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.
CBC News has come up with a new form of reporting that fails to give viewers the traditional “Who, What, When, Where, Why and How.” It’s a brand-new kind of climate propaganda, an oblique approach to delegitimizing rational, dissenting science experts on climate change. The form uses the “Throw Mud – It will Stick” methods perfected by cognitive behavioral psychologists.
Michelle Stirling, Communications Manager for Friends of Science Society, does a live explainer (link to recorded version below), deconstructing a recent ‘news’ story wherein reporter Jaela Bernstien of CBC News asked the silly question: “Climate misinformation: Are you immune?”
CBC is Canada’s ~$1.2 billion tax funded national broadcaster. Friends of Science Society operates on ~$150,000 from our loyal members and supportive donors.
The story’s backdrop relates to a report called “Fault Lines,” issued by the Canadian Council of Academies (CCA), an organization that has received nearly $55 million in tax dollars since 2002, and which has a bevy of top researchers. None of them apparently know how to pick up the phone, send an email or search our website to find out about Friends of Science Society’s funding. (Yes, we are singled out by name in the report.) While engaging in misinformation themselves, the “Fault Lines” report declares: “Misinformation can manifest in a lack of support and public demand for policies addressing climate change; loss of trust in experts, scientists, healthcare providers, and public health authorities; and increased polarization.”
How about if CBC and CCA just advocated for open, civil debate and full cost benefit analysis on climate and energy policies, as we do? That would not require a 131-page report or $55 million dollars in funding. Rather than smearing and bullying scientists who hold dissenting views, why not argue the evidence in open public debates? Then climate policy would have to stand on its own merits, instead of relying on relentless tax funded media and think tank propaganda, especially that from CBC.
And of course, in the live stream, we will address the comments of Prof. Stephan Lewandowsky. He is part of the expert panel on the “Fault Lines” report) curiously not a Canadian: “Stephan Lewandowsky, Chair, Cognitive Psychology and Professor, School of Psychological Science, University of Bristol (Bristol, United Kingdom).” His work is cited ~12 times in the body and in numerous endnotes. He famously wrote the scholarly paper “NASA Faked the Moon Landing…” which Friends of Science Society tried to get retracted from publication for what we believed were violations of the COPE publishing ethics. Find out more! Watch the show!
Tonight on Real America! Founder of @ClimateDepot Marc Morano warns Americans on what may happen if the W.H.O. is correct in believing another global pandemic is coming soon. Tune in tonight at 8pm Eastern, 5pm Pacific.@DanNewsManBallpic.twitter.com/F6pC3maiO3
Marc Morano manages CFACT’s award-winning ClimateDepot.com news and information service.
He is the award-winning producer, writer and host of CFACT’s Climate Hustle feature films.
Marc served as a reporter for “Rush Limbaugh the Television Show” and as a senior advisor to Senator James Inhofe.
He is author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change,” “Green Fraud: Why the Green New Deal Is Even Worse than You Think,” and “The Great Reset: Global Elites and the Permanent Lockdown.”
The noise produced from building the farms, especially pile-driving the turbines into the ocean floor, has been shown to affect aquatic life, according to federal regulators, who implemented a “soft start” approach before construction to drive away species.
The US government granted the dolphins a license to kill whales, porpoises and dolphins and it’s doing so at an astonishing rate.
Dozens of whale carcasses have washed-up along the Atlantic coast in the last few months, joining dozens of porpoises and dolphins that met the same fate.
More than 500,000 Americans have united in a concerted attempt to shutdown this subsidy-soaked industry – an industry apparently determined to wipe out all manner of marine mammals, including the last members of endangered whale species. And which does so with absolute impunity, thanks to the ‘Incidental Harassment Authorization’. Literally a licence to kill an unlimited number of whales, porpoises and dolphins during the construction and operation of offshore wind farms.
The carcasses are washing up with such frequency that the wind industry is now able to claim, with some justification, that it’s responsible for an uptick in ecotourism, albeit that the charismatic megafauna in question is well and truly dead. Not all (dead) whale watchers are keen on the experience, however. Indeed, Patrick Moore, one of the co-founders of Greenpeace, reckons – even if the government has given it green light – there is no justification for the wanton slaughter.
Four whales die in 4 days: Wind farms creating ‘death zone’ at sea says ex-Greenpeace boss New York Post Josh Miller and Franklin Raff 8 May 2023
Drilling foundations for offshore wind turbines and sound pulses used to prepare for the 900-foot towers has created a “death zone” for whales, according to former Greenpeace chief, Patrick Moore.
Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace and its ex-president in Canada, believes the acoustic systems used by vessels surveying the ocean floor harm the marine mammals’ sense of hearing – risking their crucial ability to navigate, and leading to more dead whales washing up onshore.
His intervention comes after four minke whale corpses were discovered between Thursday and Sunday in New York and New England, one of them on Friday in Moriches Bay, close to Westhampton, Long Island.
The four-day run of death began in Eastham, on Cape Cod, Mass., on Thursday, with a second minke found at York, Maine, on Friday, and the final corpse at Gloucester, Mass. on Sunday.
At least 36 “large” whales have washed up along the East Coast since Dec. 1, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
It tracks the deaths of “large” species in the Atlantic including minke, humpback, bowhead, fin, sei, sperm and blue North Atlantic right whales.
The toll of whale deaths includes 16 humpbacks thus far in 2023, seven of them found along the New Jersey shore.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared an “unusual mortality event” among humpbacks in January 2016.
This year’s mortalities are on pace to shatter 2017’s tally of 34, federal data shows.
The overall scale of whale deaths could be even worse: NOAA does not have a public tracker for toothed whales, such as narwhals and beluga whales.
Republican lawmakers in New Jersey said last week they wanted a 60-day moratorium on offshore wind farm development to investigate any possible link to the rash of carcasses.
Massive offshore wind turbines up to 900-feet tall have been given the go-ahead off both New York and New Jersey, as part of moves to increase renewable energy production.
In New York, cable-laying for the South Fork Wind Farm, about 35 miles east of Montauk Point began in March while in New Jersey, large areas off the Jersey Shore are zoned for turbines.
Moore voiced support for the Republicans’ concern, saying that survey work – which uses acoustic pulses to scan the seabed ahead of drilling for the turbines – is risky for whales.
“The effect of the high-intensity acoustic pulses is unknown, and the excavations are muddying waters for what will be years on end,” Moore said. “It is not reasonable to say there is no possibility of a causal relationship.”
Whales and other endangered species impacted by the acoustic pulses could be guided to their demise, with possible strandings in shallow water, striking vessels or getting entangled in fishing gear, Moore said.
“They tend to migrate south in the winter and north in the summer on certain pathways, just like birds,” he continued. “And it in this case, they appear to be swimming back into a death zone.”
Offshore wind vessels typically use high-resolution geophysical (HRG) surveys during siting efforts, utilizing a “suite of active sound sources” to obtain images of the seafloor and other geophysical features.
Two offshore wind farms are currently operating in US waters. Block Island Wind Farm off Rhode Island, which has five turbines, has been online since late 2016. The Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Project, which has two turbines off Virginia Beach, has been fully operational since fall 2020.
New Jersey state Sen. Anthony Bucco, R-Boonton, noted that the feds started tracking the spate of dead humpbacks along the East Coast since 2016 – the same year Rhode Island’s Block Island Wind Farm went operational.
“There’s too much of a coincidence here to ignore, and we continue to rapidly push forward,” Bucco told The Post. “This activity off our coast is only going to dramatically increase as they begin pile-driving and installing these wind turbines. So if this is having an effect on our marine mammals now, it could be catastrophic when that work begins.”
Greenpeace has long distanced itself from Moore, accusing the 75-year-old Canadian of lobbying for polluters and exaggerating his role. It said in 2010: “Although Mr. Moore played a significant role in Greenpeace Canada for several years, he did not found Greenpeace.”
Moore insists Greenpeace only disavowed him when he came out in favor of nuclear energy in a Washington Post op-ed in April 2006.
“Greenpeace has betrayed the mission of its founders,” Moore said. “They are protecting [windmills] instead of wild whales.” New York Post
Conservative watchdogs highlight ‘alarming’ surge in whale deaths as wind farms grow off NY, NJ coasts New York Post Josh Christenson 23 April 2023
Conservative watchdog groups ran a guerrilla-style ad campaign on the Jersey Shore for Earth Day, drawing attention to a surge in whale deaths amid the growth of offshore wind farms.
Beachgoers in Atlantic City on Saturday looked on as a single-propeller plane carried a message waving from a banner — “SAVE-WHALES-STOP-WINDMILLS.ORG” — and drivers heading out of town saw a billboard with the same message and a picture of a dead whale washed ashore.
The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and the Heartland Institute sponsored the ads to highlight the potential threat that wind turbine development poses to whales, dolphins and other aquatic life.
The campaign comes after a ProPublica report last week found that federal regulators in the Biden administration have downplayed environmental risks to greenlight “an unprecedented expansion for offshore wind” projects — including tax incentives through the president’s Inflation Reduction Act for renewable energy developers.
Steve Milloy, a senior fellow at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute who sits on Heartland’s board of directors, told The Post that the ad campaign reveals how “Orwellian” government action on the environment has become.
“As the Biden administration is literally permitting the offshore wind industry to kill endangered whales under the guise of ‘saving the planet,’ Earth Day has gone 180 degrees from where it started and has become truly Orwellian,” Milloy said.
“It’s gone from ‘Save the Whales’ to ‘Kill the Whales.’ And the green groups that have promoted Earth Day for 53 years are totally okay with this agenda.”
Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow president Craig Rucker said the push to build the wind farms comes “despite growing evidence that whales are being impacted by the preliminary sonar blasting being conducted to site windmills, as well as scores of the marine mammals washing up dead on beaches.”
“’Damn the whales, full speed ahead’ seems to be the official policy of the Biden administration when it comes to the construction of offshore wind,” Rucker said in a statement. “The White House seems to remain unfazed and fixated on implementing its reckless ‘net zero’ energy agenda.”
“Let’s hope some court steps in to, at a minimum, place an injunction against any continued offshore wind energy development until proper environmental studies can be conducted,” he added.
The noise produced from building the farms, especially pile-driving the turbines into the ocean floor, has been shown to affect aquatic life, according to federal regulators, who implemented a “soft start” approach before construction to drive away species.
The ProPublica report states that in the next 10 years, more than 3,000 turbines will be built and nearly 10,000 miles of cable will be laid on 2.4 million acres of the ocean managed by the federal government.
The construction would involve scores of ships traveling at high speeds and crisscrossing known whale habitats, increasing the chances of marine mammals being fatally struck.
Developers like Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind, which has been approved to start wind farms off the coast of New York and New Jersey, receive special authorization from the National Marine Fisheries Service to potentially injure or kill the whales as long as mitigation protocols and reporting procedures are followed.
The noise produced from building the farms, especially pile-driving the turbines into the ocean floor, has been shown to affect aquatic life, according to federal regulators, who implemented a “soft start” approach before construction to drive away species.
The ProPublica report states that in the next 10 years, more than 3,000 turbines will be built and nearly 10,000 miles of cable will be laid on 2.4 million acres of the ocean managed by the federal government.
The construction would involve scores of ships traveling at high speeds and crisscrossing known whale habitats, increasing the chances of marine mammals being fatally struck.
Developers like Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind, which has been approved to start wind farms off the coast of New York and New Jersey, receive special authorization from the National Marine Fisheries Service to potentially injure or kill the whales as long as mitigation protocols and reporting procedures are followed.
Feds admit offshore wind can kill whales! CFACT David Wojick 27 April 2023
Despite public proclamations of innocence, it turns out BOEM and NOAA clearly acknowledge the deadly threat of offshore wind development to marine mammals. Not surprisingly they do it in documents that are subject to judicial review, lest they be caught fibbing.
Of course these admissions are well hidden, buried in the depths of thousand page documents, but they are there to be found. These are the Draft Environmental Impact Statements (DEIS) that precede each offshore wind project. They are jointly prepared by BOEM and NOAA.
The key is that the overall project EIS includes the EIS for NOAA’s harassment authorizations for the construction of that project. In fact you can find this language by searching the DEIS for the word “harassment”. I am told that this is standard language which varies little from project to project.
The standard language says just what we have been saying! Harassment is likely to lead to dangerous behavior, including increased likelihood of deadly ship strikes and entanglements. It also says, as we have, that having multiple projects increases these risks.
Here is a good example of admitting that harassment is can cause harm. I could not have said it better.
“It is possible that pile driving could displace animals into areas with lower habitat quality or higher risk of vessel collision or fisheries interaction. Multiple construction activities within the same calendar year could potentially affect migration, foraging, calving, and individual fitness. The magnitude of impacts would depend upon the locations, duration, and timing of concurrent construction. Such impacts could be long term, of high intensity, and of high exposure level. Generally, the more frequently an individual’s normal behaviors are disrupted or the longer the duration of the disruption, the greater the potential for biologically significant consequences to individual fitness. The potential for biologically significant effects is expected to increase with the number of pile-driving events to which an individual is exposed.”
This warning is about risks created by pile driving but all forms of acoustic harassment fit this description. NOAA harassment authorizations are based on the estimated number of critters that will be exposed to unsafe sound levels. The source of the dangerous sounds is irrelevant. What matters most is the volume. Sound is a pressure wave; the louder the sound the greater the physical pressure on the hearing system. Pain and physical damage are possible.
In fact the infamous sonar surveying sounds, implicated in the whale deaths to date, can be much louder that the incredibly loud pile driving. Driving the enormous piles for the proposed wind projects is estimated to create sounds around 190 decibels, which is painfully loud in humans.
But some sonar equipment deliberately emits sounds over 200 decibels. Decibels is a log scale so this is not just 5% greater than 190; it is much greater.
Thus it makes no sense that NOAA claims sonar surveys have no significant impact and so do not fall under NEPA, while pile driving does. This is especially true when, as just happened, a dozen different projects are given simultaneous authorization to acoustically harass large numbers of whales.
What is important is that NOAA and a BOEM 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.
Making 12 substantial criticisms of my book and that they are all false, is quite an achievement. It is hard not to conclude that Stiglitz’ review of my book is a deceptive and false hit piece. It is perhaps not surprising that Stiglitz actually said that he was going to give the book a bad review even before he read it. In many ways, it seems like he still hasn’t read it.
The piece consists of Stiglitz enumerating four specific and compounding mistakes that I apparently make, and then another six separate observations. I will go through all of them below, starting with the four mistakes.
My first “mistake”
My first mistake is that I draw “heavily on the work of William Nordhaus of Yale University, who came up with an estimate of the economic cost to limiting climate change to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.” Instead the High-Level Commission on Carbon Prices, which Stiglitz co-authored, showed that 1.5°C-2°C goals “could be achieved at a moderate price.”
This is triply wrong. I don’t rely on Nordhaus for the cost on limiting temperature rise for 1.5°C to 2°C, simply because Nordhaus does not make that estimate.Nordhaus explicitly writes, as Stiglitz would know had he read Nordhaus or my book: “A limit of 2°C appears to be infeasible with reasonably accessible technologies even with very ambitious abatement strategies.”
Secondly, Stiglitz claims that his report estimates “a moderate price” for reaching the Paris agreement. This is false. There is no estimate of the total economic cost of a 2°C or 1.5°C target in his High-Level Commission on Carbon Prices.
Compounding Stiglitz’ error is the fact that the background report for his high-level commission does indeed list the UN Climate Panel cost estimate for reaching 1.5-2°C at more than 4% of GDP by 2100 (p2), which makes Nordhaus’ 1.38% GDP economic cost at the lowest temperature scenario of 2.35°C by 2100 substantially smaller (not larger, as Stiglitz claims).
Stiglitz throughout his piece neglects to inform the reader that Nordhaus is not just any old economist, but actually the only climate economist to get the Nobel prize for his work on climate economics. For reference, Stiglitz got his Nobel prize in economics for analyses of markets with asymmetric information like the selling and buying of used cars.
For the first mistake, Stiglitz makes two false claims and no correct, relevant claims.
My second “mistake”
My second mistake is “Nordhaus’s and Lomborg’s underestimation of the damage associated with climate change.” Stiglitz is in reality informing us that he knows much better than the world’s only climate Nobel economist.
But curiously, Stiglitz never tells us what the right cost is. As such, Stiglitz makes an absurd claim, essentially asserting he knows better than the best peer-reviewed evidence — but just couldn’t be bothered to share that knowledge publicly.
Stiglitz gives one indication of his knowledge on this matter. He claims that a significant part of the cost of climate change “includes more extreme weather events — more intense hurricanes, more droughts, more floods, with all the devastation to life, livelihood and property that accompanies them. Yet, again, he seems to have forgotten to actually acquaint himself with the best evidence on the science and economics of extreme weather events. As the leading researcher on economic impacts of extreme weather events says, Stiglitz is “just wrong.”
But more importantly, Stiglitz is just cherry-picking and ignoring the actual data. He picked the costliest recent data point and he neglects that the trend for the US (and similarly for the world) is declining.
Stiglitz is simply doubly wrong on his only indication of how Nobel Laureate Nordhaus and I should be wrong, so for the second mistake, Stiglitz makes two false, one unsubstantiated and no correct, relevant claims.
My third “mistake”
Stiglitz suggests that “A third critical mistake, compounding the second, is not taking due account of risk.” Ah, if only the world’s only actual Nobel laureate in climate economics had thought of incorporating risks.
Of course, Stiglitz could still have quibbled about a different way to model risk, and added his own take on this. But he does not. He simply — and falsely — suggests that Nordhaus or I have not taken this obvious point into consideration.
Specifically, Stiglitz assuredly tells us that the best damage estimates are underestimates because “as we learn more about climate change these best estimates keep getting revised, and, typically, in only one direction — more damage and sooner than had been expected.” No, they do not. This is the kind of claim one makes if one gets most of one’s climate information from news media.
For the third mistake, Stiglitz makes two false, one unsubstantiated and no correct, relevant claims.
My fourth “mistake”
Stiglitz seems to claim that Nordhaus and I use a discount parameter that is too low for his liking. I cite the whole paragraph, because it is unclear what his actual point is except a rant against the Trump administration:
Stiglitz apparently suggests that Nordhaus and I use a 7 percent discount rate to spew out the numbers that are in my book. This is demonstrably false. Perhaps Stiglitz knows he’s fibbing, given that he settles for criticizing Trump and then conflating the 7% with the “models Lomborg loves.”
Instead, Nordhaus’ discount rate is calibrated to the real interest rates, meaning a 4.8% discount rate in 2015, declining to 3.5% in 2100.
As he would know, having been World Bank chief economist, it is one thing what rich, liberals in Manhattan want for a discount rate. Most of the rest of the world has much higher discount rates. When we worked with the government of Haiti, the central bank decided on 12% (even contemplating 20%), while Ghana decided 8%.
For the fourth mistake, Stiglitz makes one false and no correct, relevant claims.
Other claims
Media drives alarmism
He seems to brush off my points that the hyperventilating media is one of the main causes of alarmism simply by saying “fake news”:
For example, I outline how New York Times claims that South Vietnam by 2050 will “all but disappear” because it will be “underwater at high tide.” While the story was reported in almost all media, it was clearly incorrect. Because almost all of South Vietnam is already under the high tide mark today, and almost all of South Vietnam is already well-protected today:
Regulation
Stiglitz claim that I miss discussing good regulations as a way to tackle climate.
More importantly, Stiglitz seems to have missed at least the last third of my book. Here I talk about
1. Innovation: how we should invest $100 billion per year in green R&D (regulation, not taxation)
2. Adaptation: regulation like zoning, building regulation and more pervious city surfaces (to ensure less flooding)
3. Geoengineering: which will be almost entirely a regulatory approach
4. Prosperity: mostly about better policies including regulatory policies
Stiglitz’ claim that I ignore regulation is blatantly false.
Wall Street underwater
Almost bizarrely, Stiglitz chides me for not including in my book that Wall Street could be underwater by 2100:
The research very clearly shows that at least when an area has sufficient value (as Wall St and surrounding areas certainly have) all will be safeguarded through adaptive policies (like sea walls etc.). I even show this in a graph in the book, based on this paper. We only see significant flooding when we disregard adaptation:
So when Stiglitz chides me for not including that Wall Street might be underwater in my book, it is because such a claim would be false. His is a good example of bad information from hyperventilating media.
Copenhagen Consensus
Stiglitz writes a slyly derogatory paragraph about the think tank I work for, Copenhagen Consensus:
The paragraph doesn’t seem to say anything but that the experts are conservative and that we didn’t include any “true experts” on climate science.
On his first claim, we have worked with more than 300 of the world’s top economists and seven Nobel Laureates. Our main focus is all the world’s problems, not just climate change, so many are experts in the economics of malaria, infrastructure, water, education etc. We certainly don’t have a ‘conservative’ bias — we’ve actually invited Stiglitz to be a member of several eminent panels together with his Nobel colleagues. But it also shows that Stiglitz seems to be suggesting that only liberal economists such as himself can be trusted to help set priorities for the world.
On his second claim, we have worked with many climate economists, and when we did our big climate consensus, we worked with 27 of the world’s top climate economists, publishing the results as a book with Cambridge University Press, which even got a favorable quote from the IPCC’s chairman (“This book provides not only a reservoir of information on the reality of human induced climate change, but raises vital questions and examines viable options on what can be done to meet the challenge.”).
Stiglitz’ derogatory two claims are simply incorrect.
Lack of prioritization
One of the key points of my book (and the Copenhagen Consensus’ work) is that we have to prioritize. No matter the amount of resources available, there is never enough to do everything, and hence we have to make sure we spend resources where they can do the most good first. The allocation of scarce resources with alternative uses, of course, is the key definition of economics.
Obviously, money from a tax can be used on many things (some of which I’m sure Stiglitz wouldn’t like), but they can still only be used once. And the point is, that with more stringent climate policies, GDP will be slightly lower, hence there will be less in total to spend.
The new IPCC report shows end-of-world
Stiglitz finally claims that because I cite the UN Climate Panel so often, one could believe I might be right. But, he comforts his readers, “nothing could be further from the truth”:
What I say in the book is also what is in the IPCC 2018 1.5°C report.
Then Stiglitz goes on to make the exact scare scenario in which the media excels and that I have criticized. The 60 feet sea level rise is from a world in an entirely different part of the state space. He knows very well that such statistics are only meant to scare but not informative for what will happen for us, in this part of the state space. That, of course, is exactly what the IPCC reports are about. They talk about a high outcome of 3 feet of sea level rise by 2100. The only reason to throw out 60 feet is to scare people silly.
Summary
Making 12 substantial criticisms of my book and that they are all false, is quite an achievement. It is hard not to conclude that Stiglitz’ review of my book is a deceptive and false hit piece. It is perhaps not surprising that Stiglitz actually said that he was going to give the book a bad review even before he read it. In many ways, it seems like he still hasn’t read it.
I have asked New York Times to rectify this terrible article.
Everything is hate and bots with these weak kneed crybullies.
Researchers have documented an explosion of hate and misinformation on Twitter since the Tesla billionaire took over in October 2022 — and now experts say communicating about climate science on the social network on which many of them rely is getting harder.
Policies aimed at curbing the deadly effects of climate change are accelerating, prompting a rise in what experts identify as organised resistance by opponents of climate reform.
Peter Gleick, a climate and water specialist with nearly 99,000 followers, announced on May 21 he would no longer post on the platform because it was amplifying racism and sexism.
Now that Twitter content moderators and healthy conversation enforcers are not amplifying climate activists nor suppressing dissenting voices it’s disheartening for those that believed everyone agrees with them.
Robert Rohde, a physicist and lead scientist at the non-profit environmental data analysis group Berkeley Earth, analysed activity on hundreds of accounts of widely followed specialists posting about climate science before and after the takeover.
He found climate scientists’ tweets were losing impact. The average number of likes they received was down 38 percent and average retweets fell 40 percent.
Deer in the headlights – Dessler is taking his ball and going home.
Andrew Dessler, professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, said he was moving most of his climate communication to Substack, a newsletter platform.
“Climate communications on Twitter are less useful (now) given that I can see that my tweets are getting less engagement,” he said.
“In response to almost any tweet concerning climate change, I find my notifications inundated with replies from verified accounts making misleading or misguided claims.”
The time record holder for cry-bullying, Katherine Hayhoe, is discussed in the article as well. Last time we interacted she called me a white supremacist or something.
Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe said replies from apparent trolls or bots had shot up
And of course Mann’s always complaining about organized conspiracies.
Michael Mann, a prominent climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and a regular target for abuse by deniers of climate change, said he believed the rise in misinformation was “organised and orchestrated” by opponents of climate reforms.
Earlier this month, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen hailed the ‘amazing progress’ being made by the EU’s Green Deal legislation. It is a funny kind of progress, however.
BERLIN, GERMANY – OCTOBER 24: The Berlin Cathedral and Berlin Television Tower (Fernsehturm) are no longer illuminated at night as part of an energy-saving measure on October 24, 2022 in Berlin, Germany. The German government is considering a partial price cap on natural gas prices for consumers and industry. For consumers the price would be set at 12 cents per kilowatt hour for the first 80% of the previous year’s consumption amount and to begin in March, 2023. In addition the government would reimburse consumers for their December, 2022, natural gas bill. (Photo by Maja Hitij/Getty Images)
Brussels’ Net Zero obsession will make Europe poorer, colder and darker.
Earlier this month, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen hailed the ‘amazing progress’ being made by the EU’s Green Deal legislation. It is a funny kind of progress, however. The Commission is pushing through countless regulations in its effort to ‘decarbonise’ Europe and to force member states towards Net Zero by 2050. The pace of regulation is now so great that the leader of Europe’s manufacturing employers’ association has described it as a regulation ‘tsunami’. He says it has severely damaged his members’ competitiveness on world markets.
As I show in ‘Lights Out: Is the EU Failing on Energy Policy?’, a new white paper published this week, the EU’s commitment to green objectives is not only harming businesses, it is also deepening Europe’s energy crisis. The main problem is that instead of trying to improve energy production – save for subsidising and incentivising renewables – the EU is investing almost all of its political capital in trying to cut corporate and personal energy consumption.
Apparently, these cuts need to be made to fight the so-called climate emergency. In Brussels, there is no talk of how best to maximise coal or gas production, and no will to build new nuclear reactors. All of which are desperately needed to help keep Europe’s lights on. Energy policy has become entirely subservient to climate policy, regardless of the consequences.
Unsurprisingly, member states are starting to grumble at this approach. French president Emmanuel Macron has expressed concern about the impact of the EU’s green rules on France’s energy supplies. As it stands, the EU’s Green Deal only gives backing to renewable energy. But that excludes the largest source of France’s energy – namely, nuclear power, which is carbon-free but not renewable. Macron is sensibly calling on Brussels to classify French nuclear energy as ‘green’. But for some inexplicable reason, von der Leyen and the Commission do not see much of a role for nuclear power in the EU’s decarbonisation strategy.
It is not just France that is at odds with the EU over energy. Other member states, with their own very different energy endowments and national interests, are increasingly finding themselves in conflict with the EU, or are acting without its say-so. For example, when the war in Ukraine prompted the EU to reduce its reliance on Russian gas, Berlin, Warsaw and Rome went around the world in search of supplies of liquefied natural gas independently of Brussels. There was no coordination of energy supplies from the EU. It was a case of every member state for itself.
The dangers of the EU’s energy policies are already becoming clear. For example, the EU’s obsession with cutting energy use, combined with soaring energy bills, has already led some German factories to shut down and relocate abroad. This prompted one Deutsche Bank economist to exclaim: ‘When we look back at the current energy crisis in 10 years or so, we might consider this time as the starting point for an accelerated deindustrialisation in Germany.’
He could be right. The EU’s demand for lower energy consumption will likely result in less industry, and lower living standards for Europe’s working class. The EU promises a glorious green future of heat pumps, electric cars, renewables and – most surreally – a ‘hydrogen economy’. But the reality will be a much lower quality of life in Europe.
Incredibly, things could have been even worse than this. Europe was effectively saved from blackouts by a mild winter, which significantly reduced demand for energy. But thanks to the EU’s Net Zero obsession, the threat of blackouts will likely loom for many winters to come.
TONY THOMAS has been a journalist in Australia since 1958 when he went straight from school at 18 to The West Australian newspaper, doing news and light features. He concurrently studied literature at university for eight years. In 1971 he switched to Economics coverage in the federal press gallery in Canberra, and a decade later he moved to Melbourne writing for the magazine Business Review Weekly for 20 years. He retired from paid journalism in 2001 but continues writing for the right-of-centre blog Quadrant Online. In the past ten years his output there has been 450-plus essays totalling about a million words. All up he’s been reporting for 65 years.
He’s authored close to a dozen books on anthropology, business, history, current affairs and climate, including five collections of his Quadrant essays in the past six years. See https://www.connorcourtpublishing.com…
Tony’s style is forensic and often humorous. He figures the most effective weapon against climate cultists is to ridicule them via their own overblown words and nonsense — with academics as one of his favourite targets. He continues to be amazed at how much incriminating material the climate cultists publish to their own detriment.
Tony turns 83 in June 2023 but has still not reached Shakespeare’s finale of “second childishness and mere oblivion; Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
Preferred pronouns: Ze, Hir, Zir.
“Ze is a writer and wrote that book zirself. Those ideas are zirs. I like both zir and zir ideas.”
He wants 1) more wind and solar; 2) enormous grid batteries, as if they were off-the-shelf and cheap; and 3) Big Brother demand-management in the home and business.
When it comes to energy, Chris Tomlinson is about as anti-consumer and anti-taxpayer as one can get. And he is about as pro-industrial wind and pro-grid solar as possible.
The business editorialist does not see Texas’s $65 billion investment in parasitic, dilute, intermittent energies as the villain in destabilizing a once reliable, secure electric grid. He wants 1) more wind and solar; 2) enormous grid batteries, as if they were off-the-shelf and cheap; and 3) Big Brother demand-management in the home and business.
Chris Tomlinson is a committed climate alarmist without a care to doubt himself. He is unable to be neutral in his business columns: to present the best arguments on each side and let you, the reader, decide. No, he has decided for you in his Church of Climate.
And don’t forget his boner prediction made just before Storm Uri: :“Fossil fuel-supporting Chicken Littles have done their best to spread fear of renewable energy, warning that relying on wind, solar and storage would lead to blackouts and economic devastation.” Yes, it happened just as predicted.
The top regulators of the Texas electrical grid confirmed last week that they will put short-term profits for the state’s largest Republican donors over the future of life on Earth by misleading the public about the clean energy transition.
Comment: Tomlinson immediately smears the opposition for a conflict of interest and bad politics. But Tomlinson enjoys the millionaire lifestyle because … his spouse is a renewable multi-millionaire! Chris, why not deal with the substantive arguments as a serious business editorialist?
Public Utility Commission Chair Peter Lake proved himself to be a politician’s tool by declaring that reliance on clean energy threatens Texans. In one breath, he swears to the Legislature that he is agnostic about the technology used to generate electricity and in the next misleads Texans about grid reliability.
Comment: “Politician’s tool” is what you get when you politicize any industry–and a reason to promote government-neutral free energy markets. Second, one can be “technologically neutral” and not support wind and solar on economic grounds, because both those industries would largely collapse without special government favor that penalizes ratepayers, current taxpayers, and future taxpayers. Duplicating and weakening the grid is the fault of government wind and solar.
At last week’s press conference, Gov. Greg Abbott’s appointee said he wants to burn more coal and natural gas and ignore climate concerns. While the rest of the world is successfully transitioning to primarily renewable energy, Lake made Texas’ success sound like a failure.
Comment: No, Peter Lake wants to employ the best energies to prevent a debacle and stop the recurring “conservation alerts” given to Texas from wind and solar. In case Tomlinson hasn’t noticed, the world is in a tripartite global fossil fuel boom: oil, natural gas, and coal. And despite government mandates and subsidies to duplicate the electricity grid (and, now, the transportation network).
Texas is the Poster Child of wind and solar run wild–and the State paid a very high price for replacing the reliables with the unreliables, a story told told elsewhere at MasterResource.
“For the first time, the peak demand for electricity this summer will exceed the amount that we can generate from on-demand, dispatchable power, so we will be relying on renewables to keep the lights on,” he said ominously. “On the hottest days of summer, there is no longer enough on-demand, dispatch-able power generation to meet demand in the ERCOT system.”
Comment: And imagine if just some of the $65 billion wastage had gone to reliable capacity. Wounding the supply side with dilute, intermittent, weather-fickle supply is a political fool’s errand.
What are the odds of a blackout due to the wind not generating enough electricity at night? Less than 1 percent, ERCOT CEO Pablo Vargas explained, about the same odds of a blackout from the failure of natural gas and coal power plants, such as the one that killed hundreds of Texans in 2021.
Comment: Studies, estimates … This is a sign of a politicized, centralized market, not a consumer-driven free market. Let the market decide and be done with duelling studies and editorialist opinions.
“The grid is as reliable as it has ever been,” Vargas said, trying to inject some reality into Lake’s fearmongering. “We expect the grid to be reliable this summer.”
Comment: End the wind and solar penetration and we will believe you. But natural gas is coming to the rescue.
The biggest donors to Texas’ Republican party own or work for fossil fuel businesses. Despite data and a half-dozen engineering reports showing the natural gas network triggered the 2021 blackouts, political appointees like Lake have tried to demonize wind energy.
Comment: If you want big money and big corporations out of energy politics, remove government from energy. Any government rearrangement of profit opportunities will attract political activity from the regulated.
One example of his ignorance is that Lake keeps calling them “windmills,” which no energy professional would ever do. The devices that turn wind into electricity do not mill grain; they spin turbines large enough to electrify dozens of homes.
Comment: Small potatoes, Chris. And Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary supports his use of the term: “windmill”: “a wind-driven … electric generator.” This nitpick could have freed the space for a more substantive treatment of the central issue: how to deal with a wounded grid.
Lake is not alone in his desire to keep warming the planet with carbon dioxide; he is only a cog in a Republican machine seeking to raise natural gas demand.
Comment: Vague and unpersuasive, Chris. A qualitative change toward warming begs the question of specifics. Global lukewarming and CO2 fertilization negate the alarmist narrative. IPCC scare-model scenarios need a big haircut. And show me your time series data on weather extremes to see about the trends.
If successful, Republicans will ensure Texas consumers will over-invest in a fading technology that will weigh on their electricity bills, contribute to a hotter planet, trigger more drastic climate action later and massively under-invest in the clean technology that will dominate the next century.
Comment: Natural gas combined cycle is “fading technology”? It is the technology to beat!
The fossil fuel industry’s mojo remains powerful at the Legislature, if not totally unchecked.
Comment: Politics begets politics. The government-enabled takeover of the Texas grid by wind and solar started this. Ken Lay, George W. and Rick Perry.
A plan to spend $18 billion on 10 natural gas power plants that we should never need is foundering. Insiders say Senate Bill 6 will die in the House after almost every industry group opposed it, though resuscitation is possible before May 20. Another plot to give for-profit corporations $10 billion in interest-free loans to build more natural gas power plants is alive and well. Senate Bill 2627, which a House committee will consider today, would also provide generators with a completion bonus for putting new megawatts on the grid.
Comment: Texas has a wounded grid thanks to government policy. Now what? Don’t like this recipe for reliability? Then support the obvious policy: ending the wind/solar takeover of the grid. No new capacity, retire existing capacity. Improve margins for the reliables via a free and fair market.
Last year, fossil fuel generators told lawmakers they wanted more money, and they’ll likely get it. But bigger issues around the wholesale electricity market remain undecided.
Comment: That’s right. Screw thermal generation with government here, expect to pay for reliable service there.
Lake and Vargas claimed their press conference was to keep Texas consumers informed, but it appeared designed to save their favored market plan. Senators and House members both hate Lake’s cockamamie Performance Credit Mechanism, and the current version of Senate Bill 2012 would kneecap it….
Lake and Vargas are right about one thing. The hours between when the sun sets and the night winds begin will be the tightest this summer. But other grids with the same problem have found better solutions that Texas’ leaders intend to ignore: managing demand and storing energy. New technology is the answer, not more crony capitalism.
Comment: Crony Capitalism? Wind and solar got there first and in spades. And two decades ago, right up until today. New Technology? Wind and solar are old failed technologies with proof-of-concepts in the 1880s, another story.
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Chris Tomlinson, named 2021 columnist of the year by the Texas Managing Editors, writes commentary about money, politics and life in Texas. Sign up for his “Tomlinson’s Take” newsletter….
Comment: The establishment newspapers and their associations reward each other for their shared narratives. The Houston Chronicle (Hearst) refuses to answer the simple question: Have environmental groups donated funds, directly or indirectly, for “environmental education” or “environmental reporting” (climate alarmism/forced energy transformation)? Color me suspicious….
An article in Bloomberg, “Climate change not ‘serious risk’ to financial stability, Fed’s Waller says,” quotes Christopher Waller, the Board Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank (the Fed) of the United States, saying that climate change does not pose a risk to the banking system of the United States.
Money Protecting concept. Saving symbol – Close-up Of A Human Hand Protecting Pink Piggy Bank
An article in Bloomberg, “Climate change not ‘serious risk’ to financial stability, Fed’s Waller says,” quotes Christopher Waller, the Board Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank (the Fed) of the United States, saying that climate change does not pose a risk to the banking system of the United States. Waller is right. Similar assessments have been given by the Fed and other prominent bankers previously.
Bloomberg writes:
Climate change does not pose such “significantly unique or material” financial stability risks that the Federal Reserve should treat it separately in its supervision of the financial system, Fed Governor Christopher Waller said on Thursday in a detailed rebuttal of demands for climate initiatives by the U.S. central bank.
“Climate change is real, but I do not believe it poses a serious risk to the safety and soundness of large banks or the financial stability of the United States,” Waller told an economic conference in Spain. “Risks are risks … My job is to make sure that the financial system is resilient to a range of risks. And I believe risks posed by climate change are not sufficiently unique or material to merit special treatment.”
Banks are generally resilient, Waller said, able to adapt to changing conditions as long as they pay attention to the financial fundamentals. However, it is impossible to “predict, prioritize, and tailor specific policy around each and every shock that could occur.”
Waller’s comments confirm what analysts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York previously stated. Weather disasters have not harmed banking system’s ability to operate or the profitability of individual banks. Local banks generally know the climate conditions of the regions in which they operate and understand which types of loans or financial instruments might be threatened by extreme weather, and plan accordingly.
In addition, Stuart Kirk, formerly the global head of responsible investment for international banking giant HSBC, said in 2022, that policy makers overstate the risk of climate change. The presentation where Kirk made that statement has been confirmed hundreds of times over in articles at Climate Realism. Kirk pointed out that an honest assessment of the available evidence suggests, “investors need not worry about climate risk.”
What’s true of investors is equally true of the banks they do business with.
Climate models are untrustworthy guides to future climate conditions. Increasingly banks recognize this. Let’s hope the general public begins to do so as well, and begins replacing politicians who advocate draconian climate policies that will make life less livable for everyone, except for the political elites profiting from them.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
In addition to directing The Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, Burett puts Environment & Climate News together, is the editor of Heartland’s Climate Change Weekly email, and the host of the Environment & Climate News Podcast.
At least the author has the guts to say that the IPCC should practice what it preaches.
The IPCC should aggressively limit its own emissions instead of requiring in-person sessions and the attendant long-haul flights. Although meetings contribute only a tiny fraction of total global emissions, improving accountability would have an outsized impact on the IPCC’s effectiveness, and would be a case study for robust, internationally coordinated mitigation.https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01707-5
He notes that people such as myself will use the hypocrisy to ridicule and criticize those activists who don’t walk the walk.
This irony does not go unnoticed across the political spectrum. Conservatives point to individual researchers’ emissions to justify lack of urgency or to validate their view that institutional decarbonization is impossible; progressives see a lack of effective action and a growing philosophical barrier between science and activism. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01707-5
While I disagree with this guy’s point of view, his wokeness, and silly equity framing, his writing is logical and not the least bit rationalizing.
The emissions associated with the IPCC process are not trivial, but they are manageable. The challenges mirror those of the wider mitigation problem: assessment of direct and indirect emissions, the need for fairness in the face of robust targets, the reliability of removal methods and the need for international agreement on how to verify them.https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01707-5
Even failure to achieve targets would be useful, by highlighting real-world limitations in net-zero policy assumptions, which could then inform wider societal strategy.
As the July elections for the next assessment cycle approach, IPCC members should remember that nobody is better placed to demonstrate how to eliminate emissions. The IPCC’s actions matter, not just its words. Although it might make climate scientists uncomfortable, what the IPCC does about its own carbon emissions might be as crucial to its effectiveness as advancing cogent and robust science.https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01707-5
Tom Nelson
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