Month: April 2022

Daily News 10 Apr 2022

Don’t Look Up!

A real rock from outer space (not manmade climate change) is causing perceived rising seas

Paul Driessen

In the Netflix movie, Washington politicians “Don’t Look Up” because they prefer to remain oblivious to a special effects meteor that’s about to obliterate Planet Earth. Not surprisingly, the film is really about our refusal to recognize the “existential threat” of “manmade climate change.”

Director Adam McKay recently tweeted, “We’ve got 6-8 years before the climate is so chaotic we [will] live in a permanent state of biblical catastrophe.”

Not to be outdone, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called the latest UN climate report “a file of shame, cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track toward an unlivable world.” Drilling for more oil and gas is “moral and economic madness,” he insisted. If humanity doesn’t stop using fossil fuels, we will be overwhelmed by devastating floods, heat waves, droughts, fires and crop failures.

Global sea levels have already risen “a shocking nine inches,” the PurpleOrange PR Agency proclaimed, promoting a client’s Climate Neutral Certified label, which is designed to channel more money to “authentic, immediate climate action.”

Back on the non-parallel-universe Planet Earth, a truly unlivable world would be one without fossil fuels. Not just to generate electricity, cook food, heat homes and water, and power cars, boats, trains and planes – but for fertilizers and insecticides to grow more food on less land, and for plastics, pharmaceuticals, paints, cosmetics, clothing and other essential products. For us today; for billions more tomorrow.

Fossil fuels to extract and process trillions of tons of raw materials, too, and manufacture the millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of battery modules and millions of transmission line towers that would blanket our croplands, scenic areas and wildlife habitats if we didn’t have fossil fuels.

In fact, far worse than a warmer planet with more airborne plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide would be a colder planet with less CO2. That would mean less arable land, shorter growing seasons and much lower crop yields, on top of losses from a devastated Ukraine and sanctioned Russian wheat crops.

(Why is it that Twitter twits never cancel, suppress or even fact-check climate fear porn? Why is it never just climate change, but always climate cataclysms? Why always manmade climate change, as though past natural climate changes never happened? Why do Guterres, Gore, Kerry, Biden and AOC always have to top his, her, hir, ver, zir fellow alarmists in hysteria? Why is the fear-mongering always based on computer models, never on actual data and evidence? Why does it always ignore China’s massive fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions?)

One of the prevalent climate alarm themes is sea level rise.

Back on real Earth, if the DC Swamp inhabitants of 35 million years ago had looked up, they’d have been transfixed in their last moments by a non-special-effects meteor hurtling into what is now Cape Charles, Virginia on the Chesapeake Bay. The 2-mile-wide meteor obliterated and pulverized sediments and bedrock, vaporized plants and animals, sent rock fragments hundreds of miles in every direction, and launched tsunamis into West Virginia’s eastern mountain slopes.

Shattered rock settled back into a crater 4,300 feet deep and 53 miles in diameter. Over the ensuing millennia, river and ocean sediments poured into the crater – and mile-high glaciers pulled 10-million cubic miles of water out of the oceans, burying half of North America, Europe and Asia under trillions of tons of ice. Land under the ice was pressed down, while land outside the glacial zones was lifted up. Then, some 12,000 years ago, the last Pleistocene glaciers began melting.

Oceans slowly rose – some 400 feet! Land masses underwent “isostatic rebound.” Areas that had been under the ice began rising; those that had bulged upward began sinking. In much of the Chesapeake Bay region, post-glacial subsidence is compounded by continued compression of pulverized crater rock – and by the ongoing withdrawal of groundwater from sedimentary aquifers beneath urban and agricultural areas that depend on groundwater.

The aquifers include layers of porous sandstone (with water between sand grains) interspersed among layers of impermeable but water-soaked shale and clay. As water is pumped out of the sandy layers, the shale-clay layers get squeezed by hundreds of feet of overlying rock and sediment, and their water is forced into the sandstones, and then into pumps. The overlying land steadily subsides.

In the Chesapeake Bay area, subsidence averages nearly 3 mm/year; 11.5 inches per century. That’s in addition to almost 4.5 inches per century in isostatic subsidence, plus 7 to 9 inches per century in actual sea level rise. The total perceived sea level rise can be 24 inches per century – although two-thirds of that total has nothing to do with actual sea level rise. Indeed, the Norfolk Naval Station tide gauge at Sewell’s Point shows that the rate of actual sea level rise has not changed since the gauge was installed in 1927.

The situation in Houston-Galveston, Texas, Santa Clara Valley, California, and other places around the globe is similarly complicated, even without post-glaciation issues. To single out actual sea level rise – and blame the rise on humans and fossil fuels – is simply disingenuous.

However, salt-water intrusion and coastal flooding are serious, recurrent, growing problems, especially during hurricanes and as more expensive homes are built along coasts. Some communities have slowed subsidence by relocating groundwater pumping stations away from the coast, reducing withdrawal rates, increasing aquifer recharge, or substituting surface water for groundwater. Others have installed sea walls, improved drainage systems, and pipelines to bring water from nearby lakes and rivers. Other options include desalination plants to create more fresh water, recycling household “gray water” to agricultural use, and switching to less water-intensive irrigation methods, as Israel does.

These approaches re far more practical and cost-effective than trying to stop seas from rising any further, like a modern King Canute, by banning fossil fuels, especially if it’s done only in some Western nations.

Meanwhile, inhabitants of Tuvalu, the Maldives and other Pacific islands and coral atolls worry about rising seas due to fossil fuels. However, most of them are increasing in land area, not decreasing – as corals grow, sediments are laid down off their coasts, and volcanic lava flows expand land masses.

Moreover, few of these islands and coral reefs even existed 12,000 years ago, when the Wisconsin Glaciation extracted 400 feet of seawater from the world’s oceans. The islands and atolls began growing as the seas rose. They’ve continued growing with every additional foot of sea level rise, and show no signs of stopping.

Cosquer Cave’s Paleolithic paintings near Marseille, France (the entrance is 115 feet below current sea level) and a Mel Fisher dive team’s discovery of charred tree branches and pine cones from a forest fire 8,400 years ago in 40 feet of water off the Florida coast further attest to steadily rising seas.

Yet, experts tell us. (1) “Snows are less frequent and less deep. The rivers scarcely ever freeze over now. There is an unfortunate fluctuation between heat and cold in the spring, which is very fatal to fruits.” (2) “We were astonished by the total absence of ice in Barrow Strait. I was here at this time [six years ago] – still frozen up – and doubts were entertained as to the possibility of escape.” (3) “The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer, and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot.”

It behooves to take action. Or perhaps not. Quotation (1) is from Thomas Jefferson’s diary, 1799; (2) from Sir Francis McClintock’s ship’s log, 1860; (3) from a Washington Post article, November 2, 1922.

Instead of parroting scare stories – and demanding that fossil fuels be replaced by pseudo-clean, pseudo-renewable energy – it really behooves us to think, analyze, ponder the many ways fossil fuels improve our lives, and demand real evidence instead of GIGO computer models for any supposed climate crisis.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death and articles on energy, climate and other issues.

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April 10, 2022 at 08:13AM

Daily News 10 Apr 2022

How To Save Energy

By Paul Homewood

I spotted this in a pub yesterday. It is evidently from the 1970s, but is also a grim omen of our wonderful Net Zero future:

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April 10, 2022 at 07:39AM

Daily News 10 Apr 2022

IPCC scientists say it’s ‘now or never’ to limit warming

By Paul Homewood

It’s now or never! Now where have I heard that before?

UN scientists have unveiled a plan that they believe can limit the root causes of dangerous climate change.

A key UN body says in a report that there must be "rapid, deep and immediate" cuts in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Global emissions of CO2 would need to peak within three years to stave off the worst impacts.

Even then, the world would also need technology to suck CO2 from the skies by mid-century.

After a contentious approval session where scientists and government officials went through the report line by line, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has now published its guidance on what the world can do to avoid an extremely dangerous future.

First, the bad news – even if all the policies to cut carbon that governments had put in place by the end of 2020 were fully implemented, the world will still warm by 3.2C this century.

This finding has drawn the ire of the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

"Some government and business leaders are saying one thing – but doing another. Simply put, they are lying. And the results will be catastrophic."

That sort of temperature rise would see our planet hit by "unprecedented heatwaves, terrifying storms, and widespread water shortages".

To avoid that fate, the world must keep the rise in temperatures at or under 1.5C this century, say researchers.

The good news is that this latest IPCC summary shows that it can be done, in what Mr Guterres calls a "viable and financially sound manner".

But keeping temperatures down will require massive changes to energy production, industry, transport, our consumption patterns and the way we treat nature.

To stay under 1.5C, according to the IPCC, means that carbon emissions from everything that we do, buy, use or eat must peak by 2025, and tumble rapidly after that, reaching net-zero by the middle of this century.

"It’s game over for the fossil fuels that are fuelling both wars and climate chaos," said Kaisa Kosonen from Greenpeace, who was an observer at the IPCC approval session.

"There’s no room for any new fossil fuel developments, and the coal and gas plants we already have need to close early."

But diets and lifestyles will also need changing, with huge scope for major carbon savings, according to the authors.

"Having the right policies, infrastructure and technology in place to enable changes to our lifestyles and behaviour can result in a 40-70% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. This offers significant untapped potential," said IPCC Co-chair Priyadarshi Shukla.

"The evidence also shows that these lifestyle changes can improve our health and wellbeing."

In practice, this means governments doing more to encourage walking and healthy eating, and putting in place the infrastructure for far more electric vehicles…

One of the most contentious aspects of the report concerns the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

This can be done in a number of different ways, including through planting trees and making changes to farming practices.

But the report finds that to keep warming from going over the dangerous 1.5C threshold, we will need more than new forests.

Keeping temperatures down will require machines to remove CO2 directly from the atmosphere.

This is very contentious as the technology is new and currently very expensive.

Some participants in the IPCC process are highly sceptical that these approaches will work.

"The idea of quick emissions reductions and large negative emissions technologies are a concern," said Prof Arthur Petersen, from UCL, who was an observer in the approval session.

"There are a lot of pipe dreams in this report."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-60984663

Pipe dreams indeed!

What I find amazing is the apoplectic reaction of Guterres, not to mention the absurd Matt McGrath and his chums in Greenpeace. Did not any of them actually read the Paris Agreement? If they had, they would have seen that it did nothing to cut emissions by 2030, never mind halve them. On the contrary, the actual Agreement projected a a large increase in emissions, based on the INDCs submitted by every country.

According to the IPCC Press Release, we must halve emissions by 2030:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/resources/press

That clearly is not going to happen. Even in the UK, the CCC’s Fifth Carbon Budget only targets a cut of 25%. The idea that China, India and the rest of the developing world are going to cut emissions at all is nonsensical, even if they wanted to, which they don’t.

Beyond 2030, the real pipe dreams kick in. Unproven and expensive technologies such as removing CO2 from the air and carbon capture, for instance.

There is also talk of totally reordering our lives and the cities we live in – “compact and walkable” is one phrase used. Meat eating does not escape either.

Much hope is pinned on falling costs for renewables, but the report fails to address the simple fact that intermittent wind and solar cannot run a modern economy.

But the real objective of the UN is revealed by our old friend Jim Skea. co-chair of this IPCC Working Group and long time member of the Committee on Climate Change:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/resources/press

Translation- “We in the West are consuming far too much, and it is not fair that we are richer than the rest of the world. We must make you poorer”

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April 10, 2022 at 06:36AM

Daily News 10 Apr 2022

INTERESTING LETTER BY LORD CHRISTOPHER MONCKTON

Your suggestion that warmer worldwide weather has caused net loss of life, particularly among the world’s fast-declining population of poor people, is fashionable but misplaced.

The Editor, The Lancet

Sir,

Your notion of a “climate crisis” (editorial "Climate and COVID-19: converging crises," December 2; click here for the PDF), though fashionable among the classe politique, is misplaced. That notion sprang from an elementary error of physics perpetrated in the 1980s by climate scientists who had borrowed feedback formulism from control theory, another branch of physics, without quite understanding it. Interdisciplinary compartmentalization delayed its identification until now.

After correcting the error, anthropogenic global warming will be only one-third of current midrange projections, well within natural variability and net-beneficial to life and health. CO₂ fertilization (for CO₂ is plant food) has assisted in steadily increasing crop yields – this year’s global harvest has set yet another record – and in improving drought resistance (Hao et al., 2014) and greening the planet.

Your suggestion that warmer worldwide weather has caused net loss of life, particularly among the world’s fast-declining population of poor people, is fashionable but misplaced. Cold is a bigger killer than warmth. Research conducted three years ago for the European Commission found that, for this reason, even if there were 5.4 C° global warming from 2020-2080, there would be 100,000 more Europeans than with no warming at all.

However, now that nearly all major banks – citing “global warming” as their pretext – refuse to lend to developing countries for coal-fired electricity, a billion people lack the capacity to turn on a 60 W lightbulb for just four hours a day (the International Energy Agency’s scarcely generous definition of “access to electricity”). According to the WHO, 4 million annually die of particulate pollution from smoke in cooking fires because they lack domestic electrical power and, for the same lack, 500,000 women die in childbirth. These are just two of the many causes of death from lack of access to electricity that kill tens of millions annually. The chief reason why so many cannot turn on a light is not global warming but misconceived policies intended to address what is in reality a non-problem.

More than 90% of all new greenhouse-gas emissions (BP Annual Review of Energy, 2019) are in nations exempt from the Paris agreement, which, after correction of the error of physics, is in any event supererogatory. You have said China must do more, but China – though it has its own space programme and continues to occupy Tibet by military force – is exempt from Paris on the ground that it is a “developing country”. It is not required to forswear its sins of emission.

Your advocacy of “low-carbon diets” is fashionable but misplaced. Like it or not, we have evolved over 2 million years to eat meat, which can provide all necessary energy, nutrients and vitamins. Yet ill-informed official guidelines on both sides of the Atlantic recommend low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets. Those recommendations have demonstrably been the chief cause of the surge in obesity and diabetes in both the UK and the USA. They were abandoned by court order a decade ago in Sweden at the instance of a brave doctor whom the medical authorities had attempted to prosecute because she cured all her diabetes patients by ignoring the guidelines and recommending a high-fat, low-carb diet.

Your advocacy of “renewable” energy is fashionable but misplaced. Using 14^th-century technology to address a 21^st-century non-problem would be silly enough in itself. What is worse, however, is that “renewables” have not only quadrupled the price of electricity but have also added to CO₂ emissions. The chief reason for this apparent paradox is that the more windmills and solar panels are connected to the grid the more grossly-inefficient, CO₂-emitting spinning reserve must be maintained in the often vain hope of preventing blackouts when the wind stops or the night falls.

With respect, The Lancet should study more science and economics, however unfashionable, and peddle less totalitarian politics, however fashionable and profitable – and deadly.

With all good wishes,

Viscount Monckton of Brenchley