of a Chinese take-out joint.

A study by meteorologist Anthony Watts found that almost 90 percent of the 1221 weather stations in the U.S. did not meet the National Weather Service’s setting standards, which requires that they be at least 100 feet from any artificial heat source or radiating surface. You can see some of the most egregious violators here. To deal with this defective information, climate scientists, have “adjusted” the data to solve this problem. Invariably, these adjustments have made earlier data show lower temperatures, and recent data show higher ones.

To develop reliable data, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) placed 114 state-of-the-art weather stations relatively evenly spaced about the lower 48 states. They were carefully sited to be away from urban areas, which are heat islands, airports, which can be affected by jet exhaust, etc.

The system became operative in 2005. Now, realclearenergy.com is reporting that there has been no increase in average temperatures in the continental United States over the last 14 years, as measured by these new stations. If anything, overall temperatures are slightly cooler than they were.

One big reason for this lack of warming is surely the explosion in U.S. natural gas production, thanks to fracking. The U.S. is now, by far, the number-one producer of natural gas, producing 90 billion cubic feet a day, 25 percent more than second-place Russia. This has brought the price of natural gas to its lowest point in 20 years, which has resulted in a big shift from producing power by burning coal to burning natural gas, which produces 50 percent less carbon dioxide. (The shale gas revolution has vast geopolitical implications, of course, as well as climatic ones.)

A Scientific Roundup The EPA intervenes against California’s rogue cancer regulation.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-scientific-roundup-11567551770

Perhaps you’ve read that science should rule when determining environmental standards. So why aren’t progressives cheering an Environmental Protection Agency order declaring that the chemical glyphosate doesn’t cause cancer?

In an extraordinary intervention, the EPA recently said it will no longer approve product labels that claim glyphosate is carcinogenic to humans. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup, the popular weed killer. The herbicide has been on the U.S. market since 1974, and the scientific consensus is that it isn’t carcinogenic in humans.

The letter is a rebuke to California, which in 2015 said it would add glyphosate to its official list of carcinogens under the state’s 1986 Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act, known as Proposition 65. California cited the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer’s finding that glyphosate “probably” causes cancer.

This is the U.N. outfit that has warned against cancer from pickled vegetables, caffeine and working the night shift. California’s move has inspired a flood of lawsuits against Roundup-maker Monsanto, including a $2 billion jury judgment (reduced to $86 million by a judge) in May for a California couple claiming glyphosate caused their cancer.

The Anti-Climate-Change Energy Crunch Is Starting To Hit New York Francis Menton

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

As you all know, the game plan of climate activists is to restrict and ultimately ban the use of carbon-based fossil fuels — coal, oil, and natural gas. Don’t worry, those will all be replaced in due course with perfectly clean and free “renewables.” You won’t even notice that it is happening! At least until your price of electricity triples or you can’t heat your house any more.

I’ve long said that the politics of energy will change significantly when people start to get hit with reality in the form of soaring prices or shortages. An early example of the latter is starting to take shape here in New York.

In recent years, jurisdictions have competed with one another with promises to get higher and higher percentages of energy from “renewables,” and lower and lower percentages from fossil fuels, by earlier and earlier dates. For example, California claims to be “leading the nation toward a 100 percent clean energy future and addressing climate change.” California’s SB 350, enacted into law in 2015, directs the state to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 and to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. But New York was not about to cede “climate leadership” to those rubes on the West coast. As reported here on July 6, New York’s legislature had just passed the “Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.” Its goals: to get 70% of electricity from “renewables” by 2030, followed by reduction of all carbon emissions — not just from the electricity sector — by 85% below 1990 levels by 2050. Take that, California!

And then there’s the question of where to start, because after all, you have to start somewhere. And you can’t really expect to be taken seriously in your claim to be replacing fossil fuels if you just keep adding and adding to your fossil fuel infrastructure and capacity. Back in 2014 Governor Cuomo got the ball rolling by banning “fracking” for natural gas in the state. But of course, they “frack” in a big way right next door in Pennsylvania, and it’s just a hop, skip and a jump by pipeline to bring that gas over here.

CHARLOTTE’S NEWS WEB

https://principia-scientific.org/breaking-fatal-courtroom-act-ruins-michael-hockey-stick-mann/

Excerpt:John O’Sullivan in 2017

Mann’s now proven contempt of court means Ball is entitled to have the court serve upon Mann the fullest punishment. Contempt sanctions could reasonably include the judge ruling that Dr. Ball’s statement that Mann “belongs in the state pen, not Penn. State’ is a precise and true statement of fact. This is because under Canada’s unique ‘Truth Defense’, Mann is now proven to have wilfully hidden his data, so the court may rule he hid it because it is fake. As such, the court must then dismiss Mann’s entire libel suit with costs awarded to Ball and his team.

The spectacular rise and fall of climate alarmism’s former golden boy is a courtroom battle with even more ramifications than the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. To much fanfare at the time, Mann had sued Ball for daring to publish the damning comment that Mann “belongs in the state pen, not Penn. State.” Dr Ball brilliantly backed up his exposure of the elaborate international money-making global warming scam in his astonishing book,‘The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science‘.

In his books, articles, radio and television appearances, Dr. Ball has been resolute in his generation-long war against those who corrupted the field of science to which he had selflessly dedicated his life. Now aged 79, Ball is on the cusp of utter vindication. Despite the stresses and strains on himself and his family, Tim has stood at the forefront of those scientists demanding more openness and transparency from government-funded researchers.

A Famine of Fact at U.N. Climate Panel The IPCC sounds an alarm about food production, but another U.N. agency’s data show it’s a false one. By James Taylo

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-famine-of-fact-at-u-n-climate-panel-11567201352

Global crop production sets new records virtually every year. That didn’t stop the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from publishing an alarmist report Aug. 8 that suggests global warming has devastated crop production and threatens food shortages.

“Climate change . . . has adversely impacted food security and terrestrial ecosystems as well as contributed to desertification and land degradation in many regions,” the report asserts. “Warming compounded by drying has caused yield declines in parts of Southern Europe. Based on indigenous and local knowledge, climate change is affecting food security in drylands, particularly those in Africa, and high mountain regions of Asia and South America.”

At the same time, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reports that new records were set for global corn, wheat and rice production five years running through 2017, the most recent year for which data are available. How is that possible?

The IPCC report parses words and engages in semantic tricks to give readers a false impression of declining global crop production. Note the reference to declining yields in “parts” of Southern Europe. The report doesn’t mention that yields are increasing in Southern Europe as a whole. What sense does it make to blame declining yields in a small portion of the world on global warming without crediting global warming for global gains?

Media Ignores Climate Alarmist’s Court Loss — It Doesn’t Fit The Warmist Agenda

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/30/media-ignores-

Last week, a Canadian court tossed out a lawsuit in which Michael Mann, the researcher who published the idolized hockey stick temperature chart, had sued another researcher for libel. Did the mainstream media run with this story? Of course not. That would ruin the narrative.

Mann became famous for the chart, which showed temperatures running along in a horizontal fashion before spiking at the beginning of the 20th century. It was the “evidence” the global warming alarmists had been waiting for — “science” that showed human activity was overheating Earth. It was included in at least one United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

Not all were convinced, however. There were questions about the data he used to create the stick, which he wouldn’t release. It has been called “100% fraudulent,” an “artifact of poor mathematics,” and a violation of “of scientific standards.”

Mann has been accused of engaging in “data manipulation,” and “academic and scientific misconduct.”

Some years after the stick was constructed, Canadian statisticians Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick challenged Mann’s work. They argued the “recent paleoclimate reconstruction by Mann et al. does not provide reliable evidence about climate change over the past millennium, because their data are inconsistent and their confidence intervals are wrong.” 

Climate researcher Tim Ball even went so deep as to say that Mann “belongs in the state pen, not Penn State,” where Mann conducts research.

The Next Revolution: The Green New Deal By Paul Krause

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/the_next_revolution_the_green_new_deal.html

The Green New Deal is all the rage on the Left. Psychopaths who hide their lust to dominate others claim that this is for the “salvation of the planet.” They present themselves as benign saviors to mask their tyrannical intentions. The Green New Deal isn’t about combating “climate change.” It is about finalizing total control over societies and, of course, the earth.

Proponents of green communism are now fearmongering about the danger of ancient diseases that we’re not prepared to deal with. These petty tyrants who blush and gush at the prospects of enslavement while speaking of liberty and equality are hoping to scare people into surrendering their self-reliance and self-rule. For that is the true intent of presenting the apocalyptic scenario of species extinction. If the green communists can scare people into believing the apocalypse is nigh, the frightened, they hope, will foolishly turn to the government to save them.

Of course, this enslavement to the state is not even to a national one. It would be to a transnational statist supraorganism. Our enslavement would be to a global collective of managers, or, if we lived in the 1920s, we would rightly call it a global soviet.

Since “globalism” (in its corporatist-managerial form) is on the backslide, the global communists who know no loyalty to nation, tribe, or family, need to switch the flagship of global domination from the oft-derided corporate-tech alliance to the more superficially benign transnational environmental lobby. Many people have grown skeptical of globalization by corporations and Silicon Valley startups. Most people, however, are ignorant of the dangerous intent of green communism and its lust to destroy whomever it regards are deplorables while also enslaving all other peoples and nations to its dictatorial soviet.