To Fight Climate Change, Los Angeles Bans Restaurants From Giving Out Unsolicited Ketchup Packets - "The intent of the new ordinance—which also restricts the distribution of other single-use items like napkins and utensils—is to prevent waste and combat climate change... The new policy also applies to food delivery services like DoorDash and UberEats... It's also an open question of how much this new law will actually reduce people's consumption. It's likely that businesses would be less generous with their ketchup packets even without the law, given reported shortages of that product. The penalties are also minor enough that many businesses could easily afford to not comply True, there are few victims of this new law, save for those people who forget to ask for dipping sauce and thus must munch on dry, uncovered fries. Yet the pettiness of the law makes it all the more offensive. Los Angeles has no shortage of problems that policy makers they could be addressing, from housing affordability to homelessness. Instead, they've decided to spend their time mandating a new, pointless ritual that will inconvenience a few and benefit no one."
Andrew Neil is right – on climate change, the BBC is short-changing us - "One of the dismal side-effects of Cop26, the recent climate-change conference in Glasgow, is how it sucked the oxygen out of our national media. For weeks before it started, and throughout its duration, nearly every broadcaster, newspaper and magazine devoted lavish amounts of space to the deliberations of politicians, scientists, diplomats and officials. The cumulative effect was deadening. This wasn’t because the subject is of no importance or interest, but rather because when the media is in this kind of mood there is no tension, no quarrel, no edge to the debate. The problem, in a nutshell, is that the journalists were all on board with the “line”. The starting point of every interview was the implicit agreement that everything is getting worse and that climate change is an existential threat. Metaphorically – like the preachers’ billboard – the reporters were telling us “The End is Nigh”. What this meant in practice was that every time you turned on the radio or TV, you heard the same message relentlessly repeated, and that message, as Andrew Neil has complained, seemed to come straight from the Greenpeace press office. Neil’s complaint was aimed squarely at the BBC, but, in truth, none of the other big broadcasters was any better. There were a few hold-outs against the eco doom-mongering: GB News and TalkRadio, among other insurgents, struck a more sceptical note. But in general, our national media gave themselves over to an orgy of apocalyptic hair-shirt environmentalism. And this is self-defeating and wrong. Self-defeating because, confronted with pretty much the same headline hour by hour, day by day, over a period of weeks, the response of most rational people is to smell a rat – “I’m being sold a message here” – and switch off. And wrong because, despite the weight of the climate-change consensus, there are still important arguments to be had about anthropogenic climate-change, and what we should do about it... our media – and especially the BBC – has entirely abandoned the noble tradition of pugnacious journalistic inquiry here. This can be traced back to a decision taken in 2006, after the BBC convened a private climate-change seminar in which senior Corporation figures were briefed by leading scientific experts and climate activists. The following year, the BBC Trust stated: “The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus.”... while there’s no need for “equal space”, there’s an absolute requirement, in my view, that some space should be given so that the sceptics can make their case. Otherwise, the result will be what we got from Glasgow: supine, gutless, sycophantic agreement with the official line, which is the antithesis of what robust journalism should be... One of the great hate-figures for climate-change true-believers is the Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg, who has developed a sceptical critique of the demands of passionate activists. Lomborg does not deny the reality of climate change, but he picks apart the assumptions of the consensus, and demands that they justify the colossal economic cost of the remedies they advocate: green energy, electric cars and so on. He adds that those who forecast disaster consistently underestimate mankind’s ability to adapt and find new solutions. Yes, he says, global warming will force us to change, but we will because we can: that’s what humans always do. That optimistic, central insight was glaringly absent from all the pessimistic journalistic outpourings from the BBC and others in Glasgow. And their apocalypse-peddling has consequences. A recent global survey of 10,000 young people by the University of Bath found that 56 per cent think humankind is doomed because of climate change. Is it any wonder, given the diet of bad news they are force-fed? Who can be surprised that all this gloom is causing mental-health problems among young people who sincerely believe climate change will be the end of the world?"
Climate Change Doesn’t Cause All Disasters - WSJ - "Take the recent flooding in Germany and Belgium, which many, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, are blaming on climate change. Yet a new study of more than 10,000 rivers around the world shows that most rivers now flood less. What used to be a 50-year flood in the 1970s happens every 152 years today, likely due to urbanization, flood-control measures, and changes in climate. Some rivers still flood, and reporters flock there, but more scare stories don’t mean more global flooding. The river Ahr, where most of the German flood deaths occurred, had a spectacular flow on July 14, 2021, but it was lower than deadly flows in 1804 and 1910. The real cause of increased fatalities from riverine flooding in Germany and many other places is more people building settlements on flood plains, leaving the water no place to go. Instead of more solar panels and wind turbines to combat climate change, riverside communities need better water management. And foremost, they need a well-functioning warning system so they can evacuate before disaster strikes. Here, Germany has failed spectacularly... But of course, blaming the deadly floods on climate change instead of taking responsibility for the missed early warnings is convenient for politicians like Ms. Merkel... Similarly, climate change is often blamed for wildfires in the U.S., but the reason for them is mostly poor forest management like failing to remove flammable undergrowth and allowing houses to be built in fire-prone areas. Despite breathless climate reporting, in 2021 the burned area to date is the fourth-lowest of the past 11 years. The area that burned in 2020 was only 11% of the area that did in the early 1900s. Contrary to climate clichés, annual global burned area has declined since 1900 and continues to fall. We have data on global deaths from all climate-related weather disasters such as floods, droughts, storms and fire from the International Disaster Database. In the 1920s, these disasters killed almost half a million people on average each year. The current climate narrative would suggest that natural disasters are ever deadlier, but that isn’t true. Over the past century, climate-related deaths have dropped to fewer than 20,000 on average each year, even though the global population has quadrupled since 1920. And look at 2021, which is now being branded the year of climate catastrophes. Add the deaths from the North American heat dome, from floods in Germany and Belgium, from Indian climate-related catastrophes that you may not have heard about, and from more than 200 other catastrophes. Adjusted to a full year, climate-related weather disasters could cause about 6,000 deaths in 2021. With greater wealth and technological development, we no longer see half a million or even 18,000 lives lost to climate-related weather disasters, but 6,000. Every death is a tragedy, yet current warming is avoiding many more tragedies. One of the few well-documented effects of climate change is more heat waves, which have made headlines around the world this summer. But global warming also reduces cold waves, which kill many more people globally than heat waves, according to a new study in the Lancet."
Stop blaming everything on climate change - "Channel 4’s Jon Snow even tried to blame climate change for his train to COP26 getting delayed. Along with many others, Snow’s travel plans were disrupted when a tree fell on to train tracks following strong winds... Sadly, this unthinking urge to blame any weather-related problem, big or small, on climate change has become all-too common. When Germany and other parts of Europe suffered from dreadful flooding earlier this year, the press was quick to blame climate change. ‘Look at what we have done to the planet!’ was the unequivocal message. We were told that if we did not change our ways, this sort of disaster would become the new normal. But the evidence just doesn’t support this view. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognised as much in its latest report. It found little reliable evidence that floods were becoming more frequent due to human activity. This was also the case for hurricanes, tornadoes and strong winds, as it happens. Yet when the report was released, extreme flooding became one of the go-to images newspapers used to illustrate our futures under climate change. As Roger Pielke Jr, a professor of climate studies, told spiked at the time, this was ‘flat-out misleading’. Bizarrely, this tendency to blame the climate is not even limited to weather events. Some commentators have tried to link the Syrian civil war to climate change, presenting it as a battle over resources made scarce by global warming. The Biden White House, in its National Strategy on Gender Equity, claims there is a connection between climate change and gender-based violence (though it does not deign to explain how this works). Others are warning that climate change will also lead to a mental-health crisis. We can’t allow these alarmist and downright absurd claims about the climate to go unchallenged. Blaming climate change for everything that goes wrong has consequences. It allows those who may actually be to blame for delayed trains or disastrous flooding – politicians, policymakers and planners – to escape accountability. And it diverts our attention away from the practical solutions we need to manage society’s problems. A tree falling on a train track is a sign that our infrastructure is not being maintained properly – it is not, as Jon Snow would have it, a sign of an impending apocalypse. How strange that this even needs pointing out." Climate change will indeed lead to a mental health crisis - because of climate change hystericists terrifying the credulous
Eco-anxiety: Young Canadians report climate change impact on their mental health - "One survey in the U.K. showed that half of children between the ages of seven and 11 worry about climate change. Other reports suggest kids are more worried about climate change than their own homework."
The same people who claim religion is child abuse love to torment kids with climate change hysteria
GOLDSTEIN: Higher cost of living the goal of climate change policies | Toronto Sun - "That means the 4.4% hike in our cost of living in September compared to a year ago — the highest inflation rate in 18 years — and the fact we’re now paying 32.8% more for gasoline, 9.1% more for transportation, 4.8% more for housing and 3.9% for food — is just the beginning. It’s chump change compared to what’s coming. Increasing the cost of living so that we spend less money buying fewer goods and services created by fossil fuel energy is the goal of climate change policies. It’s the reason, to cite one of many examples, for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s looming clean fuel standard, in effect a second carbon tax... Absurdly, the message coming out of the UN climate summit will be that today’s high prices for fossil fuel energy prove we must convert to renewable energy faster, as opposed to the reality of the economic and environmental damage being caused by climate hysteria."
GOLDSTEIN: Big news on climate change — Gambia wins, Canada loses | Toronto Sun - "the most interesting finding in the climate tracker study is that the only country said to have climate policies compatible with achieving the Paris accord goals is Gambia, or, as it is formally known, Republic of The Gambia But Gambia, a tiny country in West Africa of 2.5 million people, while relatively stable politically, is one of the world’s poorest nations, relying heavily on foreign aid... Now let’s look at the countries whose policies are “almost sufficient” to comply with the Paris accord. Only one is a major industrialized nation — the U.K. The others are Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Kenya, Morocco, Nepal and Nigeria. From this, we can deduce four things. First, that as a big, cold, northern, sparsely populated country with significant fossil fuel resources, we will never hit Trudeau’s climate targets, or for that matter any target set by any Canadian government, Liberal or Conservative, as has now been the case for more than three decades. Second, the only countries likely to succeed in meeting their climate targets will not be major industrialized nations but small countries in warmer climates with the help of foreign aid. Third, despite Trudeau imposing a $40 per tonne carbon tax/price on Canadians this year, rising to $170 per tonne by 2030, preparing a second carbon tax called the clean fuel standard and committing almost $115 billion to climate action, clean growth and a green recovery since 2015, Canada will always be considered a climate laggard. Fourth, carbon taxes/prices are becoming increasingly divorced from the claim their purpose is to combat climate change and correctly understood as a sin tax for using fossil fuels, raising the cost of almost all goods and services because almost all goods and services are created, grown, manufactured, or delivered using fossil fuel energy."
Quite possibly, the only way to achieve climate change hystericists' goals is to turn every country into Gambia. But if everyone needs foreign aid, no one can give it
Kelly McParland: Why the climate change crusade has failed - "Governments and climate activists have had 30 years since the 1992 UN gathering in Brazil launched the modern climate change crusade. Since then eager leaders at federal, provincial, state and global levels have met regularly, commissioned studies and issued clarion calls for action. They’ve lectured, exhorted, declared, insisted, preached and advocated. Summits have been held, fleets of jets and squadrons of limousines have ferried ministers, presidents, chancellors, princes and billionaires to posh locations where communiques were debated and approved. They’ve spent billions — perhaps trillions — on projects. And to what effect? According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), by 2019 the warming influence of human-produced greenhouse gases had risen by 45 per cent over 1990. So what’s the remedy? Judging by those same leaders (to use the term loosely), even harsher methods are required if we want to stop floods, fires and hurricanes from engulfing the planet. People take a look at this sorry history and find it easy to conclude that while the science may be legitimate, the politicians and activists offer little reason to deserve our trust. The projects they championed obviously didn’t work, probably because they were poorly conceived, badly thought out and rushed into place with an eye on photo ops and self-aggrandizement rather than the potential for success. California is a good example. There may not be a more woke place on Earth than the largest American state. It votes overwhelmingly for Democrats, hosts a celebrity culture eager to champion anything deemed “progressive” and has the wealth and population to wield real clout. Yet it persists in letting people build homes in dried-out forest areas where fire is a constant danger, and complains about drought while devoting oceans of water to almond farms and vineyards owned by the same celebrities who urge lesser souls to lower their carbon “footprint.” The biggest wildfire in the state’s history wasn’t caused by climate change; forestry officials believe it likely resulted from lightning, arson or “smoking activities.” A massive blaze that destroyed homes and vineyards last year was caused by transmission lines from Pacific Gas and Electric, the state utility, whose network was so decrepit it was forced into bankruptcy... Killing all the cows and sheep, shutting down (or blowing up) pipelines and banning oil production might work, but nobody outside the most demented extremists seriously wants to try. We had a test run with the COVID pandemic, which produced a record drop in emissions thanks to the virtual shuttering of normal life. Lockdowns and border restrictions caused air and land transport to plummet. Millions of jobs were lost, businesses went bankrupt, social problems proliferated. Hands up everyone who wants to do it all again in the name of lower emissions. The environmental advocacy organization ecojustice notes that Canada has missed every government-set emissions target for 30 years. Two thirds of that period we’ve been ruled by Liberal governments seized with eco righteousness... If the world is burning it’s the fault of blundering politicians and an activist industry that’s addicted to grandstanding and rhetoric. The professions are similar: neither requires previous experience, noteworthy credentials or evidence of skill. In politics you generally have to get elected to something at some point; activism doesn’t even require that. Together they’ve been leading the climate parade in aimless circles for decades, forever exhorting the crowd to join in. You have to wonder why they still suppose people would take them seriously."
Even Greta is dunking on the claims made by climate tzar John Kerry 😂 - "it was particularly funny to see Greta make fun of Kerry's recent claim that 50% of all greenhouse gas reductions will come from "technologies that we don't yet have"... What Kerry is trying to do is appease two different camps: the climate alarmists like Greta and AOC on one hand and normal people who like refrigeration, burgers, and modern technology on the other."
The Environmental Playacting of Today's Youth - "Youth will save the planet, according to the elite narrative about global warming... The cardinal rule when it comes to environmental virtue-signaling is that people give up what they’re willing to give up. Young people are no different. If being environmentally sound required sacrificing anything that a self-described environmental warrior actually valued, the conversation would quickly change to a different topic. One’s own habits are necessary; it’s everyone else’s that need to change. This always-unreached threshold for environmental sacrifice is particularly notable on the part of celebrity Greens, with their fortress-like SUVs, multiple residences, and massive carbon footprints—whether it’s the cavalcade of yachts and private jets that brought such luminaries as Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Zuckerberg, and Katy Perry to Google’s three-day climate-change summit in Sicily this July; environmental crusaders Prince Harry and Meghan Markle jetting off to Elton John’s French estate; or Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter’s “quick day trip” to Los Angeles from New York just ahead of the CNN climate-change debate. A police caravan drives New York City mayor Bill de Blasio 11 miles from his mayoral mansion in Manhattan to his favorite gym in Brooklyn. “Everyone in their own life has to change their own habits to start protecting the earth,” he has intoned, but taking the subway is not one of those changes appropriate for him... These are the consumers who keep football fields of computer servers buzzing round the clock to support their social media habits. If being green meant turning off one’s phone for 22 hours a day or foregoing the latest smartphone upgrade, the reasons why such sacrifices are not required would spout from every Gen Z-er and millennial’s lips. Students from the University of California, Irvine, constantly run their air-conditioners in the apartment complex where I spend summers, regardless of how cool the temperature outside is. They drive with their windows sealed and the car AC on, no matter how fresh the day (this is the new driving norm for almost everyone now). The meteoric rise of food-delivery apps, producing torrents of plastic and paper waste and a constant circulation of cars and electric bikes, has been fueled by young people’s demand for convenience and instant gratification. Cooking is apparently unthinkable. At best, one buys precut and washed food in the inevitable plastic containers. A daily Starbucks habit is deemed consistent with railing against environmentally destructive corporate greed. New York’s tap water is among the purest in the world. Yet a young neighbor of mine in New York, like progressives throughout the city, receives towering deliveries of bottled water, entailing huge energy outlays to package and transport, not to mention generating flotillas of discarded plastic. The swim team members in my gym turn on their showers in the locker room, then walk away or do nothing other than chat as water gushes down the drain. Uber drivers in college towns report that students regularly call a car to get to class, rather than walk or ride a bike... The children’s crusade for gun control is another alleged example of the purity of spirit of the young. But anti-gun youth crusaders are prepared to give up guns because, in almost all cases, they have none. Similarly, student protesters—whom we are supposed to admire for heroically skipping classes to agitate around their latest grievance—place little value on those classes and suffer no consequences for missing them."
Solar Is Cheapest Energy: Renewable Energy vs. Fossil Fuels Cost - "That’s thanks to risk-reducing financial policies around the world, the agency says, and it applies to locations with both the most favorable policies and the easiest access to financing. The report underlines how important these policies are to encouraging development of renewables and other environmentally forward technologies."
With enough subsidies, any type of energy can be the cheapest in the world
Comments: "Sure, if you're only counting how many Wh are produced locally. Never mind that transporting highly dispersed energy is very expensive and the intermittency problem remains unsolved and however it will be solved - if indeed it can be solved at all - will be very expensive as well. Somehow energy prices doubled in Germany while this amazingly cheap energy has increasingly replaced conventional sources."
"Intermittency in solar is mitigated by brute force storage solutions to store excess power generated during times of maximal generation, but the installed capacity of the solar array necessarily needs to be large enough to compensate for the reduced capacity factor of solar in order to generate enough energy to cover the down periods. Depending on tech and location, solar only has a capacity factor of 10-25%."
Greens like to look at the installed capacity of "renewable" energy to pretend that it's succeeding. But in reality it's a huge waste since a lot of that capacity is not used due to intermittency. So the fetish for "green" energy ends up wasting even more resources
The unbearable smugness of the Netflix elites - "Don’t Look Up is the least subtle allegory of modern times... ‘This is a film about a comet but REALLY IT IS ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE.’ They really do scream, especially Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays the clever, sexy scientist Dr Randall Mindy, who, unlike the dentally challenged rednecks he has the misfortune to call his fellow citizens, knows that the comet is real and that it really will hit the Earth. Poor Mindy is in a constant state of apoplexy at fickle, dim mankind, on one occasion bellowing: ‘YOU ARE ALL GOING TO FUCKING DIE.’ Leo, being a green nut himself, really hams it up, revelling in this mad, morally infantile script that gives free rein to his fire-and-brimstone eco-beliefs. Next time you see The Revenant, you’ll root for the bear. It is hard to describe just how preposterous Don’t Look Up is. Adam McKay’s 145-minute lecture disguised as a movie is on Netflix. (Where else?)... It’s like someone reached into the head of a freshly politicised 16-year-old TikToker and turned the contents into a film. It falls to an Expert (Mindy) and a Cool Person (Dibiasky) to try to prise open the eyes of the ignorant throng. These are the heroes of our age in the eyes of the Netflix elites – people with postgraduate degrees and funny-coloured hair... One good line is when Streep’s president says they should use Dibiasky for media work more often, because she’ll connect with ‘disaffected youth and the mentally ill’... It is sweet relief when they die... For the whole two-and-a-half days, or hours, or whatever, that this film lasts, you can feel the writers Adam McKay and David Sirota jabbing you in the ribs and saying: ‘It’s actually about climate change! Do you see?’ Yes we see! We get it – the comet is climate change, the politicos saying ‘Don’t look up’ are the climate-change deniers, and the scientists saying ‘Holy crap, we’re all going to die’ are the heroic climate-change activists. Blah, blah, blah, as Greta might say. It is of course this element of the film – its distillation of the climate-change issue into a morally reductive comedic fairytale – that has got many critics hot under the collar. They love this nonsense. And it really is nonsense. It is Don’t Look Up’s hammer-like eco-messaging that is the most preposterous thing of all. Its wrongness cannot be overstated. Seriously, what planet do Netflix execs and writers live on if they think scientists who warn about the end of the world risk being persecuted by the political establishment? Both Mindy and Dibiasky are hunted down by the CIA and forced ‘off grid’ for their warnings about End Times. LOL. The CIA is super-green, you muppets. It loves apocalyptic bollocks. Who can forget the New York Times piece from last year that praised the CIA for its ‘environmental sleuthing’, for ‘spy[ing] for planet Earth’? Makes a change from plotting the assassination of disagreeable foreign leaders, I guess. In the real world, far from the Californian bubble inhabited by the Netflix elites, it is scientists who question the idea that climate change will shortly propel us towards the End of Days who are persecuted, No Platformed, shut down. This silly film is the polar opposite of the truth. And then there’s the classism. Classism really isn’t too strong a word for it. Don’t Look Up drips with elitist contempt for the masses. Streep’s Prez whips up the red-cap-wearing idiocracy into a frenzy of comet denialism. When Dibiasky goes to visit her parents shortly before extinction day they tell her they’re hopeful about the business world’s belief that the comet might be safely broken up and mined for minerals. ‘Your dad and I are for the jobs the comet will provide’, her working-class mum says, and the role of the audience at this point is very, very clear – we’re meant to laugh, to mock, to agonise over the existence of such braindead creatures that worry more about their end-of-month wages than they do about the end of the world that bothers the clever heads of rich Californian movie execs. If Streep is an impersonation of Trump, these characters are caricatures of Rust Belt voters who want good, honest jobs in excavation and manufacturing and transport... The slogan of the manipulative Trumpite elites who brainwash the ignorant multitude is literally ‘Don’t look up’. They have it printed on caps and t-shirts. They say ‘Don’t look up’ and the working classes obediently refuse to look up. Which means they don’t see the comet even when it is close by. I’m not making this up. There’s McKay and Sirota digging you in the ribs again: ‘Ordinary people are stupid as shit – do you see?’ Guys, we see. There’s a scene in which one of the working-class robots decides, finally, to look up and, lo, he sees the comet. ‘They lied to us’, he says. God I would love to see the casting notes for this bit-part character. Must be fat. Must look good in a mullet. Must be able to sound dumb as hell. The snobbery of this movie is as unsubtle as its eco-metaphors. You’re beaten across the face with it from beginning to end. It just feels depressing after two-and-a-half years. Or hours. However long this thing is. Don’t Look Up sums up the unbearable smugness of the Netflix elites, of those West and East Coast cultural movers and shakers who see it as their responsibility to ‘raise the awareness’ of the little people. The makers of this movie really have convinced themselves that they are brave soothsayers who risk being collared by the CIA and capitalism itself for their reckless propagation of The Truth, when in reality they themselves are the new corporate elites who exercise an extraordinary amount of influence over public life in the 21st century. These days, it isn’t ‘denialism’ that is the problem – it’s catastrophism, the view of everything, especially climate change, as a calamity that our hubristic species has brought upon itself. That is the elite consensus opinion right now and, not surprisingly, Netflix, the cultural embodiment of the new elites, is riddled with this decadent, indulgent End of Days hysteria. Seriously, I can’t have been the only person who was rooting more for the working-class upstarts chanting ‘Don’t look up’ than I was for DiCaprio’s shrill, self-satisfied prophesier of doom."
Ironically, Don't Look Up tells us that "the science" is manipulated for political purposes
Steve Milloy on Twitter - "So many billionaires in private jets flew to Sun Valley to hear @BillGates rave about climate that the FAA had to stop temporarily shutdown Western air space to other air traffic. No #ClimateHypocrisy here. Move on."
Facebook - "We're told solar and wind future But when wind is not blowing and sun not shining? Batteries! Yet Europe uses 7.5GWh/minute and has 10.2GWh of battery storage: enough for just 1m:21s 2030: 11m:45s After that, we need 100% backup, mostly fossil fuels"
Facebook - "Lots of people commented suggesting we can fix this Yes, we can, but it makes 𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗲𝘄𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗿 because we need to pay for backup Solar costs go up 4-7x, from being some of the cheapest electricity to very expensive"
Renewables are only "cheap" if you don't count the cost of the whole system
Meme - Slow Factory: "Please understand there's no stopping climate change without addressing policing, without addressing capitalism, without addressing white supremacy and ablism and patriarchy. The ways we seek to make the world a better place aren't just interconnected, they're one big fight."
A naked admission that climate change is a trojan horse the left wants to use to ram through all their favourite policies
This coheres with the "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?" cartoon
Facebook - "UN routinely warns us that we have just a few years left until catastrophe: In 1990, Tolba, head of UN Environment Programme told the world must fix global warming before 1995 — Otherwise, we'd lose the climate struggle Earth Island Journal; Summer 1991, Vol. 6 Issue 3, p38"
Climate scientists told to 'cover up' the fact that the Earth's temperature hasn't risen for the last 15 years - "Scientists working on the most authoritative study on climate change were urged to cover up the fact that the world’s temperature hasn’t risen for the last 15 years, it is claimed. A leaked copy of a United Nations report, compiled by hundreds of scientists, shows politicians in Belgium, Germany, Hungary and the United States raised concerns about the final draft. Published next week, it is expected to address the fact that 1998 was the hottest year on record and world temperatures have not yet exceeded it, which scientists have so far struggled to explain... Germany called for the references to the slowdown in warming to be deleted, saying looking at a time span of just 10 or 15 years was ‘misleading’ and they should focus on decades or centuries. Hungary worried the report would provide ammunition for deniers of man-made climate change. Belgium objected to using 1998 as a starting year for statistics, as it was exceptionally warm and makes the graph look flat - and suggested using 1999 or 2000 instead to give a more upward-pointing curve. The United States delegation even weighed in, urging the authors of the report to explain away the lack of warming using the ‘leading hypothesis’ among scientists that the lower warming is down to more heat being absorbed by the ocean – which has got hotter. The last IPCC ‘assessment report’ was published in 2007 and has been the subject of huge controversy after it had to correct the embarrassing claim that the Himalayas would melt by 2035. It was then engulfed in the ‘Climategate’ scandal surrounding leaked emails allegedly showing scientists involved in it trying to manipulate their data to make it look more convincing – although several inquiries found no wrongdoing... The report is expected to say the rate of warming between 1998 and 2012 was about half of the average rate since 1951 – and put this down to natural variations such as the El Nino and La Nina ocean cycles and the cooling effects of volcanoes. A German climate scientist - Stefan Rahmstorf, who reviewed the chapter on sea levels - yesterday admitted it was possible the report’s authors were feeling under pressure to address the slowdown in warming due to the ‘public debate’ around the issue. The draft report, which is not new research but a synthesis of all the work being done by scientists around the world, is likely to be highly disputed at the three-day meeting... scientists are under pressure to explain why the warming has not exceeded 1998 levels although the decade 2000-2010 was the hottest on record. Alden Meyer, of the Union of Concerned Scientists based in Washington, said yesterday: ‘I think to not address it would be a problem because then you basically have the denialists saying: ‘Look the IPCC is silent on this issue.’"
Clearly we need to "follow the science" and anyone who doesn't is a "denier"
Facebook - "Clickbait vs truth: 2018 Nature study shows Tuvalu *increased* in size despite sea level rise and 'will persist for habitation over next century'. Cover of Time with UN Secretary-General in water outside Tuvalu 'Our Sinking Planet'... Story talks about all the 'vulnerable nations' like Kiribati and the Marshall Islands. Both have seen *increasing* land area. Indeed, lastest meta-overview shows "no atoll exhibited a decrease in land area over the past decades to century"... How is this possible? Bc small islands are dynamic: storms breaking up surrounding coral, washing up on beach, slightly increasing/rising area. Sea level rise reducing area (& humans both increasing area and destroying it through destabilization)... Maybe, just maybe, Time Magazine ought to tell us, that *actually*, these islands are not disappearing under the sea, and that they will likely 'persist for habitation over next century' But of course, scary alarmism sells better"
Patterns of island change and persistence offer alternate adaptation pathways for atoll nations
Throwing trillions at climate policies is sheer folly - "While it is well-intentioned, Biden’s sprawling plan has few concrete cost points and contains many ideas of varying quality. He proposes to retrofit millions of homes for hundreds of billions of dollars, although the largest US study of 40,000 retrofitted homes shows that costs are twice as high as benefits. Biden also wants to restore the full electric vehicle tax credit, although spending $US7500 for every electric car is one of the costliest ways to cut emissions. The International Energy Agency finds an electric car over its lifetime only emits about 10 tonnes less CO2 than a similar petrol-powered car. On the original US carbon market, the so-called RGGI, this reduction could be achieved for just $US60. Much of the plan simply seems to rebrand other policies, often only tenuously related to climate, such as expanding access to wireless 5G broadband and modernising decrepit schools in low-income neighbourhoods. Some parts of his climate proposal could even increase emissions, such as rebuilding roads and bridges. It is also questionable whether Biden’s plan — and other countries’ vastly ambitious climate plans — can keep their electoral backing. While more than two-thirds of the US population finds that climate is a crisis or major problem, fewer than half are willing to spend even $US24 a year to fight it. Biden’s plan will cost $US3500 per taxpayer every year. And this cost will increase significantly. Biden’s plan doesn’t specify the price for getting US emissions to zero. Only one nation — New Zealand — has been bold enough to request an independent cost estimate of cutting emissions to zero by 2050. They found that the optimistic cost would reduce GDP by a whopping 16 per cent. Translated to the US, this implies a cost of at least $US5 trillion in today’s money. And not just once, but every year. New Zealand found that the necessary petrol tax increase for net-zero would be US90c a litre. For comparison, the French Yellow Vest protests ignited after just a US 4c climate price hike. Spending 16 per cent of GDP to fix part of a 2 per cent problem is a bad deal. Even if all OECD countries cut all their CO2 emissions tomorrow and remained shut down for the rest of the century, the standard UN climate model shows it would reduce temperatures by 2100 by just 0.4C. This is because three-quarters of the expected emissions over the rest of the century come from China, India, Africa and the rest of the non-rich world. They are not about to implement unaffordable trillion-dollar climate investments. Their first goal is to get all of their people out of poverty, which means access to much more reliable and cheap energy, mostly from fossil fuels."
