Category: Uncategorized

Uncategorized 19 Jun 2017

Exit From Paris Climate Accord: A Re-Founding Of American Democracy?

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
http://www.thegwpf.com

In an interview with the French liberal newspaper Contrepoints, Belgian philosopher Drieu Godefridi discusses his view that the exit of the Trump Administration from the Paris Agreement is a sensible return to American democracy.

Drieu Godefridi

Interview with Drieu Godefridi, Belgian philosopher, jurist, author of “Le GIEC etMort; Vive le Science” (The IPCC is Dead: Long Live Science) published in English under the title “The IPCC: A Scientific Body?” Godefridi discusses his view that the exit of the Trump Administration from the Paris Agreement is a sensible return to American democracy. Godefridi traces the incremental takeover of public policy by globalists and minority view activists using unelected, unaccountable politically-rife bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) under the guise of ‘science’ to foist ever-more economically detrimental demands on the West. These groups use contrived morality and guilt to affect a bank hold-up, the trigger-about-to-be-pulled being the ‘climate catastrophe.’

Without arguing the science, President Trump called that bluff as he exited the Paris Agreement.He called it on economic and common-sense grounds, being accountable and representing the interests of Americans as an elected official. This is in stark contrast to the EU where the unelected, unaccountable EU commission has become detached from the people’s needs and entrenched in the ideological fantasy of the day. This translation includes this introduction and clarifying details for North American audiences.

Question: Drieu Godefridi, you qualify the American decision to leave the Paris Agreement as the re-founding act of the American democracy. Could you expand on this surprising point of view, surprising at least, compared to that of most European politicians and analysts?

Reply: You are right, this point of view is undoubtedly in the minority. Globalists are now considered as opposed to nationalists. The Europeans and the American Democrats would be the Globalists. The nationalists are the Republican supporters of “America First”. From this point of view, to the Globalist, everything is simple: the American exit from the Paris Accord is a selfish act of a narrow nationalist who cares about the immediate economic interests of America at the expense of the collective interest and that of the planet.

On the surface, this narrative is very convincing, it has only one fault: it is false.

The Paris Accord marks the apotheosis, not of “globalism,” but of a particular version of globalism, which one should rather qualify as socialist. Indeed, let us recall the actual content of the Paris Agreement! What does it foresee? Essentially, two things: the drastic reduction of CO₂ emissions in the West, right away, with the possibility for states such as China – the world’s largest CO₂ emitter – to continue to increase emissions to 2030, with no requirement whatsoever to reduce emissions. The second essential component of “Paris” is the Green Fund, which provides for the transfer of $ 100 billion a year from the West to the rest of the world. “Paris” is therefore, first and foremost, the triumph of what was called “support for the Third World” in the 70s and 80s, that is to say, a massive and permanent transfer of wealth from the West to the rest of the world.

Question: We can see the socialist component. But what about globalism? How does the Paris Agreement contribute to globalism?

Reply: “Paris” is doubly globalist: first, because the transfer of wealth will be done through a clever network of international institutions, such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Green Fund — an institution, with a secretariat, directors, exotic meeting places, etc. —and all the intermediate institutions created by the Paris Agreement.

Secondly, “Paris” is driven by “morality” with the IPCC itself employing the services of moral philosophers to help them make their political case. The founding moral intuition which presides over the Paris Agreement is internationalist socialism. International socialism has always considered that the differential of wealth that benefits the West results from the pillage of the rest of the planet. This is described in terms of imperialism, colonization, exploitation of weaker partners. In that world view, the only “just” solution (aka “climate justice”) to this is the immediate and unconditional transfer of a substantial portion of these wealth to the rest of the world. Thus, the Paris Accord discloses itself clearly as a matter of globalism, but of a very particular vision of it – internationalist socialism.

Question: Even if the Paris Agreement is indeed motivated by a socialist vision, is it not selfish and unjust on the part of the Americans to refuse to share their wealth?

Reply: The founding thesis of universalist socialism is that the wealth of the West is born of the plunder of the rest of the world. This is obviously false, and this has been demonstrated time and time again. The West owes its surplus of wealth to the preference given over five centuries to a particular economic system, capitalism! [1] The West has rejected the alternatives, socialism or subsistence. Moreover, the falsehood about the capitalist West as simple global robber barons is so well entrenched in leftist/socialist/globalists that even the concessions and foreign aid made to date by the West on are never enough to satisfy the transfer of wealth desired by the Third Worldists.

With the Paris Accord, which is not born from nothing, we enter a completely different dimension. This time, it is no longer morality, generosity or compassion (i.e. disaster relief) that requires the transfer of the wealth of the West. It’s science! It is the idea that because the Western industrial world has polluted the world for so many years should mean that the West must transfer its wealth to the rest of the world, which can continue to pollute. Further, this guilt money must be paid into the Green Fund which puts unaccountable, unelected green groups and green rent-seekers an opportunity to exploit this ultimate global subsidy for renewable-intermittent energies! Admire the finesse of the process: it employs the very strength of the West — capitalism — to show that the West has sinned. How naive and amateur are the Third Worldists of the past, with their moral arguments, faced with the omnipotence of the scientific argument!

However, and this should have put the flea in the ear of at least some of the European “leaders”, the results are exactly the same: bleeding the West to the benefit of the rest of the world.

Full interview

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

June 19, 2017 at 05:26AM

Uncategorized 19 Jun 2017

Matt Ridley: Gove Needs To Watch Out For The Green Lobby

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
http://www.thegwpf.com

From badgers to clean-air rules, environmentalists will fight him every inch of the way to protect their vested interests

Even Michael Gove’s enemies concede he is good at tackling vested interests. Even his friends concede he has a knack for making enemies in the process. In his new job as secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs, if he is to achieve anything, he may have to do a lot of both. So here’s a field guide to the vested interests he will encounter in the countryside.

Bruce Yandle, the American economist, once coined a phrase to explain why the disastrous policy of prohibition became law in the United States between 1920 and 1933: “Bootleggers and Baptists”. A very effective coalition developed between high-minded, high-profile moral campaigners and low-mind, low-profile smuggling profiteers to push for the outlawing of alcohol. The result was legislation that was good for bootleggers and Baptists but bad for society as a whole.

As Mr Yandle put it: “Baptists lower the costs of favour-seeking for the bootleggers, because politicians can pose as being motivated purely by the public interest even while they promote the interests of well-funded businesses”.

This coalition is alive and well in the farming and environmental world. Bootlegger car makers got politicians to give tax breaks to diesel cars on the Baptist grounds that they produce less carbon dioxide, with the result that we have worse air pollution than we would have had. Baptist greens preach about the imminent dangers of climate change, enabling their bootlegger chums in the renewable-energy industry to trouser vast subsidies for ruining landscapes and killing eagles while reducing emissions very little, if at all. Politicians fall for it.

Selfless conservationists portray themselves as disinterested saviours of species while their high-viz-clad colleagues profit from the expensive requirements for lucrative but futile surveys of newts, bats, owls, butterflies, badgers, otters, birds and bees in any piece of ground zoned for development — doing literally nothing for such species except counting them.

Farmers nobly say they are feeding a hungry world and protecting the countryside from ruin, while actually defending a subsidy system that deters innovation, gives them a retirement income and pushes up the price of land.

In other words, Mr Gove will not have to learn the difference between the lesser whitethroat and the spotted flycatcher to do well in his new job, but he will have to spot the vested bootleggers hiding behind the green Baptists. He will be familiar with the problem from his time as education secretary, where he took on the teachers and civil servants on the grounds that they were sometimes serving their own interests more than those of their clients — children.

The civil servants in Defra are almost entirely in thrall to whatever the big environmental pressure groups say, in a fine case of regulatory capture or Parkinson’s law: greens lobby for regulations, which civil servants need bigger budgets to administer, and the monitoring of which can be outsourced back to the same greens.

Try telling an environmental bureaucrat that you think his or her priorities or methods are wrong and prepare to be denounced on moral — not practical — grounds by their allies in organisations with very big budgets. Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the World Wide Fund For Nature are huge multinationals these days with a combined annual budget of more than a billion dollars, a big chunk of which is spent on lobbying, suing and public relations — rather than practical conservation.

Yet some green priorities are wrong and somebody needs to say so. The current obsession of the environmental pressure groups, shared by the civil servants and quangocrats, is that there must be no “watering down” of environmental designations after Brexit. That is to say, the alphabet soup of “special protected areas”, “marine conservation zones”, “Ramsar sites”, “sites of special scientific interest”, “areas of outstanding natural beauty” and so forth must not be lost, even though some of them derive from European legislation. […]

Mr Gove should demand that environmental policies are judged by their results, not their intentions. In fisheries, air pollution, tackling invasive species, reforming farm subsidies, wildlife conservation, badgers, landscape protection, genetically modified food and pesticides, what counts is not the size of the budget going in, the moral motive behind it, or the number of committees overseeing it — but whether it gets results. That should be the watchword of the new Defra secretary.

Full post

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

June 19, 2017 at 04:56AM

Uncategorized 19 Jun 2017

Scientific Papers Indicate Natural Processes Dominate Changes In Ozone Hole, Methane And CO2 Emissions

via NoTricksZone
http://notrickszone.com

What If Human Emissions

Aren’t All That Influential?

We have been led to believe that we can control the size of the ozone hole and both methane and CO2 concentrations with our emissions.

We have also been led to believe we control weather patterns (storminess, droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes); we control tropospheric, atmospheric, surface, and deep ocean temperatures; we control glacier retreat and advance; we control relative sea level; we control whether or not over million species go extinct by 2050 . . . all by emitting more or less gaseous substances in our pursuit of energy and comfort.

What if we are overestimating our impact on the planet? What if our gaseous emissions don’t really have anywhere near the impact we think they do?

What if we are too arrogant to even consider the possibility that the Earth cannot be “saved” by building more wind turbines and solar panels and recycling more plastic?

“We’re so self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. ‘Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.’ And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet – we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet.”

“The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!” — George Carlin

NASA: Montreal Protocol Not Responsible For Ozone Changes – Natural Meteorology Is

NASA Reveals New Results From Inside the Ozone Hole

“NASA scientists have revealed the inner workings of the ozone hole that forms annually over Antarctica and found that declining chlorine in the stratosphere [from reduced human emissions] has not yet caused a recovery of the ozone hole. …. [T]wo new studies show that signs of recovery are not yet present, and that temperature and winds are still driving any annual changes in ozone hole size. … The classic metrics create the impression that the ozone hole has improved as a result of the Montreal protocol. In reality, meteorology was responsible for the increased ozone and resulting smaller hole, as ozone-depleting substances that year were still elevated. The study has been submitted to the journal of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

“‘Ozone holes with smaller areas and a larger total amount of ozone are not necessarily evidence of recovery attributable to the expected chlorine decline,’ said Susan Strahan of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.”

Most Of The Measured Change In Ozone Is Natural, Not Anthropogenic

Hess et al., 2015

“[A] large portion of the measured change [in ozone] is not due to changes in [anthropogenic] emissions, but can be traced to changes in large-scale modes of ozone variability. This emphasizes the difficulty in the attribution of ozone changes, and the importance of natural variability in understanding the trends and variability of ozone.

Introduction: “Lin et al. (2014) attribute decadal changes in the interannual Mauna Loa ozone record to shifts in circulation patterns. However, at other locations, ozone exhibits considerable interannual variability on decadal timescales that has not been adequately explained (e.g., Koumoutsaris et al., 2008). In many cases, this ozone variability is not easily ascribed to changes in emissions. For example, changes in emissions do not explain the baseline ozone trends at Mace Head, Ireland (e.g., Hess and Zbinden, 2013; Fiore et al., 2009), measured as strongly positive during the most of the 1990s but since leveling off (Carslaw, 2005; Derwent et al., 2007, 2013; Simmonds et al., 2004). In an analysis of ozone trends over Europe, Wilson et al. (2012) conclude that the impact of European precursor emission reductions was masked by other sources of unknown ozone variability. Analyses by Logan et al. (2012) and Cui et al. (2011) show that the measured ozone increases at Alpine sites over Europe during the 1990s followed by decreases after 2000 are not easily explained by changes in emissions or changes in lower stratospheric ozone. Pozzoli et al. (2011) conclude that changes in meteorology and natural emissions account for 75 % of ozone variability from 1980 to 2005, largely masking changes in anthropogenic emissions. On decadal timescales, ozone trends can depend sensitively on the exact time period examined (Cui et al., 2011).”

Ozone Hole Grew To (2015) Record Size Due To Natural Forcing

Ivy et al., 2017

“Recent research has demonstrated that the concentrations of anthropogenic halocarbons have decreased in response to the worldwide phaseout of ozone depleting substances. Yet, in 2015 the Antarctic ozone hole reached a historical record daily average size in October. Model simulations with specified dynamics and temperatures based on a reanalysis suggested that the record size was likely due to the eruption of Calbuco, but did not allow for fully-coupled dynamical or thermal feedbacks. We present simulations of the impact of the 2015 Calbuco eruption on the stratosphere using the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model with interactive dynamics and temperatures. Comparisons of the interactive and specified dynamics simulations indicate that chemical ozone depletion due to volcanic aerosols played a key role in establishing the record-sized ozone hole of October 2015. The analysis of an ensemble of interactive simulations with and without volcanic aerosols suggests that the forced response to the eruption of Calbuco was an increase in the size of the ozone hole by 4.5 million km2.”

Due To Measurement Uncertainties, ‘Methane Emissions Might Not Have Increased Dramatically…After All’

Turner et al., 2017

“We conclude that the current surface observing system does not allow unambiguous attribution of the decadal trends in methane without robust constraints on OH variability, which currently rely purely on methyl chloroform data and its uncertain emissions estimates.”

[press release]

“[M]ethane emissions might not have increased dramatically in 2007 after all. Instead, the most likely explanation has less to do with methane emissions and more to do with changes in the availability of the hydroxyl (OH) radical, which breaks down methane in the atmosphere. As such, the amount of hydroxyl in the atmosphere governs the amount of methane. If global levels of hydroxyl decrease, global methane concentrations will increase — even if methane emissions remain constant, the researchers say. … When atmospheric concentrations of methane increase, it may not be correct to chalk it up solely to an increase in methane emissions“

Recent Methane Rise ‘Biogenic’ – Fossil Fuel Emissions Not A Driving Factor

Nisbet et al., 2016

“The isotopic evidence presented here suggests that the methane rise [2007-2014] was dominated by significant increases in biogenic methane emissions, particularly in the tropics, for example, from expansion of tropical wetlands in years with strongly positive rainfall anomalies or emissions from increased agricultural sources such as ruminants and rice paddies. Changes in the removal rate of methane by the OH radical have not been seen in other tracers of atmospheric chemistry and do not appear to explain short-term variations in methane. Fossil fuel emissions may also have grown, but the sustained shift to more 13C-depleted values and its significant interannual variability, and the tropical and Southern Hemisphere loci of post-2007 growth, both indicate that fossil fuel emissions have not been the dominant factor driving the increase. A major cause of increased tropical wetland and tropical agricultural methane emissions, the likely major contributors to growth, may be their responses to meteorological change.”

IPCC Estimates Of Methane Emissions Overestimated, Not Distinguishable From Natural Background

Ruppel and Kessler, 2017

“On the contemporary Earth, gas hydrate is dissociating in specific terrains in response to post-LGM [last glacial maximum] climate change and probably also due to warming since the onset of the Industrial Age. Nevertheless, there is no conclusive proof that the released methane is entering the atmosphere at a level that is detectable against the background of ~555 Tg yr⁻¹ CH₄ emissions. The IPCC estimates are not based on direct measurements of methane fluxes from dissociating gas hydrates, and many numerical models adopt simplifications that do not fully account for sinks, the actual distribution of gas hydrates, or other factors, resulting in probable overestimation of emissions to the ocean-atmosphere system.”

The Domination Of Natural CO2 Emissions

Carey et al., 2017

“While scientists and policy experts debate the impacts of global warming, Earth’s soil is releasing roughly nine times more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than all human activities combined.”

Reich et al., 2016

“Plant respiration results in an annual flux of carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere that is six times as large as that due to the emissions from fossil fuel burning, so changes in either will impact future climate.”

Zimmerman et al., 1982

“The estimated gross amount of CO2 produced [by termites] is more than twice the net global input from fossil fuel combustion. As we noted above, termites process the equivalent of about 28 percent of the earth’s NPP [net primary productivity, or plant energy].”

Harde, 2017

“The anthropogenic contribution to the actual CO₂ concentration is found to be 4.3%, [and] its fraction to the CO₂increase over the Industrial Era is 15%“

Munshi, 2015

“[R]esults do not indicate a measurable year to year effect of annual anthropogenic emissions on the annual rate of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere.”

via NoTricksZone http://notrickszone.com

June 19, 2017 at 03:55AM

Uncategorized 19 Jun 2017

Why “Climate Science” Snubs Climatic Temperature

via Watts Up With That?
http://ift.tt/1Viafi3

Guest essay by Leo Goldstein

When something pretending to be a science cannot adequately define a quantity for its central subject, this something is inarguably a pseudo-science. This is certainly the case in the self-professed “climate science.” It proposes the hypothesis of a dangerously warming climate, but does it define a meaningful climatic temperature that can be robustly calculated from the observations at the current time? To the extent that it does define climatic temperature (meaningfully or not), does it pay much attention to this quantity? The answer to both these questions is a resounding NO.

The proper term climatic temperature is traditionally used in unapproved climate-related web publications. But IPCC and IPCC-aligned papers typically use the word “climatological” instead of “climatic” (possibly to overcome an insecurity about their status relative to science; like ‘scientology’), but the proper word is climatic.

IPCC AR5 fails to define either “climatological temperature” or climatic temperature. A Google search for “climatological temperature” on the IPCC website (ipcc.ch) finds only 3 results, none of which defines or explains the term. A Google Scholar search for “climatological temperature” finds 2,220 results from 2010, but none of the top results uses this term as defined above.

Per the World Meteorological Organization, climatological temperature is one of the climatological standard normals which are defined as follows:

“The general recommendation was to use 30-year periods of reference. The 30-year period of reference was set as a standard mainly because only 30 years of data were available for summarization when the recommendation was first made,” (WMO, 2011) and “Under the current WMO Technical Regulations, recognising the realities of a changing climate, climatological standard normals are defined as averages of climatological data computed for successive 30-year periods, updated every ten years, with the first year of the period ending in 1, and the last year, with 0.” (WMO, 2016).

The climatist practice of calculating climatological temperature once every ten years while yelling that “it is worse than was thought yesterday” every week is not relevant here. Climatological temperature is a centered simple average of the so-called global surface temperature over 30 years, and can be calculated for any time 15.5 years or more back. But “climatological temperature” is used very rarely. It’s been hardly used by the most notorious climate papers. Typically, these papers show plots of alleged annual surface temperatures with linear regression lines over the convenient time periods. Sensitivity to the selection of end points is a well-known shortcoming of the linear regression, and the “climate scientists” fully exploit this. Thus, failure to define and to use suitable climatic temperature doesn’t seem accidental but intentional, stemming from a desire to confuse scientists and the general public.

The science of climate variability will need to break away from the infamous climate pseudo-science and the influence of international bodies. As part of this break away, I propose the definition and calculation of climatic quantities as an exponential moving average (“EMA”) of the corresponding annual values with a smoothing factor α = 0.048. In particular, climatic temperature, at any time, should be defined and calculated as EMA with α = 0.048 of the appropriate annual global average land surface temperature⁽¹⁾ through the last year for which full data is available (usually the few weeks after the end of the year).

The smoothing factor is selected to match 30 years simple average α = 0.048 ≈ 1/(30*ln(2)). Thus, the present climatic temperature would approximately match 30 years average centered about 15 years ago. It will be calculated once per year, probably in February. EMA is a more robust statistic than simple moving average, and more responsive because it weighs recent years heavier. EMA of temperature has been frequently proposed in climate realist literature.

After the standardized climatic average enters a use, anybody showing plots of annual global temperatures shall be laughed out of the room.

________________________________

(1) Selection of the appropriate annual global temperature averaging method is a non-trivial problem (Essex, McKitrick & Andresen, 2007), and it is outside of the scope of this paper. Obviously, the method of climatic temperature calculation should not be changed after selection. Preferably, one of few methods widely used prior to the rise of climate alarmism should be used. Another non-trivial problem is finding and building a non-fabricated temperature data set.

References

Essex, McKitrick & Andresen, 2007. Does a Global Temperature Exist? Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics, http://ift.tt/2sO4K27. Available from Eike-Klima-Energie

WMO, 2011. Guide to Climatological Practices. http://ift.tt/2sOedXs

WMO, 2016. Update to Guide to Climatological Practices. http://ift.tt/2ruXowC

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June 19, 2017 at 03:42AM