Tag: environmentalism

Climate forum disrupted by screaming protesters

4:33 pm

They’re coming for you next: A climate forum set up by the Republican club at Georgetown University College was so disrupted by screaming protesters that the police had to clear the room.

At the start of “Climate Forum: A Rebuttal,” protestors packed the room and, beginning with the introduction of the first speaker, shouted talking points, various obscenities, and hostile chants.

Despite campus free speech policies announced clearly by the hosts at the start of the event, the harassment continued. Amid the frequent disruptions, a protester dressed as a clown intermittently honked a horn.

The College Republicans called campus police, who tried to remove those interrupting the event, but the students refused to comply. They argued with the officers, refused to show the officers their student IDs, and declared the room an “open forum.”

Eventually, police had to clear the room entirely in an attempt to gain control of the situation. The hallway flooded with protestors — as well as students who appeared genuinely interested in listening to the panelists. Numerous campus administrators and even more officers arrived as the event remained postponed.

The panel finally restarted after police had blocked all but one doorway and refused entrance to anyone with signs. But some hecklers made it through, including one protester who had to be escorted out, but not before ensuring all attendees they are “on the wrong side of history.”

Note also that prior to the event and before they had heard anything, the Georgetown Democratic club condemned the forum,

Let us summarize what this event has taught us:

1. Those who believe in global warming are so close-minded that they are entirely unwilling to listen to another perspective.

2. Those who believe in global warming are so close-minded that they are determined to prevent anyone else from hearing another perspective.

3. Those who believe in global warming are so close-minded that they are determined to prevent anyone with a different perspective from speaking.

4. Those who believe in global warming are even willing to commit acts of violence to enforce numbers 2 and 3 above.

5. Law enforcement and the college administration at Georgetown are terrified of these protesters, and are unwilling to do anything to enforce the law and prevent those protesters from doing numbers 2, 3, and 4.

None of these lessons are very hopeful, because eventually this behavior will routinely lead to violence and possible death. In fact, it already has nearly done so in a number of places, such as the shooting at a Republican congressional baseball practice in Washington in 2017, and the routine violence in Portland whenever conservatives try to publicly demonstrate.

And it is why we got Trump, because unlike the police and administrators at Georgetown, Trump does not bow to this kind of childish and close-minded behavior. He fights back.

Finally, in what way do these protesters think they are going to persuade anyone to their perspective, with this kind of behavior?

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Yang: Private car ownership must end

3:28 pm

They’re coming for you next: In a climate forum at Georgetown University today, Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang proposed the government eliminate the private ownership of cars, and replace it with a “constant roving fleet of electric cars that you would just order up.”

Of course, this fascist Democrat doesn’t mention that, according to his own climate plan it would be the government creating and operating that fleet of cars.

Just imagine having to depend on the DMV for your actual transportation. Right now it is generally bad enough, especially in the Democratic-controlled big urban cities, to just get your driver’s license renewed. Won’t it be just wonderful when you have to call them to provide you your car?

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Fifty years of failed climate predictions

4:12 pm

Link here. From the abstract:

Modern doomsayers have been predicting climate and environmental disaster since the 1960s. They continue to do so today.

None of the apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true.

What follows is a collection of notably wild predictions from notable people in government and science. More than merely spotlighting the failed predictions, this collection shows that the makers of failed apocalyptic predictions often are individuals holding respected positions in government and science.

While such predictions have been and continue to be enthusiastically reported by a media eager for sensational headlines, the failures are typically not revisited.

Many of these doomsday predictions have been previously documented by Tony Heller at his Real Climate Science website.

Much of the fault of these failed predictions falls to the media, which blindly hawks these predictions as if they were solid science, when most were merely political activism falsely dressed up as science. Predictions like this should almost never make the news. What should count are actual results, and data, showing something that is actually happening.

Unfortunately, our mostly liberal press has since the 1980s instead decided to team up with climate activists to push their agendas. Worse, though the examples at the link end in 2014, this journalistic malpractice still goes on today. Only three weeks ago Heller posted this story, Greenland Propaganda Meltdown, noting the errors and false claims in an August 20, 2019 Los Angeles Times that claimed “Greenland’s glaciers are melting.”

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Swamp attacks Trump over hurricane forecasts

9:44 am

Last week, as Hurricane Dorian approached the Florida coast, President Trump held a press briefing where he showed a graph with extra markings that suggested that Alabama might be impacted by the hurricane.

Unfortunately for Trump, this path for Dorian — though initially considered a possibility in the National Weather Service models — was also considered very unlikely, and had been quickly dismissed from those models, making Trump’s graph out-of-date when he showed it.

Since then the Democratic mainstream media has put out hundreds of stories claiming some sort of corruption on Trump’s part for adding those extra markings. Trump has himself responded aggressively, defending his action and saying it was justified. The New York Times even reported — based on anonymous sources — that Commerce secretary Wilbur Ross had threatened to fire three people at the National Weather Service if they didn’t issue a statement defending Trump.

Now, three former Democratic NOAA heads, D. James Baker (appointed by Bill Clinton), Jane Lubchenco (appointed by Barack Obama), and Kathryn D. Sullivan (appointed by Barack Obama), have issued a statement condemning Trump, claiming his actions are threatening the scientific integrity of these agencies.

The National Weather Service (NWS) has always been a model of scientific integrity, ensuring that weather science is not politically driven, regardless of the administration. But the recent misleading statements by President Donald Trump about a NWS hurricane forecast and cover-up actions by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), its parent agency, have violated those norms.

Forgive me if I don’t take very seriously this smug, self-righteous posturing by these former NOAA officials, all partisan Democratic Party political appointees. Scientific integrity suddenly means a lot to them when they can use it to attack Trump. However, when NOAA repeatedly tampered with its climate data for the past dozen years, and has provided no good explanation for that tampering, I don’t remember these high and mighty officials, all in charge of NOAA at the time, commenting then about the importance of scientific integrity.

Trump is no saint here. He as a politician wanted to cover all bets, so he added Alabama in discussing Dorian’s threat, even though his weather scientists considered that threat slim if nonexistent. He should have relied more on those scientists and not improvised.

For him however to be attacked relentless for this minor addition is absurd, since it is perfectly reasonable for weather scientists to get their predictions wrong, and as president Trump has a responsibility to try to prepare for all eventualities.

These NOAA critics are far less credible however. There are questionable things going on at NOAA in connection with its global climate dataset that requires either an explanation or a correction. This is a far more serious issue than whether a politician expanded the threat of a hurricane in one press briefing in order to cover his ass. The tampering threatens to discredit the entire NOAA climate dataset, making all research based on it untrustworthy. If these former NOAA officials really cared about scientific integrity, they would have taken action at NOAA to deal with this tampering, when they ran those agencies. They would have either gotten it stopped, or provided the public and the rest of the scientific community a reasonable explanation for it.

They did neither, proving that their sanctimonious statement today is nothing more than partisan politics. They don’t care about scientific integrity. What they care about is defeating Trump, helping the Democratic Party, and enhancing the power of the Washington swamp.

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Sunspot update August 2019: Even fewer sunspots

3:38 pm

Silso graph for August 2019

Last month I titled my sunspot update “Almost no sunspots,” as there were only two sunspots for the entire month of July, with one having the polarity for the next solar maximum.

August however beat July, with only one sunspot for the month, and none linked to the next maximum. To the right is the Silso graph of sunspot activity for August, showing just one sunspot for the month, on only one day, August 13.

Below is NOAA’s August graph of the overall sunspot cycle since 2009, released by NOAA today and annotated to give it some context.
» Read more

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Democrats at climate forum: Ban everything!

9:24 am

Fascists: When asked by CNN interviewers during that network’s seven hour pro-Democratic climate forum yesterday what they would do to prevent global warming, it appears that the primary solution by every Democratic presidential candidate was to ban things.

Democrats appearing at CNN’s marathon 7-hour global warming forum have a plan to solve a changing climate: Ban everything!

Over the course of the television extravaganza, Democrats’ leading 2020 presidential candidates floated a variety of proposals to cut Americans’ energy use and, ostensibly, to stop the climate from changing. Among them: Bans on plastic straws, red meat, incandescent lightbulbs, gas-powered cars, nuclear energy, off-shore drilling, fracking, natural gas exports, coal plants, and even “carbon” itself.

The article goes on to detail each candidate’s banning proposals, all of which were similar, mindless, and based on an incredible level of ignorance about the climate and science. Bernie Sanders however probably gave us the most revealing and honest glimpse into all their mindsets with his suggestion that human life itself was the problem.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) went the furthest, saying we should try to minimize human life itself to help the environment. Sanders said he’d use taxpayer money to help fund 3rd world population control programs: “The answer has everything to do with the fact that women in the United States of America, by the way, have a right to control their own bodies and make reproductive decisions. And the Mexico City agreement, which denies American aid to those organizations around the world that allow women to have abortions or even get involved in birth control to me is totally absurd.” [emphasis mine]

No one should be surprised by this. Every socialist/communist/totalitarian movement in the past has always led inevitably to the killing of millions. For them, their ideas are much more important than people, and should those people get in the way, well then, they must be removed, by force and by gas chambers if necessary.

Be prepared. Should one of these power-hungry leftists win the White House they will be coming for you next.

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Scientists look at and compare two past grand minimums

11:55 am

In a new paper just published by the American Geophysical Union (AGU), scientists have used tree ring data to analyze and compare the last two past grand minimums, dubbed the Spörer Minimum (1432–1578) and the more well known Maunder Minimum (1640–1720).

The link takes you to the full paper. It is very technical but what it essentially finds is that there appear to be some differences between the two, but more important, during the deepest part of both grand minimums all evidence of the 11 year sunspot cycle (dubbed the Scwabe cycle) vanishes.

A detailed comparison between the Spörer and Maunder (CE 1640–1720) minima shows that the Spörer Minimum is associated with enhanced Δ14C variability in a band centered around the 11‐year Schwabe cycle from CE 1450 to 1479 and between CE 1545 and 1578, whereas little 11‐year variability is observed from CE 1479 to 1539. In contrast, we only observe enhanced 11‐year variability after the end of the Maunder Minimum at CE 1722–1744, which could indicate that the nature and origin of the two minima were different.

In other words, from 1479 to 1539 (Spörer) and 1545 to 1722 (Maunder) the data suggests that we would not have seen sunspots, even with today’s superior observational capabilities.

They base this conclusion by looking at carbon-14 data, which reflects the arrival of cosmic rays on the Earth. When the sun is active cosmic rays decrease. When it is inactive, with no sunspots, cosmic rays increase. This data can be compared with known and more recent sunspot cycles, and can thus provide a robust baseline for determining what the Sun’s behavior was like before the era of the telescope.

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No warming in U.S. since 2005

5:47 pm

NOAA data since 2005
Click for full image.

Using temperature stations specifically picked to eliminate as many biases and temperature errors as possible, NOAA has found that since 2005 the continental United States has experienced no warming at all.

The graph at the right, reduced to post here, illustrates this.

In January 2005, NOAA began recording temperatures at its newly built U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN). USCRN includes 114 pristinely maintained temperature stations spaced relatively uniformly across the lower 48 states. NOAA selected locations that were far away from urban and land-development impacts that might artificially taint temperature readings.

Prior to the USCRN going online, alarmists and skeptics sparred over the accuracy of reported temperature data. With most preexisting temperature stations located in or near urban settings that are subject to false temperature signals and create their own microclimates that change over time, government officials performed many often-controversial adjustments to the raw temperature data. Skeptics of an asserted climate crisis pointed out that most of the reported warming in the United States was non-existent in the raw temperature data, but was added to the record by government officials.

The USCRN has eliminated the need to rely on, and adjust the data from, outdated temperature stations. Strikingly, as shown in the graph below, USCRN temperature stations show no warming since 2005 when the network went online. If anything, U.S. temperatures are now slightly cooler than they were 14 years ago.

What is significant about this data is how it reveals the dishonesty of the adjustments that NOAA and NASA have been making to the temperature data. Those adjustments, supposedly done to make the data more accurate, have always cooled the past and warmed the present, a pattern that by itself is very suspicious.

These temperature stations were chosen to create a reliable baseline, picking stations that needed no adjustment and would thus give scientists a measure for justifying any alterations they impose on the raw data. Not only does this data suggest strongly that the claims of global warming year after year (“This year was the hottest on record!”) are suspect, it also shows that there is something seriously wrong with their adjustments. If their modifications to the raw data was correct, then this set of data should have matched it. It does not.

Will this mean they will readjust the overall data to eliminate the cooling in the past and the warming in the near present to make the data better fit what these results prove? Don’t be silly! That would show that there is little merit to the theories of the global warming alarmists, something that cannot be tolerated. It might cause those big government contracts to be cancelled. Worse, it will make it more difficult for these leftists to use the data to justify reshaping society into their vision of a socialist utopia.

No, what I expect to happen is that the scientists at NOAA (who also happen to be the ones who have been tampering with all the other data) to begin altering the temperature data from these baseline stations, to make them fit their theories. Or as Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden recently put it, “We choose truth over facts.”

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Global warming scientist Michael Mann loses Canadian lawsuit

5:39 pm

Global warming scientist Michael Mann has lost a Canadian libel lawsuit he had filed against a skeptical scientist who had said that Mann “belongs in the state pen, not Penn State.”

More details here. The court also ruled that Mann must pay the defendant’s court costs. The key quote that proves Mann’s scientific work is either incompetent or fraudulent is this:

Dr Mann lost his case because he refused to show in open court his R2 regression numbers (the ‘working out’) behind the world-famous ‘hockey stick’ graph.

Mann is most well known for his hockey stick graph that eliminated any evidence of the well-documented Medieval Warming Period and thus made it appear global warming only began with the industrial age.

Many good scientists have questioned this graph, including Canadian scientist Dr. Tim Ball, the victorious defendant in this case. The court had demanded that to prove Ball’s statement was libel, Mann had to show everyone the legitimate scientific methods he used to create the graph. Mann refused to do so, and so the court ruled against him.

I should add that a number of different scientists have analyzed Mann’s hockey stick graph and have found that, based on the information in Mann’s own published papers, they could plug the data in and with his methods create any graph they wanted, essentially demonstrating that what Mann did was junk.

Does this prove human-caused global warming isn’t happening? No, it doesn’t. What it does demonstrate once again is that another one of the icons of that theory is either a fraud or incompetent, and that his work is not worth the electrons used to publish it. In the case of Mann, the evidence of his political biases and corrupt science practices has been evident for years, first exposed in his emails in the climategate emails. There, he actually worked to destroy the careers of any scientist who questioned his work, rather than debate the facts with them.

He tried to do the same this time with Dr. Ball, and has been soundly slapped down.

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A directory of skeptical climate websites

11:09 pm

Link here. The list is very comprehensive, including many of the sites I check frequently. Note too that many of these sites are very rigorous in the analysis of data, often far more rigorous than many modern peer-reviewed climate papers I read.

As they are skeptical, so should you be. Don’t take anything said at these sites at face value, but don’t dismiss what they say outright either. Pay attention, because you might find that you will become more discerning in the future when you are bombarded with chicken-little pronouncements from the global warming activist crowd.

One quote from the article bears some contemplating:

Virtually all powerful vested interests in the Western hemisphere recognize climate change alarm as leverage to impose self-serving policies and garner higher profits. The reasons for this are myriad. [The article then lists sixteen such reasons, all well known and well documented.]

Taken individually, each of these reasons—and this list undoubtedly omits additional special interests that benefit from climate change alarm—represent a profound shift in public policy. Each of them represents investments skewing away from optimal returns and instead towards returns that favor a politically entitled group. The overall impact of all of them is regressive, increasing the cost-of-living for the most economically vulnerable populations.

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French solar road a total failure

3:34 pm

The first French attempt to build a road that had solar panels embedded in it to produce power has turned out to be a total failure, after only two years.

Despite the hype surrounding solar roads, two years after this one was introduced as a trial, the project has turned out to be a colossal failure — it’s neither efficient nor profitable, according to a report by Le Monde.

The unfortunate truth is that this road is in such a poor state, it isn’t even worth repairing. Last May, a 100-meter stretch had deteriorated to such a state that it had to be demolished. According to Le Monde’s report, various components of the road don’t fit properly — panels have come loose and some of the solar panels have broken into fragments.

On top of the damage and poor wear of the road, the Normandy solar track also failed to fulfill its energy-production goals. The original aim was to produce 790 kWh each day, a quantity that could illuminate a population of between 3,000 and 5,000 inhabitants. But the rate produced stands at only about 50% of the original predicted estimates.

The article notes that a 230-foot-long Dutch solar bicycle path has been more successful, meeting its energy goals. It also has not deteriorated. I suspect that both results are because it is being used by bicycles and pedestrians, not cars.

What always bothers me about these projects is not their sincere good intentions, but the unwillingness of their promoters to honestly assess the final results, good or bad. They laud the project’s good intentions as if that is all that matters, and rip into anyone who questions the practicality of the project. When the project fails these same promoters, usually politicians, disappear into the darkness, ignoring the bad result as they promote some new pie-in-the-sky proposal.

In this context I am especially reminded of Democratic politicians who loved Venezuela’s socialist experiment, until it went bankrupt as every socialist experiment always does.

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NOAA revises upward its ordinary average 2019 hurricane season prediction

11:51 am

NOAA last week announced that it is revising upward its hurricane prediction for the 2019, changing it from average and ordinary to slightly higher than average and ordinary.

Seasonal forecasters with NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center have increased the likelihood of an above-normal Atlantic hurricane season to 45% (up from 30% from the outlook issued in May). The likelihood of near-normal activity is now at 35%, and the chance of below-normal activity has dropped to 20%.

The number of predicted storms is also greater with NOAA now expecting 10-17 named storms (winds of 39 mph or greater), of which 5-9 will become hurricanes (winds of 74 mph or greater), including 2-4 major hurricanes (winds of 111 mph or greater). This updated outlook is for the entire six-month hurricane season, which ends Nov. 30.

The problem with NOAA’s desire to imply that we are all going to die from massive hurricanes is twofold. First, take a look at the most recent hurricane graphs at Weatherstreet.com. NOAA’s unrevised prediction for Atlantic hurricanes was totally in the center of the average for the years from 1966 to 2009. It also was significantly below 2005, the worst hurricane year on record that was used by global warming activists to claim global warming was causing more storms that were more extreme.

The problem is that 2005 was an outlier. For almost a dozen years afterward no category 3 or more hurricanes made landfall in the U.S. and only a very few have followed since.

The newly revised prediction still predicts an average and ordinary number of hurricanes in 2019, just very slightly above the average for the past half century.

But no matter. The number will be higher! We are all going to die! We must silence anyone who disagrees because their denialism will cause more deaths!

Welcome to the coming dark age.

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