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.
New research by Dr. Bellut-Staeck in the journal Medical Research and Its Applications suggests chronic infrasound exposure can lead to serious blood vessel problems. This underpins earlier literature that have reached the similar conclusions.
But the government refuses to accept the results.
New research by Dr. Bellut-Staeck in the journal Medical Research and Its Applications suggests chronic infrasound exposure can lead to serious blood vessel problems. This underpins earlier literature that have reached the similar conclusions.
But the government refuses to accept the results.
Wind turbines are known to disrupt wildlife and severely damage the surrounding biotope, And, despite being inaudible, it is known that low-frequency vibrations from wind turbines can be harmful to human health.
Humans can only perceive sound waves over a range of approximately between 20 and 20,000 Hertz. Sound waves below 20 Hz cannot be heard by humans and are called infrasound.
Natural infrasound emitted by nature is harmless but it is increasingly being understood that infra-sound generated by wind turbines pulsates and make people who are subjected to them over extended time periods sick.
Strong evidence of a hazard to health
The rotating blades of wind turbines cause air pressure changes, which in turn can cause pressure on the ears and chest and lead to health issues and even serious problems like arrhythmia and vision impairment, according to a German Medical Journal.
The study’s abstract states: “Noise-exposed citizens, who live near infrastructures such as biogas installations, heat pumps, block-type thermal power stations, and bigger industrial wind turbines (IWT’s), show worldwide mainly a symptomatology associated with microcirculatory disorder.”
In other words: Infrasound from wind turbines, or other industrial machinery, even though we can’t hear it, can disrupt the natural balance of chemicals in our blood vessels, which can lead to inflammation and problems like atherosclerosis.
So what is the German government going to do about this well-established health hazard? Don’t expect much.
Germany’s green Utopian vision is broadly based on wind power and so far the country has installed more than 30,000 turbines, many being sited near populated areas. The government isn’t about to admit it has completely goofed.
It’s a situation very similar to the COVID mRNA vaccine, which has long been exposed as a health hazard. Yet, the government insists they’re safe!
German government ignores obvious hazard
Tichy’s Einblick writes: “For its part, the Federal Environment Agency (UBA) continues to maintain that there is no scientific evidence of a possible harmful effect of infrasound from wind turbines. This argument from the chronically green-tinged authority is astonishing – because in the case of glyphosate and many other phenomena, the UBA did not need any ‘scientific proof’ of harmfulness. Suspicion was always enough to call for a ban.”
It is becoming increasingly obvious to serious climate scientists that sudden changes in temperature and weather cannot be directly attributed to any long-term effect of warming caused by human-produced ‘greenhouse’ gases. Suggestions to the contrary are best left to climate comedy-turn Jim ‘jail the deniers’ Dale and the guided hands writing most mainstream media copy. Last year saw a large spike upwards in global ‘hottest year ever’ temperatures and alarmism went into overdrive. But a recent paper published by the EU weather service Copernicus shows that the warming spike was driven by a strong, naturally occurring El Niño oscillation.
It is becoming increasingly obvious to serious climate scientists that sudden changes in temperature and weather cannot be directly attributed to any long-term effect of warming caused by human-produced ‘greenhouse’ gases. Suggestions to the contrary are best left to climate comedy-turn Jim ‘jail the deniers’ Dale and the guided hands writing most mainstream media copy. Last year saw a large spike upwards in global ‘hottest year ever’ temperatures and alarmism went into overdrive. But a recent paper published by the EU weather service Copernicus shows that the warming spike was driven by a strong, naturally occurring El Niño oscillation. Furthermore, the 0.29°C spike is not unprecedented in the observation record since a slightly larger rise occurred in 1976-77.
The Copernicus paper published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics is of particular interest because it makes a connection between a strong El Niño developing across the southern hemisphere after a prolonged La Niña. El Niño is the positive phase of the ENSO natural climate variation, while La Niña, which tends to lower temperatures, is the corresponding negative episode. In the years around 2023 and 1976, a strong El Niño occurred after a prolonged La Niña phase. In 1976 the spike was even higher at a reported 0.31°C.
The work published through Copernicus is firmly in the mainstream, so the seemingly obligatory reference is made to the unproven suggestion that global temperatures since 1950 have been rising “principally due to human activities”. This may well be the considered opinion of the scientists involved, conveniently so since such work is unlikely to be published with a different take on the politicised ‘settled’ climate science behind the Net Zero project. However the authors point out that the recent temperature spike has been a societal cause for concern, not least because its causes “are not obvious”. Thankfully such doubts do not unduly cloud the judgements of those engaged in important Net Zero work, including Jim Dale, Justin Rowlatt of the BBC and George Monbiot of the Guardian.
There has been a recent scrabble in climate circles to explain the temperature spike, given the lack of scientific proof linking it to rises in just one trace atmospheric gas, namely carbon dioxide. The authors note the recent reduction in atmospheric particulates or aerosols caused by cleaner marine fuels, increased solar activity and the Hunga Tonga submarine volcano eruption and the associated boost to upper atmosphere water vapour. But they come down on the side of the argument that “ENSO is the primary reason for the global warming spikes”.
Their conclusion is based on two significant recent observations, but they attempt to back up their work by citing the findings of climate models. Such computer models have a poor track record since they are frequently used to provide cover for pre-prepared narratives and conclusions. Whether they can provide useful or conclusive information on the chaotic, non-linear atmosphere is a subject for endless argument, but they are the best we have for attempting to measure climate mechanisms. In their paper, the scientists show that climate models that are subject only to internal variability can generate temperature spikes, although they are an uncommon occurrence. But when a prolonged La Niña immediately precedes an El Niño in the simulations, as occurred in 1976 and 2023, “such spikes become much more common”.
“Thus, our results underscore the importance of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation driving the occurrence of global warming spikes such as the one in 2023, without needing to invoke anthropogenic forcing, such as changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases or aerosols, as an explanation,” they conclude.
There have been a number of scientific papers trying to understand the recent temperature spike, although some are inconvenient in failing to support the ‘boiling’ trope and are therefore ignored in the mainstream. As the Daily Scepticrecently reported, a detailed paper from a group of mathematicians and scientists published in Nature found “limited evidence” for a global warming surge over the last the last 50 years. “No change in the warming rate beyond the 1970s is detected despite the breaking record temperatures observed in 2023,” they wrote. It is important to consider random noise caused by natural variation when investigating the recent pauses in temperature, and the more recent “alleged warming acceleration,” they argued.
All of which, of course, helps knock on the head the fast-emerging pseudoscience of weather attribution. These whackadoodle weather findings of computer models attributing individual events to long-term changes in the climate caused by humans feature heavily in mainstream media. In the absence of scientific backing, notably from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change despite its usually alarmist outlook, their political job is to help catastrophise natural events such as hurricanes, flooding and droughts. They are pseudoscience since their claims cannot be disproved or falsified. They are outside the scientific process and are simply opinions. The distinguished climate writer Roger Pielke Jr. calls them “weather attribution alchemy”. It says it all that they are now the main instrument used to alarm and scare populations into believing in a non-existent climate crisis.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’sEnvironmental Editor.
Environmentalists insist that they love the “little guys” — until they get in their way, ask inconvenient questions or try to block renewable energy projects intended to save the planet from “human-caused climate cataclysms.”
Environmentalists insist that they love the “little guys” — until they get in their way, ask inconvenient questions or try to block renewable energy projects intended to save the planet from “human-caused climate cataclysms.”
Then the little people learn the environmentalists are really working with wind and solar energy companies, public utilities, finance giants, politicians and bureaucrats — the climate-industrial complex. Stand in its way, and farmers, rural communities and American Indian groups can face protracted, expensive battles. But they often emerge victorious.
Energy analyst and journalist Robert Bryce reports that these little guys have rejected or restricted 735 U.S. wind and solar projects since 2015, including 58 solar and 35 wind proposals so far this year. Transmission lines, grid-scale batteries and other plans also face growing resistance.
Rural Americans don’t want these huge installations destroying their traditional way of life, hurting property values, raising electricity rates, wrecking vital croplands and habitats, ruining scenic vistas, killing birds, bats and other wildlife — and creating serious fire and toxic gas risks from lithium-ion electricity storage batteries.
They don’t want their countryside dotted with landfills piled high with billions of tons of broken and obsolete solar panels, wind turbine blades and other trash.
The proposed projects are daunting in their number and scale, and the dream of transitioning the United States from fossil fuels to an all-electric energy, transportation and industrial system would require vastly more.
Before being scaled back in a failed effort to reduce local and state opposition, the Lava Ridge Wind Project would have installed 400 huge turbines on some 200,000 acres of federal land in Idaho. That’s 310 square miles, over 4½ times the area of the District of Columbia. Most of its output would go to California, which already imports nearly one-third of its electricity.
The Koshkonong solar project near Christiana, Wisconsin, would cover 6,400 acres (10 square miles) and put a 667-megawatt-hour battery storage system near an elementary school.
The Biden-Harris administration’s plan for 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind energy translates into 2,500 12-megawatt turbines rising 850 feet above the waves. But all those turbines wouldn’t provide enough electricity (31,541 MW) to power New York state on a hot summer day if the wind blows.
The state’s plan is to spend $2 billion for 24,000 MWh of backup batteries for windless or sunless days, which would provide enough electricity to run the state for barely 45 minutes. Sufficient batteries would cost trillions.
Each offshore blade is 350 feet long and weighs 140,000 pounds; 2,5000 turbines would mean almost 500 miles of blades weighing more than 1 billion pounds. Imagine the cleanup and landfill costs after a major hurricane.
Yet a 2020 Princeton University report called for massively expanding U.S. wind and solar capacity to fight climate change and rebuild America.
As Mr. Bryce points out, however, those plans would require solar projects blanketing an area the size of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut combined — plus wind installations sprawling across lands equal to Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee.
That’s without factoring in wind and solar power needed to charge grid-scale backup batteries to store enough electricity to power America for even a day or week of windless, sunless days.
Other projects are equally enormous, expensive and fanciful.
Summit Carbon Solutions wants to build a pipeline to carry carbon dioxide from 57 ethanol plants in five states — and inject the carbon dioxide into geologic formations beneath North Dakota. The company can provide no guarantees that the pressurized gas will stay in the ground and not erupt suddenly and violently, killing wildlife and people by rapidly replacing breathable air — as a natural carbon dioxide reservoir did at Cameroon’s Lake Nyos in 1986.
hy are you trying to end local land-use controls, take our property via eminent domain and destroy small local and minority businesses to build these enormous projects?
• How will ruining our wild and agricultural areas, killing wildlife and reducing our living standards do any good if China and India alone emit 38% of the world’s greenhouse gases (vs. 11% by the U.S.) and are building coal-fired generating plants every week?
Proud, principled resistance is essential if citizens are to defend their jobs, lands, living standards and freedoms.
• Paul DriessThe cumulative impacts of these wind, solar, battery, transmission line and other projects would be incalculable — on land, wildlife, families, budgets and human health.
Adding to the cost, construction and raw material requirements, home, neighborhood and regional grids would have to be expanded and upgraded to handle the ballooning electricity demands and the surges and plummets associated with unpredictable, weather-dependent wind and solar power.
This is all irrelevant to those in the climate-industrial complex, who want to extol the “pivotal role” they are playing in driving America’s “renewable energy transformation,” meeting arbitrary greenhouse gas emission reduction targets and preventing “climate catastrophes.”
Property rights advocate Tom DeWeese says concerned citizens can fight back by asking tough questions about these policies and projects.
For example:
• What benefits has our community received from the solar and wind farms we already have, and from the taxpayer subsidies and increased rates we already have to pay?
… In the context of development progress, animals like cows, goats, camels, and pigs should be seen as “solutions with legs” …
Climate policies must not write off livestock
Cattle when grazed sustainably can be part of climate action and help vulnerable populations build resilience.
Ali Mohamed Climate Envoy in the Office of the President of Kenya
Livestock are a vital component of both the African food system and rural livelihoods. Africa has around 400 million cattle alone, and the livestock sector accounts for a significant 30 to 40 percent of the total agricultural gross domestic product across the continent.
Small amounts of meat, milk and eggs can have life-changing benefits in tackling malnutrition, and livestock animals also provide a reliable income source when alternatives simply do not readily exist.
Yet, from an environmental perspective, livestock are often perceived only as a problem, contributing to habitat loss, greenhouse gas emissions, and land degradation. This narrow view misses a much more nuanced reality. It is also the reason much-needed finance is not being invested in the sector.
…
In the context of development progress, animals like cows, goats, camels, and pigs should be seen as “solutions with legs” in combatting these intensifying climate and environmental crises at scale.
While there are plenty of places cattle are grazed which could also be used for growing vegetables, cattle farming is also viable in places where vegetables simply shrivel up and die.
Grazing also improves grassland health – grasslands need to be grazed. Ecologists once believed the opposite, that grazing degrades grassland and increases the risk of desertification. This wildly wrong belief led to the slaughter of over 40,000 elephants – before one of the ecologists who helped organise the slaughter realised to his horror it was all a big mistake.
There are other considerations. On Monday this week a medical specialist I see for an annual checkup told me I had to eat more meat, his advice was I had to replace most of the carbohydrates in my diet with meat. Vegetables are mostly carbohydrates, so I have to cut back on vegetables, particularly starchy vegetables like Potatoes.
There are plenty of other people in my situation.
Reducing meat in the global diet would create a lot of sick people and, in time, a lot of prematurely dead people.
But who knows, maybe some greens see quietly killing off the hundreds of millions of people who medically require meat rich diets as a milestone towards their goal to reduce global population.
Methane — the second most hated Greenhouse gas — spiked to record historic levels in the last few years, over 1,900 parts per billion. In 2019, even the WEF scientists admitted they couldn’t explain the baffling rise, and then in 2020, the world of methane went into the twilight zone. We shut down the modern world due to the pandemic, and methane levels rose even faster.
27 December 2021, Brandenburg, Sieversdorf: Bubbles, formed by rising methane gas, are seen frozen in the ice on a lake. Photo: Patrick Pleul/dpa-Zentralbild/ZB (Photo by Patrick Pleul/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Wouldn’t you know it — 150 nations signed the Global Methane Pledge without even bothering to check if the methane was man-made.
Methane — the second most hated Greenhouse gas — spiked to record historic levels in the last few years, over 1,900 parts per billion. In 2019, even the WEF scientists admitted they couldn’t explain the baffling rise, and then in 2020, the world of methane went into the twilight zone. We shut down the modern world due to the pandemic, and methane levels rose even faster.
It seems many have been blaming fossil fuels for the global surge in emissions, but forgot to check the C13 isotopes. Somehow we spend millions on breathalysing cows, measuring their burps, and feeding them seaweed, but didn’t think to do the basic chemistry. How could that be, you might wonder… 158 nations agreed to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030, but none of them audited the science even though very strange things were happening. (The point was obviously the “pledge”, the junkets, the captive industries and subsidies, anything but the science).
Methane from fossil fuels has a higher carbon-13 ratio, but even though fossil fuel use was rising, the carbon-13 levels of atmospheric methane was rolling down a hill. Indeed this new study shows it’s been falling for 17 years.
It’s not like this snuck up on us…. any inquiring mind should have seen this coming a decade ago. The lab has been recording C13 in methane since 1998 and gets air samples from 22 sites around the world every week or two.
(A) Trend of globally averaged CH4 abundance (in gray) and δ13CCH4 (purple) from the NOAA/GML GGGRN. Mean growth rates of CH4 mole fraction and δ13CCH4 are shown for the following time periods: 1983–1998, 1999–2006, 2008–2014, 2014–2020, and 2020–2022. (B) Colocated δ13CCH4 measurements at Alert (Canada), Svalbard (Norway), and Antarctica by INSTAAR, NIWA, TU/NIPR, and MPI. Each dataset is fitted with a trend in the same color. PNAS
Microbes in environment drove methane emissions more than fossil fuels between 2020 and 2022, analysis finds
They found that between 2020 and 2022, the drastic increase in atmospheric methane was driven almost entirely by microbial sources. Since 2007, scientists have observed microbes playing a significant role in methane emissions, but their contribution has surged to over 90% starting in 2020.
“Some prior studies have suggested that human activities, especially fossil fuels, were the primary source of methane growth in recent years,” said Xin (Lindsay) Lan…
“These studies failed to look at the isotope profile of methane…
They go on to mention that in a warmer world, bacteria have a higher metabolism, which means they are happier and work faster. Thus, like CO2, if the world warms for any reason at all, methane will rise — and there is nothing we can do about it.
The one last straw they could clutch is that maybe the microbes were “man-made” :
It remains unclear whether the increased microbial emissions came from natural sources like wetlands or human-driven sources, such as landfills and agriculture. The team plans to delve deeper to identify the exact source of methane.
As if somehow there was a surge in landfill, rice paddies or cows in the last few years that no one had noticed.
This is a pretty big deal — methane has supposedly caused about 30% of our current temperature rise (says the broken climate models) yet 90% of that recent rise was microbes. It’s yet another slice of the climate we aren’t controlling, but we’re still designing burgers with mealworms and bacon from fungus, in the hope of reducing methane emissions and controlling the weather. Then it turns out every swamp and square meter of soil is working against us.
Methane concentrations in the air have almost tripled since the 1700s, but that was the Little Ice Age. It’s easy to believe that as the world warmed up, the planet’s wetlands and soil microbes have just been returning to normal business for the last 300 years.
Michel, Sylvia Englund, et al (2024) Rapid shift in methane carbon isotopes suggests microbial emissions drove record high atmospheric methane growth in 2020–2022, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2411212121
An October 21 article in Bloomberg claims that Climate Change is Killing Buildings in Slow Motion. This is demonstrably false, as buildings have been affected by weather for millennia, not just during the present. This is a classic case of conflation of weather and climate, used to push the idea that a “climate crisis” is a clear and present danger, when, in fact, there is no such thing as a climate crisis occurring, except in the imaginations climate alarmists and the mainstream media that seemingly blindly accepts and publicizes their every pronouncement.
An October 21 article in Bloomberg claims that Climate Change is Killing Buildings in Slow Motion. This is demonstrably false, as buildings have been affected by weather for millennia, not just during the present. This is a classic case of conflation of weather and climate, used to push the idea that a “climate crisis” is a clear and present danger, when, in fact, there is no such thing as a climate crisis occurring, except in the imaginations climate alarmists and the mainstream media that seemingly blindly accepts and publicizes their every pronouncement.
For example, some recent Climate Realism (CR) articles take issue with similar absurd claims made by the media. In No, New York Times, Climate Change Isn’t Destroying Bridges, CR finds that climate had no role at all in the collapse of the bridge discussed, and neither did weather as the actual cause had nothing to do with climate change at all but rather an engineering failure that used undersized gusset plates that were too thin for the load of the bridge that was overloaded at the time of collapse.
In another case, Dear HuffPo: City Schools Suffer from Aging Buildings, NOT Climate Change, CR points out that “City schools in the Northeastern Unites States may well be suffering from lost school days because their buildings have insufficient HVAC systems, along with a slew of other issues that come along with aging structures.”
Infrastructure naturally ages with time. Things wear out and break. Climate change has not had any impact on that process.
While Bloomberg jumps to the absurd conclusion that climate change is the culprit in a collection of unrelated building failures, the fact is that weather, age, and poor design or maintenance are the combined forces at hand.
When confronted with such logic, climate alarmists often then point to claims that climate change is making the weather worse. But this is false. Data shows weather has not worsened in any measurable sense. CR pointed this out responding to an article in Forbes, titled Forbes is Right That Weather Isn’t Getting More Extreme, Wrong About Other Climate Claims. CR has dozens of other articles pointing out media failures in trying to link weather events (and subsequent destruction) to climate change.
Most importantly, climate science itself says the weather is not getting worse. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows clearly that there is no linkage to climate change at all. Figure 1 below shows Table 12.12 on Page 90 – Chapter 12 of the UN IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. Emergence of Climate Impact Drivers (CIDs). 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.
Figure 1 – Table 12.12 | on Page 90 – Chapter 12 of the UN IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. Emergence of Climate Impact Drivers (CIDs)
Clearly, the data doesn’t support worsening weather, rendering claims of climate enhanced weather events destroying infrastructure totally moot.
This shameful rush by the media to blame climate change for every social ill and problem society faces is part of a misguided pattern Climate Realism has discussed time and again . Almost without fail, when there is some oddball or unique event somewhere in the world, climate alarmists and the media immediately rush to blame it on climate change whether they have any facts to support it or not. Such behavior is irresponsible journalism.
The winner here is clearly China, a country that emits more GHG than all developed countries put together. Ironically, carbon reduction policies fit brilliantly into its strategy to use its coal and other fossil fuel energy to power their takeover of the “green economy.”
Despite massive subsidies and world forums, green power still only represents one-fifth of global energy
North America, with its vast resources, may be in a position to save the economies of the west. But governments on both sides of the border seem more concerned with green virtue signaling than actually finding a workable approach to carbon emissions that does not undermine our economies and ability to defend ourselves.
The prevailing notion, both in Ottawa and D.C., is that our countries should ignore our resources, and how best to use them, in order to fulfill a messianic vision of massive, rapid emissions reduction.
Canada’s proposed carbon tax, pushed through media at government expense, and zealously promoted by Mark Carney, who thinks mass decarbonization, as epitomized by Europe, provides the road map to prosperity, despite the continent’s consistent economic lethargy.
This approach has also poisoned politics as not all provinces are affected equally by the initiative. The institution of the carbon tax and other measures by government and through the relentless pressure of green non-profits, to get a 40 per cent emissions cut by 2030 may be the toast of investment bankers betting on cashing in on forced changes. But for taxpayers, the impact will vary by province. Fossil fuels account for five per cent of Canada’s overall GDP but four times as much in Calgary, Newfoundland and Labrador.
However, as much this appeals to academics and wealth pearl-clutchers in cities, it translates into higher prices than normal.
As the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh suggested, it places unfair “burdens” on the working class, one reason for his opposition to the tax. Worse still, the biggest green targets of what climatistas label as “industrial carbon” could devastate those same NDP voters — blue collar workers in mining, like manufacturing, logistics and agriculture.
Canada does not need another way to slow its economy. One recent estimate suggests that the proposed $170 a ton proposal would slice 1.8 per cent from the country’s already anemic GDP and cost upwards of 185,000 net jobs. Even Liberals admit something close to a 1 per cent decline. Some may see these draconian attempts to wipe out fossil fuels as the Lord’s work, but on the ground level it seems closer to class warfare.
Trudeau and his supports insist these policies are critical for saving the planet. Yet, attempts to follow such approaches elsewhere have not ended well. In Europe, most obviously Germany, as well as California, the shift to “renewable energy” has led, as it usually does, to high pricesthat already are driving German industry off the continent. Although not nearly as well-endowed with energy as North America, the climate lobby in Europe makes sure to throttle anything, such as offshore oil in the UK — in pursuit of green puritanism.
There’s something delusional in many of these initiatives. A key mistake is the common green assertion that fossil fuels are becoming obsolete and should be wiped out for the benefit of fitting a new economy. Yet, in the real world, despite billions in subsidies for “green power,” fossil fuels still represent roughly four fifths of global energy generation, just as it did twenty years ago. This is after expenditures of over one trillion were spent on solar and wind. The West has been reducing per capita emissions for years, but this is utterly subsumed by growth in developing countries, notably China, which not only buys huge amounts of natural gas but continues to open new coal-fired plants at a rapid rate.
North Americans be forewarned that in imposing burdens on themselves, but not competitors, green governments are essentially guaranteeing their own decline. Already in the EU, nearly a million industrial jobs have been lost over the past few years, with investment shifting to countries like China and India, which freely use coal and fossil fuels to keep costs down.
Britain’s path may give the starkest preview of the future Biden and Trudeau have in mind for us. Since 1990 the manufacturing sector’s share of GDP has dropped roughly 50 per cent along with several million jobs. This parallels a two thirds drop in UK energy production, while consumption has fallen by only one third. Three decades ago, a net energy exporter, the UK now increasingly depends on imports from the Middle East and other unstable regions.
The winner here is clearly China, a country that emits more GHG than all developed countries put together. Ironically, carbon reduction policies fit brilliantly into its strategy to use its coal and other fossil fuel energy to power their takeover of the “green economy.” China has placed itself in the catbird’s seat on renewable energy, including utter domination of solar panels and electric vehicles. China already produces twice as many EVs as the US and the EU combined, and seeks to leverage its total domination of the solar-panel industry — its battery capacity is now roughly four times ours. China also exercises effective control of the requisite rare earth minerals and the technologies used to process them.
As the west’s own overpriced EVs sit on lots, China plays us for utter fools as we undermine our own industrial economy. The forced march to EV will be particularly tough on the 125,000 who work in Canada’s car factories. Manufacturing and mining, much of it energy-related, represent, along with real estate, two of the country’s largest industries. Under the current circumstances, they are heading for a spectacular fall. Overall, the EV industry in the U.S. uses 30 per cent less domestic labor than traditional gasoline car manufacturing, and under current circumstances can only hope for some basic assembly work using Chinese components.
These policies will affect every industry and consumer as cars and things like heaters are all forced to electrify. Britain’s shift to EVs is projected to double the demand for electricity by 2040, and its government is already looking to ban the use of home chargers during peak hours. By 2050 in California, state consultants estimate total energy demand will skyrocket, by some estimates rising 60 to 90 per cent. Not surprisingly, the state will face “acute electricity shortages” over the coming decade, according to one recent analysis.
Rising demands for electricity for artificial intelligence seems likely to add to this burden. Microsoft alone is opening a new data centre globally every three days. These power-hungry operations are expected to grow from 4.5 per cent of energy demand to 10 per cent by 2035. Artificial intelligence and data center demand are leading to massive expansions in projected energy use around the world at a time of restricted supply. Google, renowned for its green virtue signaling, has boosted its own emissions by 50 per cent since 2019.
Ultimately, the oligarchs will likely get their juice from sources like decommissioned nuclear energy, while the average family will take the economic hit in order to fulfill the agenda pushed by the likes of Steve Jobs’ widow, Lauren, Michael Bloomberg, the Rockefellers, Jeff Bezos and venture capitalist John Doerr. These, and other oligarchic allies, are waging a sophisticated and well-financed media and institutional campaign to catastrophize the climate issue as a way to ban gas stoves, stop new LNG facilities, and crack down on plastics.
Finally, there is the issue of security, particularly relevant in an age of declining western power. The new green mandates, if adopted, presage yet another force to further reduce the industrial prowess of western countries, while driving more industries to China, India, and other countries who produce their goods with dirtier fuels and develop resources with less environmental care. At the same time, third world countries, for the most part, are not embracing “net zero,” as it is totally infeasible for them and will likely resist western lectures on climate policy.
All of this is occurring as a concert of ugly energy producers — Russia, Iran, and Venezuela— press their advantage on western countries. They stand to benefit from continued de-industrialization as one way to further weaken the military capacity of the west. Taking away North American liquified natural gas from Europe simply makes the continent more dependent on such malefactors as Qatar, a primary backer of terrorists and their supporters, and may lead the west, hat in hand, to beg from even worse regimes, like Russia and Iran.
The good news — while green virtue-signaling may appeal to Trudeau, Biden, and Harris — these policies could be impacted by political realities. Worried about voters in industrial states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, Harris, even as she embraces environmental bromides, has backed away from EV mandates and opposition to fracking, albeit with dubious credibility. Yet, perhaps she realizes, or those around her do, that these policies do not sell well compared to promoting more affordable and reliable energy.Trudeau, if he wants to remain relevant, may similarly need to flip the script if he hopes to forestall an utter political defeat.
A new paper just published in the PNAS identifies different culprits.
This is unlikely to mollify climate zealots as agriculture is listed among the potential causes.
The growth rate of the atmospheric abundance of methane (CH4) reached a record high of 15.4 ppb yr−1 between 2020 and 2022, but the mechanisms driving the accelerated CH4 growth have so far been unclear. In this work, we use measurements of the 13C:12C ratio of CH4 (expressed as δ13CCH4) from NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network and a box model to investigate potential drivers for the rapid CH4 growth. These measurements show that the record-high CH4 growth in 2020–2022 was accompanied by a sharp decline in δ13CCH4, indicating that the increase in CH4 abundance was mainly driven by increased emissions from microbial sources such as wetlands, waste, and agriculture. We use our box model to reject increasing fossil fuel emissions or decreasing hydroxyl radical sink as the dominant driver for increasing global methane abundance. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2411212121
Methane (CH4) is the second-most abundant anthropogenic greenhouse gas and has global warming potential (GWP) of 28 over 100 y (1); as a result, CH4 has consequential near-term radiative effects and is a prominent target for mitigation (2). Following a short pause in growth from 1999 to 2006, both the abundance and growth rate of atmospheric methane have been increasing (3). During 2020–2022, the observed CH4 growth rate reached a record high since NOAA measurements began in 1983, averaging 15.4 ± 0.6 ppb yr−1 (4). Understanding the mechanisms driving this accelerated growth is essential for predicting its future climate impact and providing scientific support for climate mitigation strategies (2).
The carbon isotopic composition of atmospheric CH4 (δ13CCH4) is a powerful tool for tracking the sources and sinks of atmospheric CH4. Different CH4 sources have distinctive δ13CCH4 values: Microbial CH4 emissions (wetlands, livestock, landfills, etc.) have lower δ13CCH4 values (global mean of –62‰) than pyrogenic (biomass and biofuel burning, global mean of –24‰) and fossil fuel CH4 emissions (global mean of –45‰) (5). Various sinks of atmospheric CH4 also have distinctive isotopic effects. Therefore, combined observations of atmospheric CH4 mole fraction and δ13CCH4 can provide unique constraints on the changes of global CH4 sources and sinks during the post-2006 rapid CH4 growth.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Global Monitoring Laboratory (NOAA/GML) has been carefully monitoring the global CH4 burden through the Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network (GGGRN) for over four decades. The collaboration between NOAA/GML and the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado Boulder has enabled δ13CCH4 measurements from the GGGRN since 1998, currently measuring weekly or biweekly from 22 globally distributed background sites (6). The dataset has been widely used for studying the evolution of global CH4 sources and sinks (7–9). Here, we report our most recent observations of atmospheric CH4 mole fractions and δ13CCH4 values through the end of 2022 and then use a box model to examine and quantify the contributions of potential drivers of the record-high CH4 growth rate.
This is unlikely to mollify climate zealots as agriculture is listed among the potential causes. With biological activity exploding across the world, due to CO2 fertilization, I personally wonder how much of this is increasing wetland productivity as well as flourishing soil microbes.
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