Leigh Revers writes at National Post Canada Universities better get prepared for Poilievre’s anti-woke agenda.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

‘Even the dullest minds in the upper administrations of Canada’s top universities
— and trust me, they are spectacularly dull — must see the writing on the wall’

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre leaves after a meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and fellow opposition leaders on Parliament Hill in early December. Photo by Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

The recent spectacular and decisive presidential election victory by Donald Trump — a self-styled benevolent “dictator” swept to power with an unequivocal mandate from U.S. voters — has become what can only be described as a political tsunami for left-leaning observers.

Vast change is in the offing. The political tectonic plates have shifted, prompting shattering eruptions along a number of predictable fault lines.

One such fiery volcano is gender ideology, a demonstrable fantasy that, mercifully, will soon be banished from American institutions, its many purveyors quickly to be bankrupted by Trump’s proposed state-assisted lawsuits brought by the swelling ranks of detransitioners.

A second is education, a metaphorical marshmallow that is no longer merely the artificially-sweetened confection promised to so many young people, but has instead become more like a skewered and charred husk grilled remorselessly on the three-pronged toasting fork of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

Americans need worry no longer, however. In a recent post on X, Elon Musk shared Donald Trump’s radical vision of a reformed college education system — one that demands the eradication of all DEI and its apparatchiks, and even threatens uncompliant institutions with severe taxation or complete forfeiture of their sprawling endowments. Inevitably, we will witness brazen back-peddling by the cadre of top-tier administrators desperate to remain gainfully employed. Harvard’s board, sitting on a treasure horde of US$53.2B (C$74.8B), will doubtless respond accordingly.

How will Canadian universities survive? While plunging needles into voodoo dolls of Pierre Poilievre, the left will eschew the ‘scary’ stateside politics, make accusations of neo-fascism, and point to Canada as a progressive retreat, a haven for the many orphans of woke ideology who, even now, are threatening on their social feeds to lay siege to our border, waving their American passports.

But what is far more likely, judging from predictions by even the state-sponsored CBC which suggest with 99 per cent certainty a Conservative win in 2025, is that the Canadian government in a year’s time will follow suit. Even the dullest minds in the upper administrations of Canada’s top universities — and trust me, they are spectacularly dull — must see the writing on the wall.

Here is the unvarnished reality in Canada in higher education in 2024. Students are being ripped off. Their degrees have been continuously devalued by the twin cudgels of enrolment inflation, as ballooning cohorts are funnelled through our universities, and the softening of standards in the face of academic appeasement and growing accommodations.

You might raise an eyebrow at that last remark. Academic accommodations are a form of concessionism where, according to a recent report at Queen’s University, nearly one in four students (22 per cent) gain some kind of benefit, usually in the shape of extended time allotments for examinations, to correct for what is often a largely imagined state of mental impairment.

In short, if you get anxious, the university concedes that you deserve more time than everyone else. This hardly constitutes quality education, and it inevitably dilutes academic standards. Obsequious compassion is showered on the deserving minorities; but if you are a hard-working student with no stakes in the victimhood game, well, you just have to suck it up.

Universities have consequently become expensive pre-adulthood training grounds that now choose to deride diligence, talent, and commitment in favour of equitable practices that attempt to champion anyone choosing to identify into minorities defined by inherent characteristics — gender, race, and sexuality. Indeed, their compulsive obsession with “belonging” — cited a mere 27 times, for example, in UofT’s most recent 17-page DEI report — has all the allure of a brain hemorrhage.

It will be interesting to see how they adapt to this new, inclement climate. For instance, in my own department, there are 40 staffers who support a suite of professional graduate programs.  Based on published United Steel Workers’ pay scales and benefit rates, this costs the university — a taxpayer-funded enterprise — well in excess of $3.5M per year. For a typical program, a quarter of the allotted budget is sucked up by administrative overhead. All of the appointees would doubtless declare graduate-school exceptionalism and, in the same breath, grouse about the ever-present patriarchy. But inspection shows only 24 per cent are men, and 40 per cent are, unsurprisingly, white women.

Now, sandwiched between provincial funding cuts and a collapse in international student admissions, campuses like mine will have to muster major savings as budget holes dilate in an ever-gloomier climate. Punitive financial incentives imposed by an incoming Conservative government will doubtless see a rapid turnaround as academics and administrators alike rush to gaslight everyone claiming that woke waste — characterized so effectively by journalist Charlotte Gill in Britain — was all “unintentional.”

Pull the other one. Recent propaganda sheets such as The Bulletin of the Canadian Association of University Teachers and Academic Matters, the journal of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations, which purport to represent professors like myself, are awash with racist DEI and tout a slavish fealty to obsessive and damaging social justice ideology. If you belong to the editorial team of either of these absurd political pamphlets, please drop me from your mailing list.

There is hope for students. Jordan Peterson has lately launched his academy, which, though limited to the social sciences so far, has breached the universities’ monopoly and comes at a bargain price. And the content is excellent, featuring such stellar authorities as Andrew Roberts, James Orr, John Vervaeke, Eric Kaufmann and a host of others. I’ve signed up.

Time is running out for legacy universities across Canada. I have a fancy next year we will see the same wave of comedy meltdowns that followed Trump’s re-election, just this time by an army of capitulating academics. “We didn’t mean to indoctrinate you with our untested ideology — Please give us more money.” Clink-clink. Too bad. It’s not in the cards.

Leigh Revers is associate professor with the Institute for Management and Innovation at the University of Toronto.

via Science Matters

https://ift.tt/aYnZD0q

December 29, 2024 at 12:34PM

Guest Essay by Kip Hansen — 28 December 2024 — 1800 words – lots of images

Reservoirs are simple.  They can be viewed as a Rain Barrel with a water spout (from a roof, for instance) supplying incoming water, a faucet near the bottom of the barrel for extracting water from the barrel, and some overflow mechanism.  

The Great Salt Lake – an Exemplar

One of the iconic geographical features of the American west is the Great Salt Lake (GSL).  Now the GSL is not a reservoir, but it can serve us here as a lesson about the reservoirs of the Southwestern US. 

A recent letter to the Salt Lake Tribune from a subscriber rightly accused the newspaper and Utah Public Radio of misrepresenting the plight of the GSL in a recent three-part series.  The reader, Maria Archibald, writes succinctly: 

“…snow (or lack thereof) is not even a primary cause of the lake’s decline. Precipitation cannot solve a problem it did not cause, and asserting otherwise is both incorrect and dangerous. Sure, the extra snow [winter 2022 and 2023] offered Great Salt Lake a temporary reprieve and may have postponed its collapse by a few years, but humans continue to guzzle one million acre-feet more than our water system can sustain….”

Archibald is absolutely correct;  weather, which affects precipitation (mostly snowpack in the case of the GSL), is NOT the reason the lake levels are low, getting lower or remaining low.  I found the same to be true when I wrote about this issue last year.  I recommend Andy May’s most recent essay on drought in the Great Southwest for  an answer to this question.

For the Great Salt Lake, there is only inflow and evaporation (which is the outflow).  The volume of water in the lake at any one time (measured by its surface level) depends almost entirely on the amount of water ALLOWED to enter the lake.   Evaporation changes with weather (mostly temperature) but is not a controllable variable.  In our GSL Water Barrel example, water is diverted from the downspout – diverted from all of the streams and rivers that naturally flow to the GSL, for human use as drinking water and irrigation for agricultural.  These uses annually divert 2.1 million acre feet (MAF) of the water that would otherwise enter the lake leaving the lake with an annual deficit – overall loss – of 1.2 million acre feet of water.  Thus, the lake cannot return to the size preferred by conservationists and environmentalists [pdf].

Note:  That deficit, in words, is three hundred ninety-one billion twenty-one million one hundred thirty thousand gallons of water.

For many, water in the Southwest means The Colorado River System

Two weeks ago, I wrote about U.S. Water Woes in the northeast part of the country – featuring NY City and Philadelphia.  Today I’d like to discuss the region most associated with not enough water in the eyes of most citizens and the main stream media – America’s great Southwest region.

This part of the United States is generally arid – dry – and almost all of it is recognizably to most people as desert (though not strictly so in the Köppen Classifications).

[ click here for full sized continental image ]

The yellow-beige-brown colors are arid areas…the purples are high mountains with snow cover in winter.  The greenish areas in Arizona and Southern California are a climate type called Warm Temperate with Dry Hot/Warm summers – they are not lush green areas as the color would seem to imply.  These are Climate Types – they have been the same for hundreds, and maybe many thousands of years. 

Normally, arid dry areas are sparsely populated, as inhabitants have to raise crops and keep herds to eat, and agriculture and herding require water.  Little water = little food.  But sometimes things don’t go that way.  The true Desert Southwest, as shown in the image here, is one of the fastest growing population areas of the country. As civilization has advanced, humans have found ways to live in challenging environments – even the U.S. Southwest. 

Add to that image, the Los Angeles/San Diego megalopolis, which occupies the entire coast west of that desert (shown in blue in the California map).   The population of the LA/SD megalopolis is about 23 million today.  Some of the water for Los Angeles is supplied by the Colorado.

Where does the water come from for all these people?  “The mighty Colorado River serves 40 million people in seven states and two states in Mexico. It also irrigates 5.5 million agricultural acres of land, including 15% of American agriculture and about 90% of the nation’s winter vegetables.”   That 40 million people represents 12% of the population of the United States.

So, as in the case of the U.S. Northeast,  some the precipitation that falls, as rain or snow,  is captured in reservoirs that hold the water and slowly feed it to the consumers.

So, what’s all the fuss about?

Lake Mead, formed by the Hoover Dam, is the primary reservoir for Colorado River water, by which we judge the availability of water for the southwest.  The water height has been falling since the turn of the century, almost 25 years.  Officially in a “Shortage Condition 2” – far below the Drought Condition.   As we’ll see I the images below, at the top of the system the major reservoir is lake Powell, behind the Glenn Canyon Dam.  Powell feeds Lake Mead.

Here’s the historical inflow of Lake Powell:

There have been up years and down years – most recently three low years followed in 2023 by a well up year and this year, with a month to go, a just below average year. 

Notice the dissimilarity between the top of the barrel inflow and the barrel water level – Lake Mead.

And coming out of Lake Powell, the streamflow at  Lee’s Ferry, which is considered the inflow for Lake Mead, looks like this long  term:

Let’s take a look at the whole system:

Here we have a map of the Colorado River Basins….both delineated on the East by the Continental Divide.  For our purposes – the Water Woes of the U.S. Southwest, the most important portions are the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin above Yuma, Arizona.  Let’s see the reservoirs:

These four lakes, their names sized by their relative importance, are the water supply for 40 million people – for their homes, their business, and the crops and herds.   

As we found in the Northeast with NY City’s reservoirs, some reservoirs supply the inflow to downstream reservoirs.  Here we see the northern tributaries to the Colorado, the Green and the San Juan (with their tributaries), have dams that divert some of the water and feed the rest downstream finally to Lake Powell, which itself feeds water through the Grand Canyon region to Lake Mead which feeds Lake Mohave which feeds Lake Havasu and on down south.

The northwest portion of Utah, seen to be outside of the Colorado River basin,  is the watershed for the Great Salt Lake.

In southern Arizona, the Salt and Gila Rivers run down to just north of Yuma, where they supply the water for the All American Canal, which feeds water to the rich agricultural lands of the Imperial Valley – and the runoff from those lands flows down into the Salton Sea.  Recently, water conservation efforts in the Imperial Valley have limited that runoff threatening the existence of the Salton Sea.

That map makes it appear that the mighty Colorado flows happily into the Gulf of California.  That is, for good or ill, not true.  Google Earth reveals:

The U.S.G.S. describes the area seen in the satellite photo above this way:

“….this NASA Earth Observatory satellite photo from September 2000 shows, irrigation and urban water needs now prevent the river from reaching its final destination. Rather, the Colorado River just disappears into the desert sands. …. The river comes to an end just south of the multicolored patchwork of farmlands in the northwestern corner of the image and then fans out at the base of the Sierra de Juarez Mountains. Only about 10 percent of all the water that flows into the Colorado River makes it into Mexico and most of that is used by the Mexican people for farming.”

The thin grey line in the photo is the official boundary formed by what would be the Colorado River, if it had water in it.

Bottom Lines:

1.  The American Southwest is a generally arid, dry region.  Unsuitable for dense human population, without the technologies necessary to store and move huge volumes of clean fresh water for drinking and agriculture.

2.  The US federal government built most of the major dams and aqueducts on the Colorado River between 1910 and 1970. The Colorado [and the Rio Grande] are now considered to be among the most controlled and litigated river systems in the world. Since 1960, the population of the region has tripled.

3.  Too Many People – Not Enough Water.  This simple fact is widely known to all levels of government in the Southwest – there are commissions and committees and treaties and agreements galore – none of which create more water but only serve to divide the available water a little differently with each new demand.

4.  Despite the scarcity of new water sources, towns and cities in the southwest continue to grow, with thousands of new homes being built and businesses moving into the area.   Some cities, such as Phoenix, have started to deny building permits for housing developments that don’t have adequate pre-planned water sources.

5.  Further north, in California, the Sacramento River, which flows into the Pacific via San Francisco Bay, is similarly being bled dry by the demands of the cities of Central California.  In wet years, the reverse is true – too much water flows through the Delta into the Bay. 

6.  The claims that the Water Woes of the Great American Southwest are due to “climate change” are simply false – the climate there has not changed in any appreciable or significant way – it is now and has been dry for a very long time.  It has been drier.

# # # # #

Author’s Comment:

I grew up in Southern California, Los Angeles.  Dry hot summers – occasional rain storms – now called Atmospheric Rivers –  washing houses down the steep mountainsides.  In university, I fought flooding and mudslides as a volunteer, with hundreds of other students.   Southern California politics were often overwhelmed by the California Water Wars.    

Just recently, California began to move ahead with a new reservoir, the Sites Reservoir, the first new reservoir in decades – and probably decades too late – and was actively opposed by various so-called conservation and environmental groups.

There is no shortage of water on the planet – but not always enough fresh water where it is needed or wanted. 

Thanks for reading.

# # # # #

---

Discover more from Watts Up With That?

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

via Watts Up With That?

https://ift.tt/qQBT07h

December 29, 2024 at 12:05PM

Citing Bloomberg, Blackout News here reports that “the use of coal continues to rise sharply.”

This suggests that the hundreds of billions invested annually in green energies are unable to satisfy the global demand for energy. Moreover, predictions of declining coal consumption are failing to materialize and show that green energy strategies are failing at enormous costs.

Source: IEA

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), coal use continues to rise instead of declining, thus surprising experts, who had expected coal use to be declining by now.

The IEA’s annual coal report shows global consumption will reach 8.87 billion tons by 2027 and that this consumption has risen by more than 1.2 billion tons since 2020.

Driven by China

The rising trend is being driven by China, which is consuming “record levels of coal”, currently 4.9 billion tons annually – which is more than half of global demand – despite the country’s promises to reduce reliance on coal.

Germany and UK consuming less

Germany and the UK, however, are significantly reducing coal use, but these countries are also now facing energy supply woes, high prices and economies that are teetering on the brink.

And since the USA’s newly elected President, Donald Trump, has pledged to make energy much cheaper, the pressure on Europe to reduce its energy costs has become enormous, thus making fossil energy crucial if it wants to remain competitive on global markets.

While coal consumption is declining in some developed nations, it’s increasing significantly in others, primarily in emerging economies. This poses a major challenge to the push for sustainable energy sources.

Green energy proponents, who have made lots of promises concerning the feasibility of green energies, are becoming ever more desperate for reports of successes when it comes to green energies. So far there haven’t been any!

Hat-tip: Blackout News. 

via NoTricksZone

https://ift.tt/iHhveCE

December 29, 2024 at 11:05AM

53.82782 -1.14830 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 1 Installed 1/1/1951 Temperature data archived from 1/1/1959. Elevation 6 metres a.m.s.l.

Cawood is a village formerly in the West Riding of Yorkshire but now defined as in North Yorkshire just north of Selby. Cawood is famous for its notable Sword and Sciantec part of Cawood an international agricultural research conglomerate who host the manually reporting climate weather station on behalf of the Met Office.

The unique Met Office’s own assessment of this site is “Excellent” and on a par with Rothamsted but that premium quality does not stop the Met office manipulating data in a wholly unacceptable manner. I personally challenge the Met Office to justify their actions with this station as detailed below.

The Cawood weather station site has been in the same place since it was originally installed with a continuous archived data set for 65 years since 1959. The manual readings are impeccably well kept with data from FOI indicating missing days observations are almost non existant – 365 days readings a year every year. In not being automated the readings will be from Liquid in Glass thermometers throughout the period with no change in instrumentation type to affect readings in any way. Although, like Rothamsted, some may claim the continually changing nature of the fields around are unnatural, I feel that is just nit picking. This site is probably as good as is possible in England and is very well run and maintained. A nationwide coverage of just 50 stations of this quality would prove an excellent reference source for historical temperature recording.

The Met Office operates a set of “Climate Averages” stations which show rolling 30 year climate averages from 1960 to date. As I demonstrated with Freedom on Information requested data in my Dungeness review, of 302 stations the Met Office quoted, 103 no longer exist. The Met office claimed that “data” for these non existent sites was supplied by a peer reviewed scientific process, however, when pressed to supply data sources for 2 sites (Folkestone and Dover) they were unable to quote what the sources actually were. Here again is the link to the full list of “Open/Closed” stations.

Leaving aside the machinations required to concoct rolling “Climate Averages” for closed stations, obvious candidates for a long term climate average would be climate stations that were both premium quality (Class 1) and operational throughout the entire period form 1960 to date. Cawood is the 100% perfect example to use……. so I tried to look it up to view the unadulterated series.

Open questions to the UK Meteorological Office – WHY ARE YOU NOT SHOWING THE DATA FOR THE LONG RUNNING CLASS 1 CAWOOD SITE? WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO HIDE?

In the absence of the Met Office simply supplying real world hard indisputable data, I shall examine the alternative “data” on offer that the Met Office feels the general public should only have openly presented to them.

Church Fenton Leaving aside that it is 3 miles from the Cawood site, I seriously doubt many residents of Church Fenton even knew where their named weather station was actually located given it was on the old RAF base now known as Leeds East Airport. Archived temperature records only exist from 1984 (24 years after the start of the time series being averaged) and ended 11 years ago in 2013. Over half the published 60 year averages must be by “peer reviewed” number concoctions, furthermore this process is continuing.

What sort of quality was this now long closed site? From its known location, though unlikely to have ever been formally CIMO assessed, and from the image below I estimate Class 3…….BUT Was it an internationally agreed distance from the runway?

Why even attempt to offer largely concocted figures from a low grade aviation site with such a short period of actual real readings? Which stations are actually being used to create these “averages”?

Linton on Ouse 16 miles distant, again the residents of the village after which the site is named are unlikely to have been familiar with their weather station located at RAF Linton on Ouse and just like the Church Fenton site not publicly accessible. Archived temperature data only runs from 1984 (24 years after the time series stats) and closed down in 2021. Again from the image below, the site looks to be of low quality probably Class 4

Dishforth Airfield 24 miles distant but at least this time it is clearly indicated as yet another aviation site. Archived temperature data runs from 1957 (before the start of the time series – good) but ends 8 years ago in 2016 again requiring mathematical conjuring tricks to formulate averages. The image below indicates a likely Class 3 site but with an elevation notably 27 metres higher than Cawood.

Finningley 25 miles distant and yet again another aviation site better known as the now defunct Doncaster/Sheffield Airport. Archived temperature records do start in 1958 prior to the time series but the station was closed 29 years ago in 1995. The weather station’s exact location is difficult to definitely confirm but Met Office data suggest it sat nearby Vulcan Bomber XH558 which is unlikely to be taking off any time soon. Half the time series data will have had to undergo computer modelled torture to provide some numbers.

And finally High Mowthorpe – the clue being in the name. Apart from being 27 miles distant it is also the small matter of 169 metres higher up. It is Met Office assessed as Class 3, again inferior to Cawood. It does have a continuous temperature record but in such a different and distant climatological location that it really cannot have any relevance to Cawood. High Mowthorpe is also not evidently the best kept of sites.

In conclusion, the Met Office has opted NOT to perform a simple long term averaging representation from just one Class 1 site’s readings (with no other inputs required) and in preference have supplied no fewer than five alternative much inferior sites with all manner of adjusted, amended, modified and likely corrupted so called “data” to confuse the public. The term “all smoke and mirrors” comes to mind. Will the Met office respond to my original challenge? I doubt it….they have too much at stake to give an honest answer.

via Tallbloke’s Talkshop

https://ift.tt/rMHBmZf

December 29, 2024 at 09:01AM