200,000 cows need to be culled to reach climate targets
Bjรธrn Lomborg - "Fires burned 10% of Australia's land surface on average every year in 20th century In this century, it burned 6% (2001-19) We now have the data for 2019-20, the year with "Australia ablaze": 4% (3.95%)"
Bjรธrn Lomborg - "Mainstream climate alarmism just wrong: Boston Globe, like almost every other outlet, use fire pics for new UN Climate Panel report Claims report says "the world is on fire"
Bjรธrn Lomborg - "The US going net-zero today and staying net-zero for the rest of the century will have a rather small impact, reducing temperature rise in 2100 by 0.16°C (0.3°F) This is because the vast part of 21st century's emissions will come from the currently poor world (China, India, rest of Asia, Africa, and Latin America). And, as I showed in yesterday's post, going net-zero not today, but in 29 years will still cost more than $11,300 per person per year in 2050 according to a new Nature study That is almost 500x as much as the average American willing to pay That won't end well"
Bjรธrn Lomborg - "Even if the entire EU went net-zero today and stayed net-zero for the rest of the century the impact would be rather small, reducing temperature rise in 2100 by 0.14°C (0.25°F) This is because the vast part of 21st-century emissions will come from what is currently the poor world We don't have good cost estimates for net-zero for the EU, but a new Nature study shows costs of 11.9% of GDP for the US and New Zealand found 16% GDP cost. Both are costs per year from 2050 (and ramping up from now to then). That means ๐ฎ๐ป๐ป๐๐ฎ๐น ๐ฐ๐ผ๐๐๐ ๐ฝ๐ฒ๐ฟ ๐ฝ๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ผ๐ป ๐ถ๐ป ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐จ ๐ผ๐ณ €๐ฒ.๐ฏ๐ฌ๐ฌ-๐ด.๐ฑ๐ฌ๐ฌ (lower than the US, because the EU is less rich) So we have well-meaning EU leaders jetting off to Glasgow to commit to even stronger climate policies that will drive up energy costs even more... cost EU citizens 10+% of their incomes while having an immeasurable impact on climate by century's end"
Bjรธrn Lomborg - "Half the world now believe that humanity will go extinct from climate change The reality? The UN expects the average person by 2100 to earn 450% of today’s income. Climate will reduce that to 434%. Problem, not end-of-world"
Leaders dial up doomsday warning to kick-start climate talks - "The metaphors were dramatic and mixed at the start of the talks, known as COP26. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson described global warming as “a doomsday device” strapped to humanity. United Nations Secretary-General Antรณnio Guterres told his colleagues that humans are “digging our own graves.” And Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, speaking for vulnerable island nations, added moral thunder, warning leaders not to “allow the path of greed and selfishness to sow the seeds of our common destruction.”"
Facebook - "Economic policy matters 17 times as much as climate policy for malnutrition WHO research shows climate change makes malnutrition worse. Even entirely getting rid of global warming saves 100,000/yr in 2050 But moving from low to high growth economy saves 1,700,000"
Peter St Onge, Ph.D. on Twitter - "January: "Nobody's banning your gas stove, conspiracy theorist."
Change in Antarctic ice shelf area from 2009 to 2019 - "Antarctic ice shelves provide buttressing support to the ice sheet, stabilising the flow of grounded ice and its contribution to global sea levels. Over the past 50 years, satellite observations have shown ice shelves collapse, thin, and retreat; however, there are few measurements of the Antarctic-wide change in ice shelf area. Here, we use MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) satellite data to measure the change in ice shelf calving front position and area on 34 ice shelves in Antarctica from 2009 to 2019. Over the last decade, a reduction in the area on the Antarctic Peninsula (6693 km2) and West Antarctica (5563 km2) has been outweighed by area growth in East Antarctica (3532 km2) and the large Ross and Ronne–Filchner ice shelves (14 028 km2). The largest retreat was observed on the Larsen C Ice Shelf, where 5917 km2 of ice was lost during an individual calving event in 2017, and the largest area increase was observed on Ronne Ice Shelf in East Antarctica, where a gradual advance over the past decade (535 km2 yr−1) led to a 5889 km2 area gain from 2009 to 2019. Overall, the Antarctic ice shelf area has grown by 5305 km2 since 2009, with 18 ice shelves retreating and 16 larger shelves growing in area. Our observations show that Antarctic ice shelves gained 661 Gt of ice mass over the past decade, whereas the steady-state approach would estimate substantial ice loss over the same period, demonstrating the importance of using time-variable calving flux observations to measure change."
Why natural gas will thrive in the age of renewables - "Intermittency is the fundamental challenge of wind and solar energy. Utilities struggle with the inherent peaks and valleys that come with renewables since power grids were originally designed for a steady supply coming from traditional baseload power plants. One obvious example: there is currently no large-scale, cost-effective way to store solar energy during the day for distribution at night."
Mark Milke: Make up your mind, IEA. Is more oil good or bad? - "Just last month, the IEA wanted governments to do everything they could to kill oil. Now, it’s begging OPEC and Russia to open the oil spigots more. It even hopes Iran can join in. This would be the same Iran that funds Hezbollah and Hamas to attack Canada’s only liberal democratic ally in the Middle East, Israel... The IEA’s call can only help the rogue regimes while hurting liberal democracies, a process that is already underway. Just last week, TC Energy put the final nail in the coffin of the Keystone XL pipeline after the Biden administration pulled the project’s permits in January. This week, it appears our own federal government is musing internally about whether Canada will need any new oil pipelines ever again. Meanwhile, anyone who thinks the Saudis and the Russians will heed the IEA’s May message of no more investment is naรฏve in the extreme. To cite just one example: Russia’s partly state-owned Rosneft is busy developing its US$170 billion Vostok oil project in the Arctic."
Germany Allows Wind Developers to Scrap Contracts as Costs Climb - Bloomberg - "Germany will allow onshore-wind developers to ditch contracts after a surge in costs made some projects unviable. Around 5 gigawatts of onshore projects awarded with subsidies in the past two years haven’t been built, the Economy Ministry said as it announced the move. Inflation has dogged the industry and investments are stalling, it said. The failure of developers to bring plans to fruition has cast doubt on Germany’s program for a huge buildout of renewable energy. Wind farms in the country — and around the world — are seeing investment foundations crumble amid soaring costs for materials and rising interest rates... The 5 gigawatts of unbuilt onshore wind roughly equates to the capacity of Germany’s last three nuclear plants that were shut down in April. Europe’s largest economy, still struggling to replace Russian gas, faces a monumental task to ramp up renewable power to the targeted 80% of generation by 2030. Rocketing costs have also affected offshore wind, with around 6 gigawatts of projects proposed off Germany’s coast not moving ahead as planned. Solar developers, too, have faced hurdles, particularly in connecting new installations to the grid"
Steve Milloy on Twitter - "Study: Manmade CO2 'much too low to cause global warming.' Carbon-14 dating debunks the climate hoax. Soaring in Altmetric rating. ๐ Now ranked #277 out of ~24 million studies. So popular, no paywall. Make it #1."
FACT CHECK: Trudeau and legacy media’s wildfire fear mongering not grounded in evidence - "Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has repeatedly claimed that the wildfires raging across the country are caused by climate change... Coalition partner and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has also made the misleading claim that Canada has “never seen wildfires” like those currently raging and linking them to climate change... Liberal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault also was quick to jump to conclusions in a statement on the wildfires... In reality, Canada has experienced several years where the area burned by forest fires was much larger including in 1989, 1994 and 1995. “The period from 28 May until 7 July (1995) saw the largest mobilization of resources on record. Over 1000 fire management personnel had moved, including 520 personnel from the United States,” writes the Global Fire Monitoring Centre. Similar claims were further perpetuated by the CBC and other legacy media outlets. Politico also spread Trudeau’s claim that climate change was the driver of the wildfire. US media outlets like the New Yorker and Bloomberg also furthered this narrative. Even the federal government’s data says little to justify the apocalyptic narrative spread by the prime minister and others. Data from the Canadian National Large Fire Database shows that the number of wildland fires has been decreasing over the past 40 years. The area burned by wildfires each year also does not show a clear enough trend to support the extraordinary claims about climate change... Experts agree that wildfires are influenced by many factors, not just the climate. According to British Columbia government data, lightning and human activity cause a vast majority of fires. In 40% of recorded cases, humans have caused wildfires as a result of activity such as open burning, vehicle use, industrial activity, fireworks or discarding burning items. Intentionally set fires due to arson can also be a cause like in the case of the 29 Okanagan fires from 2014 to 2018 that were discovered to be deliberately set by an RCMP taskforce. According to a summary of the 2022 wildfire season in British Columbia, despite drought-like conditions and high temperature records, the province saw a “below normal” level of wildfires... A lack of funding and support for controlled burning and management could also be a major factor. According to a paper published by Mark Heathcott, a former head of Parks Canada for 20 years, controlled burning is necessary to reduce fuel loads and restore forest health... Heathcott has argued that Covid-19 pandemic responses and lockdowns have set Canada back in terms of being prepared to tangle with subsequent wildfire seasons."
The EU Looks to “Jungle” Sacrifice Zones to Help It Out of Energy Crisis - "European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell’s comments last year describing the bloc as a garden and much of the rest of the world as jungle were widely criticized. Often missed, however, was that his view wasn’t just an assessment of the current lay of the land but was also forward-looking: “Because the jungle has a strong growth capacity, and the wall will never be high enough in order to protect the garden. The gardeners have to go to the jungle.” In essence he was describing a great shift underway in the EU – one that is increasingly set on moving polluting industry and energy generation outside the garden and to the bloc’s periphery in the Balkans (and North Africa, which I’ll detail in a post tomorrow). In the mind of the European elite, such an initiative will “help the EU meet its geopolitical, economic, and climate goals.” Or in other words:
Gad Saad on Twitter - "Increase in crime rates: Climate change. Do we really want to go to war for the climate? - "Senior politicians and officials seem to be carving out a new green role for Britain’s armed forces and so-called ‘intelligence’ agencies. According to these reports, troops and spies could soon be doing Gaia’s work… protecting the Amazon from loggers, and covertly monitoring emissions from China’s factories and power stations... Britain’s sudden embrace of green interventionism has echoes of the past failed foreign-policy doctrine of ‘humanitarian intervention’, which reached its peak in the Blair era... throughout the ‘war on terror’, foreign policy manifestly reflected Western governments’ domestic crises, that were projected on to the world... In order to chase the phantoms of its own imagination away, the Blair government rolled back our civil liberties and confiscated our legal and political rights. And isn’t that environmentalism in a nutshell? The reduction of living standards and the removal of freedoms demanded by the Net Zero agenda establishes an antagonistic relationship between the government and the public. Ecological interventionism may look like ‘foreign’ policy, but the consequence of the government’s chaotic search for meaning, and its alighting on green politics, will be felt most acutely by the domestic population."
Paris Agreement: a commitment to terminal decline - "The withdrawal from the Paris Agreement had nearly no effect on the ambitious architects of global ecological utopia. Climate advocates never learn anything from their setbacks since all dissent from their designs is rejected as ‘denial’. Accordingly, John Kerry, failed presidential candidate and now special presidential envoy for climate, tweeted that Biden’s announcement ‘restor[ed] America’s credibility and commitment – setting a floor, not a ceiling, for our climate leadership’. ‘Working together, the world must and will raise ambition’, he said. The Paris Agreement requires member countries to propose their own levels of emissions reduction – or Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs). America’s INDC pledge, made by the Obama administration, is to reduce emissions by 26 to 28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2025. Trump argued that this was a bad deal for Americans, and that it would lead to job losses, rising prices, loss of industry and the surrender of democracy to a global agreement. All of that is true, but it has been hidden from public debate by a mixture of green utopianism and the complexities involved in turning abstract emissions-reduction targets into tangible policies. Greens of all kinds talk a very good game about ‘creating jobs’ and ‘climate justice’. But these claims remain unsubstantiated. In 2010, for instance, Gordon Brown’s government claimed that its offshore-wind energy plans would create 70,000 jobs in the sector. But despite the agenda facing almost zero political opposition, by 2020, there were just 11,000 jobs according to the industry’s own (favourable) analysis, as reported by the FT. The sector still enjoys absurd levels of public subsidy (many tens of thousands of pounds per job ‘created’), despite claims that wind power is now ‘cheaper’ than coal or gas generation. Promises of green jobs and less expensive energy never materialise, but this is never questioned. Put simply, there is no translation from emissions-reduction targets to reality which is not going to hit Americans hard, especially those who live either in cities designed around the motor car,or in deep rural country. Americans pay on average less than half what Britons pay for petrol. But for how much longer? Similarly, America’s industrial economy is in large part built on industry powered by cheap energy. Carbon-reduction targets, which will cause energy prices to multiply, were dreamt up long before anyone had any serious ideas as to how to realise them, and without consideration for ordinary people’s lives. The existing Paris commitments are bad enough, but these will be succeeded by new levels of ambition set at this year’s climate conference in Glasgow... No matter how much smoke a sycophantic, fawning media try to blow up Biden’s rear, the American public are going to notice the dire consequences of these policies eventually... Commentators are making facile historical comparisons with Abraham Lincoln – the president that steered a divided country through its civil war. But Lincoln rebuilt an independent USA, he did not cede its sovereignty to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. In order to sustain the historical allusion, Trump stands accused of ‘racism’, ‘fascism’ and ‘white supremacy’. But while such unevidenced and hyperventilating claims may denigrate the former president, they do little to elevate Biden, and do significantly less to win over Americans to the climate cause. The drama is confected, and the promise of a green utopia is hollow. It is the bottom line that counts. As Roger Pielke Jr has pointed out, the scale of America’s ‘transition’ to Net Zero is a task far greater than any of its historical political, industrial or military projects. It ‘would require the deployment of approximately 1,500 wind turbines, over approximately 300 square miles, every day starting tomorrow and continuing to 2050’. Even if such an ambitious project were ever realised, Biden’s climate agenda would yield no net benefit to ordinary Americans, except – perhaps, maybe, but probably not – slightly fewer wildfires, slightly fewer hurricanes, and slightly less sea-level rise, and only then if viewed from the perspective of climate statistics at century timescales. Yet it would saddle the public with tens or even hundreds of trillions in debt, skyrocketing costs of living, immobility and terminal industrial decline. The conditions for civil war, in other words. Maintaining the Paris Agreement and reaching Net Zero are tasks far beyond President Biden’s means."
In 2021, let’s challenge green tyranny - "the world’s plutocrats gathered alongside their political allies in Davos for the World Economic Forum, and listened excitedly while special guest Greta Thunberg berated them for not going far enough in the fight to save the planet. It was a telling moment, capturing just how central environmentalism – especially today’s self-flagellating, end-of-days version – now is to the worldview of the West’s political, business and cultural elites. It has been quite the rise. For much of environmentalism’s history, it was largely on the fringes of elite discourse, not at the centre. It was the counter-enlightenment preserve of landed aristocrats, disillusioned Tories (the origins of the Green Party), and the New Left. Not the mission statement of prime ministers, multinationals and the very institutions of globalist rule, from the EU to the UN... Two key factors account for its ascendency: the long-standing demoralisation of capitalism, and the emergence of essentially technocratic governments after the end of the Cold War. In the anti-modern narrative of environmentalism, these managerial elites found their raison d’etre: to manage the risks and the threats produced by industrial modernity. It even provided them with an ultimate aim: to manage us out of environmental disaster. But environmentalism has always been more than just a story appended to ‘third way’ governing. It is itself essentially technocratic. It invests authority in ‘the science’ and the expert at the expense of the demos. And it did so successfully until 2016. Until Brexit and Trump. Until, that is, so many across the West, disenfranchised for so long under this technocratic consensus, seized back some degree of control. And this has had a tremendous effect on environmentalism. Ever since 2016, the tone has become shriller, the threat supposedly more urgent, the narrative more apocalyptic. Climate change is now a climate emergency. Al Gore’s merely inconvenient truth is now XR’s truth that must be told. And the future towards which we are forever tipping is catastrophic. This is because environmentalism is no longer the handmaiden of technocratic rule; it is now a weapon in the fight to restore technocratic rule... Admittedly, some environmentalists have been concerned that climate change would be pushed down the political agenda by Covid this year, just as it was after 2008 by the financial crisis... The pandemic emergency has been treated as a climate emergency in miniature. A dress rehearsal, even. This is because it has largely been interpreted through the same risk-conscious prism as broader environmental problems have. Thus Covid has been conjured up as a by-product of baleful modernity, a symptom of our unsustainable lifestyles, a message from vengeful Gaia... What’s more, Covid, like climate change in general, has also been relentlessly mobilised on behalf of the technocratic restoration against the populist revolt. Hence the death tolls in Britain and America have been deliberately attributed to their populist governments – proof, so the restorationist attack goes, that not listening to the experts, not heeding the warnings of science, is a fatal mistake. And vice versa. Listening to the science and locking down is proof of the merits of technocracy and the wisdom of its restoration. As Greta Thunberg put it, ‘It is possible to treat a crisis like a crisis, it is possible to put people’s health above economic interests, and it is possible to listen to the science’. The implication of the pandemic is as clear to Thunberg as it is to the political, media and business elites who treat her as their outsourced conscience: climate alarmism builds on the pandemic, and further justifies the technocratic restoration. In other words, the short-term expert-led governance during the pandemic emergency now justifies the restoration of long-term expert-led governance during the climate emergency. And to hell with freedom, democracy and the rest of it. A UN economist, Mariana Mazzucato, has even mooted the possibility of a ‘climate lockdown’, in which governments would limit car use, ban red-meat consumption, and shut down fossil-fuel companies."
Net Zero World Seen Crushing Canada’s Oil Output 76% by 2050 - Bloomberg - "Canada’s oil production would plunge 76% in less than three decades if the world took sufficient action to limit global warming to 1.5C (2.7F), according to government projections released Tuesday, underscoring the challenges the country faces amid global efforts to curtail emissions."
The global energy crisis of 2022: A timeline - - "While many point to the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the seeds of the energy crisis had been sown years earlier, with some countries pushing a rapid phase out of fossil fuel production that hobbled investment into critical domestic oil and gas projects while ramping up energy imports from producers like Russia, despite its history of weaponizing natural resources."
Meme - Razib Khan @razibkhan: "at a party recently and talking to a 28-year-old dev... kids came up (i have 3). asked her if she and her bf had thoughts, she said she wasn't sure she wanted kids.
Tom Mulcair: Trudeau talks tough on climate change; results fall short - "Atlantic premiers have started to push back against the planned increase in the federal carbon tax that will hit their region particularly hard. As the parliamentary budget officer (PBO) has pointed out, that tax will be costly to Canadian families. Trudeau, along with his environment and natural resources ministers, has been claiming that the rebates to families will compensate for the tax. The PBO has proven otherwise.
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Jane Goodall: Disruptive protests ‘counterproductive’ - "‘If you wanted to point to an example of where a species has been saved what would you say?’
Philip Pilkington on Twitter: "Food price inflation is running at 13% in Ireland. The people creating policy are laughably unserious. The government is borrowing money to give to farmers to destroy the food supply. This is Robert Mugabe economic policy."
Damn greedy companies jacking up food prices!
Fact: Report doesn't say that at all (it has almost no discussion of fire, and none of fire history)
This claim is simply wrong"
Climate change hysteria continues apace
Destroying the economy in the name of fighting climate change is good, because it's better that 10 people die of starvation than 1 of climate change
June: "DOE rule may block 50% of current gas stove models.""
Oops. But we need to trust the models over reality
I posted this, the article on Antarctic ice shelves expanding and the chairman of the IPCC posting a claim which has been falsified, and the climate change hystericists got very upset. One called me a climate change denier and like a flat earther. Clearly Trusting the Science means ignoring sourced arguments (including peer-reviewed research) and stooping to ad hominem attacks. Shame on the Washington Post for promoting climate change denial!
From 2021
Weird. We keep getting told wind is super cheap. Clearly they need even more subsidies
World Atmospheric CO2, Its 14C Specific Activity, Non-fossil Component, Anthropogenic Fossil Component, and Emissions (1750–2018) - "After 1750 and the onset of the industrial revolution, the anthropogenic fossil component and the non-fossil component in the total atmospheric CO2 concentration, C(t), began to increase. Despite the lack of knowledge of these two components, claims that all or most of the increase in C(t) since 1800 has been due to the anthropogenic fossil component have continued since they began in 1960 with “Keeling Curve: Increase in CO2 from burning fossil fuel.” Data and plots of annual anthropogenic fossil CO2 emissions and concentrations, C(t), published by the Energy Information Administration, are expanded in this paper. Additions include annual mean values in 1750 through 2018 of the 14C specific activity, concentrations of the two components, and their changes from values in 1750. The specific activity of 14C in the atmosphere gets reduced by a dilution effect when fossil CO2, which is devoid of 14C, enters the atmosphere. We have used the results of this effect to quantify the two components. All results covering the period from 1750 through 2018 are listed in a table and plotted in figures. These results negate claims that the increase in C(t) since 1800 has been dominated by the increase of the anthropogenic fossil component. We determined that in 2018, atmospheric anthropogenic fossil CO2 represented 23% of the total emissions since 1750 with the remaining 77% in the exchange reservoirs. Our results show that the percentage of the total CO2 due to the use of fossil fuels from 1750 to 2018 increased from 0% in 1750 to 12% in 2018, much too low to be the cause of global warming."
The contradictions in the EU’s endeavors over the past year and a half are probably best exemplified by the German Greens. Rabidly anti-Russian, they opposed any natural gas from Russia while simultaneously working to shut down Germany’s remaining nuclear power plants. Naturally this left Germany burning more coal, paying exorbitant prices for LNG, and shoveling money at industry in an attempt to soften the blow of higher energy costs. As the whole of the EU follows a similar path, it’s interesting that the bloc does not have the same expectations for the statelets in the Western Balkans"
Out of sight, out of mind
Inflation: Climate change.
Asthma: Climate change.
Heart disease: Climate change.
Lower sperm counts: Climate change.
Increased traffic: Climate change.
Increased unemployment rate: Climate change.
Hotter days: Climate change.
Cooler days: Climate change.
No change in temperature: Climate change.
Increase in illegal immigration: Climate change.
Obesity increase: Climate change.
Pandas not mating: Climate change.
Increased human promiscuity: Climate change.
Reduced sex in marriage: Climate change.
The Guru of Love blocking me: Climate change.
Climate change is real. We have fewer than four weeks left. We need to transfer $100 trillion over the next 50 years to reduce the earth's temperature by 0.02% +/- 2 degrees. This may require the permanent increase of taxes on those rich assholes but at least we will avert the extinction of humanity. Settled science."
reasons
1 climate
2 overpopulation
3 she loved to travel
when i pointed out #3 conflicted with #1 she ignored me
to be clear, she stated #3 within 10 seconds of #1"
‘My favorite example is the Black Robin which is a little bird living in New Zealand and because of the importation of cats and rats and because these native birds have no you know no defense mechanisms against those kind of predators, they were reduced eventually to just two: one fertile male and one fertile female. And this wonderful botanist Don Merton had moved them to an offshore island. And from those two we now have about 500, moved on to four different Islands to sort of get some genetic drift’...
'I'd like to see more direct action but not the kind that you know blocks traffic for miles and miles along the high road, of ordinary people trying to get home to cook supper or be with their children. That’s counter productive I think… it makes people angry, doesn't it? I mean you may be a perfectly rational person, you may actually be contributing to various causes to protect wildlife. But then when people who also want to protect wildlife do so by blocking roads and you can't get home, that's going to put you against those people isn't it?... I would say they should be. depending on what they're protesting against it could be outside the offices of BP, British Petroleum, or Shell. Or outside the Houses of Parliament if it's a question of a piece of legislation being passed or not passed as the case may be. That's useful. Bot on public roads. I’d prefer what we do, which is roll up your sleeves, get your group together, take action, inspire others to join you. And yes, raise money to help endangered species. Volunteer, you know. But try to actually do something positive'"
"Ok, boomer"
Weird, we're told that if a species is down a few (or even one) breeding pairs, it's already doomed because there isn't enough genetic diversity and there isn't a minimum viable population and you need an effective population of at least 50 or 500 individuals. Looks like the Black Robin didn't get the memo that it was ignoring the science
Wednesday, July 26, 2023
Links - 26th July 2023 (2 - Climate Change)
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