One of The Undeniable Facts About Wind Turbines….No Wind….No Power!

September 30, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Brits Rumble Frightening Energy Fact: Wind Power Depends on the (ur, ahem) Wind …

September 30, 2014 by stopthesethings

Power from wind turbines slumps – due to lack of wind
The Telegraph
Emily Gosden
25 September 2014

Electricity output from UK wind farms falls by a fifth due to unusually low wind speeds

Power produced by wind farms slumped by a fifth in the second quarter of this year, despite hundreds of new turbines being built – because it wasn’t very windy.

Official Government statistics published on Thursday show that in the three months to the end of June, the amount of electricity produced by offshore wind farms fell by 22 per cent, to 2 terawatt-hours (TWh), compared with the same period the year before.

Yet the number of offshore wind turbines operating grew significantly – with 4.1 gigawatts (GW) of capacity installed in the seas around the UK by June this year, up from 3.5GW by June 2013.

Power output from onshore wind farms also fell, by 17 per cent to 3.22 TWh. The fall came despite dozens of new wind farms being built, increasing onshore wind capacity by 14 per cent over the same period.

There was 8GW of onshore capacity at the end of June, 1GW more than a year before.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) said that the impact of increased capacity was “out-weighed by that of very low wind speeds”.

“Average wind speeds were 1.6 knots lower than a year earlier, and the lowest for quarter two for four years. Average wind speeds in June were the lowest for any month in the last 14 years,” it said.

About 900 turbines were constructed on and offshore over the course of 2013, according to Renewable UK.

Dr John Constable, director of the Renewable Energy Foundation, which publishes data on the sector and is critical of subsidy costs, said: “The latest DECC data is further confirmation that wind power output is highly variable over all timescales, minutes, hours, months, and even from year to year.

“These variabilities are physically manageable but they have highly significant negative economic impacts on the rest of the power generation fleet, whose market is made very uncertain, and these uncertainties ultimately mean much higher costs for consumers.”

While wind power output fell, the amount of electricity generated from solar farms soared by 67 per cent, to 1.2TWh.

The rise was in line with a near-identical increase in the amount of solar capacity installed.

Ministers have admitted that solar farms have been installed far more rapidly than they had expected, thanks to costs falling and developers taking advantage of generous subsidies.

In May they announced they were closing a subsidy scheme two years earlier than planned to stop the spread of the farms, which critics say are blighting the countryside.

Ministers originally anticipated between 2.4-4GW of large-scale solar being installed by 2020. Yet the latest DECC statistics show that the upper end of that range has now been exceeded, with 4.1GW installed by the end of June.

A spokesman for the wind industry trade association RenewableUK said: “Although it’s no secret that there are some periods that are even windier than others, the wider statistics show that wind energy is generating increasing amounts of clean electricity for British homes and businesses year on year.

“When you look at the last twelve months as a whole, generation from renewable sources in the UK went up to just over 17 per cent – up from 13 per cent in the previous 12 months. The lion’s share of that came from onshore and offshore wind – just over 50 per cent of it.

“In August, wind energy outstripped coal and nuclear for several days, and hit at all time 24-hour record high of 22 per cent of the UK’s electricity needs.

“National Grid has no problem taking clean power generated by wind whenever it’s available as often as it can, and it can predict exactly where the power will come from in advance with pinpoint accuracy. Every unit of electricity we generate from wind offsets a unit from polluting fossil fuels, so anyone who cares about climate change knows that we need to make the most of it whenever we can.”

One green power company, Infinis Energy, reported last month that its onshore wind farms had exported a third less power in the three months to June, compared to the same period the year before, blaming “low wind speeds experienced across the UK throughout the period”.

However, it said it would be “well placed to benefit from recovering wind speeds when they occur”.
The Telegraph

The wind industry and its parasites are always quick to wax lyrical about those few hours when the wind blew consistently and added a little meaningful power to the grid, but – like the gambler that only ever talks about his wins – these hucksters never seem able to front up to the hundreds of occasions when wind power output collapses for hours and even days on end (see our post here).

STT loves the cyclone of spin from RenewableUK when it talks about some periods being windier than others and telling power punters to look “at the last 12 months as a whole” – in an effort to varnish up the infantile nonsense of trying to rely on intermittent and unreliable wind power. You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to rumble the fact that wind power will always be delivered at crazy, random intervals and – on plenty of occasions – won’t be delivered at all.

Notable too is the breezy optimism from wind power outfit, Infinis Energy when it talks about being “well placed to benefit from recovering wind speeds when they occur”.

In the meantime, their erstwhile customers are supposed to be “well placed” sitting freezing in the dark, apparently.

The wind industry parades as an answer to global warming (now known as climate change) and does so by wrapping itself in the “alternative” energy tag. Which begs the question: “alternative” to what?

When it comes to their demand for electricity, the power consumer has a couple of basic needs: when they hit the light switch they assume illumination will shortly follow and that when the kettle is kicked into gear it’ll be boiling soon thereafter. And the power consumer assumes that these – and similar actions in a household or business – will be open to them at any time of the night or day, every day of the year.

For conventional generators, delivering power on the basic terms outlined above is a doddle: delivering base-load power around the clock, rain, hail or shine is just good business. It’s what the customer wants and is prepared to pay for, so it makes good sense to deliver on-demand.

But for wind power generators it’s never about how much the customer wants or when they want it, it’s always and everywhere about the vagaries of the wind. When the wind speed increases to 25 m/s, turbines are automatically shut-off to protect the blades and bearings; and below 6-7 m/s turbines are incapable of producing any power at all.

It’s no wonder that the Brits have noticed that wind power is nothing more than a sick joke.

Even with the most geographically widespread grid-connected set of wind farms in the world (the 3,342 MW of wind power capacity connected to Australia’s Eastern grid across SA, Victoria, Tasmania and NSW) there are dozens of occasions each year when total wind power output struggles to top 2% of installed capacity – and hundreds when it fails to muster even 5% (see our posts here and here and here).

Now, if the power consumer was given advance warning of when these total output failures were going to occur, they might simply reconsider their selfish demands of having illumination after dark or that hot cuppa in the morning. That way, they might still consider wind power as some kind of “alternative” for conventional power?

But, so far, power consumers remain stubbornly selfish; wedded to the idea that when they hit the switch, their power needs will be satisfied that very instant (the cheek, hey?).

And that’s where the myth about wind power being some kind of “alternative” falls in a heap.

Unless you’re prepared to live like stone-age hermits, power delivered at the whim of mother nature (which in practical terms means no power at all, hundreds of times each year) is NO alternative for power delivered on-demand; anytime of the day or night; every single day of the year – and in volumes sufficient to satisfy all consumers connected to the same network, at the same time.

RenewableUK’s waffle about past wind power output averages over time is patent nonsense: for most people power consumption is a here-and-now kind of thing. In the absence of a conventional generation system with adequate capacity to satisfy demand, modern economies would quickly descend into chaos if left to rely on a power generation system entirely dependent on the weather.

But it’s the howlers contained in this quote that take the glittering prize:

STT’s not sure what the benefit of predicting complete collapses in wind power output “with pinpoint accuracy” might be. Unless it’s meant to remind us that behind every single MW of wind power capacity there’s an equal amount of fossil fuel generating capacity kept ready and waiting (burning mountains of coal and gas) to take up the slack? When infants are left to their own devices it’s always nice to know there are adults around to take responsibility; except in this case, we’re forced to pay twice: once with massive subsidies to wind power outfits that simply can’t be relied on to stump up power when it’s needed; and again for the conventional generation capacity essential to keeping the grid up and running. So far, so costly and pointless.

Then there’s the descent to the old “climate change” chestnut.

Nowhere in the world has the wind industry provided any actual proof that it has in fact reduced CO2 emissions in the electricity sector. When we talk about “proof” we’re not talking about smoke and mirrors “modelling” based on long-term average wind farm output – which ignores the extra gas and coal being burnt (and wasted) in order to balance the grid to account for wild fluctuations in wind power output (see our post here); and to maintain additional “spinning reserve” (seeour post here) to account for complete collapses in wind power output – as seen in this post.

As we have pointed out just once or twice – the need for 100% of wind power capacity to be backed up 100% of the time by fossil fuel generation sources means that wind power cannot and will never reduce CO2 emissions in the electricity sector (see our posts here and hereand here and here and here and here and here).

E.ON operates numerous transmission grids in Germany and, therefore, has the unenviable task of being forced to integrate the wildly fluctuating and unpredictable output from wind power generators, while trying to keep the German grid from collapsing (E.ON sets out a number of the headaches caused by intermittent wind power in the Summary of this paper at page 4). Dealing with the fantasy that wind power is an alternative to conventional generation sources, E.ON says:

“Wind energy is only able to replace traditional power stations to a limited extent. Their dependence on the prevailing wind conditions means that wind power has a limited load factor even when technically available. It is not possible to guarantee its use for the continual cover of electricity consumption. Consequently, traditional power stations with capacities equal to 90% of the installed wind power capacity must be permanently online [and burning fuel] in order to guarantee power supply at all times.”

STT is happy to go all out and say that in Australia wind power requires 100% of its capacity to be backed up 100% of the time by conventional generation sources. As just one recent example, on 3 consecutive days (20, 21 and 22 July 2014) the total output from all of the wind farms connected to the Eastern Grid (total capacity of 2,952 MW – and spread over 4 states, SA, Victoria, Tasmania and NSW) was a derisory 20 MW (or 0.67% of installed capacity) for hours on end (see our post here). The 99.33% of wind power output that went AWOL for hours (at various times, 3 days straight) was, instead, all supplied by conventional generators; the vast bulk of which came from coal and gas plants, with the balance coming from hydro.

And Britain is no different (see our post here).

For wind power to reduce CO2 emissions in the electricity sector it has be a true “substitute” for conventional generation sources. Because it can’t be delivered “on-demand” (can’t be stored) and is only “available” at crazy, random intervals (if at all) wind power will never be a substitute for conventional generation sources (see our post here).

Perhaps the reason that the wind industry has never produced a shred of evidence (anywhere) to show that wind power has reduced CO2 emissions in the electricity sector is simply because it can’t. Running counter to wind industry claims about wind power abating CO2 emissions, the result of trying to incorporate wind power into a coal/gas fired grid is increased CO2 emissions (see our post here and thisEuropean paper here; this Irish paper here; this English paper here; thisAmerican article and this Dutch study here).

Wind power has NOTHING to do with CO2 emissions abatement in the electricity sector; and, therefore, has NOTHING to do with global warming (or climate change) – which means there is simply no justification for the massive stream of subsidies filched from power consumers and tax payers and directed to wind power outfits.

And now the stats are in, the wind industry is struggling to maintain the ruse that wind power is a credible source of electricity at all.

Reminiscent of uptight hotelier, Basil Fawlty trying to pin fault for the chaos he caused on his bemused guests, the German wind industry have started cursing the wind for not blowing (see our post here) and now their British counterparts have been reduced to the same tactic.

Some might call the wind industry “pathetic” – but that would be to ignore the $billions stolen from power punters around the globe and the grief caused to thousands of previously peaceful rural communities.

STT calls it the greatest economic and environmental fraud of all time.

Seneca Mountain Wind, Will Not Be Destroying Vermont Environment! Project Cancelled!!!

September 29, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

SENECA MOUNTAIN WIND PULLS THE PLUG

THE CALEDONIAN RECORD SEP. 28 2014, 11:41 AM 11 COMMENTS

Editor’s note: This article is by James Jardine, of the Caledonian-Record, in which it was first published Sept. 27, 2014.

Seneca Mountain Wind has removed its MET wind measurement device from its Ferdinand location.

The company also confirmed it has not started construction or site preparation at any of the other three MET sites authorized under a certificate of public good (CPG) issued to Seneca Mountain Wind by the Vermont Public Service Board.

In a letter dated Thursday, Karen Tyler, an attorney with the Burlington law firm of Dunkiel Saunders Elliott Raubvogel and Hand PLLC states, “SMW (Seneca Mountain Wind) no longer plans to either pursue its MET Tower project at a later date, or seek permission from the Board to transfer the CPG to another person or entity.”

The letter continues, “In light of these developments, [SMW] now agrees with the Appellants that their appeal of the Board’s order in Docket No. 7867 is moot.”

The MET tower in Ferdinand cited by Seneca Mountain Wind was previously constructed by Matthew Rubin when Rubin was planning a wind farm in East Haven several years ago. When Rubin canceled his plans for a wind farm, he left the MET tower in place.

Previously, Seneca Mountain Wind has argued before the Vermont Supreme Court that the certificates of public good issued by the Vermont Public Service Board have value even if Seneca Mountain Wind has canceled leases it holds on the land on which the towers are to be located. Seneca Mountain canceled a lease on land in Newark owned by Scott and Sarah Williams, Guilford, Vt., according to Newark Town Clerk Joan Bicknell. Seneca Mountain Wind also canceled a lease on land in Ferdinand and Brighton owned by Daniel Ouimette, Colebrook, N.H.

The Vermont Supreme Court, on Aug. 12, remanded Seneca Mountain’s lawsuit back to the Public Service Board, telling the PSB, “to consider, given the current circumstances whether appellant’s CPG should be revoked or declared void with respect to the towers located in the Town of Newark and the Town of Brighton.” The remand continues, “If the Board either revokes or declares void Seneca’s CPG for those towers, then the appeal will be dismissed.”

Now that Seneca Mountain Wind has confirmed it will no longer pursue its MET tower project at a later date and will not seek permission to transfer its authorizing certificate to another person or entity, anyone hoping to build a commercial wind farm in Newark, Brighton or Ferdinand will have to start from scratch.

Jihadis and Warmunists….Both want to Destroy Our Way of Life!

September 29, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

September 28, 2014
Jihadis and Warmunists: Brothers Under the Skin
By Clarice Feldman
Watching the parade of the naïve, the far left, and their energy-hogging celebrity manipulators marching in New York City this week, I was struck by how much these true believers had in common with jihadis, a notion reinforced by Purdue Professor Louis Rene Beres’ description of jihadis in Gatestone Institute and my friend “Ignatz’s’” comment at Just One Minute.

Both movements seem to these authors to be a means of denying death and change and making the mortal, immortal and the insignificant individual life, a significant force when massed with others.

If this is true — and I think it is — we cannot defeat these irrational movements in the ordinary ways. New strategies are called for.

Jihadis

Beres’ argument (and you should read it all to fully understand it) is, in sum, that the bloody depredations of jihadism provide its adherents with a “delusion of immortality” and a “religious justification” for erotic satisfaction.

If this is the case, he says, we cannot stifle its advance by treating terrorism simply as a normal striving for land or politics or strategy. It’s a different kind of enemy.

Among more “normal” conflict scenarios, America, Europe and Israel now need to consider mega-threats of both unconventional war and unconventional terrorism. Faced with determined adversaries — who are not only willing to die, but who actively seek their own “deaths” in order to live forever — Washington and Jerusalem should finally address the what needs to be done in addition to military remediation.

Sustained and selective armed force against IS and related Jihadist targets is certainly necessary and appropriate. However, it is also important to remind our leaders that force always needs to be combined with reinforcing efforts to convince these terrorists that their expected martyrdom is ultimately just an elaborate fiction.

Jihadists, in killing Americans, Israelis, and all other “unbelievers,” may not even intend to commit evil, so much as to do themselves and Allah good — and to do so with an absolute purity of heart. In their view, waging Holy War can never be shameful; it can only be heroic.

Going forward, our main task should be to systematically undermine these fantasies and doctrinal “underpinnings.” In conjunction with the recommended nuanced persuasions of military firepower, it can be done.

Warmunists

The New York demonstration, full as it was of communist organizers and sympathizers, inspired one wag to argue the marchers really were warmunists — that is, far left-wingers posing as environmentalists. (Any question respecting their commitment to environmentalism and keeping the planet clean were resolved by shots of the mounds of trash they left behind while purporting to save the planet.)

Ignatz made observations about the marchers which strike me as related to Beres’ comments about jihadis:

Lefties love to talk about revolution, “cause change” fundamental transformations, progress, etc., but they are the most retrograde reactionaries imaginable. They want a one-time revolution to cement and codify utter stasis.

People who talk about change are scared to death of the creative destruction of free markets. People who worship Darwinian progress, which after all implies millions of extinctions, want to save every single evolutionary cul-de-sac of a species they can find living in some pothole or cave somewhere. Their desire to somehow fix our climate to an optimum they have arbitrarily decided is in all our interests is obvious. Less obvious is their desire for the tranquility and stultifying sameness of socialism, not because it’s fair but because it’s predictable and controllable and therefore not as disruptive and scary. They seek the perennial childlike state of someone else supplying their security while they indulge their pleasures, presumably because they regret ever having to grow up.

These fools of all ages are on a children’s crusade to compel the adults of the world to create an actual real-world Neverland for them where nothing ever changes, they’ll never age and they can pretend they’re somehow going to be the magical ones picked by fate to cheat death.

The jihadis’ “heresy” charges against those who oppose their tyranny is simply another version of the warmunists’ “treason”. If you had any doubt about that, here’s Robert F Kennedy, Jr, who disproves his existential claims about climate warming by flying in private planes to warn us we will perish if we don’t stop using conventional energy.

Kennedy lamented in an interview with Climate Depot, [he]is not permitted by law to “punish” or to imprison those who disagree with him — and this, he proposed, is a problem of existential proportions. Were he to have his way, Kennedy admitted, he would cheer the prosecution of a host of “treasonous” figures — among them a number of unspecified “politicians”; those bêtes noires of the global Left, Kansas’s own Koch Brothers; “the oil industry and the Republican echo chamber”; and, for good measure, anybody else whose estimation of the threat posed by fossil fuels has provoked them into “selling out the public trust.” Those who contend that global warming “does not exist,” Kennedy claimed, are guilty of “a criminal offense — and they ought to be serving time for it.”
Just as Eric Hoffer warned us a half century ago about all mass movements in his book The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements such movements thrive in climates where individual opportunities are limited. He said then that they had not had much purchase in the United States because capitalism and our Constitution permitted so much advancement and freedom. Don’t the warmunists and the jihadis imperviousness to reality and fact share a common root? Doesn’t the drive of both to convert us all to their way of thinking echo Hoffer’s belief that the death denier “strengthen[s] his own faith by converting others”? Can you think of a better explanation, for example, of Kennedy’s tyrannical wish?

As anti-capitalist laws and regulations cooked up by this administration impoverish the middle class and shrink it while expanding the numbers now on the dole and pc restrictions of free speech in the workplace and colleges strangle us, do you suppose the climate for pernicious mass movements will grow or will it shrink?

I think we need to redouble our efforts to separate fact from fiction here and abroad even as we undertake warfare in the Middle East and to strengthen free markets and free speech rights here even though to do so means challenging in every available forum the ridiculous notions of the adherents of both of these mass movements.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/09/9_27_2014_18_33.html##ixzz3Ef1vqfKg
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Climate Scientist Calls For Common Sense, Not Alarmism, in the Handling of the Environment.

September 28, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Richard Lindzen–MIT hot shot on climate–declaims on the issues and warns us

Posted on September 27, 2014 by john1282

Who am I to even comment on the eloquence of Richard Lindzen, who has tried–lord how he’s tried, to educate people on climate science done by real scientists.

Here he provides some wisdom on the mess that is the debate on Anthropogenic Warming.

I would add, as a humble physician–warm is better, what’s the damn panic about a few degrees of warming?

Dr. Lindzen:

Reflections on Rapid Response to Unjustified Climate Alarm
The Cato Institute’s Center for the Study of Science today kicks off its rapid response center that
will identify and correct inappropriate and generally bizarre claims on behalf of climate alarm. I
wish them luck in this worthy enterprise, but more will surely be needed to deal with this issue.
To be sure, there is an important role for such a center. It is not to convince the ‘believers.’ Nor
do I think that there is any longer a significant body of sincere and intelligent individuals who
are simply trying to assess the evidence. As far as I can tell, the issue has largely polarized that
relatively small portion of the population that has chosen to care about the issue. The remainder
quite reasonably have chosen to remain outside the polarization. Thus the purpose of a rapid
response Center will be to reassure those who realize that this is a fishy issue, that there remain
scientists who are still concerned with the integrity of science. There is also a crucial role in
informing those who wish to avoid the conflict as to what is at stake. While these are important
functions, there are other issues that I feel a think tank ought to consider. Moreover, there is a
danger that rapid response to trivial claims lends unwarranted seriousness to these claims.
Climate alarm belongs to a class of issues characterized by a claim for which there is no
evidence, that nonetheless appeals strongly to one or more interests or prejudices. Once the
issue is adopted, evidence becomes irrelevant. Instead, the believer sees what he believes.
Anything can serve as a supporting omen. Three very different previous examples come to mind
(though there are many more examples that could be cited): Malthus’ theory of overpopulation,
social Darwinism and the Dreyfus Affair. Although each of these issues engendered opposition,
only the Dreyfus Affair led to widespread societal polarization. More commonly, only the
‘believers’ are sufficiently driven to form a movement. We will briefly review these examples
(though each has been subject to book length analyses), but the issue of climate alarm is
somewhat special in that it appeals to a sizeable number of interests, and has strong claims on the
scientific community. It also has the potential to cause exceptional harm to an unprecedented
number of people. This has led to persistent opposition amidst widespread lack of interest.
However, all these issues are characterized by profound immorality pretending to virtue.
Malthus’ peculiar theory wherein the claimed linear growth of food loses out to the exponential
growth of population has maintained continuous popularity in the faculty lounge for about two
centuries. It is, therefore, worth noting that Malthus had no evidence that food supply would
increase only linearly. Nor did he have evidence for exponential population growth. Malthus
initially went so far as to estimate an e-folding time for population of 25 years, based on the
population of North America, and ignoring the role of immigration. Although Malthus, himself,
eventually acknowledged these problems, the enthusiasm for his anti-human conclusions remains
strong. Neither the green revolution nor the diminution of famine amidst increasing population
dissuades them. The fact that Chad is poor and the Netherlands is rich never strikes the believer
as odd. Apparently, the growth of cities, the movement of workers from the farm to the city,
and, for much of the developed world, immigration, all served to convince people of means that
there were too many other people around, and Malthusian theory formed a framework for
something they were (and are) eager to believe.
Social Darwinism and its corollary, eugenics, represents another case of a theory without support
that was widely accepted with, at times, horrid consequences. Darwin’s “The Origin of the
Species” had immense influence. It presented a theory whereby natural selection and what were
essentially mutations could account for biological evolution. While it offered valuable insights
into the development of finch beaks, it was hardly meant to describe societal evolution.
Nevertheless, the notion of ‘survival of the fittest’ applied to society had obvious appeal to those
who perceived themselves to be the fittest and who naturally regarded the application as
scientifically justified. It was a small step to eugenics which was the counterpart of modern day
environmentalism during the first third of the twentieth century, and was supported by all the
‘best’ people (including George Bernard Shaw, Margaret Sanger, Alexander Graham Bell, and
Theodore Roosevelt) despite the fact that there actually was a mathematical theorem (the Hardy-
Weinberg Theorem) that showed that the impact of eugenics on the gene pool would be
negligible. Needless to add, mathematics is of no importance to the ‘best’ people. Malthusian
population fears continue to the present, but eugenics was rendered unfashionable by the obvious
implications presented by the Nazis.
While science is a common vehicle for such misuse, the Dreyfus Affair shows that other vehicles
exist. In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was accused of passing secret French military
information to the Germans. There was, in fact, no evidence to support this accusation.
Nevertheless, there was again a strong desire on the part of many people in France to believe the
accusation. To be sure, there was the endemic anti-Semitism in France. However, there was
also the humiliation of France’s loss in the Franco-Prussian War, and the desire to blame such
loss not on the army, but on the perfidy of a group that some considered to be ‘outside’. (The
Nazis’ ‘stab in the back’ theory for the German loss in WW1 represents a similar instinct).
Dreyfus was tried (several times) and sentenced to Devil’s Island. Prominent Frenchmen (Emile
Zola in particular) , incensed by the obvious injustice campaigned for Dreyfus, and the issue
literally split France in half (partly because the conflict between Catholics and Secularists also
entered the Affair). Dreyfus was eventually exonerated after the identification of the actual spy
became undeniable.
The current issue of global warming/climate change is extreme in terms of the number of special
interests that opportunistically have strong interests in believing in the claims of catastrophe
despite the lack of evidence. In no particular order, there are the leftist economists for whom
global warming represents a market failure, there are the UN apparatchiks for whom global
warming is the route to global governance, there are third world dictators who see guilt over
global warming as providing a convenient claim on aid (ie, the transfer of wealth from the poor
in rich countries to the wealthy in poor countries), there are the environmental activists who love
any issue that has the capacity to frighten the gullible into making hefty contributions to their
numerous NGOs, there are the crony capitalists who see the opportunity to cash in on the
immense sums being made available for ‘sustainable’ energy, there are the government
regulators for whom the control of a natural product of breathing is a dream come true, there are
newly minted billionaires who find the issue of ‘saving the planet’ appropriately suitable to their
grandiose pretensions, etc., etc. Strange as it may seem, even the fossil fuel industry is generally
willing to go along. After all, they realize better than most, that there is no current replacement
for fossil fuels. The closest possibilities, nuclear and hydro, are despised by the
environmentalists. As long as fossil fuel companies have a level playing field, and can pass
expenses to the consumers, they are satisfied. Given the nature of corporate overhead, the latter
can even form a profit center. The situation within science itself is equally grim. Huge sums of
government and private funding have become available to what was initially a small backwater
field. Science becomes easy when emphasis is on malleable models supported by hugely
uncertain data that can be readily found ‘consistent’ with the models supplemented by fervidly
imagined catastrophic ‘implications.’ Indeed, uncertainty is often exaggerated for just this
purpose. Opposition within the scientific community is immediately met with ad hominem
attacks, loss of funding, and difficulty in publishing.
Of course, science is not the only victim of this situation. Affordable energy has been the
primary vehicle for the greatest advance in human welfare in human history. This issue
promises to deny this to the over 1 billion humans who still lack electricity. For billions more
energy will be much less affordable leading to increased poverty. Poverty, itself, is a major
factor in reduced life expectancy. It requires a peculiarly ugly obtuseness to ignore the
fundamental immorality of this issue.
Although all these issues have strong political consequences, it is by no means clear that their
origin is, itself, political. I would suggest that a more likely situation is that politics is always
opportunistically seeking some cause that fits its needs. However, once an illusional issue
becomes a passionate belief, it becomes impervious to argument. Given how dangerous some
illusional positions are, it is an important problem to know how to avoid them. This is a problem
that is truly worthy of Cato’s attention. Rapid response can only do so much; belief seems to
inevitably trump objective reality when one is free to choose ones narrative.
Richard S. Lindzen
Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, Emeritus, MIT
Distinguished Senior Fellow, Cato Institute
September 14, 2014

Climate Change Alarmists Cannot Handle the Truth! We Are Not In Control of the Climate!!!

September 28, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Federal Study Confirms Climate Change is Natural, Not Caused by Humans

September 25, 2014 By Ernest Istook

New federal study confirms that climate change is caused by nature, not by man. Released even while President Obama was saying the opposite at the United Nations.

What is the the world’s biggest problem?

President Obama told the United Nations that it’s not terrorism, poverty or disease, but global warming and climate change that he claims will have the most dramatic impact on our future.

On the same day, the National Academy of Science published a new study that shows 80% of climate change on the West Coast is due to natural causes and is not caused by humans.

The official study is by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, working with the University of Washington,

Plus global temperatures have been cooling for 18 years now.

Obama promotes billions in crony capitalism for green energy, higher electric rates, and raising costs of autos and appliances , all based on scaring us into thinking there’s no other way to save the planet.

Thankfully, despite efforts to silence them, now some brave scientists are promoting truth rather than propaganda.

With insights, I’m Ernest Istook.

The Facts That Climate Alarmists Ignore! CO2 is NOT Evil!

September 25, 2014September 25, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Press Release 25/09/14

New Research Finds Earth Even Less

Sensitive To CO2 Than Previously

Thought

Research Used Data From This Year’s

IPCC 5th Assessment Report

London, 25 September: A new paper published in the prestigious journal Climate Dynamics find that the effect of carbon dioxide emissions on global temperatures is likely to be even smaller than previously thought.

Earlier this year, in a widely discussed report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, climate researcher Nic Lewis and science writer Marcel Crok put forward a new estimate of the Earth’s climate sensitivity based on observational data, finding that it was much less alarming than suggested by computer simulations of the Earth’s climate.

Now, Lewis and well known American climate science professor Judith Curry have updated the Lewis and Crok report estimates using the latest empirical data, a more sophisticated methodology and an approach to accounting for uncertainties that has been described by one independent reviewer as “state of the art”. Their findings fully support the modest estimates of climate sensitivity and future warming given in the Lewis and Crok report, and compared with that report make it look even less likely that the substantially higher estimates based on computer simulations are correct.

“Our results, which use data from this year’s IPCC fifth assessment report, are in line with those of several recent studies based on observed centennial warming and strongly suggest complex global climate models used for warming projections are oversensitive to carbon dioxide concentrations,” said Nic Lewis.

Best sensitivity estimates are medians (50% probability points). Ranges are to the nearest 0.05°C

Nicholas Lewis & Judith A. Curry (2014) The implications for climate sensitivity of AR5 forcing and heat uptake estimates, Climate Dynamics 25 September 2014

Abstract
Energy budget estimates of equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) and transient climate response (TCR) are derived using the comprehensive 1750–2011 time series and the uncertainty ranges for forcing components provided in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Working Group I Report, along with its estimates of heat accumulation in the climate system. The resulting estimates are less dependent on global climate models and allow more realistically for forcing uncertainties than similar estimates based on forcings diagnosed from simulations by such models. Base and final periods are selected that have well matched volcanic activity and influence from internal variability. Using 1859–1882 for the base period and 1995–2011 for the final period, thus avoiding major volcanic activity, median estimates are derived for ECS of 1.64 K and for TCR of 1.33 K. ECS 17–83 and 5–95 % uncertainty ranges are 1.25–2.45 and 1.05–4.05 K; the corresponding TCR ranges are 1.05–1.80 and 0.90–2.50 K. Results using alternative well-matched base and final periods provide similar best estimates but give wider uncertainty ranges, principally reflecting smaller changes in average forcing. Uncertainty in aerosol forcing is the dominant contribution to the ECS and TCR uncertainty ranges.

Full paper of the accepted manuscript is available, along with data and code here

Why Have So Many People Gone Enviro-Mental? It’s a Scam!

September 22, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2014 BY STEVEN HAYWARD

FULL-FRONTAL ENVIRONMENTALISM: WE KNEW IT ALL ALONG

There’s an old line that environmentalists are “watermelons”—green on the outside, red on the inside. A lot of environmentalists will take great offense if you say this: No no! We like economic growth and capitalism just fine! We just want it to be “sustainable,” whatever that means. And don’t ask for specificity about what “sustainability” means in detail, unless you have a lot of time and a full bottle of hootch handy. Before long you’ll figure out that “sustainable” is just a code word for green things we like, and that it has no rigor whatsoever aside from old-fashioned factor-efficiency, which economists figured out over a century ago at least.

But anyway, environmentalists resist being called socialists. But next week Naomi Klein is coming out with a book called This Changes Everything. In case you’ve forgotten your show notes, Klein is the author of The Shock Doctrine, a book ragingly popular with the far left that is so far gone into absurd conspiracizing and looney renderings of “neoliberalism” that it makes Lyndon LaRouche look positively staid by comparison.

What is the “this” that “changes everything” in her title? Why climate change, don’t you know? And what does it “change”? Why capitalism, of course. The argument of the book in one sentence is that only overthrowing capitalism can solve climate change. Don’t take my word for it. Here’s how the progressive lefty site CommonDreams described it today: “Forget everything you think you know about global warming. The really inconvenient truth is that it’s not about carbon—it’s about capitalism.” For this bit of candor about what we’ve long suspected of the climate campaign, we owe Klein and her followers a debt of thanks. I’m going to send her a bouquet of (sustainably-raised) flowers.

Climate change is just the ultimate in “late capitalism” I guess but what’s really getting late is the odor of this badly decayed Marxism. (Klein still uses the uproariously hilarious term “late capitalism” without a trace of irony in her pre-publications articles.) Talk about trying to sell something past its “use by” date! Wasn’t World War I the crisis that “changed everything”? Then the Great Depression? Then the Cold War? The panic and crash of 2008? “This changes everything,” as G.K. Chesterton probably said somewhere, is the refrain of the lunatic in the asylum who thinks he’s Napoleon. It’s always something.

The book unwittingly reveals that none of this crusading and posturing is about the environment at all. Bill McKibben’s dust jacket blurb gives the game away: “This is the best book about climate change in a very long time—in large part because it’s about much more.” Silly me: I thought it was about greenhouse gas emissions.Thought experiment: if we wave a magic wand, will Klein, McKibben, et al suddenly say, “Oh, I guess capitalism is okay after all”? Anyone want to buy some sustainable swampland in Florida?

It will be interesting to see whether “mainstream” environmental groups will distance themselves from Klein’s book. I intend to ask them about her argument at every opportunity. I expect every kind of weasel excuse imaginable. So I guess I better put in for a large order of free-range, gluten-free, sustainably-raised Green Weenies.

“Watermelons”, as James Delingpole so aptly describes them, Green on the Outside, & Red on the Inside!

September 22, 2014September 22, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Communists coming out of the Green Closet.

Image source: Oliver Darcy/TheBlaze

Christopher Monckton is presently in Australia. Previously he has said: (link – WUWT)

So at last the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement and took over Greenpeace so that my friends who founded it left within a year because they’d captured it. Now the apotheosis is at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world.

Patrick Moore who will soon visit Australia, co-founder of Greenpeace, left the Green Movement when it was infiltrated by communists: (link)

The collapse of world communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall during the 1980s added to the trend toward extremism. The Cold War was over and the peace movement was largely disbanded. The peace movement had been mainly Western-based and anti-American in its leanings. Many of its members moved into the environmental movement, bringing with them their neo-Marxist, far-left agendas.

Further:

Progressives are very resilient, so when Soviet communism finally collapsed after 70 years of world wide tyranny, progressives and liberal Democrats pushed the existential green movement to the forefront, which was in reality the same old exhausted red communism in a new disguise.

The “Green” Movement tried to disguise their “Red” Socialist/Communist ideas, however, now they are coming out of the closet.

The New York “Climate” March, as reported by the Blaze had socialists elements spread through it. (link)

Dozens of signs denouncing capitalism were spotted at the demonstration, often held by self-proclaimed socialists.
“Capitalism is destroying the planet,” a sticker on one woman’s shirt read, “We need revolution, nothing less.”

Image source: Oliver Darcy/TheBlaze

Members of the Socialists Workers Party also manned a table, passing out flyers attempting to make “the case for ecosocialism.”

Famous Climate Alarmists Frequently Resort to Blatant Lies to Create Fear!

September 20, 2014 / 1957chev / 3 Comments

Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth May, Naomi Klein: Climate handmaids fail—to tell the truth

Perpetuating the massive deception of a planetary climate emergency

It goes without saying that most rational people with a reasonable amount of common sense worry about pollution and want to keep our environment healthy and habitable. So why do the radical environmentalists and the man-made climate change/anthropogenic global warming (AGW) alarmist crowd choose to outright lie about the problems facing us?

The UN’s IPCC, the extreme-green groups, the mainstream media, the UN-dependent scientists, academia, and politicians are all perpetuating the massive deception of the unproven hypothesis of man-made climate change/anthropogenic global warming, and use it as supposed evidence of a cataclysmic global emergency demanding extreme measures and the surrender of our rights, freedoms, and money.

The AGW movement, a quasi-religious, political, ideological one, is supported by many celebrity acolytes who, by virtue of being famous people, garner huge publicity for the cause whenever they parrot the climate change dogma. This high-minded entertainment fodder has ripple effects that are far from trivial. Mindless celebrity regurgitation of the man-made climate change/AGW catechism, in the seeming absence on their part of any serious effort to study the issues, has grave consequences that affect people, the environment, the economy, wildlife, human rights, and democracy. The celebrity flag-waving on behalf of the AGW movement also serves to exacerbate the corruption of science and the scientific method for political purposes. That’s when things get dangerous and evil. Michael Crichtonexplained:

“When we allow science to become political then we are lost. We will enter the internet version of the Dark Ages, an era of stifling fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don’t know any better.”

Celebrated author and poet Margaret Atwood has over half a million Twitter followers; Elizabeth May is an MP and the leader of the Green Party of Canada; Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, and bestselling author. The three of them enjoy extensive national and international media exposure and public speaking opportunities. They are high-profile Canadians who have earned fame, honours, public respect and trust. They choose to voice their opinions on the subject of man-made climate change/AGW, a matter of public interest, on a variety of public platforms.

That being the case, shouldn’t the moral onus be on them to get at all the facts before they presume to preach to the people? Don’t they have an ethical duty to do their best to tell the truth if they want to try to influence public opinion and policy with their lecturing, moralizing, castigating, laying blame, and telling us how to live?

Atwood, May, and Klein appear to believe that the unproven hypothesis of made-made climate change/AGW is a fact beyond doubt. They tend to ascribe any and all weather events to AGW, even though the five standard global datasets (GISS, HadCRUT4, UAH, RSS, NCDC, comprising two satellite and three terrestrial datasets) that measure global warming have not recorded any increase for the last 18 years. Apparently, Atwood, May, and Klein are not aware of this 18-year-long development, or if they are, they choose not to mention it—because if they did, their doom-and-gloom exhortations would fall flat. They don’t explain that climate changes all the time, always has, always will—it’s natural.

The three celebrities demonize “carbon” and carry on about our “carbon footprint” and “carbon credits” and “carbon pollution” but never explain what they mean by “carbon.” They don’t seem to know, or choose not to acknowledge, that the “carbon” involved in the climate change debate is carbon dioxide (CO2), a harmless, invisible trace gas (constituting 0.04% of the atmosphere), vital to life on earth. Carbon dioxide is plant food—not a pollutant. And since they don’t mention that there hasn’t been any warming for 18 years, they also don’t tell you that during that time, the levels of carbon dioxide (allegedly the cause of global warming) have gone up. That’s a rather inconvenient fact if you want to demonize CO2 as the driver of man-made global warming/climate change!

Margaret Atwood: Hell on earth, a scary scenario

Last November, Margaret Atwood published an odd article on climate change in Huffington Post, in which she asserted:

“Conditions around the world are being altered much faster than was formerly predicted…It’s a scary scenario, and we’re largely unprepared.”

If, by “formerly predicted,” Atwood is referring to the dire prognostications of the UN’s IPCC faulty climate models, the truth is that every single one of them has actually turned out to be spectacularly wrong. Undeterred, Atwood doubles down and fast forwards the occurrence of the predicted conditions (she does not specify what they are) that have failed to materialize, providing no sources for her claims. The truth is that whatever weather and climate events have occurred within the last decade and a half cannot be blamed on AGW, because there hasn’t been any warming for 18 years and counting.

In the same article, Atwood makes a bizarre, not to mention irresponsible and naive suggestion. In reference to absorption of excess rainfall, she opines that “In cities, depaving could help.” (What? Would she advocate “depaving” and turning her hometown Toronto into Muddy Yorkagain?) Atwood obviously does not seem to know (or care?) that a major source of particulate pollution is unpaved roads!

Margaret Atwood regularly tweets about things related to “climate change,” by which she means man-made climate change. For example, in one tweet she asserts that climate change is partly “at root of Toledo water pollution.” In another, she urges her 529,000 Twitter followers to sign and re-tweet a petition to phase out “carbon pollution to zero,” lest “climate change accelerate beyond our control, threatening our survival.” She is also joiningDavid Suzuki’s Blue Dot tour (she’s an honourary member of the board of the David Suzuki Foundation), designed to “see every Canadian’s right to live in a healthy environment legally recognized” (emphasis added—sounds reasonable, but you can be sure that whatever “legally” really means, it will probably entail “depaving,” along with edicts, diktats, and intrusive, Big Brother smart-controls on how you may live your life).

Margaret Atwood is a President of the Rare Bird Club of BirdLife International and she has tweeted about saving vultures from poisoning, and spoken out about protecting Amherst Island (and Ostrander Point) in Ontario from industrial wind turbines:

“I was horrified to hear of the proposal to blanket Amherst Island with wind turbines…The need to reduce our carbon footprint is widely known, but the destruction of rare natural habitat and species is not the way to do it. Amherst Island is the wrong place for a windfarm. It is a very wrong place.”

Of course, as anyone who has taken a good look at the wind energy industry knows, there is no right place for the useless satanic white windmills, whichkill birds and bats in catastrophic numbers wherever they are located. Why doesn’t Atwood tell the whole truth about how all industrial wind turbines brutally slice and dice any avian creatures that get in their way (ironically while actually adding to CO2 emissions)? What kind of activist bird lover is she? And doesn’t she see all the other devastating environmental, social, and economic evils the monster machines represent? (Talk about “depaving”! Each industrial wind turbine requires an 800-ton concrete platform, and that is just the beginning of howun-green those useless, eco-dirty things really are.)

The terrible irony is that Margaret Atwood has written novels about dystopian worlds, and that with her AGW activism she seems to be helping to create a real one. She says her novels are “speculative fiction” about worlds that “could really happen.“ Atwood has written that speculative fiction can:

“…explore proposed changes in social organisation, by showing what they might actually be like for those living within them. Thus, the utopia and the dystopia, which have proved over and over again that we have a better idea about how to make hell on earth than we do about how to make heaven.”

But Atwood seems unable to recognize that the man-made climate change movement, in which she is a celebrity activist, and the AGW ideology for which she is a high-profile advocate, have been deliberately conceived and engineered as the phoney rationale for a dystopian UN objective (“hell on earth”), as outlined in its master plan for world governance, Agenda 21. This plan would curtail, if not eliminate, not only our democratic rights but also our country’s very sovereignty; it’s a plan to inventory and control everything and everyone on the planet. And this plan not only “could really happen”—it really is happening right now; in fact, it began to be slowly, stealthily implemented more than 20 years ago.

That is the real “scary scenario.”

Margaret Atwood and all the other AGW celebrity acolytes seem to be completely oblivious to the big picture as they go about aiding and abetting the greatest scientific deception of our time. Atwood has written: “There’s a new term, cli-fi (for climate fiction, a play on sci-fi), that’s being used to describe books in which an altered climate is part of the plot.” With her high-profile AGW activism she is helping to perpetuate the real-life AGW climate fiction—a fiction that in Ontario has already cost billions of dollars in the name of green energy, diverted attention and resources from genuine, urgent problems facing us, inflicted untold suffering on people, stalled the economy, blighted the environment, killed wildlife.

Those are real “hell on earth” consequences.

Elizabeth May: Giving voice to nonsense

Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada, claims:

“The Green party is the only party that bases its policies on evidence. That is why we may take positions ahead of the “group-think” curve…We have been consistent about climate policies, while other parties treat the greatest threat to our children’s future as a passing fad.”

If May’s claim about her party’s evidence-based policies is true, and she sees it as her job “to communicate the science,” why hasn’t she admitted that the evidence and science show that there has not been any global warming for 18 years? It appears that May is “consistent about climate policies” to the extent that she consistently and mindlessly (as in “group-think”) repeats false, long-ago debunked predictions (“greatest threat to our children’s future”), while apparently failing to understand, or deliberately ignoring, the latest scientific findings.

In an April interview on CBC TV, Canada’s national broadcaster, Elizabeth May lauds the IPCC, which is actually a political body masquerading as a scientific one, for part three of its Fifth Assessment Report:

“It’s science, it’s evidence, it’s not someone’s opinion…based on evidence, based on science, these aren’t a group of people who get together and look in a crystal ball…this is scientific warnings that are based on what is happening now.”

As we have mentioned, all of the climate model predictions the IPCC uses to formulate its reports for policy makers—predictions which are actually nothing more than opinions, the equivalent of looking into a crystal ball—have failed. None of the climate models have agreed with the observed data, i.e. the hard scientific evidence.

Does May not know this, or is she deliberately obfuscating the truth? Either way, it doesn’t make her look good. And by “what is happening now,” does she mean that the “serious threat,” with which she tries to scare Canadians, and “the risk for security, the risks of failed states, the risk of a collapse of civilization” are actually unfolding now, at a time when global warming, supposedly the cause of all the doom-and-gloom, has not happened for 18 years? If there hasn’t been any global warming for almost two decades, how can whatever is “happening now” have been caused by it? May’s rhetoric, misinformation, and apocalypse-mongering are deeply irresponsible, reckless, and harmful.

In the interview (see it to believe it), and in what seems like a breezily sanctimonious, arrogant, holier-than-thou tone, Elizabeth May goes on to make the astonishing statement that “99.5% of the scientists who know the issue” agree that climate change is man-made. This claim has been debunked many times over (and just like Pinocchio’s nose, the original phoney statistic of 97% seems to get bigger every time someone cites it). And yet, here is Elizabeth May on national television telling viewers something that is simply not true. Perhaps she thinks she’s in good company because everyone from President Obama down with a vested interest in maintaining the fiction continues to make the same bogus claim. Needless to say, and as usual, the CBC interviewer, in this case Peter Mansbridge—probably because he isn’t informed but given his position certainly ought to be—doesn’t challenge her on the untruth.

And it gets worse. May says that the “denier industry was invented by the fossil fuel industry lobby.” She seems to be proud of her knowledge of “the science,” as she calls it:

“I learned the climate science when I was a senior policy advisor for the Minister of the Environment in the 1980s. We were looking at all the science that was coming in from all around the world, and it was before anyone had “invented”* the idea that there was doubt. The “invention”* of doubt was a product of the fossil fuel lobby that decided after the Earth Summit and after the Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed…then they decided, oh oh, this could cut into profits, we’d better invent doubt…”

*[May employs air quotes.]

What’s astonishing here is May’s smug, self-satisfied conviction that the doubt could only have been manufactured by an avaricious, manipulative fossil fuel industry bogeyman, and not perhaps have come out of the rigorous research of honest climate scientists, (as, for example, Canadian Dr. Tim Ball), who adhere to the scientific method in which healthy, questioning, intelligent scepticism plays an indispensable role. And, if she really does know “the science” as she claims, why is she not telling the truth that there are sound scientific findings out there that invalidate the AGW hypothesis?

May also displays an unbelievably patronizing attitude about people who question the fiction that she promotes:

“So when I talk to people who aren’t convinced, I’m very respectful because I understand that a lot of good people have gotten one little bit of information that seems plausible and have allowed that to morph into their head into some level of large-scale doubt about the science. If we had a lobby that wanted to deny the laws of gravity and the media decided to give them equal voice…that’s the level of the science debate. We shouldn’t be giving voice to nonsense.”

Wow! Look at the poor saps who have that one little “plausible” thing morph into a huge, doubtful balloon in their heads! Let’s censor the ones who let it fester and want to talk to the media about it! Who is actually being granted a national platform and given voice to nonsense here? The irony is that the mainstream media, including our taxpayer-funded national broadcaster the CBC, have given scant, if any voice to the fine scientists and other experts who have not been corrupted into toeing the party line of man-made climate change.

Elizabeth May is a national political figure who holds herself out to be an expert who knows “the science,” but seems to be getting away with disseminating serious misinformation, with the CBC’s vaunted Peter Mansbridge uttering nary a peep of a challenge. This is a national disgrace. Pity the young people, because as she indicates in the interview, she speaks to (indoctrinates?) them in places where they are a captive audience, as she puts it, and they are forced to listen to her nonsensical, apocalyptic view of their future.

Naomi Klein: A death sentence for the planet

In the media and in her latest book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein does a good job as an AGW alarmist, with what some might even say is histrionic fear mongering. A sampling:

“…keep warming below catastrophic levels,” “…this crisis continues to be existentially terrifying,” “…in the midst of a climate emergency,” “…we’re on a four-to-six-degree temperature trajectory. To be in decade zero, and out of time,” “…a clear and present danger to civilization, “…a death sentence for the planet,” “…a weapon of mass destruction,” “…the road we’re on…will lead us to a greater brutality..to a world of a kind of disaster apartheid I think we caught a glimpse of with Hurricane Katrina.”

When it comes to the climate, Klein also seems to have a problem understanding or telling the truth. She claims to have “immersed myself in the science and politics of climate change.” But she doesn’t appear to be interested in facts: “It’s that I don’t want quibbling about the science. This is how a lot of the debate gets derailed. I don’t want to be derailed with quibbles about how many hurricanes there were in 2012.” (Could that be because, inconveniently, statistics show that there have been a lot less hurricanes and other extreme weather events than the AGW believers claim to be the consequences of man-made climate change?) In a recentCBC radio interview, she quotes Michael Mann, “the famed climate scientist” of the Hockey Stick debacle who employed statistical tricks to produce a misleading graph of global warming history—the graph was used extensively as a propaganda tool to fuel the man-made global warming hype. Perhaps Klein doesn’t know that two Canadian researchers exposed the manipulations:

What they found was that 99% of the time you could process random data using Mann’s techniques and it would generate a Hockey Stick shape. This meant that Mann’s claim that the Hockey Stick graph represented an accurate reconstruction of the past climate was in tatters.

Given Klein’s Jewish heritage, it’s hard to understand how she can use the odious term “deniers,” with its terrible allusion to the Holocaust, when referring to the learned climate scientists and others who have demonstrated that the scientific data do not support the hypothesis of man-made global warming/climate change: “We focus too much on climate deniers,” she says. The use of this nasty ad hominem label has led to outrageous excesses, such as a sickening ad for the upcoming climate march in New York City, wherein it’s implied that respected scientists, other experts, and ordinary people who think for themselves and who happen not to agree that the scientific data support the unproven hypothesis of man-made climate change are tolerant of genocide.

Klein advocates “deep changes to our political and economic system.” She says, “Core inequalities need to be tackled through redistribution of wealth and technology” and bemoans that we seem to be “incapable of responding collectively to an existential crisis and incapable of acting collectively for a greater good.” The socialist/communist plan of action she’s apparently advocating appears to be in line with the UN’s Agenda 21 objectives, which Canadian Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (now resident of communist China when he’s not being fêted in Toronto by celebrity and former Canadian governor-general Adrienne Clarkson as “a true Canadian gem” who “invented the environment”) took a lead in formulating when he said:

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

That would be a real death sentence for the planet.

The grave consequences of celebrities thinking that star power doesn’t need the truth

Of course, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth May, and Naomi Klein aren’t the only Canadian celebrities chastising us for not “believing in” the religion of man-made climate change or doing enough about it. There are many others, including the publicly-lionized David Suzuki, another pseudo-expert on climate science whose shocking and appalling lack of knowledge on the subject was exposed to world-wide ridicule on Australian national television last September. (Watch the video or read the transcript here.)

Do any of the celebrities ever stop to think about the damage they cause by failing to do their homework and study the issues before recklessly and irresponsibly taking their uninformed opinions on the road?

Do they have any inkling that what they say, write, tweet, or sing in public forums may help to bring about and sustain, for example, the miserable realities of trying to live amidst industrial wind turbines which have been forced on rural residents as a direct result of the deception of man-made climate change posing a planetary emergency, thus supposedly necessitating special, draconian, democratic-rights-robbing legislation which gives the wind industry unprecedented rights to despoil prime farmland, expropriate land, kill wildlife, adversely affect people’s health, destabilize the electrical grid, fracture communities, devalue property, and allows it to enjoy 20-year guaranteed, significantly above-market returns on investment, courtesy of the taxpayers?

People are suffering badly for a big, celebrity-enabled lie, and losing their rights, their jobs, their homes, their communities, their environment, their way of life, their money.

Celebrity acolytes and advocates of man-made climate change, with their hysterical exaggerations, outrageous fear mongering, blatant misinformation, and bald-faced untruths have to take a good look at themselves and their role in the terrible consequences of helping to propagate the greatest scientific deception of all time.

Even Scientists Do Not All Agree on Climate Change – It is NOT Settled!

September 20, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Sept. 19, 2014 12:19 p.m. ET

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The crucial scientific question for policy isn’t whether the climate is changing. That is a settled matter: The climate has always changed and always will. Mitch Dobrowner

The idea that “Climate science is settled” runs through today’s popular and policy discussions. Unfortunately, that claim is misguided. It has not only distorted our public and policy debates on issues related to energy, greenhouse-gas emissions and the environment. But it also has inhibited the scientific and policy discussions that we need to have about our climate future.

My training as a computational physicist—together with a 40-year career of scientific research, advising and management in academia, government and the private sector—has afforded me an extended, up-close perspective on climate science. Detailed technical discussions during the past year with leading climate scientists have given me an even better sense of what we know, and don’t know, about climate. I have come to appreciate the daunting scientific challenge of answering the questions that policy makers and the public are asking.

The crucial scientific question for policy isn’t whether the climate is changing. That is a settled matter: The climate has always changed and always will. Geological and historical records show the occurrence of major climate shifts, sometimes over only a few decades. We know, for instance, that during the 20th century the Earth’s global average surface temperature rose 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

Nor is the crucial question whether humans are influencing the climate. That is no hoax: There is little doubt in the scientific community that continually growing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, due largely to carbon-dioxide emissions from the conventional use of fossil fuels, are influencing the climate. There is also little doubt that the carbon dioxide will persist in the atmosphere for several centuries. The impact today of human activity appears to be comparable to the intrinsic, natural variability of the climate system itself.

Rather, the crucial, unsettled scientific question for policy is, “How will the climate change over the next century under both natural and human influences?” Answers to that question at the global and regional levels, as well as to equally complex questions of how ecosystems and human activities will be affected, should inform our choices about energy and infrastructure.

But—here’s the catch—those questions are the hardest ones to answer. They challenge, in a fundamental way, what science can tell us about future climates.

Even though human influences could have serious consequences for the climate, they are physically small in relation to the climate system as a whole. For example, human additions to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the middle of the 21st century are expected to directly shift the atmosphere’s natural greenhouse effect by only 1% to 2%. Since the climate system is highly variable on its own, that smallness sets a very high bar for confidently projecting the consequences of human influences.

A second challenge to “knowing” future climate is today’s poor understanding of the oceans. The oceans, which change over decades and centuries, hold most of the climate’s heat and strongly influence the atmosphere. Unfortunately, precise, comprehensive observations of the oceans are available only for the past few decades; the reliable record is still far too short to adequately understand how the oceans will change and how that will affect climate.

A third fundamental challenge arises from feedbacks that can dramatically amplify or mute the climate’s response to human and natural influences. One important feedback, which is thought to approximately double the direct heating effect of carbon dioxide, involves water vapor, clouds and temperature.

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Scientists measure the sea level of the Ross Sea in Antarctica. National Geographic/Getty Images

But feedbacks are uncertain. They depend on the details of processes such as evaporation and the flow of radiation through clouds. They cannot be determined confidently from the basic laws of physics and chemistry, so they must be verified by precise, detailed observations that are, in many cases, not yet available.

Beyond these observational challenges are those posed by the complex computer models used to project future climate. These massive programs attempt to describe the dynamics and interactions of the various components of the Earth system—the atmosphere, the oceans, the land, the ice and the biosphere of living things. While some parts of the models rely on well-tested physical laws, other parts involve technically informed estimation. Computer modeling of complex systems is as much an art as a science.

For instance, global climate models describe the Earth on a grid that is currently limited by computer capabilities to a resolution of no finer than 60 miles. (The distance from New York City to Washington, D.C., is thus covered by only four grid cells.) But processes such as cloud formation, turbulence and rain all happen on much smaller scales. These critical processes then appear in the model only through adjustable assumptions that specify, for example, how the average cloud cover depends on a grid box’s average temperature and humidity. In a given model, dozens of such assumptions must be adjusted (“tuned,” in the jargon of modelers) to reproduce both current observations and imperfectly known historical records.

We often hear that there is a “scientific consensus” about climate change. But as far as the computer models go, there isn’t a useful consensus at the level of detail relevant to assessing human influences. Since 1990, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, has periodically surveyed the state of climate science. Each successive report from that endeavor, with contributions from thousands of scientists around the world, has come to be seen as the definitive assessment of climate science at the time of its issue.

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There is little doubt in the scientific community that continually growing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, due largely to carbon-dioxide emissions from the conventional use of fossil fuels, are influencing the climate. Pictured, an estuary in Patgonia. Gallery Stock

For the latest IPCC report (September 2013), its Working Group I, which focuses on physical science, uses an ensemble of some 55 different models. Although most of these models are tuned to reproduce the gross features of the Earth’s climate, the marked differences in their details and projections reflect all of the limitations that I have described. For example:

• The models differ in their descriptions of the past century’s global average surface temperature by more than three times the entire warming recorded during that time. Such mismatches are also present in many other basic climate factors, including rainfall, which is fundamental to the atmosphere’s energy balance. As a result, the models give widely varying descriptions of the climate’s inner workings. Since they disagree so markedly, no more than one of them can be right.

• Although the Earth’s average surface temperature rose sharply by 0.9 degree Fahrenheit during the last quarter of the 20th century, it has increased much more slowly for the past 16 years, even as the human contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen by some 25%. This surprising fact demonstrates directly that natural influences and variability are powerful enough to counteract the present warming influence exerted by human activity.

Yet the models famously fail to capture this slowing in the temperature rise. Several dozen different explanations for this failure have been offered, with ocean variability most likely playing a major role. But the whole episode continues to highlight the limits of our modeling.

• The models roughly describe the shrinking extent of Arctic sea ice observed over the past two decades, but they fail to describe the comparable growth of Antarctic sea ice, which is now at a record high.

• The models predict that the lower atmosphere in the tropics will absorb much of the heat of the warming atmosphere. But that “hot spot” has not been confidently observed, casting doubt on our understanding of the crucial feedback of water vapor on temperature.

• Even though the human influence on climate was much smaller in the past, the models do not account for the fact that the rate of global sea-level rise 70 years ago was as large as what we observe today—about one foot per century.

• A crucial measure of our knowledge of feedbacks is climate sensitivity—that is, the warming induced by a hypothetical doubling of carbon-dioxide concentration. Today’s best estimate of the sensitivity (between 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) is no different, and no more certain, than it was 30 years ago. And this is despite an heroic research effort costing billions of dollars.

These and many other open questions are in fact described in the IPCC research reports, although a detailed and knowledgeable reading is sometimes required to discern them. They are not “minor” issues to be “cleaned up” by further research. Rather, they are deficiencies that erode confidence in the computer projections. Work to resolve these shortcomings in climate models should be among the top priorities for climate research.

Yet a public official reading only the IPCC’s “Summary for Policy Makers” would gain little sense of the extent or implications of these deficiencies. These are fundamental challenges to our understanding of human impacts on the climate, and they should not be dismissed with the mantra that “climate science is settled.”

While the past two decades have seen progress in climate science, the field is not yet mature enough to usefully answer the difficult and important questions being asked of it. This decidedly unsettled state highlights what should be obvious: Understanding climate, at the level of detail relevant to human influences, is a very, very difficult problem.

We can and should take steps to make climate projections more useful over time. An international commitment to a sustained global climate observation system would generate an ever-lengthening record of more precise observations. And increasingly powerful computers can allow a better understanding of the uncertainties in our models, finer model grids and more sophisticated descriptions of the processes that occur within them. The science is urgent, since we could be caught flat-footed if our understanding does not improve more rapidly than the climate itself changes.

A transparent rigor would also be a welcome development, especially given the momentous political and policy decisions at stake. That could be supported by regular, independent, “red team” reviews to stress-test and challenge the projections by focusing on their deficiencies and uncertainties; that would certainly be the best practice of the scientific method. But because the natural climate changes over decades, it will take many years to get the data needed to confidently isolate and quantify the effects of human influences.

Policy makers and the public may wish for the comfort of certainty in their climate science. But I fear that rigidly promulgating the idea that climate science is “settled” (or is a “hoax”) demeans and chills the scientific enterprise, retarding its progress in these important matters. Uncertainty is a prime mover and motivator of science and must be faced head-on. It should not be confined to hushed sidebar conversations at academic conferences.

Society’s choices in the years ahead will necessarily be based on uncertain knowledge of future climates. That uncertainty need not be an excuse for inaction. There is well-justified prudence in accelerating the development of low-emissions technologies and in cost-effective energy-efficiency measures.

But climate strategies beyond such “no regrets” efforts carry costs, risks and questions of effectiveness, so nonscientific factors inevitably enter the decision. These include our tolerance for risk and the priorities that we assign to economic development, poverty reduction, environmental quality, and intergenerational and geographical equity.

Individuals and countries can legitimately disagree about these matters, so the discussion should not be about “believing” or “denying” the science. Despite the statements of numerous scientific societies, the scientific community cannot claim any special expertise in addressing issues related to humanity’s deepest goals and values. The political and diplomatic spheres are best suited to debating and resolving such questions, and misrepresenting the current state of climate science does nothing to advance that effort.

Any serious discussion of the changing climate must begin by acknowledging not only the scientific certainties but also the uncertainties, especially in projecting the future. Recognizing those limits, rather than ignoring them, will lead to a more sober and ultimately more productive discussion of climate change and climate policies. To do otherwise is a great disservice to climate science itself.

Dr. Koonin was undersecretary for science in the Energy Department during President Barack Obama’s first term and is currently director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University. His previous positions include professor of theoretical physics and provost at Caltech, as well as chief scientist of BP,BP.LN +0.42% where his work focused on renewable and low-carbon energy technologies.

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