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.
Chinese solar manufacturers are building factories in the U.S. to reap American subsidies created by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), President Joe Biden’s signature climate bill, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Chinese solar manufacturers are building factories in the U.S. to reap American subsidies created by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), President Joe Biden’s signature climate bill, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Companies based in China are responsible for about 25% of the 80 gigawatts in new solar manufacturing capacity announced in the U.S. since the IRA became law in August 2022 and established robust tax credit programs to incentivize domestic green energy production, according to the WSJ. Assuming that the factory construction and expected outputs announced by these China-based solar companies stay on schedule, they could reap a combined $1.4 billion worth of value from IRA subsidies each year.
The fact that China-based companies could capture IRA subsidies contradicts one of the key goals of the IRA, which was to serve as a key tool for developing a domestic green energy supply chain, according to the WSJ. The Chinese companies using subsidiaries or partnerships to get in on the IRA subsidies include LONGi and Trina Solar. (RELATED: Chinese Solar Companies Have Been Dodging Tariffs, Biden Admin Says)
Leon Panetta Says China Could Use Dem-Backed Battery Factory To Spy On America https://t.co/vmSnfa3j9w
“We definitely don’t want to miss the wave,” Steven Zhu, the president of Trina’s U.S. operations, told the WSJ in reference to the subsidies made available by the IRA.
The supply chains of both Trina Solar and LONGi are reportedly linked to forced labor of Uyghur Muslims in China, according to a 2023 analysis published by Sheffield Hallam University.
China dominates the global supply and refining capacity for the raw materials needed to mass-manufacture green energy-related products, and approximately 80% of the world’s solar panel production happens within China’s borders, according to the WSJ. Even though production costs are still higher in the U.S. with the help of subsidies, some Chinese companies are deciding that it is still worthwhile to set up shop in the American market.
Several of the companies that are anticipating access to IRA tax credits have shifted their production to other Asian countries in the past as American policy and tariffs changed, according to the WSJ. A White House spokesman told the WSJ that the China-based solar companies bringing operations to the U.S. with the IRA’s help mark a reversal in the decades-long trend of American jobs being offshored to China.
The potential for Chinese companies cashing in on IRA subsidies is not confined to solar manufacturing. Gotion, Inc., a subsidiary of the China-based electric vehicle (EV) battery manufacturer Gotion High-Tech, is poised to major subsidized facilities in Illinois and Michigan despite opposition from locals and lawmakers stemming from Gotion High-Tech’s extensiveties to the Chinese Communist Party, which the Daily Caller News Foundation has covered in depth.
The White House did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
Europe has set aside billions of euros to massively increase its reliance on solar panels to generate power, and the continent’s rush to go green has resulted in increased dependency on cheaper Chinese products that benefit from Chinese subsidies, according to Politico.
Chinese manufacturers may soon cement their dominance over the European solar market if policymakers do not quickly step in to protect European firms, according to Politico.
Europe has set aside billions of euros to massively increase its reliance on solar panels to generate power, and the continent’s rush to go green has resulted in increased dependency on cheaper Chinese products that benefit from Chinese subsidies, according to Politico. That dependency has in turn severely undermined the few European businesses that specialize in producing solar products, and the European solar manufacturing base may effectively disappear within weeks if officials do not act decisively to support the industry.
“The situation is really, really, really troublesome,” Johan Lindahl, the secretary general of the European Solar Manufacturing Council (ESMC), told Politico. “We might lose a majority of the European industry in the next couple of months if there’s no strong political signal.” (RELATED: Germany Went All In On The Green Transition. Now, Its Economy Is Crumbling)
China, which dominates the supply chains for raw materials and refining needed to mass-manufacture green energy products, currently controls about 80% of the world’s solar manufacturing capacity, according to Politico. State subsidies and low labor costs give Chinese solar products a clear cost advantage over European competitors, with some European solar products costing almost three times more.
Only 3% of the solar panels installed across Europe in 2023 were produced in Europe, according to Politico. Several firms, such as Exasun, a Dutch solar panel manufacturer, and Energetic, an Austrian company that made solar modules, have already gone out of business.
“Our market is being attacked by cheaper imports from third countries fueled by huge subsidies,” center-right Lithuanian lawmaker Liudas Mažylis told Politico. “We have to think about providing immediate support to solar manufacturers.”
The European Union (EU) wants to massively increase its domestic solar manufacturing and implementation by 2030, per S&P Global. Accordingly, EU officials may be hesitant to try to box China out of the solar market, fearing a setback to the climate agenda or any potential retaliatory protectionism from China, according to Politico.
The solar industry has been lobbying European officials to pursue measures like government buyouts of stocks, softening the rules around state aid for solar developments and implementing new rules for green projects that would decidedly favor European companies, according to Politico.
“[The] situation is worrying … there is an obvious trade imbalance and dependence on China here,” an anonymous official from an EU nation told Politico, which granted the individual anonymity to speak freely on the subject. However, “tariffs against China are probably a bad idea … We need to start making strategic choices. Maybe solar is not the battle we should fight.”
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
Hysteria reigned supreme as recent global mainstream media headlines blamed last year’s drought in the Amazon basin on human-caused climate change. The BBC reported that without human involvement, the drought may have been a once in 1,500 year event. Damian Carrington of the Guardian said it “hit the maximum ‘exceptional’ level on the scientific scale”, whatever that means.
Hysteria reigned supreme as recent global mainstream media headlines blamed last year’s drought in the Amazon basin on human-caused climate change. The BBC reported that without human involvement, the drought may have been a once in 1,500 year event. Damian Carrington of the Guardian said it “hit the maximum ‘exceptional’ level on the scientific scale”, whatever that means. Those of a more sceptical persuasion might note that the scares arose from computer models funded by the green billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham. In fact, rainfall in the area has shown little cyclical deviation across nearly 300 years, severe droughts are common in the basin, particularly in El Niño years, and temperatures in Brazil have risen by only 0.6°C since 1900 – considerably less than rises claimed for the northern hemisphere.
The scares emanated from World Weather Attribution (WWA), a green activist unit run out of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College. The take-out figure, reproduced around the media, was that the event was 30 times more likely to happen due to what the Guardian called “global heating”. The climate crisis is “super-charging” extreme weather across the planet, informs a clearly very disturbed Carrington, and the Amazon rainforest is already thought to be close to a “tipping point” into a drier state.
Calm down. Not according to work published last September by two geo-scientists in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate. The graph below tracks rainfall going back to 1760 and shows a remarkably consistent cyclical pattern up to present times. The graph also shows that severe droughts were not uncommon in the historical past – events that are also recorded in copious writings from the time.
The scientists used proxy evidence provided by tree rings to calculate rainfall and found that recent high and low flow anomalies on the Amazon river “may not have exceeded the natural variability of precipitation and stream-flow during the 19th century”. Recent river-level extremes may have been equalled or possibly exceeded in the pre-industrial 1800s, they added.
In its way the WWA fills a gap in the pseudoscientific market. Much to the irritation of activists, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has largely refused to be drawn on any increasing signal in natural disasters such as droughts, hurricanes and wildfires. Using what it claims to be “peer-reviewed” methods, WWA computer models first simulate a climate with no human involvement that does not exist, and then compare it with another simulation that is supposed to reflect the involvement of humans burning hydrocarbons. Any weather event at a local level that is magnified in the second scenario – magic words can be applied at this point – is said to be due to human-caused climate change. “I can think of no other area of research where the relaxing of rigour and standards has been encouraged by researchers in order to generate claims more friendly to headlines, political advocacy and even lawsuits,” is the verdict of the distinguished science commentator Roger Pielke Jr.
The WWA accepts the influence of a strong El Niño causing drought in the Amazon last year, but said its study showed climate change was the main driver of the event, “through its influence on higher temperatures”. It is a little warmer in Brazil than 120 years ago as the planet has naturally bounced back from the Little Ice Age. But the tropics generally show much less warming than parts of the northern hemisphere.
The above temperature graph for Brazil has been published by the World Bank and it shows a rise from 1901 to 2022 of just 0.6°C. In fact on a five-year smoothing trend it displays a near 0.3°C fall between 2017 and 2022.
The billionaire-funded WWA and its faithful poodle press pack are clearly attempting to fill global populations with alarm about a collapsing climate and the need for a supra-national, collectivist Net Zero solution. WWA co-founder and regular BBC contributor Dr. Friederike Otto is quite clear about the political message being promoted. She noted that it was “very worrying” that human-caused climate change was the driver of the devastating drought in the Amazon last year. “Our choices in the battle against climate change remain the same in 2024 – continue to destroy lives and livelihoods by burning fossil fuels, or secure a healthy, liveable future by rapidly replacing them with clean renewable energy.” But whatever the political agenda, the product of attribution models is not scientific proof. In fact they prove nothing since they fail the most important principle of the scientific process – they cannot be tested and shown to be either true or false. In the end they are just opinions, and it is to the increasing discredit of much mainstream media that they are treated as anything else.
The Ottos of this world might think they can stop the climate changing, but back on the real planet the Amazon seems to be getting along just fine. Deforestation is a real problem but that has nothing to do with a changing climate, and is solvable at a political level. Improving the standard of living for people living in the Amazon region by encouraging more hydrocarbon use might help. Last week the Daily Sceptic reported on the accelerated rate of global ‘greening’ caused by higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the last two decades. This growth can be seen in the map below.
Leaf Area Index (LAI) 10-year growth/trend by region (blue/green represents high growth/trend)
The entire Amazon region has not shown as much leaf growth as India, Europe and eastern equatorial Africa. It has yet to hit the “maximum exceptional level on the scientific scale”, as the Guardian probably wouldn’t note, but it hardly suggests an area in vegetative decline.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’sEnvironment Editor.
The 2023 Atlantic hurricane season: 20 named storms, 7 hurricanes, and 3 major hurricanes versus the “average” of 14 named storms, 7 hurricanes, and 3 major hurricanes. Last year tied 1933 as the fourth most active…. So where is the greenhouse signal in all this?
“… your argument appears to rely on the same tactic you disparage in others: ‘the selective emphasis of certain facts that bolster their stance’…. You omit the abundant and vital array of studies…. You’re also way out of date.” – Andy Revkin to Dessler (below)
Last summer/fall was supposed to be another hurricane season of note, according to climate scientist/alarmist/activist Andrew Dessler. On June 12, 2023, he wrote in “Climate change is making hurricanes more destructive” (Substack):
Because hurricanes are one of the big-ticket weather disasters that humanity has to face, climate misinformers spend a lot of effort muddying the waters on whether climate change is making hurricanes more damaging. With the official start to the 2023 hurricane season in the North Atlantic on June 1, I figured it was time to explain why we can be so confident that hurricanes are indeed more destructive today due to climate change….
His explanations were a tee-up to an anticipated big hurricane season with the cycle in the upward direction. But nope. It was a pretty average year with the U.S. spared (probably a disappointment to Dessler and the other climate alarmists).
The Texas A&M professor gives his reasons for alarm and then attempts to discredit his critics:
Climate misinformers will respond that sea level only contributes a few percent to the total flood depth. But the non-linearity of flood damages means that even a small contribution from sea level rise to total flood depth can increase damages a lot.
But Andy, if the number of hurricanes declines because of anthropogenic forces, and if natural forces are increasing sea level too …. And speaking of incremental change (a valid concept), what about the decline in incremental forcing from each unit of CO2 emissions given the saturation effect? AND if adaptation helped by an absence of climate policy reduces the incremental effect …. Your take is cherry picking, focusing on one part of the picture (the alarmist part) without bringing in the whole. Ditto to the positives of CO2 enrichment on the global ecosphere that go unmentioned.
Dessler then gets to the predictions:
It is likely that the global proportion of Category 3–5 tropical cyclone instances … have increased globally over the past 40 years. and this will continue in the future: the proportion of Category 4–5 TCs will very likely increase globally with warming.
He does state some caveats, but in the name of humility and unsettled science, this should have fronted his post. Dessler does not know what he doesn’t know (or what cannot be known) to fall back on his simplistic view of climate causality. Here is his backhanded admission with some good news tucked in (darn, he must think to himself):
What we’re not sure about: number of tropical cyclones. We don’t have a good handle on what determines how many TCs form annually. Every year there are around 100 of these storms globally, and we don’t know why it’s that number and not, say, 10 or 1000. Without a basic theory, we have little confidence in how the number of TCs will change as the climate warms, although most models predict that the number of TCs will decline.
Dessler loves to offend (part of the PR campaign where no quarter can be given to critics, à la Michael Mann):
What we’re not sure about: monetary damage from tropical cyclones. Every climate misinformer loves loves loves to talk about how, there’s no trend in the observed (normalized) damage. I could explain why this is wrong, but Prof. Kerry Emanuel already did it and you should just read what he wrote.
And
Another reliable yardstick is to ask the people who have money on the line: insurance companies. If you do that, the verdict is clear: insurance premiums are skyrocketing and companies are fleeing places that are vulnerable to TCs (Florida, Louisiana) — exactly what you would expect in a world where the risk of TC damage was going up.
And he has to give it to his critics one more time: “The ‘no increase in damages’ is not a very good argument for the many reasons that Emanuel explained [and] deserves to be dropped into the dustbin of history, but it’s so useful to climate misinformers that I’m sure it will never disappear.”
Dessler summarizes:
This post has only touched on the ways that TCs are getting more damaging…. When arguing against this, climate misinformers don’t necessarily propagate outright lies. Rather, their method of misinformation lies in the selective emphasis of certain facts that bolster their stance. For example, they will focus on statistics like the number of storms, emphasizing that we don’t see any increase while conveniently omitting that climate scientists don’t predict an increase….
This is classic cherry picking. Instead of the selective offering of climate misinformers, you should look at all of the data. If you do that, it’s clear that hurricanes and other TCs are getting more destructive.
Pushback/Comment Dissent
“All the data”? The big picture? Let’s do that! Bjorn Lomborg, Roger Pielke Jr., Ryan Maue …. Maue has recently crunched the data to find non-alarming trends in hurricane number and intensity, which Dessler ignores in his “it should be this” in my simplified world. But in this case, commenters put Dessler on defense with cause:
2. Here is a more comprehensive look at the scientific consensus on tropical cyclones
A serious rebuttal, but Dessler has to resort to sarcasm and disrespect:
Andrew Dessler: Hey Roger, ol’ chum! Great to hear from you! Bringing the heat, as always, my friend! I can’t believe I still block you, let me undo that immediately! Then we can hang out on twitter and reminisce about the great times we had, like the time you accused me without evidence of plagiarizing an oped! Man, that was hilarious! Now where’s that unblock button …
Andy Revkin registered his concern to Dessler:
Andy @Revkin This is not an either/or issue, as you note (either climate change or societal change driving tropical cyclone “impacts”). But your argument appears to rely on the same tactic you disparage in others: “the selective emphasis of certain facts that bolster their stance.”
You omit the abundant and vital array of studies of “paleotempestology” records showing that strong hurricanes can be frequent in periods when sea temperate were cooler: See Jeff Donnelly’s work over the last two decades, a 2007 study I wrote up in The New York Times: “Over the last 5,000 years, the eastern Caribbean has experienced several periods, lasting centuries, in which strong hurricanes occurred frequently even though ocean temperatures were cooler than those measured today, according to a new study.” https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/science/earth/24storm.html
You’re also way out of date. Relying on Kerry Emanuel’s near-decade-old rebuttal to Roger’s 538 post misses Roger’s subsequent output (see links in his reply to this post) and misses Kerry’s important recent work with PhD advisee Rapahel Rousseau-Rizzi nailing down that shifts in *aerosol* pollution have been the dominant shaper of recent North Atlantic hurricane patterns (not CO2-driven warming): Natural and anthropogenic contributions to the hurricane drought of the 1970s–1980s: https://texmex.mit.edu/pub/emanuel/PAPERS/Rousseau-Rizzi_Emanuel_2022_published.pdf
Ken Rice: As far as I can see, none of that actually contradicts what Andy has written in this post. All else being equal, warmer sea surface temperatures will tend to increase the intensity of a TC. However, there are other factors that could change the frequency of TCs, so that warming may lead to fewer TCs overall.
Andy @Revkin: His post is about hurricane *destructiveness* and loss, with intensity just one of the factors that can increase loss. Most of the others are societal sources of vulnerability, as countless disaster researchers have found. Think back to Hurricane Dorian’s damage in the Bahamas. Most of the islands recovered rapidly. The Haitian migrant workers who lived in the informal settlement called The Mudd were devastated. Same hurricane, different impacts. This Guardian report by David Smith really nailed the reality: ‘The poor are punished’: Dorian lays bare inequality in the Bahamas
Andy @Revkin. … What is important, to my eye, in the wider climate activism world is to reconsider the longstanding practice (goes back to An Inconvenient Truth) of making the climate > hurricanes story all about emissions reduction (discounting what you and I just stressed, which is the need to reduce risk by all means necessary).
I strongly sense – based on decades of reporting – that emissions-focused arguments for action are dangerously obscuring the need for aggressive changes on the ground to cut risk where vulnerability is greatest. Sift for the #expandingbullseye hashtag. Same issues in hurricane, fire, flood zones both rich and poor. Here’s a snippet from Florida: Here from Colorado wildfire country. And emissions cuts are needed forever, as I’ve been writing since 1988.
Final Comment
The 2023 Atlantic hurricane season: 20 named storms, 7 hurricanes, and 3 major hurricanes versus the “average” of 14 named storms, 7 hurricanes, and 3 major hurricanes. Last year tied 1933 as the fourth most active…. So where is the greenhouse signal in all this?
The moral of the story? Don’t whine for global government and the rule of ‘experts’. Don’t exaggerate. Prepare for change (Revkin, above). And adaptation to change requires … abundant, affordable, resilient, flexible energies–the fossil fuels primarily.
But Andrew Dessler wants none of this. His latest post is against LNG (backing Biden’s recent “pause’) that will not only encourage more coal usage abroad in the short-term, it will encourage the building of more coal capacity long-term. Enough said….
An article in the Los Angeles Times (LAT) by Hayley Smith and Grace Toohey, titled “El Niño and climate change are supercharging incoming storm, SoCal’s biggest this winter,” falsely claims the present storm is being caused or exacerbated by climate change.
But the powerful atmospheric river — worrisome enough on its own — is being supercharged by climate change and El Niño, which together are warming ocean waters, upping the odds of significant downpours and offering a preview of the state’s future in a warming world, experts say.
The incoming storm is feeding off unusually warm waters between California and Hawaii where a significant marine heat wave has persisted for months, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UCLA.
As is typical for many media outlets these days, the authors of the LAT story are conflating short term weather patterns with long term climate change. As defined by the World Meteorological Organization, and referenced in Climate at a Glance: Weather vs. Climate, climate is an average of weather over 30 years. So, “a significant marine heat wave has persisted for months” is part of a short-term weather pattern, not an indication long-term climate change. For example, it is unlikely to be there next year. Only a long-term trend of increasing significant marine heat waves or marine heat waves of greater strength would suggest a signal of climate change, cut no such trend can be found in the record.
The supposed human driven climate change has been noted for a century so you can’t really claim that El Niño or La Niña events spanning millennia are being driven by the recent noted warming, especially if they change from year to year from warm to cool.
The LAT quotes Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UCLA, saying,
“As ocean temperatures warm, and as atmospheric temperatures warm, those rates of evaporation of water vapor into the lower atmosphere are going to increase quite quickly,” Swain said during a briefing Friday. “A few degrees of warming of nearshore and offshore water temperatures means that there’s more moisture in that lower atmosphere.”
In other words, extra heat and moisture from the warm sea surface are moistening the atmospheric river storms as they approach California, making them more likely to deliver heavy rainfall.
But that doesn’t explain how in the winter of 2022 and 2023, when California had a record snowfall year during a La Niña event, that extra evaporated moisture made it into the atmosphere when the ocean surface was cooler.
You can’t have it both ways when trying to blame climate change for weather events.
Because La Niña and El Niño cycles often span multiple consecutive years, the last La Niña event impacted the Pacific during the winter of 2020-2021 and then again in the winter of 2022/2023, as shown in this analysis (figure below) by Meteorologist Paul Dorian, “La Nina Conditions Continue Across the Equatorial Pacific.”
Then in June 2023 the pattern switched to El Niño, and now the LAT is flip-flopping the climate blame game for weather events, based mainly on opinion from one scientist.
The most damning evidence against the flip-flopping LAT claims comes from the latest climate report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On table 12.12 on Page 90 – Chapter 12 of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. Emergence of Climate Impact Drivers (CIDs) seen below, there is no evidence in the present that climate change is affecting heavy precipitation or marine heat waves, highlighted in yellow.
Table 1 from Page 90 – Chapter 12 of the UN IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. Emergence of Climate Impact Drivers (CIDs) in time periods, for the present-day, 2050, and 2100. The color corresponds to the confidence of the region with the highest confidence: white colors indicate where evidence of a climate change signal is lacking or the signal is not present, leading to overall low confidence of an emerging signal.
As can be seen from the IPCC Table 1, there is no evidence of any increase or decrease, globally or by region, in the frequency, severity or extent of frost, mean precipitation, river floods, heavy precipitation and pluvial floods, landslides, aridity, hydrological drought, agricultural or ecological drought, fire weather or wildfires, mean wind speed, severe wind storms or tornados, tropical cyclones or hurricanes, sand and dust storms, snow glacial or ice sheets, heavy snowfall and ice storms, hail, snow avalanche, relative sea levels, coastal floods, coastal erosion, marine heatwaves, ocean acidity, or air pollution enhancing weather.
In other words, climate change isn’t driving current weather patterns at all.
There’s no evidence supporting the LAT claim that climate change enhancing El Niño in a way that would cause heavier precipitation during the present storm in California. Instead, what this story really reveals is just another couple of low-information journalists’ efforts to blame every negative weather event on human caused climate change.
On Tuesday, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, offered a further concession to demonstrating farmers by dropping her controversial proposal to halve pesticide use within six years.
Ursula von der Leyen offers further concession by dropping her controversial proposal to halve pesticide use within six years.
The European Union has caved in to angry protests from farmers, cutting its target to scrap specific agricultural emissions which formed part of the bloc’s net zero drive.
A demand to reduce nitrogen, methane and other emissions linked to farming by almost a third has been removed from a wider Brussels plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 90 per cent by 2040.
On Tuesday, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, offered a further concession to demonstrating farmers by dropping her controversial proposal to halve pesticide use within six years.
A recommendation urging EU citizens to eat less meat was also removed from the plan.
The concessions came amid mounting demonstrations by farmers in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Romania ahead of this year’s EU elections.
Spanish farmers on Tuesday joined the movement by blockading major highways with convoys of tractors and burning tyres.
Meanwhile, blockades on supermarket distribution centres have left shelves empty in Brussels, while several people have been injured in traffic accidents caused by farmers’ protests in the Netherlands, as they dumped rubbish and set fires on highways.
Organisers have threatened to continue disruption in the lead-up to the European Parliament elections in June.
The plight of the disillusioned farmers has become politically symbolic ahead of the vote.
To quell their angry protests, which have sometimes become violent and caused destruction to cities, Mrs von der Leyen acknowledged net zero rules targeting farmers would need to be watered down.
Our farmers deserve to be listened to,” she told the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Tuesday.
“I know that they are worried about the future of agriculture and their future as farmers.
“But they also know that agriculture needs to move to a more sustainable model of production so that their farms remain profitable in the years to come.”
The Commission president admitted the proposal to cut pesticide use had become a “symbol of polarisation”.
Brussels is also rowing back on planned rules on animal welfare and allowing the cultivation of land left fallow to restore nature.
The reduction of nitrogen oxide emissions was seen as a key pillar of the EU’s climate change strategy, which sparked the initial wave of farming protests in the Netherlands over the summer of 2022.
The target means farmers will be required to reduce their livestock in order to meet the binding limit on emissions.
Mrs von der Leyen has also tried to get farmers on side by announcing a series of “strategic dialogues” to allow them to voice their concerns directly to EU bureaucrats.
A recent article in the New York Times (NYT) claims that coastal cities are “bracing” for climate change, which they claim is making events like heavy rainfall and atmospheric rivers more common and severe. This is false.
A recent article in the New York Times (NYT) claims that coastal cities are “bracing” for climate change, which they claim is making events like heavy rainfall and atmospheric rivers more common and severe. This is false. It is wise for coastal cities to improve their resilience in response to flooding and storms which have occurred throughout history. However, real-world data show climate change has not made atmospheric river events and other instances of extreme rainfall worse.
The article, titled “Coastal Cities Brace for Climate Change,” comes with the ominous subtitle “[t]his week’s atmospheric rivers may only be the beginning.” Writer Manuela Andreoni writes that flooding from recent storms has “battered cities in the South and East Coast,” and “Overlapping atmospheric rivers over the West Coast have brought heavy rains that are likely to come back in the next few days.”
Andreoni goes on to assert that climate change makes these kinds of events more likely, because warmer air “holds more moisture, which means storms in many parts of the world are getting wetter and more intense[.]”
Warm air does holds more moisture than cooler air does, and the modest warming of the past century has occurred alongside a similarly modest increase in overall precipitation in the northern hemisphere, but the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has found is no direct correlation to flooding. The As pointed out inClimate at a Glance: Floods, the IPCC admits that there is low confidence in even the sign of any changes in the frequency or severity of flood events. Additionally, the cost of floods in the United States in relation to to GDP has dropped over time, despite the fact that infrastructure has increased in value.
U.S. flood damage as a proportion of U.S. gross domestic product. Data plotted by Bjorn Lomborg.
The factors that influence extreme precipitation events are more complex than the NYT leads one to believe.
[…]a peer-reviewed paper published in 2020 used satellite and sounding data and found there has been no trend influencing tropical lower stratospheric water vapor, in the region these west coast atmospheric rivers originate.
Even more powerful than that, a data analysis of global relative humidity data over the land and oceans (where atmospheric rivers originate) and publicly available from the UK Met Office, shows relative humidity actually declining.
Atmospheric rivers and major flooding are historically common on the west coast. The worst known flood in California history occurred in 1862, in which an atmospheric river event dumped an equivalent of ten feet of water between rain and snow on California, resulting in massive flooding in the Sacramento Valley. Core drilling revealed similar and worse floods occurred in the same region in AD 212, 440, 603, 1029, 1418, and 1605.
The NYT also claims that coastal regions are “especially vulnerable to climate change, not just because of storms and floods, but from rising seas and erosion.” These claims have been thoroughly refuted in previous Climate Realism posts, here, here, and here, for example. Coastal areas are obviously vulnerable to sea level rise, but it’s not dangerously accelerating, and other factors such as overdevelopment, land compaction and subsidence, natural geography, and poor water infrastructure are larger factors in determining whether a coastal city is especially flood prone in the United States.
The rest of the article is relatively reasonable, detailing ways that cities are improving their infrastructure to improve storm resilience, such as restoring estuaries and other coastal ecosystems that buffer coastlines from storm surge. Hardening infrastructure is a good idea regardless of climate change. We made this point at Climate Realism, in response to similar previous articles published by the NYT.
The NYT and its writers should examine actual data available regarding flooding, atmospheric rivers, and heavy rainfall, before hyping climate change as a cause of problems with coastal cities. Had they done so, they would find that there is no reason to blame naturally occurring, extreme weather events on climate change, and they would avoid misleading their readership.
Recent setbacks in the fortunes of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investing have not kept a bloc of deep-pocketed financial institutions from adopting policies fundamentally at odds with farmers’ ability to grow food, a coalition of state agricultural officials said in a Jan. 29 letter to six big banks.
Recent setbacks in the fortunes of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investing have not kept a bloc of deep-pocketed financial institutions from adopting policies fundamentally at odds with farmers’ ability to grow food, a coalition of state agricultural officials said in a Jan. 29 letter to six big banks.
The banks – Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo – are part of the U.N.-sponsored Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA). Agricultural officials from 11 states and one secretary of agriculture warned in their letter that “we hold serious concerns about the commitments made by your bank as part of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), and the potential impacts on the agricultural sector; specifically, food availability and price increases on consumers, credit access for our farmers and agriculture product producers, and overall negative economic consequences.”
“Due to the potential impacts on agriculture, we are seeking more information on what appear to be troubling environmental commitments by your banks that target our farmers, ranchers, and agriculture producers, with grave consequences for consumers and that undermine the security of our food supply,” the state officials wrote. “More specifically, we understand that you have joined the NZBA and committed to ‘transition[ing] all operational and attributable GHG emissions from [your] lending … portfolios to align with pathways to net zero by mid-century, or sooner.’ To accomplish this goal, NZBA banks must require their customers to measure and disclose the GHG emissions in specific sectors, including agriculture.”
“Implementing these commitments would have severe consequences for American farmers – including cutting America’s beef and livestock consumption in half, switching to inefficient electric farm equipment, and moving away from nitrogen fertilizer necessary for American agriculture to thrive,” the officials write. “We are deeply troubled that your banks have given the U.N. Environment Programme (ENEP) authority to ‘review’ and ‘monitor’ your banks’ climate targets for ‘consistency’ with U.N. criteria, especially given UNEP’s leading role to inciting Sri Lanka to adopt its disastrous fertilizer ban. The documents you have signed indicate that most of you will establish emissions targets for agriculture in 2024 or sooner. With this deadline upon us, we request information and documents relating to your commitments.”
The Perils of Net-Zero
“Achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture requires a complete overhaul of on-farm infrastructure – one of the goals of the NZBA,” the letter goes on. “This would have a catastrophic impact on our farmers. Proposed net-zero roadmaps describe dramatic, impractical, and costly changes to American farming and ranching operations, such as switching to electric machinery and equipment, installing on-site solar panels and wind turbines, moving to organic fertilizer, altering rice-field irrigation systems, and slashing U.S. ruminant meat consumption in half, costing millions of livestock jobs.”
“To make matters worse, these changes will increase food costs and decrease food production at a time when global food demand is expected to rise dramatically. The ‘green premium’ from low emissions ammonia fertilizer alone is predicted to increase fertilizer costs by up to 60% and food prices by up to 26%, even according to net-zero proponents like the World Economic Forum,” the latter points out.
“As members of the NZBA,” the letter continues, “you have committed to setting ‘net-zero’ targets for your business using the UNEP Finance Initiative’s (UNEP FI) ‘Guidelines for Target Setting for Banks.’ Further, you have agreed to let UNEP review your climate targets, committing to publish [them] annually and share them with UNEP FI for review, to monitor their consistency with the U.N. Race to Zero criteria and evidence that action is being taken. The UNEP then assesses whether you are making ‘progress’ against the NZBA required emissions targets.”
Such a scheme spells disaster not just for U.S. farmers but for farmers around the world. The six banks reveal themselves as charter members of the global climate cartel, working hand in hand with an unaccountable and unelected international agency in a scheme destined to suppress global food production.
The state agricultural officials who, unlike the directors of the big banks and U.N. bureaucrats, know a thing or two about the rigors of farming represent Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Carolina, Texas, and West Virginia. Their letter comes amid widespread protests by farmers in France, Germany, Belgium, and elsewhere in Europe against an assortment of climate policies that threaten the livelihoods of food producers. The peasants are getting restless.
The world’s largest offshore wind developer Ørsted is suspending its dividend, cutting jobs and exiting several markets as the group plots a recovery from a calamitous 12 months.
Wind developer says moves needed to create ‘leaner and more efficient company’.
The world’s largest offshore wind developer Ørsted is suspending its dividend, cutting jobs and exiting several markets as the group plots a recovery from a calamitous 12 months.
Ørsted said on Wednesday it would “pause” dividends for 2023-2025, cut as many 800 jobs and retreat from markets in Norway, Spain and Portugal. The Financial Times has the story.
Chief executive Mads Nipper is battling to restore investor confidence after an overly aggressive expansion in US market and higher interest rates left the Danish group facing multibillion dollar impairments.
The measures announced on Wednesday are designed to make Ørsted a “leaner and more efficient company”, Nipper said.
As the group, which is 50.1 per cent owned by the Danish government, tries to stabilise itself, chair Thomas Thune Andersen will step down after almost a decade in the job. Andersen’s exit comes after former finance chief Daniel Lerup and chief operating officer Richard Hunter left in November.
Ørsted’s struggle reflects the pressures facing the wider industry, which investors had championed until higher interest rates, overly ambitious expansion plans and supply chain disruption hit the sector over the past two years.
However, Ørsted has been particularly exposed in part because of its large presence in the still embryonic US market, where it has struggled to get tax credits and complained of onerous requirements for parts to be made locally.
One way to investigate this problem is to look at climate model output across many models to see how their warming trends compare to those models’ diagnosed equilibrium climate sensitivities (ECS). I realize climate models have their own problems, but at least they generate internal variability somewhat like the real world, for instance with El Ninos and La Ninas scattered throughout their time simulations.
When computing temperature trends in the context of “global warming” we must choose a region (U.S.? global? etc.) and a time period (the last 10 years? 50 years? 100 years?) and a season (summer? winter? annual?). Obviously, we will obtain different temperature trends depending upon our choices. But what significance do these choices have in the context of global warming?
Obviously, if we pick the most recent 10 years, such a short period can have a trend heavily influenced by an El Nino at the beginning and a La Nina at the end (thus depressing the trend) — or vice versa.
Alternatively, if we go too far back in time (say, before the mid-20th Century), increasing CO2 in the atmosphere cannot have much of an impact on the temperatures before that time. Inclusion of data too far back will just mute the signal we are looking for.
One way to investigate this problem is to look at climate model output across many models to see how their warming trends compare to those models’ diagnosed equilibrium climate sensitivities (ECS). I realize climate models have their own problems, but at least they generate internal variability somewhat like the real world, for instance with El Ninos and La Ninas scattered throughout their time simulations.
I’ve investigated this for 34 CMIP6 models having data available at the KNMI Climate Explorer website which also have published ECS values. The following plot shows the correlation between the 34 models’ ECS and their temperature trends through 2023, but with different starting years.
The peak correlation occurs around 1945, which is when CO2 emissions began to increase substantially, after World War II. But there is a reason why the correlations start to fall off after that date.
The CMIP6 Climate Models Have Widely Differing Aerosol Forcings
The following plot (annotated by me, source publication here) shows that after WWII the various CMIP6 models have increasingly different amounts of aerosol forcings causing various amounts of cooling.
If those models had not differed so much in their aerosol forcing, one could presumable have picked a later starting date than 1945 for meaningful temperature trend computation. Note the differences remain large even by 2015, which is reaching the point of not being useful anyway for trend computations through 2023.
So, what period would provide the “best” length of time to evaluate global warming claims? At this point, I honestly do not know.
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