Healthy Great Barrier Reef, healthy environmental scandal | The Spectator Australia - "The release of the Australian Institute of Marine Science’s Annual Summary Report on Coral Reef Condition for 2021/22 has exposed a major scandal in Australian environmental management – not only has the reef recovered from damage 10 years ago, but it is at record levels. This should revolutionise how the Great Barrier Reef is managed, end some executive careers, as well as open a new and optimistic chapter in the life of the reef. For years, the primary economic purpose of the Great Barrier Reef hasn’t been generating tourists for Queensland, but ARC grants for academics and matching Commonwealth Grants for the Queensland government dedicated to ‘saving’ the reef. Generations of scientists and politicians have guaranteed the federal government that if it doesn’t pay up, the reef will (metaphorically) get it. The reef’s iconic status has been paraded through the outrage press for (what feels like to many) the sole purpose of threatening to extort us. While the revealed health of the reef is a matter for celebration, it is also a major scandal that the recovery, which underway since around 2012, has not been celebrated by AIMS. Instead, AIMS appear to have kept it oddly quiet. The last time they published aggregated figures for the reef was 2016-17 in the lead-up to the 2019 election when the reef was an issue for voters. Since then, we have had 5 years of catastrophism, culminating in the most recent threat by Unesco to list the reef as endangered. And the only reason we now have aggregated figures for the whole reef is because Peter Ridd took the AIMS data and did it for us. Someone has to be held responsible for this dereliction of duty... it’s never been about the reef. When Labor is in power, the Greenies and Internationalist Malthusians go quiet. This is their side in power and they hope to get what they want through stealth and negotiation. When the Coalition is in power, all hell breaks loose, even when, as we can see, reality contradicts the narrative. The really stunning thing about this graph is that the reef saved itself before any of the loony god-complex schemes hatched by environmentalists have had any chance to be implemented. Ideas like shading the Great Barrier Reef, or pumping cold water onto it so it doesn’t suffer from bleaching, or transplanting bleach-resistant corals... And all this while Adani has started up its operations and we are shipping more coal and gas through the reef than ever before, and sugar production is on an uptrend. It’s clear that the industries fitted-up with the ‘demise’ of the reef can’t be blamed for anything. Of course, the entrenched academic and ideological interests are determined that good news is really bad news. So we are told that while the cover may have rebounded, it is the wrong sorts of corals, and that things could easily reverse... We’ll never know how subjective the measures are because AIMS does not even attempt to take a photographic survey of the reef, despite this being world’s best practice. In Japan, they have used a towed optical camera array system that photographs the reef and can generate a 3D structure models with a resolution down to 10 centimetres. They can use AI on to generate replicable figures for cover. Their system is also 47 times as productive as our intern, scanning 7000 sqm/hr to her 150."
Facebook - "Official reef-wide average widely published as the Great Barrier Reef got worse. But when it got better, official average stopped in 2020... You can also see an alternative from Dr Ridd, former professor of marine physics at James Cook University. He has posted his estimate of the reef-wide average, along with examples of how the average was used to say things getting worse but now, as things are better, doesn't get updated"
Proposed solar energy export charges leave owners feeling like they are being 'penalised' - "Solar panel owners say they feel punished by proposed changes which would see them charged for exporting surplus electricity to the grid. Households with solar panels that export power to the grid could be slugged a fee under a proposal by the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC). The AEMC said the increasing number of households with solar panels were causing "traffic jams" in some areas of the grid. It said tariffs would give network operators the option of encouraging people to export energy back into the grid at times it could handle it, while discouraging it at a time when the grid was overwhelmed with supply. In the proposal, it said solar panel owners would lose some cash on existing returns, but doing nothing would result in blackouts and intermittent blocking of energy exports — ultimately leaving customers worse off... SA Power Networks spokesman Paul Roberts supported the tariff system and said the organisation wanted to double the amount of solar panels in its network by 2025. Mr Roberts said rooftop solar was the largest power generator in South Australia at the moment and it was already causing some issues. Localised congestion issues have forced market operators to intervene recently and switch off thousands of solar panels to ensure grid stability."
When green roosters come home to hatch. So much for all the green rhetoric about earning money by contributing energy back to the grid. Of course the green cope is that solar is too good so capitalism has failed because infinite electricity would not be a problem except under it
On reddit someone was claiming grid overload is not an issue with solar, as it's very easy to stop solar energy generation since you can just "break the circuit. Flip a switch", so "solar can be turned off almost instantly with no ill effects". Weird how all the experts don't know that
Pumped-Storage Hydroelectricity - an overview - "Pumped hydroelectricity storage (PHS) is the oldest kind of large-scale energy storage and works on a very simple principle—two reservoirs at different altitudes are required and when the water is released from the upper reservoir to the lower reservoir, energy is created by the downflow, which is directed through a turbine and generator to create electricity. The water is then pumped back to the upper reservoir. The loss of energy in transforming energy from one form to another and back again is of the order of 80%"
Greens keep claiming that this is the solution to renewable intermittency. Among other things, how many big cities are near mountains and water supplies? And greens nowadays hate dams too
‘Your gas guzzler kills’: Bay Area drivers’ SUV tires deflated by apparent climate activists - "In what appears to be part of a growing international campaign by anonymous climate activists, a Bay Area nurse says her sport utility vehicle’s tires were deflated by someone who left a letter stating, “ATTENTION — your gas guzzler kills.” The incident last week incident went viral on Reddit after a user posted a copy of the attached letter, though it was not the only SUV targeted. Another woman reported a similar incident to Vacaville police that same morning... The letter posted on Reddit originated from a Vacaville woman who shared her frustrations in a Facebook post Tuesday morning after she found her car parked outside her home with its tires deflated and a letter signed by “The Tire Extinguishers.” “It’s not you, it’s your car,” the letter reads. “We did this because driving around urban areas in your massive vehicle has huge consequences for others.” The letter stated SUVs “are a disaster for our climate” and that activists are “taking actions into our own hands because our governments and politicians will not.”... The act angered many who commented on the Facebook and Reddit posts, and some users said similar incidents have happened locally. It also created an inconvenience for the woman, who said she drives an SUV to transport her two special needs children and 88-year-old great-great-aunt, who is a double amputee and uses a wheelchair... The Tire Extinguishers group claimed responsibility Friday for 12 deflated SUVs in the region... A website referenced in the letter includes a template of the letter, as well as tips on how to spot an SUV and how to deflate SUV tires by unscrewing the cap on tire valves. The site urges activists to “target posh / middle-class areas” but avoid “cars clearly used for people with disabilities.” The Tire Extinguishers site says the group has no leader. The anonymous group has taken credit for a string of SUV tire deflations in Chicago and New York. An unnamed Tire Extinguishers spokesperson who responded to an email sent by The Chronicle on Thursday said the group’s activism originated in the United Kingdom in March. The Tire Extinguishers say they have so far deflated tires on more than 5,000 SUVs worldwide"
Why greens love lockdown - "the response to the Covid-19 pandemic has caused untold damage to people’s lives. Discussing whether draconian policies are effective, or whether there may be other ways of managing the crisis, has been muted by angry ripostes – you will be branded a ‘denier’ or a ‘granny-killer’. To disagree is to have blood on your hands. But surely, despite these tensions, most people want the whole thing to be over? It doesn’t seem so. One tendency seems to hope that lockdown is just the dawn of an age of confinement. Greens, after a year at home on full pay, believe this is the beginning of a bright new era of global environmental consciousness and good international governance, in which lockdown will be the norm. .. For Monbiot, the logic of lockdown was simple enough. ‘What we’ve discovered with the pandemic is that when people are called upon to act, they’ll take far more extreme action than environmentalists have ever called for’, he said. In Monbiot’s view, all that was required to elicit the obedience of the population was for the government to make it ‘abundantly clear that we have to do this for the good of all’. But this is not true. If it were true, there would not have been the need to pass emergency legislation, to force businesses to close, and to abolish gatherings, including protests, all under threat of fines of up to £10,000. Which is far in excess of what most people could afford without serious consequences, including the loss of their home. Moreover, there are countless reports of local authorities and the police failing to understand the regulations they were enforcing and exceeding their authority. People have stayed at home because there was nowhere to go to, and nothing to do, and because they do not want to break the law, and because they have been terrified of the virus. A July survey of British people’s estimation of the deaths caused by Covid found that (excluding ‘don’t know’) they overestimated the number of fatalities by up to 10 times. A third overestimated by 10 to 100 times, and 15 per cent overestimated by over 100 times. Rather than seeking to allay unfounded fear, and despite their putative emphasis on ‘The Science’, lockdown hawks capitalised on this overestimation of risk to fuel their cheap, utilitarian moral arithmetic. This may have been effective during this pandemic, in which threats are perceived as immediate, and the lockdown is presented as an extraordinary measure with an end in sight. But a climate lockdown would be forever. And in order to sustain it, the green misanthropes would need to take even greater liberties with the facts and stats... If there is a link between climate change and fatalities, then it is only possible to conclude that climate change has saved countless millions of lives. In order to sustain the notion of climate change as a grave risk, researcher-advocates have had to invent counterfactual worlds, in which there is no global warming, to claim that risks in this, the real world, are indeed increasing, despite material evidence to the contrary: the fact that we are living longer, healthier, wealthier lives... whereas Covid lockdowns are intended to contain a virus and prevent it from overwhelming the NHS, climate lockdowns are intended to constrain human reproduction and consumption, to prevent us from overwhelming the planet. Some greens have been excited about how great lockdown is since last March. They wrote, from the comfort of their nice homes, on their full pay, about how fresh the air was, how clear the skies, and how prominent the birdsong. It was Kuhlemann’s colleague at UCL, Mariana Mazzucato, who in September really spelled it out: ‘Under a “climate lockdown”, governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban consumption of red meat and impose extreme energy-saving measures.’ In order to save ourselves from this fate, ‘we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently’, she claimed. It is hard not to notice that academics’ demands for radical changes to society are invariably underpinned by threats. Like many greens, Mazzucato claims that ‘Covid-19 is itself a consequence of environmental degradation’, and that this makes the reorganisation of society an imperative on which many millions of lives depend. This is simply not true. According to Our World in Data, the global burden of communicable, maternal, neonatal and nutritional diseases fell from 471million DALYs (disability-adjusted life years) in 1990 to 288million in 2017... The reason for this progress is made explicit by a plot of communicable disease burden against per capita GDP. Wealth is by far the greatest vaccine. The obvious consequence of Covid and climate lockdowns, then, would be to reduce our ability to respond to actual emergencies, to spend on healthcare and public-health measures. It seems clear that green thinking is first and foremost driven by authoritarian impulses, which are subsequently given only a superficially plausible rationale. That is to say that the desire to reorganise society, which depends on hollow critiques of consumer and corporate capitalist society, exists prior to the facts, and yet are traded in the public sphere as obviously true, unimpeachable facts... green demands for climate lockdown should be viewed as a greater risk to us than infectious diseases and extreme weather. The only way they can make their arguments for a ‘better world’ is to fantasise about saving us from imminent crises. They cannot actually offer anything positive at all. Society has failed to grasp the extent to which green imperatives are ideological fantasies. Green claims are routinely taken at face value, rather than interrogated, to see what kind of world greens really want. One thing we can be sure of now, however, is that as soon as the climate lockdowners get what they want, they will simply move the goalposts. In December, the Guardian’s global environment editor, Jonathan Watts, claimed that, despite nearly a year of grounded flights, immobilised cars, a loss of 10 per cent or more of GDP, and a record plunge into further debt, lockdown had not done enough and was ‘too short to reverse years of destruction’. Now we know what lockdowns look like, it should sharpen our minds to the danger not from climate change, but from environmentalism."
Charcoal may be great for barbecues — but it’s bad for the planet |
In the liberal utopia, life will not be worth living
Marc Andreessen on Twitter - "The two premodern religions were ancestor worship and nature worship (see "The Ancient City" by Fustel de Coulanges). The two postmodern religions are evidently identitarianism and environmentalism. Is this a coincidence, or something deeper?"
Conrad Black: The climate of fear that gave way to unjustifiable environmental policies - "alarmist predictions have been ringing in the eardrums of all of us for decades. For one of the weekly internet columns I write in the United States, I recently recited a few of the more memorable of these jeremiads, including from Al Gore, the centi-millionaire producer of the ”settled science” of the “Inconvenient Truth,” which hasn’t happened yet, and the Prince of Wales, who has been advising us for some time to live under thatch and travel in carpools or on bicycles. At one point, former British prime minister Tony Blair advised us that we only had a few months to take the measures necessary to avoid our self-inflicted doom. As I’ve written before, what really happened was that after their overwhelming defeat in the Cold War, the intellectual and faddish appendages of the international left, severed from the defunct torso of the Soviet Union, and with unsuspected talents of improvisation, crowded onto the bandwagon that had been rolled determinedly forward by the authentic conservationists and naturalists (as well as the pacifistic kooks), who were rightly complaining about pollution levels and commendably extolling the welfare of wildlife. This movement had begun unexceptionably enough: everyone is in favour of the environment and no sane person likes pollution. And it was assisted in a multiplicity of unforeseeable ways, such as by U.S. President Richard Nixon, who founded the Environmental Protection Agency and 642 national parks because his parents, in his youth, were too poor to afford real vacations, so they made extensive use of state and national parks. (This is among his many presidential munificence for which his media enemies have given him practically no credit.)... one country after another required ever-cleaner emissions standards from its automobile manufacturers or abandoned nuclear energy, not because it wasn’t efficient or had damaged the environment, but because if there ever were a problem, it would be a serious one. Thus has Germany, Europe’s greatest power since it was unified by Bismarck 150 years ago, transformed itself into an energy vassal of the decrepit, truncated state of Russia, through natural gas imports and an abandoning of nuclear energy. Those who guided Ontario through an insanely costly pursuit of so-called “sustainable energy” and almost drove it into the status of a have-not province, departed the provincial Liberals shortly before they sank and took over the wheel house of the federal Liberals and began pursuing essentially the same environmental policy. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, an Alberta MP, managed this issue capably, especially when John Baird was environment minister. They spoke of a “Canadian solution,” and backed judiciously away from the insane Kyoto Protocol, under which all economically advanced countries were to pay Danegeld to underdeveloped countries — including to China, the chief polluter of the world and ever-present economic threat to the West — in huge dollops of cash as a penalty for developing our economies and thus supposedly endangering the planet. China made itself the head of the claimant countries, known as the G77, despite being the chief wrongdoer... Anyone who has been alive for the last 50 years can see that the climate is not changing very quickly. This week, the Obama administration’s undersecretary of energy for science, Steven Koonin, published his book, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.” This follows such publications as former British chancellor Nigel Lawson’s “An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming,” Rupert Darwall’s “Green Tyranny” and Bjorn Lomborg’s “False Alarm.” As Koonin points out, in their latest assessments of climate science, both the United Nations and the U.S. government make the points that humans had no detectable impact on hurricanes over the last century, the Greenland ice sheet isn’t shrinking any more rapidly now than it was 80 years ago and the net economic impact of man-made global warming will be minimal, at least to the end of this century. Add to this the fact that Canada’s carbon footprint is not material to the world as a whole, and that the leading climatic offenders, China and India, are not altering their high-pollution economic growth policies and consider the entire subject to be nonsense and hypocrisy. A carbon tax is just a tax increase falsely masquerading as planetary salvation."
Climate Change Barely Affects Poverty - WSJ - "The World Health Organization estimates that climate change will cause an additional 250,000 deaths each year in the two decades following 2030, mostly among the world’s poor. The WHO compared the real world with an imaginary one in which there’s no climate change, calculating the difference in deaths from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, dengue fever, flooding and heat. By far the biggest killer at 85,000 additional deaths in 2050 is malnutrition... malnutrition deaths have declined dramatically over the past three decades and will continue to drop rapidly over the next three. This is partly due to increasing crop yields, which would still rise under climate change but slightly slower—resulting in 85,000 deaths in 2050 that might not have been had temperatures held still. Economic growth—which allows families to buy more food regardless of yields—is the primary cause driving down malnutrition deaths. This puts the impact of global warming in context: For nutrition, climate change isn’t a disaster, but something that slightly slows down progress. The future may be even brighter than what’s shown in this chart, which is only the WHO’s medium economic growth scenario. It also predicted what low and high growth would mean for malnutrition deaths. In the former, there are two million total malnutrition deaths in 2050. In the latter, there are 300,000. Growth policies can avoid 1.7 million annual deaths. That is far more than any climate measures could provide. Even stringent regulations won’t eliminate global warming, meaning they could at best prevent some of the 85,000 predicted deaths. And in the process these measures would slow economic growth, keeping more people poor. The Paris climate agreement is projected to keep 11 million more people in poverty come 2030 than otherwise would be. If the Glasgow climate conference in November leads to the adoption of much stronger climate measures, policy makers will raise that total to 80 million additional people in poverty by 2030, which will inevitably cause even more malnutrition deaths."
A Reasonable Alternative to COP26 and Preaching Climate Doom - WSJ - "Politicians at the Glasgow climate conference seem to be competing to come up with the most outrageously dire forecast. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called global warming “a doomsday device,” while United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said that humans are “killing ourselves with carbon.” They both get points for alliteration, but neither of these statements is true... Economist William Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize in 2018 for his work on effective climate solutions, and the chart nearby shows the outcome of his model to find the optimal climate policy. His crucial point is that the damage global warming inflicts aren’t the only costly part of climate change; climate policies also create significant economic harm. Since we have to pay both costs, his model aims to minimize their sum. Without any regulations to slow climate change, Mr. Nordhaus expects the average temperature to rise by 7.4 degrees Fahrenheit over what it was in 1900 by the end of the 21st century. The total cost comes to $140 trillion. (Mr. Nordhaus uses a higher damage estimate than the U.N.’s 2.6% projection.) Very stringent climate policies could reduce the temperature rise to 3.9 degrees Fahrenheit, shrinking climate harm. This is how climate change is usually discussed—with an almost exclusive focus on the havoc rising temperatures wreak, and none on that created by climate regulations. But policies to address global warming create significant damage as well, making energy more expensive and slowing economic growth. As the chart shows, limiting the rise to 3.9 degrees Fahrenheit would result in an eye-watering $177 trillion in climate policy cost according to Mr. Nordhaus’s model. That model shows that the optimal policy mix would be one that slows the average temperature’s rise so that by 2100 it only reaches 6.3 degrees. That’s the option that minimizes the total damages from climate change and climate policies. The most cost-effective way to do this would be a global carbon tax, which Mr. Nordhaus models. It would start today at $37 per ton of carbon dioxide (equivalent to 33 cents extra for a gallon of gasoline), rising to $271 a ton in 2100 ($2.41 a gallon extra). Such a tax would cost the economy $21 trillion but cut long-term global climate damage by $53 trillion. This policy is far off from Glasgow’s unrealistic promises of net zero... Just about every problem, including the dangers of global warming, are easier to deal with when people are more prosperous. When a hurricane hits Florida, the death toll and structural damage are much less terrible than what would be inflicted on a poorer nation like Haiti or Guatemala by the same storm. Though it’s often the opposite of traditional climate policy, promoting prosperity is likely the best way to protect the world’s poor from global warming, and it improves their quality of life in countless other ways too."
Doing too much to "solve" climate change does more damage than doing nothing
European ‘Hunger Stones’ Blow Up Key Climate Narrative - "Almost two-thirds of Europe is having what used to be known as a brutal summer, before climate hysterics rebranded the weather, and the latest panic is the re-emergence of grim Hunger Stones from ancient riverbeds gone dry... The Hunger Stones of Europe are sub-aquatic cousins of high water markers. During historically severe droughts, local chroniclers would chisel marks and messages into large stones that were only seen roughly once a generation. Some of the low-water markings also included laments of the human tragedy that accompanies drought, notably starvation... A tree-ring study printed in Science Advances, a journal published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, confirmed that “megadroughts” used to be more common before the evil Industrial Revolution kicked off all of that cursed First World tech... this drought may not be because of anything we did; at most, we’ve had only a fraction of a fraction of an infinitesimally small effect on the climate. Droughts have happened before and they’ll happen again. Meanwhile, if all the do-gooders who run the global deciding apparatus truly want the best for humanity, then this is not the time to shut down reliable, cost-effective energy generation, or ban farmers from using the fertilizer that actually works, or force the bloody destruction of hundreds of thousands of livestock. Famine and want are already looming over too many vulnerable people; why in the name of God would you make it worse?"
Rationing is back – and Britain’s authoritarian greens are delighted - "I used to imagine that one of the benefits of living in an advanced country was that at least the basics worked. In the developing world you didn’t have reliable water or power. But in the West, when you turned on the taps, water always came out and the lights stayed on without you having to invest in a private generator. That is changing. Worse, we aren’t trying to solve the problems, but are instead telling people to “cut back – maybe you don’t really need all that water (or electricity) anyway”. We are being asked to change our lifestyle to match the situation, not the other way round. Yet mastering our environment to make us wealthier has been a fundamental Western attitude of mind for 200 years. If we don’t do it, we won’t be successful for much longer. Take the water situation first. No one can blame Vladimir Putin for the hosepipe ban. The country is just as wet as it has ever been. Met Office data shows that there has been no significant change in rainfall levels since 1840 and indeed the past 30 years have been 10 per cent wetter than the previous 30... it is 30 years since we last built a reservoir and only 4 per cent of our water is transferred between water companies. Another way of adapting is through desalination. We are, after all, surrounded by seawater. It is a very good way of avoiding further extraction of water from rivers. Yet the one plant we have, at Beckton in East London, has not been turned on and might never be. A further proposal, in Hampshire, is stuck thanks to green campaigners, who worry that it is too energy-intensive, and the opposition, typically, of the local Conservative MP. So instead we take the easy way out – reduce demand... We see the same “learn to live with it” response in energy policy. Obviously, the short-run shock is heavily influenced by the Ukraine war. But the longer run policy is not. We have chosen to invest in forms of energy that are unreliable and simply cannot generate what we need, yet come at extraordinary cost. Indeed the UK’s grid capacity is actually falling despite all the new pressures on it... My big worry is that it has got easier to tell people to “get used to it”. The Covid lockdowns showed that some people – the Establishment laptop class, not those who actually work at work – discovered that they could live a more restricted lifestyle. Some discovered they quite liked it. We must make sure that our leaders don’t think that’s possible again. The right way forward is not telling people to do less with less. It is becoming a more productive society once again. Building infrastructure. Investing in nuclear and gas – the only power that can do the job. Mastering our environment."
Meme - "THE SAME LEFTISTS WHO INSIST THEY'LL "TAKE CARE OF THE PLANET" RUN CITIES THAT LOOK LIKE THIS *trash*"
Epicurious Will Stop Publishing Beef Recipes In A Move It Calls 'Pro-Planet' - "Digital food magazine Epicurious will no longer publish recipes featuring beef in what it says is an effort to help home cooks become more environmentally friendly."
Land-use intensity of electricity production and tomorrow’s energy landscape - "The global energy system has a relatively small land footprint at present, comprising just 0.4% of ice-free land. This pales in comparison to agricultural land use– 30–38% of ice-free land–yet future low-carbon energy systems that shift to more extensive technologies could dramatically alter landscapes around the globe. The challenge is more acute given the projected doubling of global energy consumption by 2050 and widespread electrification of transportation and industry. Yet unlike greenhouse gas emissions, land use intensity of energy has been rarely studied in a rigorous way. Here we calculate land-use intensity of energy (LUIE) for real-world sites across all major sources of electricity, integrating data from published literature, databases, and original data collection. We find a range of LUIE that span four orders of magnitude, from nuclear with 7.1 ha/TWh/y to dedicated biomass at 58,000 ha/TWh/y. By applying these LUIE results to the future electricity portfolios of ten energy scenarios, we conclude that land use could become a significant constraint on deep decarbonization of the power system, yet low-carbon, land-efficient options are available."
This is ironic, because the people promoting low land density energy usually love density. Maybe they need everyone to live in high rise buildings in cities because they know they need a lot of land for useless wind and solar
Bjorn Lomborg: Suppressing good news is scaring our kids witless - "We are incessantly told about disasters, whether it is the latest heat wave, flood, wildfire or storm. Yet the data overwhelmingly show that over the past century people have become much, much safer from all these weather events... despite what you may have heard about record-breaking costs from weather disasters — mainly because wealthier populations build more expensive houses along coastlines — damage costs are actually declining, not increasing, as a per cent of GDP. But it’s not only weather disasters that are getting less damaging despite dire predictions. A decade ago, environmentalists loudly declared that Australia’s magnificent Great Barrier Reef was nearly dead, killed by bleaching caused by climate change. The Guardian newspaper even published an obituary. This year, scientists revealed that two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef shows the highest coral cover seen since records began in 1985. The good-news report got a fraction of the attention the bad news did. Not long ago, environmentalists constantly used pictures of polar bears to highlight the dangers of climate change. Polar bears even featured in Al Gore’s terrifying movie An Inconvenient Truth. But the reality is that polar bear numbers have been increasing — from somewhere between five and 10,000 polar bears in the 1960s up to around 26,000 today. We don’t hear this news, however. Instead, campaigners just quietly stopped using polar bears in their activism... Despite COVID-related setbacks, humanity has become better and better off. Yet doom-mongers will keep telling you the end is nigh. This is great for their fundraising but the costs to society are sky-high: we make poor, expensive policy choices and our kids are scared witless. We also end up ignoring much bigger problems. Consider all the attention devoted to heat waves. In the United States and many other parts of the world heat deaths are actually declining, because access to air conditioning helps much more than rising temperatures hurt. Almost everywhere, however, cold quietly kills many more people than heat does. In the U.S., about 20,000 people die from heat every year, but 170,000 die from cold — something we rarely focus on. Moreover, cold deaths are rising in the U.S. and our incessant focus on climate change is exacerbating this trend because politicians have introduced green laws that make energy more expensive, meaning fewer people can afford to keep warm. Lacking perspective means we don’t focus first on where we can help most. On a broader scale, global warming prompts celebrities and politicians to fly around the world in private jets lecturing the rest of us, while we spend less on problems like hunger, infectious diseases and a lack of basic schooling. When did politicians and movie stars ever meet for an important cause like de-worming children?... To know what to expect from a warming planet, we can look at the damage estimates from the economic models used by the Biden and Obama administrations, which reveal that the entire, global cost of climate change — not just to economies, but in every sense — will be equivalent to less than a four per cent hit to global GDP by the end of the century."
Bjorn Lomborg on Twitter - Greenpeace on Twitter - "You know what doesn’t leak? Renewable energy."
"You know what doesn't produce power on demand?"
Dr. Waheed Uddin on Twitter - "Leaking oil from each wind turbine causing fire in Califirnia and arsons."
Climate change awareness: Empirical evidence for the European Union - "In this paper, we assess public attitudes on climate change in Europe over the last decade. Using aggregate figures from the Special Eurobarometer surveys on Climate Change, we find that environmental concern is directly related to per capita income, social trust, secondary education, the physical distress associated with hot weather, media coverage, the share of young people in the total population, and monetary losses caused by extreme weather episodes. It is also inversely related to greenhouse gas emissions, relative power position of right-wing parties in government and tertiary education. Moreover, we find a significant, opposite impact for two dummies for years 2017 and 2019, which we respectively associate with the effects of Donald Trump’s denial campaigns and the U.S. Paris Agreement withdrawal announcement, and Greta Thunberg’s environmental activism."
Late capitalism means worrying about stupid shit
This shows that reducing emissions won't stop climate change hysteria (and will do the opposite indeed) - since that is not the true motivation for it
