Links - 24th June 2019 (2) (Environmentalism/Climate Change)

Amsterdam to Sydney in an electric car - "Wiebe Wakker has arrived in Sydney, after driving there in an electric car from Amsterdam over the course of almost three years.Mr Wakker says he travelled 60,000 miles (95,000 km) across 33 countries "without money", relying on offers from volunteers for meals, accommodation and charging points.He says he aimed to demonstrate the capacity and reliability of electric cars, in order to promote them as a way of tackling climate change."
Bjørn Lomborg: "How is this a victory for electric cars?
3 years spent to cover a distance of 17,000km. Even just driving 8 hours a day makes it less than 2km per hour (or 1.2 miles per hour). Walking would be faster."

Air conditioning energy: AC saves lives and causes less climate change than heating. - "the case against AC has always been more a moral judgment than a scientific one. Summer cooling is no more damaging to the climate than the heating that we do in winter. In fact, it’s substantially less so, since the United States burns more fuel on radiators than it does on air conditioners... the long-term shift in population from our coldest, Northern states into the hot and humid South has in sum reduced the amount of fossil fuel we burn to keep our houses at a comfortable temperature. Simply put: It’s more efficient to air-condition homes in Florida than it is to warm the ones in Minnesota... studies done in natural work settings find that overheating has a large—and decidedly negative—effect on employees. One recent paper looked at 70 factory workers exposed to different temperatures and found that those in hotter conditions made more mistakes and showed signs of temporary cognitive impairment. Controlled experiments in the lab generally come to the same conclusion. And if you go by research from Japan, where office thermostats are set at 82 degrees during the summer, some two-thirds of employees describe themselves as being uncomfortable and unproductive in July and August."

Green Policies Turned California A Charred Black - "Public lands “have proved far more vulnerable to forest fires than properties owned by private groups,” Hoover Institution scholar Richard Epstein wrote in California’s Forest Fire Tragedy. “Private lands are managed with the goals of conservation and production. The management of public lands has been buffeted by legislative schemes driven by strong ideological commitments.”The loudest voices assign blame for the fires to man-made climate change. But the human activity primarily responsible for the destructive spread of wildfires is public policy favoring burned timber over harvested timber. While maybe well-intended, laws inspired by the 1970s environmentalist movement, which is determined to make sure saw blades and trees never meet, have stoked the furnaces... Given the extensive fire coverage in the media, it would be easy to believe we’re living in unprecedented times. Yet the number of all U.S. wildfires has remained “roughly constant” since the 1970s, a 2015 Reason Foundation policy brief tells us. What has increased, and sharply every year over the past three decades, is the area burned by wildfires. The average size of each wildfire more than doubled over that period.The report’s author, Julian Morris, says “climatic factors cannot explain the pattern of fires observed over the past century.” Then there has to be another cause. Though it’s politically incorrect to agree with President Trump, he wasn’t wrong when he tweeted about the “gross mismanagement of the forests” being a factor in the fires."

More Evidence Organic Farming is Bad - "Scientists are increasingly coming to the firm conclusion that we have to optimize our farming, and organic farming just doesn’t cut it. This should come as no surprise, as organic farming is not evidence-based or even outcome-based – it is methodology-based, and also is derived from an appeal-to-nature fallacy. It avoids whatever does not feel “natural,” and then tries to present itself as more wholesome. Unfortunately, this resonates with human psychology, but the details don’t make sense when you take a close look. Organic produce is no better, but it is more wasteful, and therefore more expensive and worse for the environment... Of course the organic lobby has a lot of money and are good at messaging and propaganda, which is why we are where we are in the first place. This includes their anti-GMO stance, which is also bad for the environment. GMOs have the potential to increase yield, allow more crops to fix nitrogen from the air, and to reduce land use. They will be a critical part of our strategy to feed the world without accelerating climate change"
If you care about climate change, organic farming is bad

Labour plans to bring in a 10-hour week to tackle climate change - "Brits could work for just 10 hours a week and take home up to 75 per cent less pay under a radical scheme to tackle climate change being discussed by Labour... The document, called The Ecological Limits of Work, was savaged by critics who said its suggestions would wreck the economy."

We’re All Gonna Die: Climate Change Apocalypse by 2050 - "Man-made climate change (now dubbed "climate crisis" by The Guardian's editors) poses potentially serious risks for humanity in this century. But acknowledging the hazard is not enough for a growing claque of meteorological apocalypse porn peddlers who insist that if their prescriptions for solving the problem are not followed then civilization will momentarily come to an end... Now comes a policy paper, Existential climate-related security risk: A scenario approach, from an Australian climate action advocacy group the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration. The headline over at Vice says it all: "New Report Suggests 'High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming to an End' in 2050... Weitzman outlined a low probability-high consequence scenario in which ECS could be as high as 10°C. Such a case would indeed be catastrophic considering that the temperature difference between now and the last ice age is about 5°C and it took several thousand years for that increase to occur.So just how likely is such an extremely high ECS? In its Fifth Assessment Report, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) noted that the "equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) is likely in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C, extremely unlikely less than 1°C, and very unlikely greater than 6°C." More reassuringly, a 2018 article in Climate Dynamics calculated a relatively low climate sensitivity range of between 1.1°C and 4.05°C (median 1.87°C)."

This Pacific Island Was Expected to Disappear, But It's Actually Growing Larger - "The Polynesian island nation of Tuvalu has long been marked as a prime candidate to get swallowed up by the ocean as sea levels rise, but new research shows the land mass of the nation is actually expanding... the land area increase was 2.9 percent, even while recorded sea levels rose around the coasts of the country. The team from the University of Auckland in New Zealand says we may have to rethink how many island nations like Tuvalu are likely to disappear."We tend to think of Pacific atolls as static landforms that will simply be inundated as sea levels rise, but there is growing evidence these islands are geologically dynamic and are constantly changing," says one of the researchers, Paul Kench."
When predictions of environmental doom are exactly contradicted by reality

A global assessment of atoll island planform changes over the past decades - "Over the past decades, atoll islands exhibited no widespread sign of physical destabilization in the face of sea‐level rise. A reanalysis of available data, which cover 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls including 709 islands, reveals that no atoll lost land area and that 88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4% contracted."
Sounds like climate change has been good for islands
Addendum: rising seas, Pacific islands disappear, Island disappear

What happened to the climate refugees? - "In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that climate change would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010. These people, it was said, would flee a range of disasters including sea level rise, increases in the numbers and severity of hurricanes, and disruption to food production.The UNEP even provided a handy map. The map shows us the places most at risk including the very sensitive low lying islands of the Pacific and Caribbean.It so happens that just a few of these islands and other places most at risk have since had censuses, so it should be possible for us now to get some idea of the devastating impact climate change is having on their populations... Meanwhile, far from being places where people are fleeing, no fewer than the top six of the very fastest growing cities in China, Shenzzen, Dongguan, Foshan, Zhuhai, Puning and Jinjiang, are absolutely smack bang within the shaded areas identified as being likely sources of climate refugees.Similarly, many of the fastest growing cities in the United States also appear within or close to the areas identified by the UNEP as at risk of having climate refugees... a very cursory look at the first available evidence seems to show that the places identified by the UNEP as most at risk of having climate refugees are not only not losing people, they are actually among the fastest growing regions in the world."

The UN ‘disappears’ 50 million climate refugees, then botches the cover-up - "After Asian Correspondent posted the story on April 11th, it was picked up by news outlets around the world, such as Investor News and American Spectator, and was referred to in yesterday’s Australian newspaper and even got a mention on Fox News.Since that story appeared, the “handy map” Atkins cites in his original story seems to be gone down the memory hole... Only one small problem there, UN people: a little annoyance called Google Cache, which has that page archived here... The American Association for the Advancement of Science now says that there will be 50 million climate change refugees by 2020."

30 Years Ago Officials Predicted The Maldives Would Be Swallowed By The Sea. It Didn’t Happen - "In September 1988, the Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported a “gradual rise in average sea level is threatening to completely cover this Indian Ocean nation of 1196 small islands within the next 30 years,” based on predictions made by government officials... The article went on to suggest the Maldives, along with its 200,000 inhabitants, could “end” sooner than expected if drinking water supplies dry up by 1992 “as predicted.” Today, more than 417,000 people live in the Maldives."