Germany’s Energy Surrender - WSJ - "One might expect that a country suffering a generational energy crunch would be trying everything possible to expand supply. Yet Germany is proceeding with the closure of three nuclear power plants—around half of the country’s nuclear power generation—by the end of the year... The closures have been expected for years, but keeping the reactors open for their previously planned lifetimes could have helped alleviate some of the pain Germans are feeling now as rising global demand drives up the cost of energy. German one-year forward electricity prices have hit €300 per megawatt hour. For comparison, the 2010 to 2020 average was under €50 per megawatt hour. The antinuclear move has support from many of Germany’s climate-change obsessives, but abandoning carbon-free nuclear power has had predictable results on emissions. Coal was the country’s top energy source in the first half of 2021, generating more than a quarter of Germany’s electricity. Wind and solar produced 22% and 9%, respectively, as nuclear has fallen to around 12%. France, which relies heavily on nuclear power, puts out about half as much carbon dioxide per capita as Germany. The French also are coping with high energy prices as a result of nuclear outages and greater exposure to skyrocketing natural gas prices. But Paris is responding by building more nuclear reactors. Berlin—at the self-made mercy of the sun and wind—is now deepening its reliance on Russian gas to keep the lights on. This is the background explanation for its weak response to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. Germany’s staunch support for the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia, despite opposition from allies, undermines the West’s response to Vladimir Putin’s designs to dominate Eastern Europe. Germany is now pushing to keep nuclear power off the European Union’s list of “environmentally sustainable economic activities,” a designation that could lower the cost of financing nuclear projects. It’s bad enough that the Germans have undermined their own energy security, but they shouldn’t foist their self-destructive policy on the rest of the Continent."
XR founder Gail Bradbrook compared to Prince Harry for driving diesel car - "Gloucestershire eco warrior Dr Gail Bradbrook has come under fire for ferrying her children around in a diesel car while bringing London to a halt over climate change... many Extinction Rebellion supporters do not realise how privileged they are and their protest appears "puerile" and "utterly misplaced" when contrasted to what is going in Afghanistan."
500 organizations in Canada, U.S. urge feds to stop investing in carbon capture technology - "Investment in carbon capture technology will hinder Canada’s transition away from fossil fuels and exacerbate the effects of climate change, says a new letter co-signed by hundreds of organizations. Over 500 environmental groups and other organizations from Canada and the U.S. put the piece together, which ran as a full-page ad in the Washington Post and Ottawa’s Hill Times. It expresses their concern with government investment in carbon capture and the green guise associated with it."
Effective technologies hinder virtue signalling
What if the cash spent on flawed eco schemes went on new green tech that TRULY worked? - "Albert Einstein is reputed to have said that the definition of insanity is 'doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results'. To me, that perfectly sums up the spirit of Cop26, which kicks off in Glasgow tomorrow... I've been watching such grandiose declarations about transforming the global economy and our way of life for more than 20 years — yet emissions continue to increase... The Ugandan president put it bluntly: 'Africans have a right to use reliable, cheap energy.' The renewable energy sources favoured by the vast majority of environmental activists in wealthier nations have two big problems. First, they take up a vast amount of space, often displacing nature: for example, replacing 1 sq m of gas-fired power plant requires 73 sq m of solar panels, 239 sq m of on-shore wind turbines, or an astonishing 6,000 sq m of biomass (renewable organic material produced by plants and animals, including wood, energy crops such as short-rotation forestry and farm waste). Recent analysis found that to fulfil Biden's promise of a carbon-free economy by 2050, the U.S. could require a land mass equivalent to more than four times that of the UK to develop enough clean power. Second, and of even greater importance, the two most common renewable energy technologies are intermittent or unreliable. Solar energy isn't produced when it is overcast or at night-time. Wind energy requires a breeze. So it is deeply misleading to compare energy costs of wind or solar, only when it is windy or sunny, to fossil fuels. Modern society requires 24 hours of non-stop power, when there's no sun or wind, so fossil fuels are still needed... The International Energy Agency estimates that if the world achieves all of its ambitious stated electric vehicle targets, the saved CO2 emissions over this decade will be 235 million tons. According to the UN Climate Panel, this will reduce global temperatures by about one ten-thousandth of a degree celsius (that's 0.0001c) by the end of the century. Because tackling climate change with current technology is almost impossible, climate policy mostly tinkers at the margins, focusing more on bombastic promises and feel-good rhetoric and less on actions that cut emissions. Politicians have been doing this for decades — the same thing over and over without succeeding — and making ever-bigger promises... A new study in the journal Nature shows the cost of 95 per cent reduction by 2050, almost Biden's promise of net zero, would cost 11.9 per cent of GDP or more than $11,000 (£8,000) for each U.S. citizen, every year. No wonder, then, that politicians elsewhere show little interest in establishing the costs of their own extravagant promises. But pretending the technological answer exists and we just lack willpower to transform our economies is reckless. It stops us from pursuing the real solutions. If we care about fixing this challenge, we need to change course. Continuing to do what the EU has done, cutting carbon with a mixture of market and planning diktats, has avoided just 3 pence worth of global damage for each pound spent so far. That's partly because trying to effect change in the EU is expensive, and many EU climate policies are more inefficient than necessary (it favours using wind and solar to cut a ton of CO2 over the much cheaper option of switching from coal to gas)... Consider how the world in the 1960s and 70s worried about starvation. Applying today's approach would mean asking the rich to eat less and send leftovers to the poor. That could never have worked. What did work was the Green Revolution, innovating higher-yielding crops. It is likely this saved a billion people from starvation... The best example of game-changing climate innovation is the ten-year $10 billion U.S. public investment in shale gas set up under President George W. Bush. It led the way for a production surge of cheap gas, out-competing a significant part of coal in the U.S. energy mix. This was a major part of why the U.S. has the single biggest emission reduction of the past decade. Yet while everyone agrees we should spend much more on R&D, the fraction of rich countries' GDP going into R&D has halved since the 1980s. Why? Because putting up inefficient solar panels makes for good photo ops. It feels like we're doing something, whereas funding eggheads is harder to visualise. Leaders at Cop26 should focus much more on innovation... The geneticist who led the first draft sequence of the human genome argues for research into algae that produces oil, grown on the ocean surface. Because the algae converts sunlight and CO2 to oil, burning it will be CO2-free."
‘The developing world has much bigger problems than climate change’ - "They probably make the world a slightly better place. But the giveaway is in the number 26 – this is the 26th time that we have tried this. We have been trying since 1992, when we signed the Rio Convention... going to extremes is rarely the correct solution. Take another man-made problem – traffic deaths. There are more than one million traffic deaths around the world per year. We could stop them all by setting speed limits at five kilometres per hour. Nobody would die, except maybe from boredom. But we do not do that because there are other costs involved. Likewise, climate change is a problem, a real cost that we want to avoid, but climate policies also have real and substantial costs... a vast amount of emissions that we are going to see in the 21st century will come from the countries that are not so rich – China, India, countries in Africa, the rest of south-east Asia and Latin America. These countries are looking to pull their populations out of poverty. They are unlikely to decide that it is better to leave everyone in poverty in order to pursue Net Zero... [environmentalists] will always say that these countries should be allowed to get rich – and that they actually will get rich from utilising renewable energy. But if you really can become rich from that, it seems odd that we then have to twist everybody’s arms to make it happen. Besides, the developing world has far bigger problems than climate change. Tuberculosis kills roughly 1.5million people every year. Malnutrition still kills around three million children per year. Why do we have such little regard for these other issues, most of which are predicated on poverty? We need to move away from saying ‘this is the end of the world’. If global warming were a meteor hurtling towards Earth, it would make sense to throw the kitchen sink at the problem. But the reality is that global warming is a middling problem in a world of problems, many of which are arguably much bigger – like the lack of education, lack of good healthcare, lack of food, lack of security and lack of peace."
Michael Shellenberger on Twitter - "By 2020, the US had reduced its emissions 22% below 2005 levels. The reason nobody talks about this is because it was mostly thanks to replacing coal with fracked nat gas, which emits half the CO2 as coal, and which had nothing to do with UN climate agreements or climate policies
The same thing happened in Europe. EU had by 2020 reduced its emissions 26% below 1990 levels, mostly due to replacing coal with natural gas, and closing dirtier coal plants in Eastern Europe, neither of which had anything to do with UN climate agreements
And now, new data “actually shows slightly declining *global* emissions over the past decade,” something almost nobody is talking about...
Why does any of this matter? Because facts matter, for starters. But also because 70% of Americans, disproportionately young people, say news media coverage of climate change is making them anxious and depressed
The truth is that *most* environmental trends are going in the right direction
Climate scientists say “we’re hopeless unprepared” for climate change but that’s false. We’re more prepared than we’ve ever been. For politicians, activists, & journalists to spread falsehoods that cause anxiety & depression among schoolchildren is unconscionable
Ever since the above debate climate scientists have refused to debate me (see below). They falsely claim that I behaved inappropriately, talked too fast, and engaged in ad hominems. You can see for yourself that I didn’t. My real sin was pointing out truths they find inconvenient
Honestly, it shows the fragility of apocalyptic activists/scientists/journalists that they never mention
- declining disaster deaths
- no scientific scenario for more deaths
- no increase in disaster costs
- emissions declined 22% in US since 2005 & 26% in EU since ‘90
No issue since “over-population” has been more exaggerated than climate change… What’s really being expressed is Western elite anxiety over loss of control No wonder Xi & Putin both boycotted the wannabe imperialists at #COP26
Meanwhile, we are letting illicit drugs like fentanyl kill 100,000 of our family members every year. There’s no UN conference on it. No wall-to-wall media coverage. And no teenager urging us to panic"
North Face refused to make jackets for a gas company and now the oil industry is trolling them for all the petroleum used in making their apparel - "those expensive jackets – along with nearly every other product in North Face's lineup – is made with and from gas and oil products, and then shipped using fossil fuels."
Meme - "You can't figure out how to unload cargo ships but you know how to change global warming..."
B.C. emergency department head blames 'climate change' for patients health problems - "Like death by heat, doctors have traditionally struggled to clinically attribute mortality and severe illness to air pollution. For Merritt, this summer’s wildfire season changed all that. When a patient came in struggling to breathe, Merritt knew the smoke — that hadn’t lifted from the region for days on end — had made a case of asthma worse. For the first time in his 10 years as a physician, the ER doctor picked up his patient’s chart and penned in the words “climate change.”"
The universal diagnosis!
Rex Murphy: IPCC's ridiculous code red for humanity is a declaration of defeat - "The IPCC is the United Nation’s formidably denominated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a moniker designed to have people leap out of their sleep at the very sounding of so august a title. It has the same summoning power today as the Roman papacy at the peak of its influence. Curiously like the papacy it also claims infallibility. Curiously too, in this, like all religions, it is fascinated by the end of the world. In fact the IPCC’s main or only function seems to be predicting it on a regular basis, as they have been doing for some time now... Even if this much-hyped scenario turns out to be true, which I seriously doubt: there is not a single person on the IPCC, or who owns a private jet that brings them to their conclaves, who will bear or taste any of the burdens he or she will attempt to impose on normal people as a consequence. For that crowd there will always be a party in the Hamptons."
Keeping a diesel is greener than buying a new electric car - "there are a large number of carbon emissions tied up in the manufacture of a car. According to a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists in 2015 the manufacture of a mid-range electric car with sufficient battery power to carry it 265 miles on a good day will require 68 per cent more emissions than the manufacture of a petrol equivalent. As a result – taking the mix of electricity generation in the US – you would have to drive 19,000 miles before you could begin to say you had saved a single puff of carbon emissions. In the case of Britain’s electricity mix, a study published in the journal Nature Sustainability last year claimed that over a typical lifespan an electric car would be responsible for 30 per cent fewer carbon emissions than a petrol equivalent. This somewhat depends, however, on whether you accept the Government’s argument that burning biomass like wood pellets in power stations – the single biggest source of ‘renewable’ energy – really accounts for zero carbon emissions. The Government’s methodology for counting emissions relies on the dubious and contradictory assumption that while planting a tree in Britain removes carbon from the atmosphere, chopping down a tree in North American and transporting it to Britain to burn in a power station does not generate emissions. But even if you accept the claim that zero carbon electricity really is zero carbon, that doesn’t mean you can cut your emissions by rushing out and buying an electric car. If you already own a serviceable petrol or diesel car, as Alok Sharma does, the equation is very different. The carbon emissions involved in the manufacture of the vehicle are already embedded – they can’t be negated by scrapping it years before its time. Buy a new electric vehicle, on the other hand, and you certainly will be responsible for extra emissions. If you want to cut your carbon emissions the very worst thing you can do is do what celebrities are apt to do – and as Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, has admitted to doing: buying an electric car to commute to London from his Hertfordshire constituency (a journey he could easily make by train) while holding on to a second petrol-guzzling car for journeys outside London. We hear endlessly how sales of electric cars have surged over the past couple of years but I have tried and failed to find a vital statistic: what percentage of these cars have been bought to replace old, life-expired vehicles – and what percentage have been bought as additional vehicles to allow their owners to show off their environmental credentials?"
Maybe electric cars are popular because they are effective means of conspicuous consumption
UN Won't Rule in Climate Case Brought by Greta Thunberg, Others - "Two years ago, a group of teens and pre-teens filed a petition with the United Nations saying five major emitters were violating their rights. On Monday, the UN committee tasked with reviewing their complaint basically handed them a participation trophy and then ruled largely in favor of the polluting countries."
Good. When people try to abuse the justice system they need to be ignored
Also headlined: "United Nations Tells Kids to Screw Off"
Top comment: "I remember protesting the golf war when I was in 5th grade and had no idea what it was about but that the adults were urging us to and we were just following other kids who were doing what the adults wanted to get the news channel to appear for publicity. ugggh..."
Bjorn Lomborg on Twitter - "Remember the big, global shut-down much of last year from Covid? It had 𝗻𝗼 impact on climate: "we could not detect any associated impact on temperature or rainfall" To actually have an impact on climate, you need Covid-reductions 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 year"
Bjorn Lomborg on Twitter - "It is quite remarkable, how climate-worried pundits feel free to badmouth any research that doesn't produce the 'correct' outcome Here @Noahpinion telling us that the world's only climate economist to get the Nobel prize is "obviously bananas""
Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, And Why It Matters - "On January 8, 2014, at New York University in Brooklyn, there occurred a unique event in the annals of global warming: nearly eight hours of structured debate between three climate scientists supporting the consensus on manmade global warming and three climate scientists who dispute it, moderated by a team of six leading physicists from the American Physical Society (APS) led by Dr. Steven Koonin, a theoretical physicist at New York University. The debate, hosted by the APS, revealed consensus-supporting climate scientists harboring doubts and uncertainties and admitting to holes in climate science – in marked contrast to the emphatic messaging of bodies such as Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)... Koonin was uncommonly well-suited to lead the APS climate workshop. He has a deep understanding of computer models, which have become the workhorses of climate science. As a young man, Koonin wrote a paper on computer modeling of nuclear reaction in stars and taught a course on computational physics at Caltech. In the early 1990s, he was involved in a program using satellites to measure the Earth’s albedo – that is, the reflection of incoming solar radiation back into space. As a student at Caltech in the late 1960s, he was taught by Nobel physicist Richard Feynman and absorbed what Koonin calls Feynman’s “absolute intellectual honesty.” On becoming BP’s chief scientist in 2004, Koonin became part of the wider climate change milieu. Assignments included explaining the physics of man-made global warming to Prince Philip at a dinner in Buckingham Palace. In 2009, Koonin was appointed an under-secretary at the Department of Energy in the Obama administration. The APS climate debate was the turning point in Koonin’s thinking about climate change and consensus climate science (“The Science”). “I began by believing that we were in a race to save the planet from climate catastrophe,” Koonin writes in his new book, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, And Why It Matters.” “I came away from the APS workshop not only surprised, but shaken by the realization that climate science was far less mature than I had supposed.” “Unsettled” is an authoritative primer on the science of climate change that lifts the lid on The Science and finds plenty that isn’t as it should be. “As a scientist,” writes Koonin, “I felt the scientific community was letting the public down by not telling the whole truth plainly.” Koonin’s aim is to right that wrong. Koonin’s indictment of The Science starts with its reliance on unreliable computer models. Usefully describing the earth’s climate, writes Koonin, is “one of the most challenging scientific simulation problems.” Models divide the atmosphere into pancake-shaped boxes of around 100km wide and one kilometer deep. But the upward flow of energy from tropical thunder clouds, which is more than thirty times larger than that from human influences, occurs over smaller scales than the programmed boxes. This forces climate modellers to make assumptions about what happens inside those boxes. As one modeller confesses, “it’s a real challenge to model what we don’t understand.” Inevitably, this leaves considerable scope for modelers’ subjective views and preferences. A key question climate models are meant to solve is estimating the equilibrium climate sensitivity of carbon dioxide (ECS), which aims to tell us by how much temperatures rise from a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Yet in 2020, climate modelers from Germany’s Max Planck Institute admitted to tuning their model by targeting an ECS of about 3° Centigrade. “Talk about cooking the books,” Koonin comments. The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating. Self-evidently, computer projections can’t be tested against a future that’s yet to happen, but they can be tested against climates present and past. Climate models can’t even agree on what the current global average temperature is. “One particularly jarring feature is that the simulated average global surface temperature,” Koonin notes, “varies among models by about 3°C, three times greater than the observed value of the twentieth century warming they’re purporting to describe and explain.” Another embarrassing feature of climate models concerns the earlier of the two twentieth-century warmings from 1910 to 1940, when human influences were much smaller. On average, models give a warming rate of about half of what was actually observed. The failure of the latest models to warm fast enough in those decades suggest that it’s possible, even likely, that internal climate variability is a significant contributor to the warming of recent decades... “That the models can’t reproduce the past is a big red flag – it erodes confidence in their projections of future climates.” Neither is it reassuring that for the years after 1960, the latest generation of climate models show a larger spread and greater uncertainty than earlier ones – implying that, far from advancing, The Science has been going backwards. That is not how science is meant to work. The second part of Koonin’s indictment concerns the distortion, misrepresentation, and mischaracterization of climate data to support a narrative of climate catastrophism based on increasing frequency of extreme weather events. As an example, Koonin takes a “shockingly misleading” claim and associated graph in the United States government’s 2017 Climate Science Special Report that the number of high-temperature records set in the past two decades far exceeds the number of low-temperature records across the 48 contiguous states. Koonin demonstrates that the sharp uptick in highs over the last two decades is an artifact of a methodology chosen to mislead. After re-running the data, record highs show a clear peak in the 1930s, but there is no significant trend over the 120 years of observations starting in 1895, or even since 1980, when human influences on the climate grew strongly. In contrast, the number of record cold temperatures has declined over more than a century, with the trend accelerating after 1985... “Over the past thirty years, the incidence of natural disasters has dramatically increased,” Treasury secretary Janet Yellen falsely asserted last month in a pitch supporting the Biden administration’s infrastructure package. “We are now in a situation where climate change is an existential risk to our future economy and way of life,” she claimed. The sacrifice of scientific truth in the form of objective empirical data for the sake of a catastrophist climate narrative is plain to see. As Koonin summarizes the case: “Even as human influences have increased fivefold since 1950 and the globe has warmed modestly, most severe weather phenomena remain within past variability. Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose.” Koonin also has sharp words for the policy side of the climate change consensus, which asserts that although climate change is an existential threat, solving it by totally decarbonizing society is straightforward and relatively painless. “Two decades ago, when I was in the private sector,” Koonin writes, “I learned to say that the goal of stabilizing human influences on the climate was ‘a challenge,’ while in government it was talked about as ‘an opportunity.’ Now back in academia, I can forthrightly call it ‘a practical impossibility.’” Unlike many scientists and most politicians, Koonin displays a sure grasp of the split between developed and developing nations, for whom decarbonization is a luxury good that they can’t afford... “Who will pay the developing world not to emit? I have been posing that simple question to many people for more than fifteen years and have yet to hear a convincing answer.” The most unsettling part of “Unsettled” concerns science and the role of scientists. “Science is one of the very few human activities – perhaps the only one – in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected,” Karl Popper wrote nearly six decades ago. That condition does not pertain in climate science, where errors are embedded in a political narrative and criticism is suppressed. In a recent essay, the philosopher Matthew B. Crawford observes that the pride of science as a way of generating knowledge – unlike religion – is to be falsifiable. That changes when science is pressed into duty as authority in order to absolve politicians of responsibility for justifying their policy choices (“the science says,” we’re repeatedly told). “Yet what sort of authority would it be that insists its own grasp of reality is merely provisional?” asks Crawford. “For authority to be really authoritative, it must claim an epistemic monopoly of some kind, whether of priestly or scientific knowledge.”... [There is] the emergence of a climate science knowledge monopoly. Its function is, as Crawford puts it, the manufacture of a product – political legitimacy – which, in turn, requires that competing views be delegitimized and driven out of public discourse through enforcement of a “moratorium on the asking of questions.” This sees climate scientist gatekeepers deciding who can and cannot opine on climate science... “I agree with pretty much everything you wrote,” a chair of a university earth sciences department tells Koonin, “but I don’t dare say that in public.” Another scientist criticizes Koonin for giving ammunition to “the deniers,” and a third writes an op-ed urging New York University to reconsider Koonin’s position there. It goes wider than scientists. Facebook has suppressed a “Wall Street Journal” review of “Unsettled.” Likewise, “Unsettled” remains unreviewed by the “New York Times,” the “Washington Post” (though it carried an op-ed by Marc Thiessen based on an interview with Koonin) and other dailies, which would prefer to treat Koonin’s reasoned climate dissent as though it doesn’t exist. The moratorium on the asking of questions represents the death of science as understood and described by Popper, a victim of the conflicting requirements of political utility and scientific integrity. Many scientists take this lying down."
Another "climate change denier" who must be deplatformed!
Pressing Pause In Climate Alarmism In Favor Of Smarter Solutions - "At his recent World Leaders Climate Summit, President Biden repeated his claim that climate change presents an "existential threat." This pervasive climate alarmism is the culmination of persistent eco-anxiety over the past decades. Already in 1982, the United Nations was predicting that climate change along with other environmental concerns could cause a worldwide “devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust” by the year 2000. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. Today, almost every catastrophe is blamed on global warming, and we are being told that we must radically change the entire world until 2030 to avoid the apocalypse... The U.N. Climate Panel estimates that the average person in half a century will be 363 percent as rich as today. When they include all the impacts of climate change, the increase in well-being will instead be equivalent to 356 percent of today’s incomes. That is a problem, not the end of the world... The Paris Agreement which President Biden just rejoined has been marketed as the solution to climate yet, by the United Nation’s own reckoning, it will accomplish almost nothing. In a best-case scenario, it will achieve just 1 percent of what political leaders have promised. And no major nation is on-track to actually deliver on their promises. The Paris agreement is phenomenally expensive, costing $1-2 trillion every year by 2030. Yet, even if all nations actually kept their promises, including Obama’s for the US, and also stuck to them through the rest of the century, the impact would be an almost immeasurable 0.3°F reduction in temperatures by the end of the century. The cost would vastly outweigh the benefit to the extent that each dollar spent will avoid just 11¢ of global climate damage. But there is another cost to excessively focusing on the climate problem in a world full of problems. COVID-19 showed us how worrying mostly about climate leaves us poorly prepared for all the other global challenges. The World Health Organization itself had repeatedly emphasized throughout the last decade how climate is one of the world’s leading health challenges, which is perhaps one of the reasons the group seemed to be blindsided by corona... The world’s poor battle with much greater challenges like starvation, poverty, dying from easily curable diseases and lack of education. And these challenges have solutions where each dollar can help much more. Spending just a thousandths of the cost of the Paris agreement could save more than a million people from dying of tuberculosis today. Each dollar would do more than a thousand times more good than spent poorly on climate. Similarly, we could do phenomenally much better at much lower cost helping children out of malnutrition or improving learning in schools. We could address most of the world’s top issues with a fraction of what we’re spending on climate."
Bjorn Lomborg keeps talking about innovation and green energy, but never gives the slightest detail and never mentions nuclear
Bjorn Lomborg on Twitter - "Scientific American: the term climate change should henceforth be called "climate emergency" Scientific American has decided to embrace climate alarmism rather than scientific reporting... Their article uses this fire picture and claims climate cause “increasingly dangerous wildfires” A science magazine would have shown (and known) that global burned area has declined for 119 years... They allege climate is the reaso “a hurricane blasts Florida” (really!) A science magazine would have shown (and known) that fewer hurricanes hit the US today... They insist climate is the reason “a California dam bursts because floods” (really!) A science magazine would have shown (and known) US relative flood cost decreasing... They allege climate is causing “a sudden, record-setting cold snap” in Texas” (what?!) A science magazine would have shown (and known) that climate means fewer cold days and nights... They say climate causing world's "biggest environmental emergency" A science magazine would have shown (and known) that deaths from climate emergencies have *declined* for a century... "
DOMINIC LAWSON: Free speech, fake science - and why we must take the fight to the climate zealots - "As I write this column, I do so without knowing if all those who regularly purchase the Daily Mail from their newsagents will be allowed to buy the edition in which it appears.That infringement of their — your — liberty is the purpose of Extinction Rebellion, a small-ish but increasingly influential group of middle-class climate change protesters who want to silence anyone or any organisation that doesn't share their hysterical view that the planet and its inhabitants will fry to fossil-fuelled extinction within a decade or two unless we return immediately to a form of pre-industrial subsistence.That, ostensibly, is why they had been blockading the print sites of most of our national newspapers.Their belief is not based on science but is quasi-religious: they regard any provider of information which does not conform to their strictures as wicked and to be silenced (if they refuse to be converted), rather in the same way that the Spanish Inquisition treated heretics. One of its founders and still an active member, Roger Hallam, went even further, declaring that 'maybe we should put a bullet in the head' as 'punishment' for those he deems responsible for this alleged impending planetary extinction... the Press is now defending itself robustly against XR's physical attempts to silence it, yet there has been a peculiar reluctance to challenge the protest group's claims forensically. Peculiar, because it is not just that their methods are objectionable: so are their arguments.Perhaps the only time this happened (at least on the BBC) was when Andrew Neil, during XR's tedious onslaught last year on those attempting to get to work in London, interviewed the movement's then spokeswoman, Zion Lights.Neil asked her to give the scientific basis for her claims that 'our children are going to die in the next ten to 20 years'. After some confused waffle, she responded: 'The overall issue is that the deaths are going to happen' — which did not get us much further.She seemed even more at a loss when Neil responded to her insistence that 'billions of people will die [as a result of climate change] over the next few decades': 'I looked through the report of the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and there is no reference to anything of the sort.'Alas, the BBC have since parted company with Mr Neil, whose critical approach to this matter is not their house style... As the late chief scientific adviser to the Government, Professor Sir David MacKay, said a week before he died in 2016: 'Because my time is thinner and thinner, I should call a spade a spade…'There is this appalling delusion people have that we can take this thing [renewables] and we can just scale it up, and if there is a slight issue of it not adding up, then we can just do energy efficiency. Humanity really does need to pay attention to arithmetic and the laws of physics.'Yet the XR lot regard nuclear power as satanic, not just because of its former connection with weapons production, but also because they shun anything which doesn't seem to them 'natural'. It seems they would rather mankind died of hunger naturally, than prospered through technological and industrial processes. Or, rather, they take prosperity for granted, without understanding how it was created (perhaps because the great majority of them seem to come from homes which have never known poverty).Yet our politicians seem cut from the same cloth. When Greta Thunberg came to the UK in April last year, they queued up to praise her and her arguments, which are indistinguishable from those of XR... the Government legislated to make the UK 'net zero carbon by 2050' — admittedly 25 years later than XR's impossible demand. But it had no idea how much this would cost, or how it would be done. The New Zealand government did carry out such an exercise, and concluded that to achieve 'net zero' by 2050 would cost 16 per cent of GDP annually. This would equate to £560 billion a year if applied to the UK — equivalent to almost three-quarters of all public expenditure.Yet this legislation was passed without even a debate, let alone a vote in the House of Commons: it was enacted through a statutory instrument. This could only happen because the overwhelming majority of MPs are too scared to be seen as so-called 'climate change deniers'.And they absolutely refuse to engage with such rigorous thinkers as Bjorn Lomborg, the president of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre think-tank, or Michael Shellenberger (named as a 'hero of the environment' by Time Magazine in 2008), both of whom argue that grotesquely excessive resources are being ineffectually dedicated to 'preventing' climate change. So Bjorn Lomborg's latest book, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts The Poor, And Fails To Fix The Planet, has been almost entirely ignored in the British media (forget about any BBC interviews with Lomborg).And I believe the Daily Mail is the only British newspaper which has given much space to Shellenberger's new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All — perhaps the most pertinent of his points being that to move to 100 per cent renewables 'would require increasing the proportion of land used for energy from today's 0.5 per cent to 50 per cent'."
Former Extinction Rebellion activist goes full nuclear - "Zion Lights is now director of Environmental Progress UK, but was formerly a leading spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion UK and the founder of its newspaper, The Hourglass.Her decision to campaign for nuclear energy will have surprised and angered many of her fellow environmentalists, but she argues that “Covid-19 has led us to a crossroads and we now have a unique opportunity to build a green future that involves clean energy”... When I went on the Andrew Neil Show last autumn, he asked me what solutions Extinction Rebellion had to offer to tackle climate change. Speaking for the organisation, I was careful not to say anything that was not backed by the movement’s declared policies, which are to leave it to Citizens’ Assembles to decide.However, the question has bothered me ever since — because there exist scientifically assessed solutions for addressing climate change, and in the energy arena one of those solutions is nuclear power.She argues that the UK must reduce reliance on fossil fuels, which she described as highly polluting and dangerous, and that nuclear energy is a “low-carbon energy source that we can invest in now”. “For many years I was skeptical of nuclear power. Surrounded by anti-nuclear activists, I had allowed fear of radiation, nuclear waste and weapons of mass destruction to creep into my subconscious. When a friend sent me a scientific paper on the actual impacts, including the (very small number of) total deaths from radiation at Chernobyl and Fukushima, I realised I had been duped into anti-science sentiment all this time”... “I also discovered that nuclear waste is minimal, well-stored and well-managed, and has never actually killed anyone,” she wrote, adding “the mindset that you cannot be pro-environment and pro-nuclear at the same time needs challenging. The more research I read, the more I learned about how nuclear power is an essential tool in the battle to address climate change”."
