Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
The accumulation of over two centuries of precipitation records across Greece indicates there have been overall slightly declining trends in precipitation extremes across the region and “negligible climate variability.” This supports a new study’s tongue-in-cheek title referencing a “404 Not Found” climate crisis.
The accumulation of over two centuries of precipitation records across Greece indicates there have been overall slightly declining trends in precipitation extremes across the region and “negligible climate variability.” This supports a new study’s tongue-in-cheek title referencing a “404 Not Found” climate crisis.
Eight scientists have published a new study examining the popularized conceptualization of an anthropogenically-induced climate change that has increasingly become “the post-modern scapegoat for which every disaster is blamed.” The authors point out, for example, that even the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic has been blamed on a human-caused warming climate.
The study utilizes detailed precipitation data available for Greece, as these climate records often extend to the early 1800s.
The scientists tendentiously searched for climate-related (i.e., 30+ years) trends that might confirm there is a “climate emergency, climate crisis, etc.” in the works linked to an anthropogenic influence.
“The current period can be characterized as normal without notable climatic events.”
“The overall period does not show a linear trend or appreciable difference in the two 30-year climate periods.”
“…precipitation did not linearly change during the past 7 decades.”
Analyses of precipitation extremes may even support a “decreasing, albeit slightly” trend over the two centuries, as the record average and maximum rainfall depths occurred in the 1800s or early 1900s.
In anticipation of the timeworn, “But Greece is not the globe!” criticism, it should be noted that comprehensive analysis of global-scale precipitation data in the satellite era also do not support detection of intensifying trends associated with the timing of the sharp rise in anthropogenic CO2 emissions or a warming climate.
The sky warriors hold the climate models that have been predicting global doom to be sacrosanct. But as we have reported many times in the past, they’re flawed.
The sky warriors hold the climate models that have been predicting global doom to be sacrosanct. But as we have reported many times in the past, they’re flawed. A new research paper confirms our warnings. It would be helpful if the brand name media would make note of it. We won’t be holding our own hot air, though.
A January report from Berkeley Earth – self-described as a “non-profit research organization” that “has been preparing independent analyses of global mean temperature changes since 2013″ – starts out as anyone would expect: with a frightful declaration “that 2022 was nominally the fifth warmest year on Earth since 1850.” Which of course means nothing.
It goes on to say “the last eight years have included all eight of the warmest years observed in the instrumental record,” another string of words that sound ominous but aren’t.
What is important, however, is buried near the bottom of the report.
Since 1980, Earth’s temperature trend “has changed little.” The researchers reckon that global temperatures have increased 0.19 degrees Celsius per decade over that period. The data was pulled from 50,498 weather stations combined with sea-surface temperature data.
With this in mind, let’s take a look at the predictions that have been made by the climate models. Their forecasts indicate that temperatures should be increasing at the rate of about 0.28–0.29 degrees Celsius per decade. That’s about 50% higher than the increases Berkeley Earth found.
“The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) finds that the global average temperature has been increasing at the rate of 0.18 degrees Celsius per decade since 1981. NASA’s GISTEMP data set reports an increase of 0.19 degrees Celsius per decade. The U.K.’s Hadley Centre finds the increase is about 0.20 degrees Celsius per decade.
The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts reports the global average temperature trend generated by its fifth-generation atmospheric reanalysis (ERA5). Reanalysis is a blend of observations with past short-range weather forecasts rerun with modern weather forecasting models. From 1979 on, the ERA5 calculates that the global average temperature has been increasing at a rate of 0.19 degrees Celsius per decade. The Japan Meteorological Agency’s JRA-55 reanalysis finds the per-decade rate of increase is 0.18 degrees Celsius.
Meanwhile satellite measurements, which we’ve argued are the standard and the only gauges that can be trusted, tell us global temperatures have averaged an increase of only 0.13 degrees Celsius per decade since Dec. 1, 1978. Taking variables such as “the orbital decay of satellites, the deterioration of instruments, and changes related to replacing satellites over time” into account, Bailey says, produces a rise of 0.18 degrees per decade.
Will the media now back off their doomsday reports, laden with nonsense from the likes of John Kerry, Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Al Gore, Bill Nye, King Charles III, U.N. functionaries and an entire cast of narcissists, attention seekers, virtue signalers, screeching hysterics, and blind zealots?
Unlikely. The press has been carrying the narrative for decades and is fully invested in perpetuating the fear as long as possible. It doesn’t hurt that the “solutions” for global warming also happen to be Democrats’ favored policies for wealth redistribution and the capture of our free market economy. The mainstream media have become a subunit of the Democratic Party responsible for disseminating its never-ending torrent of propaganda.
National Science Teachers Association Rejects the Scientific Method
by Dr. Sharon Camp
Never have I been so inspired upon being removed from a venue. Actually, as a retired teacher of AP (advanced placement) environmental sciences and chemistry, I haven’t been escorted from very many places. Perhaps none. I should explain.
I am a member of the CO2 Coalition, in Arlington, Virginia, where I wear my scientist hat – a B.S. in geology and Ph.D. in analytical chemistry – and serve on the organization’s education committee. In supporting our mission of educating the public and policymakers on the benefits of carbon dioxide and the role of the gas in Earth’s ecosystems, I tap into my teaching and science backgrounds.
As one of four people chosen to represent the CO2 Coalition at the March meeting of the National Science Teaching Association (NSTA) in Atlanta, I looked forward to returning to a conference I found so engaging as a teacher. Thousands of educators congregate at the annual meeting to hear lectures and explore the displays of hundreds of vendors for new tools to use for labs and lessons.
I did not quite know what to expect from teachers visiting the CO2 Coalition’s conference display.
On the one hand, we offered educational materials, including beautifully designed comic books and entertaining videos, and lesson plans. All would be useful in teaching the science behind carbon dioxide as an atmospheric gas and plant fertilizer. However, we also had a newly published paper that is critical of the NSTA’s position on teaching climate change.
The 40,000-member association’s position paper, “The Teaching of Climate Science,” instructs teachers to conform to the so-called consensus that human-induced emissions of carbon dioxide will cause dangerous heating of the atmosphere and to dismiss contradictory evidence.
The association accepts the opinions of various organizations backing the popular global-warming theory while rejecting the differing views of thousands of scientists. Such dissenters include researchers of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who disagree with the IPCC’s politicized, official reports to the public, and the CO2 Coalition’s more than 100 members. The plain truth is that the NSTA position ignores the tenets of the 400-year-old scientific method.
For a teacher of science like me, the scientific method is more than some formalized procedure. It requires that a student be able to write a hypothesis, design experiments to test the proposition, accurately collect high-quality data, and apply critical thinking to findings.
My labs were data-driven, meaning students were to have no preconceived notions about the results of experiments. Rather, they were to rely on the analysis of data gathered with care and integrity. Students applied the scientific method and critical thinking to actual experiments instead of learning only about abstract concepts.
How can somebody with my regard for science sit quietly by when a national organization claiming to represent 40,000 members tosses aside an empirical approach to discovery that has underpinned western civilization for centuries? How to remain silent when those claiming educational dominion over children require their adherence to an unscientific methodology and censorship of dissenting voices? Well, I can’t.
So, there I stood in an Atlanta conference center with colleagues (a communications specialist, a geologist and IPCC reviewer, and a Ph.D. in chemistry), eager to share our knowledge and educational aids – and wondering how our critique of NSTA’s views on climate change would be received.
At first, we were overwhelmed by an enthusiastically appreciative response from educators, including teachers from public and private institutions and homeschoolers. We ran out of lesson plans in two hours. There clearly was a need for non-politicized material on the science behind photosynthesis, cellular respiration, carbon dioxide, and other atmospheric gases.
More than half the teachers we encountered expressed doubts about the rhetoric of climate alarmists. Surprisingly to us, even more were shocked to learn of NSTA’s position on teaching climate change and its unquestioning rejection of evidence contradicting establishment orthodoxy. Most of the teachers – unlike, apparently, NSTA leadership – understood science to be a process of continual inquiry and debate guided by testable data.
By halfway through the conference’s second day, nearly all our material had been distributed. It was then that organizers of the NSTA gathering insisted that we stop sharing our critique of the association’s anti-science position. For refusing to yield to this censorship, we were escorted from the building.
We were, nonetheless, encouraged by finding so many educators hungry for honest discovery and, in some cases, grateful for scientific information utterly new to them. We concluded that NSTA’s narrow approach to learning is being driven by a politically-correct bureaucracy disconnected from a significant number of the association’s members.
There is hope for science education in America. Our work continues.
Sharon Camp has a bachelor’s degree in geology from the University of Georgia and a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from Georgia Tech. She has worked in industry, for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and as an advanced placement environmental science teacher. She is the Senior Education Advisor for the CO2 Coalition, in Arlington, Virginia.
For those of you that remember the yeoman’s work that Steve McIntyre did at Climate Audit debunking Michael Mann’s hockey stick and flawed methodology this should come as no surprise. Once again, hockey sticks get generated where the original data doesn’t show it.
Note from Anthony:For those of you that remember the yeoman’s work that Steve McIntyre did at Climate Audit debunking Michael Mann’s hockey stick and flawed methodology this should come as no surprise. Once again, hockey sticks get generated where the original data doesn’t show it. The only conclusion you can make is that the data and the method have been adjusted to fit a preconceived and desired result. This series of Tweets has been compiled here for easier access and readability. – Anthony
[M]ost readers are familiar with famous “hide the decline” from Climategate. Below are 1850-2000 parts of 5 series calculated from Asian tree ring data, explained below. I recently received some fantastic PAGES2k reverse engineering from @detgodehab and am re-visiting.
The data illustrated below comes from (1) original Briffa 2001 Asian series with late 20th century decline (chopped off in Mann’s IPCC diagram); (2) average of Asian series in gridded MXD series sent by Briffa/Osborn to Rutherford and Mann, ostensible input in Mann 2008
(3) average of (the 45) gridded MXD as used in Mann 2008. As discussed long ago at Climate Audit, Mann chopped off the offending declines and replaced them with temperature data. This was a different incident to the IPCC diagram or the 1999 WMO “hide the decline” diagram.
(4) PAGES2K (2013) introduced a novel Asia reconstruction (Cook et al) from tree rings in which late 20th C decline observed in Schweingruber data did not exist. Closing values were similar to high values at mid-20th century. The difference was not reconciled by PAGES2K.
(5) the current PAGES reconstruction – the “Woke Reconstruction” for short and used in IPCC AR6 – contained a subset of the PAGES2K Asia dset, the average of which yields a monster blade. The “decline” is in the Woke rear-view mirror.
A few years ago, I had noticed that some of the tree ring chronologies underlying the Woke Reconstruction had enormous closing blades that did not appear possible to replicate using standard methodologies.
I did a couple of Twitter threads as well:
I've triple checked the calculations. While the versions differ dramatically, they also clearly come from the same data (due to high frequency similarity). Where did PAGES2K chronologies for paki033 and indo005 come from? How were they calculated?
I asked two lead authors of PAGES 2019 about the provenance of the Asian tree ring series, but got nowhere. They didn’t consider that they had any responsibility as lead authors of a Nature article to answer questions about their data.
The underlying reference (Cook et al 2013) contained only a single sentence as purported description of chronology methodology: that they took “considerable care” to avoid ‘segment length curse’, with “partial use” of a novel technique then recently introduced by UEA’s Tom Melvin
the keepers of these chronologies were at Columbia U which resolutely refused data when I was trying to figure out Hockey Stick mysteries. Jacoby: “Fifteen years is not a delay. It is a time for poorer quality data to be neglected and not archived.”
anyway, reader @detodehab got intrigued with the puzzling Asian tree ring chronologies and reverse engineered their calculation. He replicated the results to every detail. No one could have possibly imagined the actual calculation from details in PAGES2K or Cook et al 2013.
It’s hard for a statistical methodology to be so bad as to be “wrong”. Mann’s principal components methodology was one seemingly unique example. PAGES2K’s Asian tree ring chronologies are another. It’s worse than anyone can imagine.
unfortunately, exposition of the defective calculation are technical and will take some time. But for now, the monster blade of the “Woke” PAGES 2019 Asian tree ring data is bogus. PAGES2019 selectively chose the biggest blades, nearly all of which come from bogus chronologies.
I have a question for readers on order of exposition. Which should come first: 1) narrative of detective work by which calculation was reverse engineered 2) pathologies of PAGES2K Asia tree ring methodology Not all Asia chronologies are pathological, but biggest blades are.
on the left is description of PAGES Asia2K chronologies and on right is my brief description of their actual algorithm as deduced by @detgodehab and verified by me. I’ll return later to how he figured this out. For now, the pathologies of the method.
I’ll describe the pathologies of the PAGES2K Asia algorithm more or less as we discussed them in DMs over past few weeks. @detgodehab had begun with analysis of paki033, the series that I had featured in a 2021 thread and blog article.
@detgodehab had ported the algorithm to Octave. The paki033 iteration stopped after 20 iterations. So let’s look at the evolution of the chronology. It opened as nondescript series on left and closed with big blade. On right is sequence of steps showing emergence of closing blade
what happened to individual cores? Tree ring “chronologies” are calculated as the difference between measurements and smooth (pseudo-model). Between start and close, the ‘model’ moved closer to zero at the close, so that contribution to chronology (shown on right) increased bigly
I have a question for readers on order of exposition. Which should come first: 1) narrative of detective work by which calculation was reverse engineered 2) pathologies of PAGES2K Asia tree ring methodology Not all Asia chronologies are pathological, but biggest blades are.
on the left is description of PAGES Asia2K chronologies and on right is my brief description of their actual algorithm as deduced by @detgodehab and verified by me. I’ll return later to how he figured this out. For now, the pathologies of the method.
bingo. Excluding the last 50 years of data, paki033 had an even bigger blade //50 years earlier//. For good measure, @detgodehab did test excluding 25 years and got same big blade //25 years earlier//.
so it was very clear that the big blade being produced by the PAGES2K Asia chronologies was bogus and some sort of artefact of their methodology and NOT due to climate. This doesn’t disprove global warming. It is only relevant to PAGES2K.
Also, PAGES2K uses much other data. Nor are all Asia 2K chronologies calculated with this bogus methodology. But PAGES2019 selected the worst and most bogus chronologies (claiming they were the best) and that’s why there’s the monster blade shown in opening tweet.
while it’s evident that the PAGES2K Asia methodology was pathological, when @detgodehab chopped off 100 years, it didn’t produce a blade. I haven’t parsed this to see why. There are many mysteries in the algorithm which I’ll continue to describe.
In an iteration, convergence is presumed. But PAGES2K algorithm did NOT converge for paki033. It was stopped at iteration 21. I ran D’s algorithm for 100 iterations and found that the Melvin “test statistic” (a weird one) increased up to iter ~68, dropped suddenly, then rose
this is NOT acceptable behaviour in a valid algorithm purporting to converge
what was happening to the chronology during these wild changes in “convergence” statistic? The blade (which had stopped at ~4) continued to grow reaching ~37 at iteration 50, then declined to ~15.3 by iteration 100. Obviously not climatic
the maximum of the blade by iteration for 500 iterations is shown below. It did actually converge under Melvin statistic – but to an implausibly large blade of 15.338.
@detgodehab observed “so clearly convergence doesn’t mean that a chronology is valid”. Clearly.
recall the diagram shown previously in which I had extracted the smooth ‘model’ for an individual core. At right are the ‘models’ for each core at convergence: they all approach zero at end.
a technical point: there are two main approaches to “detrending” each core to allow for juvenile growth: 1) a separate curve for each tree/core; 2) one curve (typically negative exponential plus constant) for site.
I did an experiment applying Melvin’s iterative method and supsmu smoothing as follows: 1) to individual cores as done in PAGES2K Asia; 2) one curve for entire site (“RCS”). The monster blade only appeared with PAGES combination of Melvin iteration and supsmu corewise smoothing.
thus far, I’ve discussed one site paki033.
@detgodehab has verified that same flawed algorithm was used for at least 8 other Pakistan sites. Note that these sites (together with Columbia U’s Mongolia chronologies) dominate PAGES19 list of heavy contributors to closing blade.
Also note that all these sites were preferential selected by the PAGES2019 screening procedures (which I’ve criticized elsewhere.)
The urban heat island (UHI) effects on Tmin averaged 3.5 times as large as on Tmax, an unsurprising result and qualitatively consistent with previous studies.
In my last post (Part IV) I showed how urbanization (as measured by population density) affects GHCN monthly-average Tmax and Tmin near-surface air temperatures during the warm season in the Northern Hemisphere. We are utilizing a technique that recognizes rural thermometer sites can experience large spurious warming with very small increases in population density, as has been known for over 50 years.
The urban heat island (UHI) effects on Tmin averaged 3.5 times as large as on Tmax, an unsurprising result and qualitatively consistent with previous studies. Also, I showed that the homogenization procedure NOAA uses to adjust the Tmax and Tmin temperatures caused greater UHI effects compared to raw (unadjusted) data, a result I cannot explain.
Again I will emphasize that these UHI warming results are based upon spatial comparisons between neighboring stations, and do not say anything quantitative about how much urbanization effects have spuriously warmed long-term temperature trends over land. That is indeed the goal of our study, but we have not reached that point in the analysis yet.
Here in Part V of my series on UHI I just want to show the difference between U.S. and non-U.S. stations, in this cased for adjusted (homogenized) Tmin data. This is shown in the following two plots, which are the same except the second plot has a logarithmic scale in population density.
The non-U.S. stations have a more rapid rise in UHI warming at very low population densities than the U.S. stations do, but less rapid warming at high population densities. Possible reasons for this include country differences in thermometer siting and differences in waste heat generation. I’m sure you can think of other possible reasons.
As can be seen most (over 80%) of the GHCN 2-station matchups come from the U.S. Other countries have considerably fewer 2-station matchups, for example Canada (7.8% of the Northern Hemisphere total), Japan (4.7%), Turkey (2.8%), South Korea (1.3%), and China (1.1%). These low totals are not necessarily due to a lack of stations, but to a lack of station pairs within 150 km and 300 m elevation of each other needed for my current method of analysis.
This man is about to take an oath promising to govern us according to our laws and customs. But he actually wants to do away with such customs as being able to choose what sort of transport to buy, and being able to use the Kings highway without impediment.
„I have dedicated much of my life to the restoration of harmony between humanity, nature and the environment, and to the encouragement of corporate social and environmental responsibility. Quite frankly, it has been a bit of an uphill struggle. But, now, it is time to take it to the next level.
„In order to secure our future and to prosper, we need to evolve our economic model. Having been engaged in these issues since I suppose 1968, when I made my first speech on the environment, and having talked to countless experts across the globe over those decades, I have come to realise that it is not a lack of capital that is holding us back, but rather the way in which we deploy it. Therefore, to move forward, we need nothing short of a paradigm shift, one that inspires action at revolutionary levels and pace. With this in mind, I am delighted to be launching a Sustainable Markets Initiative, with the generous support of the World Economic Forum.“
This man is about to take an oath promising to govern us according to our laws and customs. But he actually wants to do away with such customs as being able to choose what sort of transport to buy, and being able to use the Kings highway without impediment. Because of his long held ideological stances and alignments, he is not respected by a large proportion of the people in the disunited kingdom. Tough times for pro-monarchists.
We know what sort of ‚experts‘ Charles has been talking to. We also know he’s led a sheltered life of immense privilege and comfort. He has no idea what it’s like to dread opening a gas and electricity bill.
— Rog Tallbloke (Righto/Chief) 🇬🇧 (@RogTallbloke) May 1, 2023
It’s time for that debate. Listen to a bit more of what King Charles has to say.
The WEF'S GREAT RESET KING: The pandemic "represents an unprecedented opportunity to.. reset the way we live… we need a shift in our economic model that places the transition to Net Zero at the heart of how we operate…"
In what could be a potential big win for conservatives, the practice of “Chevron deference” is to be targeted by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) in an upcoming court case for the next SCOTUS session.
In what could be a potential big win for conservatives, the practice of “Chevron deference” is to be targeted by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) in an upcoming court case for the next SCOTUS session.
Chevron deference has become known as the practice of deferring to the decision making of a federal agency when the agency is interpreting language in the law that Congress has left ambiguous. Rather than interpret the language themselves, the judges, under Chevron deference, rely on the decisions of the federal regulator under question.
While initially this decision benefited a more conservative agenda during the Reagan administration under environmental policy challenged in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council in 1984, since then, the policy of Chevron deference has overwhelmingly benefitted more liberal causes to federal regulations and agency decisions.
As reported by the Wall Street Journal:
“The Supreme Court said Monday it would reconsider a 1984 precedent some conservatives have argued grants too much power to federal regulators by directing courts to defer to an agency’s legal approach when Congress has left the statutory language ambiguous.
…
“The case granted Monday involves a fishing-industry challenge to a National Marine Fisheries Service regulation involving the payment of onboard monitors who oversee compliance with federal fishery-management law. The court expressly declined to consider the technical issue of the payment scales and instead took on the far more consequential question presented: whether to overrule the Chevron decision or significantly curb its application.”
There is no guarantee how SCOTUS will rule specifically on Chevron given the details of this fishing case, but the fact that SCOTUS is taking the case at all, and focusing mainly on the Chevron deference portion of the case, rather than the technical payment scales issue, sets up a potential huge win for conservatives.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
“‘We are delighted that the court took this case not only to potentially deliver justice to these fishermen, but also to reconsider a doctrine that has enabled the widespread expansion of unchecked executive authority,’ said Paul Clement, a litigator who has won significant victories for conservative causes at the high court.
“Mr. Clement, who was solicitor general in the George W. Bushadministration, will argue the industry’s side when Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo is heard in the court’s next term, which begins in October.”
Protesters from Just Stop Oil climate protest group glue their hands to the frame of a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s, The Last Supper inside the Royal Academy, London. Picture date: Tuesday July 5, 2022. (Photo by James Manning/PA Images via Getty Images)
Just Stop Oil (JSO) activists have an insatiable appetite for mayhem.
Protesters from the environmental group are slowing down traffic in London today, conducting a ‘go slow’ march through Parliament Square.
This isn’t the first time, of course, that they’ve caused disruption. [emphasis, links added]
A few days before this rather odd demonstration, campaigners entered the National Gallery in central London and proceeded to glue themselves to the frame of John Constable’s The Hay Wain.
Earlier this month, a JSO protesterdisrupted the World Snooker Championship in Sheffield by jumping onto the table and emptying a bag of orange powder paint over the playing surface.
Next up, according to reports, is the King’s coronation.
Some JSO members appear to be hypocrites of the highest order
A peer-reviewed paper, released earlier this month, suggests that some activism is driven by narcissism.
The study, conducted by two prominent psychologists at the University of Bern, Switzerland, found narcissism to be a common feature among ‘anti-sexual assault activism’.
But might that narcissism also be a motivating factor for other demonstrators, including members of JSO?
When we think of narcissism, we tend to focus on agentic narcissism (those with diminished empathy for others), or grandiose narcissism (someone who displays an excessive sense of self-importance).
However, communal narcissists – those who consider themselves the most caring person in their social surroundings – differ from more traditional narcissists, in that they use communal events to satisfy their grandiose needs.
According to the researchers, manipulative individuals with ulterior motives may view some types of activism as a vehicle for obtaining positive self-presentation (e.g., virtue signaling) and gaining status.
They may also view public demonstrations – particularly those against sexual assault – as a way of dominating others and engaging in social conflicts to ‘get their thrills’.
In short, some are willing to exploit the adoration (or notoriety) of the movement to fuel their own egotistical desires. The authors aren’t describing JSO members specifically, but you would be forgiven for thinking otherwise.
One of the psychologists involved in the study, Alexander Bertrams, told me that many forms of modern-day activism are attractive to narcissists, as they help satisfy their self-related needs.
‘In this sense,’ he said, ‘we have found a relationship between greater involvement in activism and a higher inclination for virtue signaling.’ This allows an activist to advertise their supposed moral superiority over non-activists.
‘We think that narcissists are involved in activism not for altruistic reasons, but for selfish ones,’ said Bertrams, who was quick to emphasize that activism in itself is not narcissistic.
Instead, an increasing number of individuals with narcissistic traitsview activism as a powerful channel to act out narcissistically.
On JSO protesters, Bertrams told me that climate activism, which ‘is currently receiving a lot of media attention, elicits strong emotional reactions from the people, and involves a certain amount of aggression.’ For this very reason, he noted, ‘it is likely to be very attractive to narcissists.’
According to Bertrams, there are two groups of climate activists: those who take action out of their authentic views and are truly convinced that urgent action is required; and, on the other side, there are the narcissists who appear to be more interested in performative acts of ‘care’.
They are fixated on the idea of drawing attention to themselves, rather than actually drawing attention to any specific environmental matter.
‘If trying to damage artworks in the name of saving the climate leads to increased admiration in one’s peer group and invitations to talk shows,’ said Bertrams, ‘that strikes me as very attractive to narcissists.’ Indeed.
Narcissists derive great pleasure from being able to control and influence the actions of other people.
Then, there is the matter of hypocrisy: an infuriating practice that is intimately associated with narcissism. Some JSO members appear to be hypocrites of the highest order.
After all, they famously used adhesives made from fossil fuels to glue themselves to paintings and roads. They claim to care about saving humanity, yet have prevented ambulances and fire engines from reaching their destinations.
Bertrams stressed the fact that ‘narcissists place a lot of value in presenting themselves in a positive light,’ but rarely, if ever, live up to their lofty ideals away from the public eye.
A virtuous image is important to them, even if this image is built on nothing but a foundation of sand.
Of course, one needn’t be a trailblazing psychologist to see through the JSO charade. Nevertheless, the study sheds some much-needed light on the motives of some modern-day activists.
The Biden Administration is preparing to rush approval for the Atlantic Shores offshore wind project, which is located approximately 10-20 miles off the coast of New Jersey between Atlantic City and Barnegat Light, despite the risk it poses to marine mammals — particularly the severely endangered right whale.
The Biden Administration is preparing to rush approval for the Atlantic Shores offshore wind project, which is located approximately 10-20 miles off the coast of New Jersey between Atlantic City and Barnegat Light, despite the risk it poses to marine mammals — particularly the severely endangered right whale.
They are poised to allow NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) to grant Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind the right to harass, and potentially kill through a generous IHA (Incidental Harassment Authorization) permit, the following numbers of marine mammals:
CFACT just submitted a detailed comment to NOAA opposing this authorization and urging them to pay attention to the potential harm that could be wrought on the natural world.
The flaws in the wind turbine plan are myriad, but here’s a biggie:
Proponents of the plan point to the very large survey area as mitigating the danger to the whales. They couldn’t be more wrong. As CFACT makes clear in our submission, “what is crucial is that the survey area is about 35 miles wide East to West and almost all of the migrating whales presently pass through this space. Thus the survey has the potential effect of blocking the migration, or at least seriously disrupting it, taking nearly 100% of the needed space not 2.11%.”
That’s right, virtually all of the whales would have to make it through the vast underwater din the survey would create in order to complete their annual migration.
Gifted mathematician David Wojick did his trademark thorough scouring of the governmental record and unearthed direct admissions of the threat wind turbines pose to marine mammals buried deep within.
What is important is that NOAA and BOEM [the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management] are clearly stating that the acoustic threats we have been warning about and suspecting are real. The telling correlations between sonar blasting and increased whale deaths cannot be waived away.
Correlation is not causation, but correlation between cause and predicted effect is very strong evidence that the cause is effective. NOAA and BOEM’s repeated insistence that there is no evidence offshore wind development is killing whales is clearly contradicted by their own Environmental Impact Statements.
Intermittent energy from offshore wind turbines is expensive and inefficient.
Their large, dirty footprint should not be ignored.
Wind turbines should not get a pass on the risk they pose to marine life.
While the media is now determined to push the climate scare, it was not too long ago that they gave us serious analysis. Well respected science reporter, Fred Pearce, wrote this piece about coastal erosion in Hemsby and the rest of Norfolk back in 1996:
EIGHTY years ago this winter, tides destroyed the coastal village of Hallsands in south Devon. The few remains are today a mecca for ghoulish geographers who come to see how offshore dredging-in this case from the building of the nearby Devonport dockyard-can expose a coastline to violent erosion.
On the other side of the country today, the residents of Norfolk villages such as Salthouse, Hemsby and Happisburgh fear that this winter their homes could join Hallsands beneath the waves. They believe a combination of ill-conceived coastal engineering and offshore dredging is stripping their coast of the sand and gravel needed to maintain beaches and stave off the assault of the sea. And they believe that planners and engineers, using out-of-date maps and quoting very low erosion rates, are blind to what is going on.
Take the coast road almost anywhere in Norfolk and you will see the evidence of rapid erosion. At Happisburgh, Beach Road vanishes over a cliff. From the edge, you can see what looks like a badly built brick chimney rising from the beach. The chimney is in fact a well, left intact when storms washed away the cliff around it a few weeks ago. A draft shoreline management plan drawn up by consulting engineers Sir William Halcrow in 1996 for local councils and the Environment Agency (EA) claims that the cliff here is retreating at “up to 2 metres per year”.
But the local council’s flood warden, Colin Daniels, says: “Up to 15 years ago this cliff was stable. Now the sea takes about 10 metres a year. Beach Road has gone since last winter, we lost 2 metres a fortnight ago and another metre since then.” And to cap it all, a line of houses shown on the map Halcrow published this year went over the cliff years ago.
And more than a few houses are at stake. Halcrow’s plan points out that behind Beach Road lie many low-lying villages, which are vulnerable to flooding, and the Norfolk Broads, a large area of scenic waterways and wildlife reserves. According to the plan: “Any further retreat of the coastline would result in widespread flooding.”
Refusing to pay
The Norfolk coast, like much of eastern England, is vulnerable to erosion. Its cliffs have been retreating throughout recorded history. Moreover, sea walls built after the great floods of 1953, which killed more than 300 people, are now crumbling away. The government is refusing to pay for repairs which cost more than the value of the property protected.
But, on this stretch of Norfolk’s coast at least, there is more to the story. In many places lines of dunes that until recently had been advancing are now being washed away, and the erosion of unprotected coastline behind the dunes has accelerated dramatically. Human activity is increasingly being blamed.
Take Hemsby, a holiday village down the road from Great Yarmouth. Drive beyond the boarded-up pub, slot-machine arcades and holiday chalets and you come to a line of tall sand dunes, called the Marram Hills, that protect the low-lying village and a large area behind it from the sea.
Here, Halcrow was out again, estimating a “coastline retreat of up to 2 metres per year”. Pat Gowen, a retired biologist at the University of East Anglia, knows different. He owned a holiday home in these dunes until 1988, when storms ate away the front of the dune and toppled it into the sea.
Today, standing at the spot once occupied by his bungalow, Gowen is close to low tide, 40 metres seaward of the last of the surviving dune. “We have lost 120 metres of dunes and 53 bungalows here in the past 15 years,” he says. Until the late 1970s, this dune system was advancing towards the sea. But it may soon all be gone. “One big tide could break through,” says Gowen. “It would flood right back through the valley.”
What has gone wrong along this coast? Is this just natural erosion, or something more? The vital new element, says John Pethick, a geomorphologist at the Cambridge Coastal Research Unit, is a reduction in the sea’s supply of sediment to beaches. The balance between the amounts of sand and gravel washed onto and off the beaches determines whether the coastline retreats or advances. Back in the 1960s, says Pethick, “they put up defences around Cromer and down towards Happisburgh. But that arrested sand movement to beaches south of Happisburgh. Sandy beaches there that I remember playing on as a child are now just mud.”
More than 70 per cent of East Anglia’s beaches are losing sand, and with it the ability to absorb wave energy. The oscillation of millions of grains “can rapidly absorb the kinetic energy of even a big storm”, says Pethick. But the mud left behind absorbs far less energy, exposing cliffs, dunes and sea walls to an ever greater battering.
The balance of sediment between the beaches and offshore may also have been upset by offshore dredging. The seabed naturally accumulates sand and fills up bumps and hollows with material from the coast. By lowering the seabed, dredging tends to increase not just the amount of sediment that is dragged offshore, but also the shoreline’s exposure to waves.
Marine dredging is a fast-growing business off the coast of Britain. In 1995, dredgers removed more than 26 million tonnes of sand and gravel from Britain’s coastal seabed. More than 10 million tonnes were dredged off East Anglia, largely from sand banks between 5 and 20 kilometres off Great Yarmouth. Most of this material goes to make concrete for the road-building and construction industries. But some, ironically, is for replenishing British beaches. And about half the East Anglian sand is exported, mostly to the Netherlands. Schiphol airport near Amsterdam was constructed from Norfolk aggregate. Gowen argues that the sudden acceleration of erosion witnessed since 1983 coincides precisely with the expansion of dredging off Great Yarmouth.
In theory, dredging is strictly controlled. The Crown Estate, as both landlord and planning authority of Britain’s foreshore, commissions hydrological and sediment modelling studies to justify its claim that individual dredging proposals will not damage the shoreline. The studies, paid for by the dredging companies, are carried out by H R Wallingford, a privatised hydrology consulting company. “If the models suggest an effect then the application is turned down,” says Tony Murray, head of marine offshore estates at the Crown Estate.
Inexact science
Alan Brampton, who carries out the studies at H R Wallingford, says that he is engaged in “an inexact science. Sediment transport is very difficult to model.”
But he argues that conservative assumptions in the models should ensure that no major damage is done. Murray now admits that these studies of individual dredging proposals may not be enough, however. “There is concern about a possible cumulative effect of lots of dredging licences. We do have research looking into that.” The main research effort on this coastline is the Sediment Transport Study for the Southern North Sea, which has yet to do more than review old Wallingford data.
“Everybody is shooting from the hip. There is no evidence either way,” says North Norfolk district council’s technical services officer, Peter Lawton. Knowledge has improved very little since the House of Commons environment committee report of 1992. At that time the committee complained: “We were concerned to find that the whole area of the impact of marine aggregate extraction on the coastal zone is under-researched and based on premises years out of date.”
Halcrow, in its 1996 shoreline management plan, commented: “Whilst it is known that sediment exchange occurs between the shoreline and the offshore areas, it is not clear how, and more importantly where, this occurs.” It warned that “any changes to [offshore] banks must be considered with extreme caution. Of considerable local concern is the issue of dredging from these banks and studies should establish the links between these activities and coastal processes.”
What can be done? Conventional sea walls are extremely expensive, at more than £1000 per metre. They also cause damage elsewhere by restricting the supply of sediment. The latest effort to plug that gap in Norfolk’s defences is building offshore “reefs” to soak up wave energy. At Sea Palling, where seven people died in the 1953 floods, the EA is building five rock reefs, while pumping sand from offshore to replenish the beach. But Pethick says: “My worry is that the reefs will break the back of the Norfolk coast. They trap sediment washing down from the north, so beyond them erosion will increase. There could be a huge catastrophe one day, with the sea invading the Norfolk Broads.”
Pethick espouses “soft engineering” for all but the most indispensable bits of coastline. This plan would allow cliffs, which provide a lot of sediment for a small amount of land lost, to erode, in the hope that the sediment will bolster dunes and beaches elsewhere that can protect large areas of low-lying land. “Managed retreat”, in the jargon, is now intended policy for several sections of the East Anglian coastline, including five stretches between Sheringham and Lowestoft. The locals are unimpressed. What they mostly see, they say, is unmanaged retreat.
This winter, they will be holding their breath whenever winds come from the north at Salthouse, a line of houses below sea level sitting right behind a large shingle bank. Beyond the bank, there is nothing but sea all the way to the North Pole. Every year the sea washes away more pebbles, while engineers from the EA bulldoze what remains back up to create an ever narrower bank.
“There is not enough material to get the banks back to their normal profile,” says Steve Hayman, one of the agency’s engineers, “and we can’t justify the expenditure of shipping in more shingle.” Last February, the sea briefly breached the shore, creating a 200-metre gap in the bank. Local flood warden and parish council chairman Ivan Large says that “the banks won’t stand up to another storm like last winter’s”.
Gowen agrees. “I don’t see that Salthouse has a future. Before long, perhaps this winter, the sea is going to come through here permanently. We are no longer just talking about losing isolated clifftop houses. Whole villages are going to go. It’ll be Hallsands all over again.”
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