Facebook - "Climate change means more heat deaths but over the last two decades it is has avoided even more cold deaths These are facts. We all deserve to know them. But these facts are now censored on Facebook. This post will likely be flagged, too. They have been flagged by a self-appointed group of bad-faith climate-alarmists. Incredibly, they never actually produce an argument against the facts above. They even interview the guy, who co-wrote the article, and he doesn't make 𝗮𝗻𝘆 argument against them — because they're true. But they don't want you to know these facts, because they don't fit their narrative. This is shameful. Censoring facts doesn't help us make better policy, it only helps underpin poor decisions and social scares."
Peer reviewed research is dangerous fake news when it contradicts the narrative
Bjørn Lomborg - Posts | Facebook - "Why do climate alarmists have such hard time with good news? Gas replaced much coal in US, because fracking made it cheaper. Great, because gas emits half CO₂ of coal. But so many (like McKibben) argue that methane leakage entirely undoes this achievement.... Wrong."
This is the same cognitive dissonance you see with apocalyptic cults
Bjørn Lomborg - Posts | Facebook - "Silly: "Climate change most significant public health issue of our time" Biden's Climate Advisor McCarthy Heart disease kills 33% and cancer 26% of all Americans Heat kills 0.3% and declining. Cold 6.4% and increasing Yes, global warming is a problem. No, 0.3% is not our biggest challenge"
Massachusetts Climate Official Ismay Proposes 'Turning the Screws' to Break Citizens' Will to Stop Climate Change - "When he says this is something he can’t say publicly, it is pretty ironic. Socially distanced Zoom meetings have made more than one careless comment public. Perhaps the most shocking thing about this video is that none of the other participants look remotely surprised or shocked... taxes are not the only weapon the government has. In particular, the political left has several weapons at their disposal to make citizens behave the way they prefer and is willing to use them all. We all saw this during the COVID-19 pandemic.First, they have the bureaucracy. From that behemoth structure, they can select who will speak to the country, and they will choose those individuals carefully... Some of [Fauci's] advice has been outright contradictory. Yet anyone who does not follow it can be suppressed, vilified, or ruined by a video posted on social media.It was easy to find dissenting opinions if you were motivated to look, but many people aren’t. The corporate media never covered them and worked to discredit anyone who contradicted Fauci. Dr. Scott Atlas, a health policy expert from the Hoover Institution on the White House Task Force, was regularly targeted for sharing peer-reviewed research. Far more Americans than anyone would have predicted obediently went into their homes and stayed there for months on end. People gave up their small businesses and continue to allow their children to learn remotely, primarily because they hear a consistent message that breeds fear. Then there is the opposite approach, which we saw applied to the unrest and violence in Portland and Seattle this summer... The silence is so bad that on January 31st, left-wing radicals took over a hotel in Olympia, Washington. They brought knives, hatchets, and clubs, assaulted at least one staff member, and took over the building. They demanded the city government stop clearing homeless tent encampments and house the homeless in the hotel. They were eventually cleared by police, but there was almost no coverage. For residents in the Pacific Northwest, normalizing political violence breaks residents’ will to demand a government that protects them."
Burning wood under fire: Are forests going up our chimneys? - "You may think that conservationists would be happy with the European Union's (EU) goal to switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy. However, the reality of the issue is not that simple.They claim that a new demand for wood is driving deforestation and boosting carbon dioxide levels, as well as dangerous particulate matter emissions.The EU Renewable Energy Directive from 2009 requires member states to include renewables in 20 percent of their energy needs by 2020.This week, the European Parliament's Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) voted to increase the renewable energy target to 35 percent by 2030 and to introduce an additional target for renewable heating... In 2015, biomass accounted for about two thirds of the EU's renewable energy consumption, with wood and wood products making up about half of the used products... According to a study commissioned by the NGOs Birdlife Europe, Forests and the European Union Resource Network (FERN) and Transport & Environment, the use of wood for energy purposes increased by about 75 million cubic meters between 2010 and 2015 — an uptick of 21 percent.But they claim that the use of wood waste from the forest industry has gone up by only 10 percent, whereas the use of wood coming directly from the forest has increased by 24 percent... Slovakia's and Romania's forests are being chopped down to meet the EU's newly-risen demand for wood... Some countries - including the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark - have built new wood-fired plants or converted coal-fired plants to produce electricity from burning wood.Drax power station in North Yorkshire, England, is the UK's biggest power plant and provides about 7 percent of the country's electricity. The company boasts that it generates 70 percent of its electricity from compressed wood pellets rather than coal. But part of their wood source comes from the US." "The USA is now the main supplier of wood pellets to Europe"... When power plants burn wood, they can claim to emit zero carbon dioxide.In practice that's not true of course, and depending on the water content of the wood, wood-burning furnaces might emit even more CO2 than coal-burning plants per unit of electricity produced.The popular notion is that if you cut down a tree, burn it and plant a new tree in its place, you are simply recycling carbon.But as Zuidema points out, "forests and trees have a very important role to play while they are alive and standing in the forest as a carbon sink."Cutting down trees that are still sequestering carbon is a big mistake, she says — even if young trees might indeed replace the older ones one day: "Forest biomass is not carbon-neutral at all."... In a simulation study, researchers concluded that an increased demand for wood fuel could cause ecosystems in North Carolina to shrink by about 10 percent until 2050, replacing natural hardwood and pine habitats with intensively managed forests... During the COP23 in Bonn, China and 18 other nations announced plans to increase the use of wood and other plant matter as a means of generating electricity.Announcements like this have left some conservationists deeply worried that if too many countries follow the example of the EU, the situation will only get worse."
The dirty secret of "renewable" energy. Environmentalism is bringing us back to the 18th century in the name of progress and we're just fooling ourselves about how "green" it is
Pollutionwatch: wood burning is not climate friendly - "Burning wood is not CO2 free; it releases carbon, stored over the previous decades, in one quick burst. For an equal amount of heat or electricity, it releases more CO2 than burning gas, oil and even coal, so straight away we have more CO2 in the air from burning wood. This should be reabsorbed as trees regrow. For logs from mature Canadian woodland, it could take more than 100 years before the atmospheric CO2 is less than the alternative scenario of burning a fossil fuel and leaving the trees in the forest... It seems that wood burning is not climate neutral in the short term and requires an increase in forested area to be climate neutral in the longer term."
So burning wood because it is "renewable" is actually worse for climate change
SPOING
Europe’s renewable energy policy is built on burning American trees - "all this, scientist Bill Moomaw argues, comes down to a tragically shortsighted view of both carbon accounting and our current climate predicament.Moomaw, now a professor emeritus at Tufts, is a co-author of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Climate report, co-author of four additional IPCC reports, and an expert on carbon sinks.In 2009, as Massachusetts began debating whether to treat biomass as carbon neutral, he dove into the science. By assessing carbon emissions from bioenergy, and the slow regrowth rates of a replacement forest, he concluded that biomass stood to be “a serious problem.” To Moomaw, the question of whether biomass was ultimately carbon neutral was less important than when it balanced out... The analysis was later confirmed by a colleague at MIT, John Sterman, who did the math, and confirmed that burning wood today would worsen climate change, “at least through the year 2100 — even if wood displaces coal, the most carbon-intensive fuel.”... one thing wasn’t up for debate: Burning biomass means quickly dumping more carbon into the atmosphere at exactly the point we need to begin rapidly drawing it down. “I’m at loss to understand how this [policy] went forward unless you discover there was total government capture by the forest products industry.”The first problem, he argued, comes from the industry-promoted idea that biomass simply makes use of wood that would have decayed anyway, an assumption made by the European renewable energy standards. Under the terms of the Kyoto Protocol, the forest owner, not the end-user of wood products, is supposed to account for the carbon lost when a forest is cleared. Because the assumption is that the cleared trees would decompose anyway, companies like Drax only have to count the carbon needed to turn from waste wood into fuel — gasoline for chainsaws, diesel for shipping — not the actual carbon that leaves their smokestacks.This means that wood bought from the US effectively disappears from carbon markets, if not the atmosphere... Whether burning trees for biomass or forging steel for windmills, every renewable energy policy releases carbon on the front end in hopes of savings on the back. The carbon-neutrality argument for biomass assumes that when a new tree grows back, it rebinds the carbon burned decades before for energy. After that point (called “parity”), the atmosphere is better off than if, as the biomass industry usually assumes, a power station had burned coal instead, and the wood had been burned as waste.This reasoning, Moomaw argues, is based on a set of dubious assumptions that effectively cook the books. Imagine carbon in the form of a household budget. “If we did financial accounting like that in our daily lives,” he said, “we’d all be in prison.”... “Carbon neutral,” Moomaw said, “isn’t the same as climate neutral. Even once you reach parity, that carbon has been floating around for a century, absorbing radiant heat. That means more methane released from the permafrost, and more melt on the glaciers. Those don’t go away in a hundred years even if replacement trees successfully grow. Even if we stopped releasing carbon tomorrow, sea levels would still rise for centuries. Climate effects are irreversible.”... Moomaw joined a group of nearly 800 scientists from across the world in petitioning the EU Parliament to end its support for biomass... To meet just an increase of 3 percent in global energy demand with wood, the scientists wrote, the world would have to double its commercial logging. “At a critical moment when countries need to be ‘buying time’ against climate change, this approach amounts to ‘selling’ the world’s limited time to combat it.” What role, then, do researchers see for biomass? Back when it started, the original renewables designation for biomass had been based on the idea that, say, a Finnish paper mill or a Swedish sawmill should get credit for running on its own scraps, rather than diesel. So if paper plants and sawmills burn residues and wastes that would otherwise quickly decompose, they wrote, that would be carbon neutral. But no increase in logging could be justified on climate grounds — even if, as the trade groups insist, it provided an additional income stream for forest owners."
Wind power, the unreliable renewable - "Even put together, wind and photovoltaic solar are supplying less than 1 per cent of global energy demand. From the International Energy Agency’s 2016 Key Renewables Trends, we can see that wind provided 0.46 per cent of global energy consumption in 2014, and solar and tide combined provided 0.35 per cent. Remember this is total energy, not just electricity, which is less than a fifth of all final energy, the rest being the solid, gaseous, and liquid fuels that do the heavy lifting for heat, transport and industry... Such numbers are not hard to find, but they don’t figure prominently in reports on energy derived from the unreliables lobby (solar and wind). Their trick is to hide behind the statement that close to 14 per cent of the world’s energy is renewable, with the implication that this is wind and solar. In fact the vast majority — three quarters — is biomass (mainly wood), and a very large part of that is ‘traditional biomass’; sticks and logs and dung burned by the poor in their homes to cook with. Those people need that energy, but they pay a big price in health problems caused by smoke inhalation. Even in rich countries playing with subsidised wind and solar, a huge slug of their renewable energy comes from wood and hydro, the reliable renewables... If wind turbines were to supply all of that growth but no more, how many would need to be built each year? The answer is nearly 350,000, since a two-megawatt turbine can produce about 0.005 terawatt-hours per annum. That’s one-and-a-half times as many as have been built in the world since governments started pouring consumer funds into this so-called industry in the early 2000s.At a density of, very roughly, 50 acres per megawatt, typical for wind farms, that many turbines would require a land area [half the size of] the British Isles, including Ireland. Every year. If we kept this up for 50 years, we would have covered every square mile of a land area [half] the size of Russia with wind farms. Remember, this would be just to fulfil the new demand for energy, not to displace the vast existing supply of energy from fossil fuels, which currently supply 80 per cent of global energy needs... Do not take refuge in the idea that wind turbines could become more efficient. There is a limit to how much energy you can extract from a moving fluid, the Betz limit, and wind turbines are already close to it... As machines, wind turbines are pretty good already; the problem is the wind resource itself, and we cannot change that. It’s a fluctuating stream of low–density energy. Mankind stopped using it for mission-critical transport and mechanical power long ago, for sound reasons. It’s just not very good.As for resource consumption and environmental impacts, the direct effects of wind turbines — killing birds and bats, sinking concrete foundations deep into wild lands — is bad enough. But out of sight and out of mind is the dirty pollution generated in Inner Mongolia by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets in the turbines. This generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale, which is why the phrase ‘clean energy’ is such a sick joke and ministers should be ashamed every time it passes their lips. It gets worse. Wind turbines, apart from the fibreglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. They need about 200 times as much material per unit of capacity as a modern combined cycle gas turbine. Steel is made with coal, not just to provide the heat for smelting ore, but to supply the carbon in the alloy. Cement is also often made using coal. The machinery of ‘clean’ renewables is the output of the fossil fuel economy, and largely the coal economy... And let’s put some of that burgeoning wealth in nuclear, fission and fusion, so that it can take over from gas in the second half of this century. That is an engineerable, clean future. Everything else is a political displacement activity, one that is actually counterproductive as a climate policy and, worst of all, shamefully robs the poor to make the rich even richer."
The 2020 report doesn't seem to have an update on this figure, or indeed anything on general global/overall renewable trends, or breakdowns, probably because it is inconvenient
Wind energy to power UK by 2020, government says - "Friends of the Earth's renewable energy campaigner, Nick Rau, said: "We are delighted the government is getting serious about the potential for offshore wind, which could generate 25% of the UK's electricity by 2020... the vice president of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Dr Sue Ion, said that wind power could only provide about 20% of the country's electricity to preserve grid stability."
From 2007. Interestingly, in 2020, wind energy was 24.8% of the UK's energy
Facebook - "Congo Kids mining Cobalt in slavery for EV Cars"
Greta on train eating: "EV Owners thinking they are saving the world"
Bjørn Lomborg - Posts | Facebook - "Breathless climate reporting over and again tells us how the world will be rocked by ever more damaging extreme weather.It is wrong for US flooding — which has seen its impact decline about 10-fold since 1903.As we saw some days ago, it is also wrong for the whole world. The relative costs are not going up — in fact they are (insignificantly) decreasing... What we see is a dramatic reduction in costs in percent of GDP (which is a very a good proxy for the Net Stock of Fixed Assets — all the stuff that can be damaged) from costing almost 0.5% of GDP each year in the early 1900s, and now costly nearly 0.05% today.The reason why this is measured in percent of GDP is that more fixed assets (like bigger and nicer houses, more roads or more cars) mean more damage for the same amount of flooding. Correcting with GDP fixes that.It is also how the UN says we should measure impacts of catastrophes, here from SDGs: "Indicator 1.5.2 Direct economic loss attributed to disasters in relation to global gross domestic product (GDP)" (and similarly for 11.5)... If you wanted to focus just on absolute damage costs, perhaps one of the easiest ways to reduce absolute damage costs to zero would be to make everyone destitute — clearly not desirable."
What made the acid rain myth finally evaporate? - "The NAPAP reported in 1990. The findings were explosive: first, acid rain had not injured forests or crops in US or Canada; second, acid rain had no observable effect on human health; third, only a small number of lakes had been acidified by acid rain and these could be rehabilitated by adding lime to the water. In summary, acid rain was a nuisance, not a catastrophe.The findings of NAPAP were not welcomed by the powers-that-be, many of whom had staked their reputations on the impending Clean Air Act which would call for drastic reduction of sulphur dioxide emissions. The NAPAP was ignored.Acid rain was succeeded by the "hole in the ozone layer" as the next environmental worry, which in turn was pushed off the stage by global warming. Oops, I forgot! Just before global warming we briefly worried about global cooling, causing drought, famine, frozen oceans etc, fears triggered by a small dip in average northern hemisphere temperatures from 1940 to mid-1970s. As the fella said - "You'd have to wonder"."
All the "acid rain deniers" need to be banned from social media so they can't spread "misinformation"
Decade-Long Study Says Acid Rain Isn't an Environmental Crisis - "A $537 million, decade-long study ordered by Congress concluded Wednesday that acid rain should be ″viewed as a long-term problem″ requiring pollution controls but is not the environmental crisis some scientists have suggested."
[Yesterday, today, tomorrow. A retrospective look at the acid rain problem] - "Last century, at the end of the seventies, Europe was startled by a serious environmental problem: acid rain. Acid rain was held responsible for the decline of fishes in Scandinavian lakes. Later, it was suggested that acid rain could lead to forest dieback over vast areas of Europe. Forests in the Netherlands could be at great risk, as well. It was clear to everyone what it was all about, for 'rain' means water falling from the atmosphere and the meaning of 'acid' was evident, too. Acid rain caused much commotion in the eighties but, since then, it has faded into the background. Why is it, that there is so little attention paid to acid rain these days? Maybe the acid rain problem was a hype; with an exaggerated reaction to a problem that was, in fact, insignificant. This article aims to reconstruct the history of one of the most prominent environmental problems of the twentieth century. The article describes the origin of the acid rain problem in the 1960s and describes the scientific research that was carried out to develop a better understanding of the problem from an atmospheric chemical point of view. Subsequently, it treats the rise of public awareness in the seventies. The article subsequently focuses on the situation in the Netherlands. The initial research into forest health showed alarming results. This led to widespread concern within The Netherlands, which, once more, urged the government to come into action. Some measures to reduce air-polluting emissions were already taken in the early 1980s. However, these were meant, mainly, to improve local air quality. As the eighties progressed, acid rain provided an additional argument for reducing air pollution. This article presents the consequences of the emission reductions for the acidity of acid rain, and it discusses--in brief--the acid rain problem in light of current scientific knowledge. Finally, it answers the question of why forests did not die."
Forest Fires Aren’t at Historic Highs in the United States. Not Even Close - "there is widespread agreement that California’s megafires stem largely from decades-long mismanagement of its forests. As The New York Times explained earlier this month, for more than a century, many firefighting agencies have aggressively focused on extinguishing blazes whenever they occur, a strategy that has often proved counterproductive... Texas actually has more forest and higher temperatures than California, but the Lone Star state rarely struggles with fires, perhaps because 95 percent of its land mass is privately owned and these owners act as responsible stewards of the land.If climate change was truly the primary culprit of the wildfires, wouldn’t it stand to reason other parts of the US would be suffering similar results? Are there reasons climate change impacts California more than Texas and the Southeast US?... News agencies and NIFC were simply ignoring all data prior to 1960. When this data is included, one sees 2017’s record setting fires burned about one fifth of the acreage of fires in 1930 and 1931. These were peak years, but they were not exactly anomalies, Lomborg pointed out. The entire data set, a quarter century of figures that comes from the official record of the United States, shows the yearly average between 1926 and 1952 was several times higher than the peaks of today... We’ve seen no shortage of crises in 2020, but it’s worth remembering a simple truth: pandemics, riots, and wildfires are nothing new. They have been around as long as humans have.What’s changing is our response to these phenomena. Each crisis is presented as an opportunity to save humanity, and each requires giving more control to central planners. Rahm Emmanuel popularized the phrase “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” but it was economist Robert Higgs who showed that crises are the mortal enemy of liberty. His great work Crisis and Leviathan lays bare the state's tradition of claiming new powers during emergencies, powers that rarely are relinquished fully when the crisis ends.Higgs admitted he was worried about the correlation between liberty and crises, because he understood a basic truth: there will alway be human crises."
'Climate alarm' is as big a threat as climate change - it leads to anxious lives and bad policies - "Climate alarmism is becoming ever more strident.In my home country, Denmark, the front page of the most read magazine proclaims that "climate anxiety is good for the climate".This is a remarkably honest message, signalling that it has become acceptable to frighten people senselessly to support climate policies. A YouGov poll in 2019 found that almost half of the world's population believes climate change will likely end the human race.It makes school children ask why they should educate themselves, when they don't have a future anyway.If climate change really could end the world, then perhaps this alarmism might be warranted, but that is simply not the case.The UN's climate panel has estimated that the negative impact of climate change equates to incomes reducing by 0.2% to 2% by the 2070s.By then, each person worldwide will be 363% richer; however, climate change will mean people will only be 356% richer than today. That's a problem - but it isn't the end of the world... When we panic, we make bad decisions... The UN's Environment Programme found that the impact climate policies have had in the last 10 years equates to living in a world where no new policies were made after 2005.Despite the poor track record of previous policies, many rich countries are now competing to go even further and become carbon neutral.Only one, New Zealand, has dared to ask for an independent estimate of the cost of going carbon neutral by 2050 - at least a staggering 16% of GDP, every year.Even this enormous sacrifice will only slow global warming by just 0.002°C by the end of the century.Due to three quarters of this century's emissions coming from poorer countries, the actions of rich countries have little matter.Even if all rich nations stopped all their CO2 emissions tomorrow, and for the rest of the century, temperature rise would only reduce from 4.1C (39.4F) to 3.7C (38.7F) by 2100... Climate alarm leads to anxious lives and bad policies. It also takes our attention off the world's many other problems, like preparing for global pandemics. We can do so much better."