Category Archives: Climate change

A positive story about both coal AND Donald Trump

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The world may really be about to change. From Donald Trump saves coal from renewables surge from The Weekly Standard and published in The Australian.

No country has a greater abundance of hydrocarbon energy than the US. The corollary is that no country was as big a loser from participating in the Paris Agreement and its intention to progressively decarbonise the world’s hydrocarbon superpower. On July 10, the Energy Information Administration forecast that next year the US would produce 12 million barrels of oil a day and overtake Saudi Arabia to be the world’s No 1 producer. When it comes to the politics of energy, the interests of the US and European green ideology are irreconcilable.

Trump understands this. “Our country is blessed with extraordinary energy abundance, which we didn’t know of even five years ago and certainly 10 years ago,” the President said last year. Those remarks were not only a paean to America’s energy resources, they were a full-dress rejection of the policies of his predecessor and of the Democrats’ goal of Europeanising US energy policy.

“We have nearly 100 years’ worth of natural gas and more than 250 years’ worth of clean, beautiful coal,” he said. “We are a top producer of petroleum and the No 1 producer of natural gas. We have so much more than we ever thought possible. We are really in the driving seat. And you know what? We don’t want to let other countries take away our sovereignty and tell us what to do and how to do it. That’s not going to happen. With these incredible resources, my administration will seek not only American energy independence that we’ve been looking for so long, but American energy dominance.

“And we’re going to be an exporter — exporter. We will be dominant. We will export American energy all over the world … These energy exports will create countless jobs for our people, and provide true energy security to our friends, partners and allies all across the globe.”

For the first time since 1992, when George HW Bush went to the Rio Earth Summit, a US president was outlining a global energy strategy diametrically opposed to the tenets underlying the UN climate process. Trump was establishing a rival pole based on energy realism and energy abundance.

On just this alone, PDT can lift the American economy into a prolonged period of rising growth and higher incomes. It’s amazing that no one else has the strength and courage to do the same anywhere else.

What did Australians use before they had candles?

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Electricity!

Maddening because all of it is destructive of wealth and community but with absolutely nothing in return. If you see global warming and climate change as the biggest hustle in the history of the human race, repulsively stupid, where the community is defrauded and robbed to benefit a handful of grifters in a way that will make some of them very wealthy indeed [see Al Gore], or will raise incomes and status for quite a number beyond any worth provided whatsoever [the halls of academia and the business community are filled with such vultures], then the world as you see it has truly gone mad. Infuriating for the rest of us, but without the slightest idea how to change direction before we go over the cliff.

Something interesting happened in Canada!

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The vid above is about policing in the most woke (= idiotic) city on earth in the most woke (= insane) province in Canada’s fair domain. The rest is about energy policies which provides a lesson to us all.

Ontario was once the wealthiest province in Canada, but is in the process of proving that while there may be much ruin in a great nation, eventually you really can ruin the place if you work at it long enough and hard enough. Here is a cautionary tale proving there are some people for whom no level of ruin is ever enough: $312 Billion: Green Energy Makes Ontario the Most Debt-Ridden Province on Earth. Not long, worth your time, in my view, but here is something to get you started.

A major issue has been crippling energy and environmental policies. It began when, in 1992, then-premier Bob Rae appointed businessman and former UN Under-Secretary-General Maurice Strong to be chairman of Ontario Hydro. At the time, Ontario was a prosperous, economically sound province. Strong changed that when he applied the energy and environmental policies he proposed for the entire world. In 1992, he introduced them through his creation of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) and the conference he chaired in Rio de Janeiro.

At the conference, Strong introduced his creation of Agenda 21, a global energy and environment policy of world-shattering implications, and got it ratified. It was at the same conference that world leaders signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UNFCCC set the ground rules for the UN’s climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In Article 1 of the UNFCCC treaty, it specified:

“Climate change” means a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over considerable time periods.

It is a definition that predetermines the outcome of the IPCC’s work. You cannot isolate human causes of climate change without knowledge and understanding of natural changes and mechanisms. The fact that we cannot forecast the weather beyond 72 hours demonstrates how little we understand about natural climate change and its causes. Accurate forecasts require accurate science, and yet the science is still highly immature.

To further his anti-development agenda, Strong needed “science” to isolate and prove that increasing carbon dioxide emissions from industrial activity, a natural outcome of increasing production, would cause runaway global warming. Once the science was determined, the bureaucracies of national weather offices such as Environment Canada (EC) could push policies to cripple energy production, industry, and development. It is not coincidental that Gordon McBean, later assistant deputy minister of EC, chaired the founding meeting of the IPCC in 1985. Other countries and regions were slow to adopt these principles, but in Ontario, Strong was able to use his position at Ontario Hydro to implement with impunity the crippling policies he orchestrated in Rio.

You’ll never guess what happened next.

 

The politics of the environment

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Steve Hayward who wrote the article discussed on the decline but sadly not the fall of the politics of climate change wrote an earlier and related article on Conservatism and Climate Science. This is the core of the issue discussed:

The conservative ambivalence or hostility toward the intersection of science and policy can be broken down into three interconnected parts: theoretical, practical, and political. I begin by taking a brief tour through these three dimensions, for they help explain why appeals to scientific authority or “consensus” are guaranteed to be effective means of alienating conservatives and spurring their opposition to most climate initiatives. At the root of many controversies today, going far beyond climate change, are starkly different perspectives between left and right about the nature and meaning of reason and the place of science.

This is his final conclusion found at the very end:

Liberals and environmentalists would do well to take on board the categorical imperative of climate policy from a conservative point of view, namely, that whatever policies are developed, they must be compatible with individual liberty and democratic institutions, and cannot rely on coercive or unaccountable bureaucratic administration.

Nice thought, except that for liberals and environmentalists, who are largely the same group, the very aim is to achieve coercive and unaccountable bureaucratic administration. They are not interested in the issues or in finding the dimension of the problems involved and seeking solutions to whatever problems there are. Their only interest is taking control over our lives and running things themselves without interference.

So why are we the last to know?

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There’s an old story I heard when I first came to Australia about how the original inhabitants of Tasmania had lost the art of fishing, so lived on an island surrounded by water but never ate the fish that swam in the oceans around them. So one day others may tell of a people who inhabited an island made out of coal but chose to drive their electricity using windmills while running water up hill. In this vein, let me draw the following to your attention, from The Wall Street Journal: Climate change is over. There at the start we find this:

No, I’m not saying the climate will not change in the future, or that human influence on the climate is negligible. I mean simply that climate change is no longer a pre-eminent policy issue. All that remains is boilerplate rhetoric from the political class, frivolous nuisance lawsuits, and bureaucratic mandates on behalf of special-interest renewable-energy rent seekers.

Judged by deeds rather than words, most national governments are backing away from forced-marched decarbonization. You can date the arc of climate change as a policy priority from 1988, when highly publicized congressional hearings first elevated the issue, to 2018. President Trump’s ostentatious withdrawal from the Paris Agreement merely ratified a trend long becoming evident.

This is a trillion-dollar issue, that if you get it wrong, will lower living standards by substantial amounts for a generation at least and potentially more. From the same kinds of people who brought you Venezuela, the climate change spectre has made some people rich, has made obscure academics in obscure corners of the world of research famous and wealthy, has scared no end of our citizens about some possible rising of the oceans and an over-heated planet fifty years into the future, but has not produced a single verifiable fact about the climate.

If no one else is shooting themselves in the foot, then why are we? It’s time to stop, and return to burning coal and start building nuclear power stations just like everyone else.

The “progressive” monoculture and free inquiry

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Because they do it about maths it is an open and shut case so is not truly comparable to what really goes on, which is largely found in the social sciences. The story of Peter Ridd – told here – is extraordinary mostly because of how blatantly political the university was in shutting down debate.

Universities, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, are dominated by progressives. A US study found less than 10 per cent of academics identify as conservative, while another study found 39 per cent of US campuses have no Republicans. The situation in Australia appears to be similar. Universities seek gender and racial diversity but they are missing the diversity that is crucial for their effective functioning: viewpoint diversity.

“When everyone shares the same politics and prejudices, the disconfirmation process breaks down,” Haidt says.

Academics interviewed by Inquirer tell of a variety of ways that the progressive monoculture limits free intellectual inquiry in Australia. Important projects do not receive funding. Challenging papers are not published. Important issues are not investigated. Studies are designed to reach predetermined outcomes. Erroneous research is misguiding society. Academics self-censor. Administrators censor heretics. Students are exposed to fewer ideas and are marked down or failed for expressing a different perspective.

Witchcraft in the form of science

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Jo Nova on The “ten second” guide to the world of skeptics. She says it is only for newbies but said so well and so contrary to modern forms of madness, thought I would list those essential ten seconds’ worth, but there is much more at the link.

The oddest peculiarity of all is that for someone who is an AGW sceptic, it appears as if almost the entire world has gone mad.

Daemonology, climatology, it’s all the same thing, a means for the ignorant to pretend they know something important when they actually don’t

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This is Karabar commenting on a previous post. It’s about the kind of people who now invest psychologically in global warming. They are the same people who once burned witches at the stake.

In 1597 King James VI of Scotland published his work “Daemonology”. Within a few decades, Europeans discussed endlessly various methods of killing demons of all description. As time passed and people became “enlightened”, it became obvious that all this discussion about ‘fighting dangerou0s demons’ was nothing but make-believe intended to enhance the power and wealth of the elite.

We really haven’t learned anything, since in the 21st century we discuss endlessly the make-believe of ‘global warming’, ‘dangerous climate change’, the ways in which human activities affect the weather, etc.

Discussions about the imaginary “Global Climate” are as much nonsense as discussions four centuries ago about werewolves, vampires, and witches. In order to determine whether or not some parameter has changed, it is necessary to have some sort of metric that can be examined over time to discover the extent and nature of the change.

“Climate” indeed has such a metric, in the form of classification systems, for the most part Koppen-Geiger and Trewartha. Both have six basic classifications, which are further subdivided into approximately ten sub classifications each. In examining the geographical changes over a century or so, it is clear that areas of each classification can expand or contract slightly in tune with the cyclical nature of the solar system. Indeed, over the breadth of the twentieth century one can argue that there has effectively been no NET change, other than the remarkable greening of vegetation over the past three or four decades which is reflected in the Trewartha classification.

If there were such a parameter as the imaginary “global climate”, what would it be? Would it fall into the classification A, B, C, D, E, or F? Would that mean that the climate of the Scott base is of the same classification as Honolulu?

As homo sapiens did three or four centuries ago, today we insist on the discussion of pure nonsense, but instead of it being how to identify and torture witches, we insist on discussion nonsense such as ‘global warming’, ‘ocean acidification’, and ‘decarbonisation’.

Four centuries have passed with little or no anthropocentric advancement in common sense. Thousands of innocent people were tortured and burned alive in this previous bout of idiocy. How many have to suffer due to the IPCC version of “Daemonology”?

A bit of history and a challenge to the climate change people, a challenge they are absolutely certain never to take up.

Maybe weather really is climate after all

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Now updated with the above video from 1977.

I fear we are looking at a breath of sanity in the midst of madness, but enjoy it while you can.

Trump mocks global warming in tweet

President Trump mocked the idea of global warming in a tweet Thursday, making one of his first (if not the first) such public comments on the topic since entering the White House almost a year ago.

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In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!

4:01 PM – 28 Dec 2017

Why it matters: Trump has tweeted in the past that he thinks global warming is a hoax, but that was in 2012 and he has not focused on the topic much at all in his Twitter activity as president. This tweet shows he’s still openly mocking mainstream climate change science, even without directly questioning it.

Fast facts: Most scientists agree human activity, primarily through the burning of fossil fuels, has been the primary contributor to Earth’s aggregate temperature going up this past century. That does not mean, though, that freezing cold weather, like the East Coast is experiencing right now, won’t happen in the future in many parts of the world. Climate change science is much more complicated than that, but citing cold weather is still a favorite line of politicians and others who doubt climate change is happening. Sen. James Inhofe, Republican from Oklahoma, threw a snowball on the Senate floor in February 2015 to mock global warming.

One level deeper: Trump’s tweet was also mocking the Paris climate deal, a global accord virtually every country in the world except the United States supports. It calls on countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but as it stands the commitments wouldn’t cut emissions to the levels most scientists say is needed. America’s commitment under President Obama was actually relatively moderate — up to 28% cut in such emissions by 2025 based on 2005 levels, but the Trump administration pointed to conservative groups’ studies showing it could cripple the U.S. industrial economy while other countries, notably China, were called on to do less.

Between the lines: The Trump administration released without political influence a statutorily required reportearlier this year confirming in great depth that human activity is driving climate change. Trump’s tweets get a lot of attention, but make sure to also watch what the administration does or doesn’t do on this issue.

The bottom line: Words matter, and so do the president’s tweets. His perspective on this issue is influencing his most ardent followers, a new poll suggests. A survey released in October from George Mason University found that just 21% of conservative Republicans think global warming is mostly human-caused, a decrease of nine points since earlier this year.

One more thing: The semantics around climate change, or global warming, are almost as divisive as the science itself. Global warming was the default term up until the last decade or so, when climate change became more popular among those urging action to cut greenhouse gas emissions. That shift was partly to respond to comments like Trump made Thursday by clarifying that a higher global aggregate temperature does not mean the entire planet would be getting universally warmer.

And for interest, you can follow the entire twitter conversation here. It’s an astonishing thread.