“Engineers have always played a leading role in the development of powerful adaptation technology. Engineering education should therefore stay far away from ideology-driven computer models. These models steer them in the wrong direction. That is my message to the Academies of Engineering and the Universities of Technology.”
I’ll take the undeniable power, safety and consistency of technical-based decisions made through reason, data and the scientific method (engineering) over politics, ideology, UN climate models and fact-free emotions any day.
Professor Guus Berkhout has published a challenge to the engineering community, to step up and make the Western energy transition work. He emphasizes that reliable and affordable energy is the key to future prosperity and well-being. So, if the transition fails then the Western world will fall back into poor economies without any power and authority. His opening call is pointed and clear:
“Experienced Engineers must take the lead in the Energy Transition. Green politicians made a big mess of the energy transition and climate scientists encouraged them with their computer models. Putin and Xi JinPing must have watched the self-destruction of the Western World with utter amazement and gratitude. Experienced engineers must pick up the pieces soonest.”
Berkhout says there are actually three distinct challenges, all engineering intensive. One is developing the technology needed for adaptation to climate change, whatever the cause of…
“If ever there was an illustrated article to share with your doubting friends, this may be it. As they say a picture can be worth a 1000 words.” Amen, to that…
“Combating The Climate Crisis and Pursuing Environmental Justice” is the title of the segment of the 2020 democratic platform that, if ever successfully implemented could send America back to the days before the industrial revolution. It’s nearly 3000 words opens with the following paragraph.
“Climate change is a global emergency. We have no time to waste in taking action to protect Americans’ lives and futures. The last four years have seen record-breaking storms, devastating wildfires, and historic floods. Urban and rural communities alike have suffered tens of billions dollars in economic losses. Dams have failed catastrophically in Michigan. Farmers’ crops have been drowned in their fields across the Midwest. Coastal communities from Florida to New Jersey are facing an existential crisis as a result of sea level rise and stronger storms. Thousands of Americans have died. And President Trump still callously and willfully denies the…
Credit: OH 237 @ Wikipedia Natural climate variability similar to what we see today has been going on for thousands, if not millions of years, whether ‘greenhouse gas’ theorists moaning about modern human activities like it or not.
– – –
The Roman Empire coincided with warmest period of the last 2,000 years in the Med, says The GWPF.
The Mediterranean Sea was 3.6°F (2°C) hotter during the Roman Empire than other average temperatures at the time, a new study claims.
The Empire coincided with a 500-year period, from AD 1 to AD 500, that was the warmest period of the last 2,000 years in the almost completely land-locked sea.
“REMEMBER when we paved the world with electronic waste
that chopped eagles and condors and made bats extinct because we thought wind was natural and uranium evil? – man that was a dark age!” – Michael Shellenberger
“MUCH that passes as idealism is disguised
hatred or disguised love of power.”
– Bertrand Russell
•••
TIME Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” and U.N. IPCC expert reviewer Michael Shellenberger drops another inconvenient truth-bomb in the fight against the dangerous and costly politicisation of science.
“But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.”
REGARDLESS of your position on the magnitude of anthropogenic carbon dioxide as the supposed “climate control knob“, this is a timely and important read. Especially in the dangerous new age of postmodernism that we currently inhabit where truth, reason, honesty and integrity within government, academia and the sciences is in such short supply.
Ergo, props to Michael Shellenberger. Questioning dogma objectively, in the quest to restore scientific integrity, is risky business, these days.
On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.
I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.
But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.
Here are some facts few people know:
Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”
The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”
Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declinedby an area nearly as large as Alaska
The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, notclimate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California
Carbon emissions have been declining in rich nations including Britain, Germany and France since the mid-seventies
Adapting to life below sea level made the Netherlands rich not poor
We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter
Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change
Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture
I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism.
In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies.
Some people will, when they read this imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women’s cooperatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.
I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them. Over the last few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions
Until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an “existential” threat to human civilization, and called it a “crisis.”
But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.
I even stood by as people in the White House and many in the news media tried to destroy the reputation and career of an outstanding scientist, good man, and friend of mine, Roger Pielke, Jr., a lifelong progressive Democrat and environmentalist who testified in favor of carbon regulations. Why did they do that? Because his research proves natural disasters aren’t getting worse.
But then, last year, things spiraled out of control.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said “The world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “Climate Change Kills Children.”
The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would “wipe out civilizations.”
Mainstream journalists reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of the world,” and that deforestation was like a nuclear bomb going off.
As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change.
Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened.
I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough. I needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence.
It is based on two decades of research and three decades of environmental activism. At 400 pages, with 100 of them endnotes, Apocalypse Never covers climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, species extinction, industrialization, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.
Some highlights from the book:
Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress
The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land
The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium
100% renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5% to 50%
We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities
Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4%
Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did
“Free-range” beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300% more emissions
Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon
The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants
Why were we all so misled?
In the final three chapters of Apocalypse Never I expose the financial, political, and ideological motivations. Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist beliefs forced the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make poverty “sustainable.” And status anxiety, depression, and hostility to modern civilization are behind much of the alarmism
Once you realize just how badly misinformed we have been, often by people with plainly unsavory or unhealthy motivations, it is hard not to feel duped.
Will Apocalypse Never make any difference? There are certainly reasons to doubt it.
The news media have been making apocalyptic pronouncements about climate change since the late 1980s, and do not seem disposed to stop.
The ideology behind environmental alarmsim — Malthusianism — has been repeatedly debunked for 200 years and yet is more powerful than ever.
But there are also reasons to believe that environmental alarmism will, if not come to an end, have diminishing cultural power.
The coronavirus pandemic is an actual crisis that puts the climate “crisis” into perspective. Even if you think we have overreacted, Covid-19 has killed nearly 500,000 people and shattered economies around the globe.
Scientific institutions including WHO and IPCC have undermined their credibility through the repeated politicization of science. Their future existence and relevance depends on new leadership and serious reform.
Facts still matter, and social media is allowing for a wider range of new and independent voices to outcompete alarmist environmental journalists at legacy publications.
Nations are reorienting toward the national interest and away from Malthusianism and neoliberalism, which is good for nuclear and bad for renewables.
The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilization is better for people and nature than the low-energy civilization that climate alarmists would return us to.
And the invitations I received from IPCC and Congress late last year, after I published a series of criticisms of climate alarmism, are signs of a growing openness to new thinking about climate change and the environment.
Another sign is the response to my book from climate scientists, conservationists, and environmental scholars. “Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book,” writes Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. “This may be the most important book on the environment ever written,” says one of the fathers of modern climate science Tom Wigley.
“We environmentalists condemn those with antithetical views of being ignorant of science and susceptible to confirmation bias,” wrote the former head of The Nature Conservancy, Steve McCormick. “But too often we are guilty of the same. Shellenberger offers ‘tough love:’ a challenge to entrenched orthodoxies and rigid, self-defeating mindsets. Apocalypse Never serves up occasionally stinging, but always well-crafted, evidence-based points of view that will help develop the ‘mental muscle’ we need to envision and design not only a hopeful, but an attainable, future.”
That is all I that I had hoped for in writing it. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll agree that it’s perhaps not as strange as it seems that a lifelong environmentalist, progressive, and climate activist felt the need to speak out against the alarmism.
I further hope that you’ll accept my apology.
Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website or some of my other work here.
Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” Green Book Award Winner, and author of Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (Harper Collins, June 30, 2020). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, and other publications. His TED talks have been viewed over five million times.
THE book-burners have been busy again. This time it’s a TIME Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” and U.N. IPCC expert reviewer, Michael Shellenberger.
HIS crime, apologising “for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.”
Here are some facts few people know:
Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”
The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”
Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
THE use of hard facts to back up his apology didn’t please the deep-green authoritarians at Forbes, keen to protect their “climate crisis” narrative, at all costs.
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) June 29, 2020
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“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
FOR years, the Polar Bear has been abused by climate change activists as the poster child of ClimateChange™️. They didn’t use rats or spiders to promote their misanthropic agenda. Instead, they chose the cute, cuddly, fluffy polar bear to illicit a desired emotional response.
“Climate Action” Poster Child | CLIMATISM
YOU would have noticed that the polar bear is a much less common feature in science, while the fake news mainstream media has stopped using the polar bear as a propaganda tool to drive their climate agenda.
THE Arctic bear has been superseded by child soldiers and penguins …
WITH deadly irony, polar bear numbers have grown dramatically and to “dangerous” levels as carbon dioxide emissions have risen. A CO2 correlation, at last!
INDIGENOUS Inuit’s of Northern Canada are now facing the very real task of having to cull the population as “the polar bear may have exceeded the co-existence threshold.”
“Inuit believe there are now so many bears that public safety has become a major concern,”
“Public safety concerns, combined with the effects of polar bears on other species, suggest that in many Nunavut communities, the polar bear may have exceeded the co-existence threshold.”
TELLING the truth on climate change and polar bears is considered heresy in the post-normal society of climate change hysteria that we currently inhabit. Just ask Peter Ridd.
It’s long past time for polar bear specialists to stop holding out for a scientifically accurate global estimate that will never be achieved and determine a reasonable and credible ‘best guess’. Since they have so far refused to do this, I have done it for them. My extrapolated estimate of 39,000 (range 26,000-58,000) at 2018 is not only plausible but scientifically defensible.
In 2014, the chairman of the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) emailed me to say that their global population size number ‘has never been an estimate of total abundance in a scientific sense, but simply a qualified guess given to satisfy public demand.’
In my new book, The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened, I contend that this situation will probably never change, so it’s time to stop holding out for a scientifically accurate global estimate and generate a reasonable and credible ‘best guess’. Recent surveys from several critical polar bear subpopulations have given us the information necessary to do this.
UPDATE: I have made this a sticky post for a while: new posts will appear below.
These new numbers make it possible to extrapolate from ‘known’ to ‘unknown’ subpopulations within so-called ‘sea ice ecoregions’ (defined in 2007 by polar bear scientists at the US Geological Survey, see Amstrup et al. 2007), as shown below, to update old estimates and generate new ones for never-studied areas.
USGS – Polar Bear Ecoregions
Since the PBSG has so far refused to take this step, I took on the challenge. I contend that an estimate of about 39,000 (range 26,000-58,000) at 2018 is not only plausible but scientifically defensible. See the graph below from my new book:
Global polar bear population size estimates to 2018. From Chapter 10 of The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened (Crockford 2019).
This new estimate for 2018 is a modest 4-6 fold increase over the 10,000 or so bears that existed in the 1960s and after 25 years, a credible increase over the estimate of 25,000 that the PBSG offered in 1993 (Wiig et al. 1995).
However, my new estimate is much larger than the improbable figure of about 26,000 (range 22,000-31,000) offered by PGSG biologists in 2015 (Regehr et al. 2016; Wiig et al. 2015). The scary question is this: what do Arctic residents do if there are actually as many as 58,000?
See my new book (Crockford 2019) for the full rationale and references used to arrive at this figure.
The bottom line: it is scientifically unacceptable for the PBSG to continue to refuse to provide an extrapolated ‘best guess’ global estimate for polar bears, given that the scientifically accurate estimate they crave is essentially unattainable. An estimate of about 39,000 (range 26,000-58,000) at 2018 is not only plausible but scientifically defensible.
REFERENCES
Amstrup, S.C., Marcot, B.G. & Douglas, D.C. 2007. Forecasting the rangewide status of polar bears at selected times in the 21st century.US Geological Survey. Reston, VA. Pdf here
Crockford, S.J. 2019. The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened. Global Warming Policy Foundation, London. Available in paperback and ebook formats.
Regehr, E.V., Laidre, K.L, Akçakaya, H.R., Amstrup, S.C., Atwood, T.C., Lunn, N.J., Obbard, M., Stern, H., Thiemann, G.W., & Wiig, Ø. 2016. Conservation status of polar bears (Ursus maritimus) in relation to projected sea-ice declines. Biology Letters 12: 20160556. http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/12/12/20160556
Wiig, Ø., Born, E.W., and Garner, G.W. (eds.) 1995. Polar Bears: Proceedings of the 11th working meeting of the IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialists Group, 25-27 January, 1993, Copenhagen, Denmark. Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge UK, IUCN. http://pbsg.npolar.no/en/meetings/
Wiig, Ø., Amstrup, S., Atwood, T., Laidre, K., Lunn, N., Obbard, M., et al. 2015. Ursus maritimus. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2015: e.T22823A14871490. Available fromhttp://www.iucnredlist.org/details/22823/0 [accessed Nov. 28, 2015]. See the supplement for population figures.
DIRE predictions of an “ice-free” Arctic remain a popular and effective fear-mongering tool in the bag of ClimateChange™️.
SOME of the Arctic sea-ice predictions made by alarmists ‘scientists’ and the mainstream media over the years. ALL of which have failed to materialise :
“Arctic summers ice-free by 2013” (BBC 2007)
“Could all Arctic ice be gone by 2012?” (AP 2007)
“Arctic Sea Ice Gone in Summer Within Five Years?”(National Geographic 2007)
“Imagine yourself in a world five years from now, where there is no more ice over the Arctic” – Tim Flannery (2008)
“North Pole could be ice-free in 2008” – Mark Serreze (New Scientist 2008)
“Gore: Polar ice cap may disappear by summer 2014” (USA Today 2009)
“Arctic expert predicts final collapse of sea ice within 4 years” (Guardian 2012)
“Say Goodbye to Arctic Summer Ice” (Live Science 2013)
“Ice-free Arctic in two years heralds methane catastrophe – scientist” (The Guardian 2013)
“Why Arctic sea ice will vanish in 2013” (Sierra Club 2013)
“Next year or the year after, the Arctic will be free of ice’” – Peter Wadhams (The Guardian 2016)
ARCTIC temperatures and melt cycles correlate almost perfectly with ocean circulation cycles (AMO) driven by the sun, and show zero correlation with atmospheric CO2 levels :
Reykjavik, Iceland Temperatures Vs. The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation
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CONCLUSION
AN old Slovak proverb states, “The truth rises to the surface like oil on water.” So too, over time, has the truth been revealed as to the actual state of polar bears and the supposed “shrinking” Arctic.
THE mainstream media and climate scientists are aware of the underlying data on polar bears and the Arctic. They simply choose not to share the truth with you or any positive ‘Climate Change’ news, for that matter.
GOOD news climate stories would only spoil their “Climate Emergency” agenda that they have worked so hard to manufacture and maintain. Not to mention, would put in jeopardy a load of reputations, egos and money now at stake. The scam, it seems, is almost too big to fail.
AS for the polar bear, it is ours now! We own it as the symbol of a stable Arctic and a ClimateChange™️ agenda on life-support, becoming more hysterical by the day, under constant siege by ‘inconvenient’ scientific data and a litany of failed predictions.
“People have been imagining that the climate is changing, exaggerating every weather event, getting widespread press coverage, and blaming it on man – for as long as there have been newspapers.”
–Tony Heller Climate Change Insanity Never Changes
AUSTRALIA’s highly variable climate is influenced by the broad patterns in the oceans around it and the atmosphere above it. These patterns are considered the “dominant climate and weather drivers“ according to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology.
WHILE El Niño and La Niña occur in the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean Dipole oscillates in the waters of the Indian Ocean, influencing climate and weather patterns of Australia and the entire planet.
Sustained changes in the difference between sea surface temperatures of the tropical western and eastern Indian Ocean are known as the Indian Ocean Dipole or IOD. The IOD is one of the key drivers of Australia’s climate and can have a significant impact on agriculture. This is because events generally coincide with the winter crop growing season. The IOD has three phases: neutral, positive and negative. Events usually start around May or June, peak between August and October and then rapidly decay when the monsoon arrives in the southern hemisphere around the end of spring.
Sea surface temperatures
Indian Ocean sea surface temperatures impact rainfall and temperature patterns over Australia. Warmer than average sea surface temperatures can provide more moisture for frontal systems and lows crossing Australia.
POSITIVE IOD – IMPLICATIONS FOR DROUGHT and BUSHFIRES
WHILE most of the mainstream media, and ClimateChange™️ activists have juvenilely blamed trace gas Carbon Dioxide for Australia’s devastating bushfires, little to nothing has been said about ENSO and in particular the IOD.
IT doesn’t take Einstein to workout why ClimateChange™️ activists, the CO2 theory-obsessed fake news mainstream media and the extended climate-ambulance-chasing family choose to omit natural climate drivers from their doomsday rhetoric.
HOWEVER, policy makers, industry and the public must be made aware of Mother Nature’s dominant and natural climate drivers so that public funds are not misallocated and importantly so that we can identify the warning signs of drought and other extremes using ENSO and IOD to predict and prepare for future and inevitable catastrophes.
2019 saw the lowest rainfall on record for Australia and in particular Eastern and South Eastern Australia where the devastating bushfires occurred. This coincided with “one of the strongest positive IOD events to impact Australia in recent history”, according to the BoM.
BoM goes on to state that “the IOD’s legacy of widespread warm and dry conditions during the second half of 2019 primed the Australian landscape for bushfire weather and heatwaves this summer.”
IN this case, it seems undeniable that ‘correlation does equal causation’.
DATA-over-theory guy Willis Eschenbach from “the word’s most viewed climate and science website” – Watts Up With That? exposes who really are the “deniers” when in comes to identifying naturally occurring cycles of drought and rainfall patterns that influence Australia’s weather, climate and bushfires …
I kept hearing so much about the Australian bushfires being the result of or driven by “climate change” or “global warming” that I thought I’d take a look at just what’s happened to the rainfall there. Here are a hundred and nineteen years of Australian rainfall.
Here’s the curious part. The earth has been undergoing a mild warming pretty steadily since 1970, about the last half-century.
But although the last couple years have been dry, the last half-century in Australia has been wetter than the previous half-century. Not dryer. Wetter. And a lot wetter.
In fact, anyone under about sixty years old has never experienced dry Australia.
Now, I mentioned this and showed this graph on Twitter, where I post as @weschenbach, and someone said something like “Well, Australia’s a big area to average. Maybe it’s wetter in the middle and less so on the coast.”
That seemed unlikely. I mean the moisture is coming in from the ocean and so the coasts are generally wetter than the outback … plus with overall more rain, the middle would have to be pretty wet.
But I’m a man for data over theory, so I went back to the same source listed above, and I got the rainfall records for New South Wales where the fires are. Here are those results.
australia-NSW-rainfall-1900-2019
And once again, yes, the last few years have surely been dry in NSW … but again, that’s weather. And once again, the recent half-century has been much wetter than the first half of the 20th century. Not dryer. Wetter.
Finally, forest management experts have been warning the Australian government over and over again for years that neglecting forest management and giving up on fire hazard reduction burns was piling up fuel in the bush, and that it was only a matter of time and a dry year before catastrophe struck … here’s a particularly strong warning from 2015, and it is far from the only one.
But nooo … misguided green activists wouldn’t hear of that. They protested the fire hazard reduction burns.
aussie-greens
Hilariously, the Australian Broadcasting Commission has deleted their article on the activists’ protest because it doesn’t fit the “CLIMATE EMERGENCY!” narrative … bunch’a deceptive left-wing idiots who don’t know that the intarwebs never forget.
And when you add the incredibly high fuel load in the oily flammable eucalyptus forest to the fact that more than a dozen arsonists have been arrested for starting many of the fires, it should come as no surprise to anyone that these fires have been devastating, destructive, fatal, and horrible …
It should come as no surprise because they were warned. Clearly. Repeatedly.
Now, I live in the fire zone in California, and so I have great sympathy and compassion for those who are in the path of the fires in Australia. And our fire problem here is inter alia for the same reason—abysmal forest management practices driven by Green activists with hearts of gold and brains of oatmeal.
But those blaming it on climate change? Look, if the CO2 emissions in Australia went to zero, it might make the earth cooler by about 0.05°C by the year 2050 … call me crazy, but I don’t see Australians giving up on air travel as being a very effective fire-fighting strategy.
My best regards to everyone on a lovely clear night,
IN the heated and divisive days of CO2-centric catastrophism that we currently inhabit, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, has a fundamental responsibility as the nation’s premier, government meteorological and ‘scientific’ body to douse the flames of ‘man-made’ Climate Change hysteria by publicly explaining to policy makers, the public and to the mainstream media that completely natural and cyclical climate events are “the main climate drivers” of climate and weather extremes in Australia.
AGAIN, policy makers, industry and the public must be made aware of Mother Nature’s dominant and natural climate drivers so that public funds are not misallocated and importantly so that we can identify the warning signs of drought and other extremes using ENSO and IOD to predict and prepare for future and inevitable catastrophes.
THEY would also do well to quell the apocalyptic fantasies being instilled by ClimateChange™️ activists and teachers into our most vulnerable – our children – leading to all manner of psychological disorders and outbreaks of genuine fear and distress …
The poor children were absolutely terrified. “We are gonna die! I don’t want to die!” screamed one little child during a propaganda session on “climate” forced on 2nd and 3rd graders at a public school in Toronto.
BACK in 1923, when scientists behaved like scientists, the BoM, then known as the Commonwealth Meteorological Office prided itself on existing “as a corrective to scare mongering and shameless prophecy.”
“It is fortunate for the community’s peace of mind that the Commonwealth Meteorological Office exists as a corrective to scare mongering and shameless prophecy.” – Mr. E. Bromley
BOY, are we praying for a return to the measured days of 1923, well before ClimateChange™️ hysteria trumped reason and dissenters called to be lynched!
BOM notes that ENSO is “the dominant climate / weather driver”. And they would be correct. To think that windmills and solar panels, or handing over billions of our hard-earned money to the U.N., or shutting down one more coal-fired power station can effect ENSO is at best unscientific, at worst, insanity writ large.
IF the climate activists and their media sycophants were serious about ’emissions’ and their effect on climate and weather, they would be glueing themselves to the pavement, outside the embassies of China instead of de-industrialising Australia and sending jobs and ’emissions’ back to…China.
DON’T take my word for it, you only have to read Greta Thunberg’s the UN’s very own words on exactly what the “Climate Crisis” is really all about …
“the climate crisis is not just about the environment.It is a crisis of human rights, of justice, and of political will.Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled it.We need to dismantle them all.” – Why We Strike Again by Greta Thunberg
WE are yet to be told what system would replace capitalism. However, one does not have to read far into the history of the environmental movement to work out which form of actual “oppression” they would prefer.
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CONCLUSION
MANY complex climate and weather factors lead to catastrophic bushfires. In my opinion, mankind does play a huge roll in the fires. Arson, the criminal build-up of dry fuel loads and poor forest management have greatly exacerbated Australia’s latest bushfire ‘crisis’.
WHILE Australia is set to have a Royal Commission following this season’s devastating bushfires that burnt over ten million hectares, levelled ~2000 homes and killed ~30, don’t expect to see the ENSO, IOD, arson or fuel-load management playing a lead roll. The climate ambulance chasers will use the enquiry – the 58th since 1939 – to push their ruinous deindustrialisationClimateChange™️ agenda.
AS the excellent Viv Forbes predicts, the RC will merely …
“provide a grandstand for the Climate Rebellion Mob who will get starring roles on ABC/Fairfax. Big business will probably promote a carbon tax to fight bushfires while foresters and land owners will hardly be heard.”
IF the coverage and commentary we’ve seen from the mainstream media, CO2 theory-obsessed politicians and Hollywood elites is anything to go by, then Forbes would be spot-on. A sad indictment on the 24/7 news cycle and social media times that we currently inhabit where the press and influencers instinctively default to blaming ‘man-made climate change’ for every and any weather event regardless of the actual science, underlying data or reference to history.
ACTIVISM at its most lazy and dangerous that will only lead to further loss of life, destruction of infrastructure and the decimation of plants and wildlife when the inevitable bushfires return.
IF we lived in a sane world where logic, reason and cool heads prevailed over alarmism, sensationalism and hysteria, then basic CO2-science, as illustrated by ‘scientist’ Peter L. Ward, below, would steer us in a positive, less climate-divisive direction, preserving the integrity of science … and do a great deal to lower electricity bills along the way.
BUT, don’t hold your breath. ClimateChange™️ has morphed into a $1.5 TRILLION per year, or $4 BILLION per day business, according to a 2015 figure by Climate Change Business Journal. And, besides the lucrative and seemingly unlimited taxpayer funds available to feed-the-green-beast, far too many egos, jobs and reputations are now at stake for ClimateChange™️ to go anywhere soon.
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A must read for policy makers, the mainstream media and all those interested in the molecule at the centre of the Global Warming Climate Change debate – carbon dioxide…
Mark Twain, in his inimitable way, is reputed to have quipped “what gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Today, many climate scientists “know for sure” that observed global warming is caused by greenhouse-gas emissions. Many have worked tirelessly for decades, publishing thick summary reports, forging the appearance of a scientific consensus sufficient to convince political leaders to take action to prevent runaway global warming.
Such an agreement was reached in Paris on December 12, 2015. If greenhouse-gases are indeed the problem, their work will go down in history as heroic.
But science is not done by consensus, by popular vote, or by group think. As Michael Crichton put it: “In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.”
The drive to demonstrate scientific consensus over greenhouse-warming theory has had the unintended consequence of inhibiting genuine scientific debate about the ultimate cause of global warming.
Believers of “the consensus” argue that anyone not agreeing with them is uninformed, an idiot or being paid by nefarious companies. The last thing most climate scientists want to consider at this point, when they think they are finally winning the climate wars, is the possibility of some problem with the science of greenhouse-warming theory. Believe me, I have tried for several years to communicate the problem to numerous leading climate scientists.
New data and improved understanding now show that there is a fatal flaw in greenhouse-warming theory.Simply put: greenhouse gases do not absorb enough of the heat radiated by Earth to cause global warming.
Understanding this very surprising and rather blunt statement is much easier than you might think. It gets down to understanding why a traditional light bulb gives off a great deal of heat whereas a new LED light bulb producing the same amount of light remains quite cool.
Heat is what makes us feel warm. More formally, heat is thermal energy flowing spontaneously from a warmer body to a cooler body. Thermal energy is well observed at the molecular level to be the oscillation of all the bonds that hold matter together. The hotter the body of matter, the higher the frequencies of oscillation and the higher the amplitudes of oscillation at each frequency of oscillation. In this way, heat and the temperature that results from absorbing heat both consist of a very broad spectrum of all of these frequencies of oscillation.
A traditional light bulb uses a large amount of electricity to heat the tungsten filament to temperatures around 5500 degrees, causing the filament to glow white hot. This high temperature is required to produce visible white light. The glowing filament gives off a very broad spectrum of frequencies of radiation, however, that we perceive as heat. Only a very small number of the highest of these frequencies are useful as visible light.
A new LED light bulb, on the other hand, uses a very small amount of electricity to cause a diode to emit a very narrow range of frequencies within the spectrum of visible light. The LED radiates only visible light — it does not radiate heat.
The primary purpose of a light bulb is to provide visible light. To repeat, a traditional light bulb radiates heat, a small portion of which is visible light. An LED on the other hand, only radiates visible light, requiring much less electricity. This is why you can substantially reduce your electric bills by replacing traditional incandescent light bulbs with LED light bulbs.
How does this apply to greenhouse gases? Detailed laboratory studies of absorption of radiation show that carbon dioxide absorbs less than 16 percent of all the frequencies making up the heat radiated by Earth. Just like LEDs, this limited number of frequencies absorbed by carbon dioxide does not constitute heat. This limited number of frequencies cannot cause an absorbing body of matter to get much hotter because it contains only a very small part of the heat required to do so.
Current radiation theory and current climate models assume that all radiation is created equal—that all radiation is the same no matter the temperature of the radiating body. Current theory simply assumes that what changes is the amount of such generic radiation measured in watts per square meter.
Extensive observations of radiation emitted by matter at different temperatures, however, show us clearly that the physical properties of radiation, the frequencies and amplitudes of oscillation making up radiation, increase in value rapidly with increasing temperature of the radiating body.
Climate scientists argue that the thermal energy absorbed by greenhouse gases is re-radiated, causing warming of air, slowing cooling of Earth and even directly warming Earth. There simply is not enough heat involved in any of these proposed processes to have any significant effect on global warming. Greenhouse-warming theory “just ain’t so.”
Peter L. Ward worked 27 years with the United States Geological Survey. He was the chairman of the White House Working Group on Natural Disaster Information Systems during the Clinton administration. He’s published more than 50 scientific papers. He retired in 1998 but continues working to resolve several enigmatic observations related to climate change. His work is described in detail at WhyClimateChanges.com and in his book What Really Causes Global Warming? Greenhouse gases or ozone depletion? Follow him on Twitter at @yclimatechanges.
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CLIMATISM addendum :
IMPORTANT part of the climate debate ‘conveniently’ overlooked : The heat absorption ability of the CO2 molecule diminishes as concentration increases in the atmosphere. 90%+ of warming is achieved in the first 20ppm. Further rises make little difference.
WHEN presented with the unemotional facts on global warming climate change, one can begin to see clearly that the entire global phenomena, that has consumed; academia, our political, scientific and financial institutions and sycophant mainstream media, is nothing more than a political agenda, as laid out by the fabricators of theorised CO2-induced climate change — the United Nations — in their very own words :
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,
we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“
– TimothyWirth,
Fmr President of the UN Foundation
I have been asked by a couple of people to produce a simple climate change factsheet, and it might be worth bookmarking for future use.
I have kept it simple, with no graphs or references. As those familiar with this blog, everything below has been fully covered a number of times. Anybody who needs more explanation on a particular item only needs to ask.
“The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.” – Bertrand Russel
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DON’T expect to see this ‘good’ environmental news on the mainstream media anytime soon.
WHEN you’re in the business of demonising carbon dioxide and frightening the Thunberg’s kiddies for political and ideological ends, such good news comes as a rather unwelcome message!
The world is literally a greener place than it was twenty years ago, and data from NASA satellites has revealed a counterintuitive source for much of this new foliage. A new study shows that China and India—the world’s most populous countries—are leading the increase in greening on land. The effect comes mostly from ambitious tree-planting programs in China and intensive agriculture in both countries.
Ranga Myneni of Boston University and colleagues first detected the greening phenomenon in satellite data from the mid-1990s, but they did not know whether human activity was a chief cause. They then set out to track the total amount of Earth’s land area covered by vegetation and how it changed over time.
The research team found that global green leaf area has increased by 5 percent since the early 2000s, an area equivalent to all of the Amazon rainforests. At least 25 percent of that gain came in China. Overall, one-third of Earth’s vegetated lands are greening, while 5 percent are growing browner. The study was published on February 11, 2019, in the journal Nature Sustainability.
The maps on this page show the increase or decrease in green vegetation—measured in average leaf area per year—in different regions of the world between 2000 and 2017. Note that the maps are not measuring the overall greenness, which explains why the Amazon and eastern North America do not stand out, among other forested areas.
“China and India account for one-third of the greening, but contain only 9 percent of the planet’s land area covered in vegetation,” said lead author Chi Chen of Boston University. “That is a surprising finding, considering the general notion of land degradation in populous countries from overexploitation.”
globalgreening_tamo_2017
This study was made possible thanks to a two-decade-long data record from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. An advantage of MODIS is the intensive coverage they provide in space and time: the sensors have captured up to four shots of nearly every place on Earth, every day, for the past 20 years.
“This long-term data lets us dig deeper,” said Rama Nemani, a research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center and a co-author of the study. “When the greening of the Earth was first observed, we thought it was due to a warmer, wetter climate and fertilization from the added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now with the MODIS data, we see that humans are also contributing.”
China’s outsized contribution to the global greening trend comes in large part from its programs to conserve and expand forests (about 42 percent of the greening contribution). These programs were developed in an effort to reduce the effects of soil erosion, air pollution, and climate change.
Another 32 percent of the greening change in China, and 82 percent in India, comes from intensive cultivation of food crops. The land area used to grow crops in China and India has not changed much since the early 2000s. Yet both countries have greatly increased both their annual total green leaf area and their food production in order to feed their large populations. The agricultural greening was achieved through multiple cropping practices, whereby a field is replanted to produce another harvest several times a year. Production of grains, vegetables, fruits and more have increased by 35 to 40 percent since 2000.
countrieschart_tamo_2017
How the greening trend may change in the future depends on numerous factors. For example, increased food production in India is facilitated by groundwater irrigation. If the groundwater is depleted, this trend may change. The researchers also pointed out that the gain in greenness around the world does not necessarily offset the loss of natural vegetation in tropical regions such as Brazil and Indonesia. There are consequences for sustainability and biodiversity in those ecosystems beyond the simple greenness of the landscape.
Nemani sees a positive message in the new findings. “Once people realize there is a problem, they tend to fix it,” he said. “In the 1970s and 80s in India and China, the situation around vegetation loss was not good. In the 1990s, people realized it, and today things have improved. Humans are incredibly resilient. That’s what we see in the satellite data.”
NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using data courtesy of Chen et al.,(2019). Story by Abby Tabor, NASA Ames Research Center, with Mike Carlowicz, Earth Observatory.
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GLOBAL GREENING…
“A quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25.” – NASA
NASA previously reported on the ‘greening of the earth’ thanks to the CO2 ‘fertilisation’ effect.
HOWEVER, such good news was again carefully omitted by the mainstream media and environmental activists keen to preserve their ‘catastrophic’ global warming climate change narrative and continue their demonisation of life-giving gas carbon dioxide, deceptively referring to it as “carbon pollution” :
“A quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25.” – NASA
IN 2013, the CSIRO commissioned a study that found “Deserts ‘greening’ from rising carbon dioxide: Green foliage boosted across the world’s arid regions.”
THE ‘greening’ of deserts, thanks to rising CO2, happens to be a very unwelcome message for the environmental movement and apparently for the CSIRO, too! So, they simply removed the study from their website!
By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~
Berkhout says there are actually three distinct challenges, all engineering intensive. One is developing the technology needed for adaptation to climate change, whatever the cause of…
By Dr. Jay Lehr~
“Climate change is a global emergency. We have no time to waste in taking action to protect Americans’ lives and futures. The last four years have seen record-breaking storms, devastating wildfires, and historic floods. Urban and rural communities alike have suffered tens of billions dollars in economic losses. Dams have failed catastrophically in Michigan. Farmers’ crops have been drowned in their fields across the Midwest. Coastal communities from Florida to New Jersey are facing an existential crisis as a result of sea level rise and stronger storms. Thousands of Americans have died. And President Trump still callously and willfully denies the…
Credit: OH 237 @ Wikipedia
In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them. Over the last few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions
Climatism 
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