James Lovelock on Climate Prediction: "I’ve grown up a bit since then."

… while we here in Canada are just getting the flat tire rolling on the rim …

As the Dutch saying goes: “Once one sheep has crossed the dam, more will follow”

“heat stressed”….?????????
I honestly can’t think of one thing less important

Cheers, Eric! Good catch. Perhaps the tide is turning as one by one, they come out on the side of sanity. Hope there’s a mass defection of fence-riders before the US election.

EPA’s Clean Power Plan and its Moment of Truth
By Stephen Heins
While many of us have actively tried to follow the broad-based scientific discussions about climate change including those at the Paris Meetings, most of us are stuck between to the “alarmist” and the “denier” narratives. The “luke warmers,” as we are called, suspect that the climate change discussion is far from over.
Most troubling to some observers of the current Washington DC bureaucracies, the FCC and the EPA, is that they fit the classic mold of federal agencies furiously trying to regulate industries while they themselves are many years behind the investment, technology and innovation of the industries they regulate.
Suffice it to say, the world’s 7.4 billion people of global economy and planetary environment are far too important to be left to silo thinking or national and global politics. This is especially true with the skyrocketing need for big data, huge wireless broadband and ongoing technological innovation, particularly in the under-developed and under-represented parts of the world.
With that in mind, here are several flaws in the final version of the Clean Power Plan (CPP) of 2015:
The use of several studies (e.g. Harvard’s study of indirect health benefits) are likely examples of “study-bias;”
Medical computations of indirect health benefits from the reduction of PM 2.5 (or fine particulate matter) have never been well demonstrated;
The CPP places complete faith in the advancement of technology responding to political dictates instead of the marketplace;
The CPP lacks a full accounting of the costs of stranding electrical assets and the large investment in new infrastructure, which essentially just replicate old distribution assets;
The Clean Power Plan has never been properly vetted by the states, and there never was a state or national political mandate calling for its formulation;
Currently, a clear cut democratic majority, 28 states, have officially challenged the legality of the Clean Power Plan;
With the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia just beginning its En Banc proceedings, President Obama and Secretary McCarthy are likely to be in the rear view mirror by the time it is fully litigated;
Indistinguishable from any political campaign, the robust public relations campaign conducted by the EPA and the White House, and a large number of related texts and emails, are shrouded in the lack of proper disclosure not unlike the Colorado Toxic Spills;
Actual greenhouse gas reductions from the Clean Power Plan are miniscule, and, according to Scientific America and the Energy Information Administration (EIA), by 2015, 47 states had already achieved sharp decreases in emission from 2007 levels, with more than billion tons of reductions;
The US is already on a glide path whereby America has reduced more Green House Gas (GHG) than any other country in the world, a fact which even the Sierra Club acknowledges;
The EPA has never provided a real cost benefit analysis of the Clean Power throughout all versions of the regulations;
The CPP gives the EPA and state environmental agencies first class status, making all other state and federal agencies (like the Department of Energy, Federal Energy Regulatory Committee, and State Utility Regulators) virtual second class citizens, with second class powers;
With “cross state” and regional emission differences, the CPP makes states and regions compete against each other in energy markets previously regulated by states, and is de facto helping to create a national emissions market, which has already been defeated legislatively;
The Clean Power Plan is fraught with backward looking and silo thinking, with no heed paid to the rapidly expanding convergence of energy, technology and wireless telecommunications. In the case of the above convergence, there is no consideration for the rapidly expanding need for electricity, big data and wireless broadband to allow significantly more energy efficiency, better environmentalism and economic development in all 50 states;
The CPP has a serious lack of transparency, whereby much of the information remains undisclosed. Much of the grant money provided by the EPA for health and emissions studies (Harvard, Syracuse, George Mason, Johns Hopkins et al) is essentially undeclared;
The significant input provided by large environmental groups like the Sierra Club and the NRDC is largely buried in the footnotes or hidden in private emails;
Finally, as Professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard and the Wall Street Journal point out, the constitutionality of Clean Power Plan and its new found powers violate the separation of powers and the long standing principle of cooperative federalism between the states and the federal government.
Stephen Heins
Energy Consultant, Business Writer and Practical Environmentalist
“Proactive, precise, published”
The Word Merchant, LLC
Suite 3
530 Wilson Avenue
Sheboygan, WI 53081
920-918-8098 (I Phone)
920-395-2854
stephen@twmheins.com

Another warmist ‘warms’ to skepticism. Funny how somehow skeptics are never persuaded to accept warmism.

James Lovelock of course also played a critical role in the ozone depletion hypothesis that led to the Montreal Protocol and a worldwide ban on CFCs and other halogenated hydrocarbons. Lovelock’s only role was purely objective and scientific. Because halogenated hycrocarbons were chemically inert and because they did not otherwise occur in nature he wondered if their release into the atmosphere even in minute quantities would cause an accumulation that could have environmental implications. The testable implication of this hypothesis is that air samples far from human habitation should contain measurable amounts of this unnatural substance. So he sailed to the middle of the North Atlantic and took air samples far from human habitation and therein he did find measurable amounts of halogenated hydrocarbons. QED. He published these findings a now famous paper (Lovelock, J. (1973). Halogenated hydrocarbons in and over the Atlantic. Nature , 241. 194-196).
It so happened that 1973 was a time of intense ozone layer environmentalism. It was a movement to “save the ozone layer” and thereby to save us from skin cancer and cataract epidemics and all life on the surface of the earth including marine life from the hideously harmful effects of UVB radiation. See:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291833573_ozonePaperResource
And so the hunt was on almost immediately after the Lovelock paper to see if a “dangerous accumulation” of these synthetic chemicals could end up in the stratosphere and harm the ozone layer. Within a year a credible theory of ozone destruction was proposed by Mario Molina and the late Frank Rowland of UC Irvine (Molina-Rowland. (1974). Atmospheric sink for chlorofluoromethane: chlorine atom catalyzed destruction of ozone. Nature, 249(5460) 810-812.). Environmentally conscious scientists began looking for evidence of ozone depletion that could be described in terms of the Rowland-Molina theory of ozone destruction (RMTOD). In 1985, the British Antarctic expedition at Halley Bay near the South Pole produced data that was widely accepted as empirical evidence of the RMTOD. It was in the form of a steep decline in total column ozone (TCO) during the months of October and November between 1973 and 1984 measured at Halley Bay. The decline came to be called the ozone hole. Maurice Strong and the UNEP seized this opportunity, declared a global environmental crisis, convened the Montreal Protocol, and set in motion the latest incarnation of the fear of anthropogenic ozone depletion.
However, the ozone hole is a localized event that contains both seasonal and decadal cycles. It has more credible explanations in terms of ozone distribution rather than in terms of ozone destruction. The ozone hole is not a testable implication of RMTOD. The more rational testable implication is a dangerous and sustained decline in mean global TCO. The absence such evidence is the likely reason for an extreme focus in the South Pole, an area known for its anomalous behavior in a planetary context.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2843032
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2748016

Robots!?! So robots will take over all the jobs that cause “heat related” stress???
So robots will do all the “daily cleaning” and “manual jobs”?
What’s he going to power them with? Pixie dust?

Hypocrite he is.
Just to invoke the concept of Gaia is promoting relgious “faith” and dogma.
Cheerss
Roger
http://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com

“Let’s see … I think uranium that is affordable to extract would last about 50 years, something in that range. It might be 100. When you’ve used all that up, you go to thorium, and that would last you three times as long as uranium – so, shall we say, about 200 years?”
The same error the “Peak Oil” crowd makes, assuming that “is affordable to extract” is fixed, and not susceptible to improvement. Sometimes radical improvement. The energy return on uranium is so great that you come out ahead extracting it from rocks. And there are traces of it in coal ash and tailings. And sea water.
I wonder if he was counting on reprocessing “spent nuclear fuel”, because the first pass only extracts 5% of the energy, the fuel only has to be removed because of the buildup of decay products that absorb neutrons without contributing energy. Reprocessing increases your fuel supply by 20 fold.
And that doesn’t begin to address the potential of mining asteroids, which, among many other things, will have uranium and thorium.

Lovelock now believes that “CO2 is going up, but nowhere near as fast as they thought it would.

I do not fully understand this comment. Manmade emissions of CO2 have been business as usual. Manmade emissions have not slowed or fallen below what was originally predicted/projected when the scare took force in the 1980s.
Perhaps, he is inferring that the carbon cycle was not well understood, and it was not appreciated that carbon sinks would take up about 50% of Manmade emissions. Thus although Manmade emissions are at least what was originally contemplated, atmospheric levels of CO2 are rising/have risen less than one may expect given the volume of Manmade CO2 emissions.
I agree with others that he needs to do more to tell the world of his revised views and grown up thinking.

“Lovelock is responsible for destroying the lives and environments of rural communities in Ireland UK and elsewhere leaving them financially ruined in some cases trying to fight wind farms.”
Lovelock and his daughter have both for many years been outspoken critics of wind farms and supporters of those campaigning against them. If it’s not too much trouble, try putting “Lovelock + wind power” into a search engine, reading some of what it finds and coming back here to correct your misinformation. I disagree with many of Lovelock’s views but his take on wind power is as correct as it has been consistent.

I just don’t think there is anything great about someone that, at age 95 or so, finally discovers a new way of thinking. Most people, at least from my own observations, are able to drop the rosy-colored glasses and switch from heart-felt belief systems to empirical thinking around age 30. He could not have been that ignorant of the world around him for that length of time unless he was just too enamored with his own renown.