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IN THIS ISSUE:
- Alarmists Embrace Authoritarianism, Ignore Lessons of History
- Podcast of the Week: Green Energy Is Powered by Human Rights Abuse (Guest: Ronald Stein)
- Higher Carbon Dioxide Levels Don’t Threaten Human Health
- Holland Shows Handling Rising Seas Is a Technical Challenge, Not an Existential Threat
- Climate Comedy
- Video of the Week: Indiana Jones and the Cheeseburger Crusade
- BONUS Video of the Week: Chinese Dominance of Rare Earth Elements
- Recommended Sites
Being a Climate Alarmist Means Never Having to Admit You’re Wrong
A mountain of evidence shows climate alarmists never learn from their mistakes, be they clear misstatements of facts or repeatedly failed prognostications.
Why should they? The press lets climate alarmists get away with making more false claims than any other group on any other topic, including the efficacy of the COVID vaccines in keeping people from catching the disease or requiring hospitalization. Climate alarmists have nothing to fear from so-called fact checkers in corporate or social media, because the “fact checkers” are either true believers themselves or fellow beneficiaries of the climate alarm gravy train.
Accordingly, I have decided to of expose a litany of climate false alarm claims made in recent months periodically in my lead essay of Climate Change Weekly. These essays won’t be about politics or opinions but instead straight exposés of patently false climate science assertions publicized in the preceding months, for which the authors of those stories were never called to the carpet or forced to issue a correction.
In Climate Change Weekly last July, I poked fun at one of the most mystifyingly wrong but persistent claims made by climate alarmists: that a warmer world would mean the disappearance of snow. This claim is definitively refuted by data cited in Climate at a Glance: Snowpack showing average North American snowpack extent is virtually unchanged in recent years compared to the late 1960s, when satellite measurements began. Beyond America, average snowpack has increased throughout the Northern Hemisphere in the fall and winter months, but you’d never know this if you read the headlines of major newspapers or watch climate-related news stories on corporate media outlets.
For example, in December even as huge storm fronts were striking the Western mountain ranges from California through Washington State, the Washington Post published an article titled “Snow may vanish for years at a time in Mountain West with climate warming.” Not to be outdone in the snow stupidity competition, just last week The New York Times published an article asserting “Skiing is an endangered sport, caught between a warming planet and a global pandemic.” The article states, “In recent years, with snow cover diminishing and untouched powder increasingly difficult to reach, skiers like Ms. Backstrom have been pushed onto groomed trails more often.”
In two Climate Realism articles, Heartland Institute President James Taylor went to the data and resoundingly refuted other false and wrongheaded claims made by the Times and the Post. Citing satellite measurements gathered by the Rutgers University Global Snow Lab (GSL) on global, hemispheric, and continental snow cover dating back to the 1960s, Taylor showed the past 30 years have brought no decline in global or North American snow cover. Instead, there has been a modest increase in snow cover during the past three decades. Taylor writes,
The Times’ article is particularly ironic considering the many snowfall records that have been set in prime ski regions during the past year. North Lake Tahoe, which is home to several of the best ski slopes in the country, enjoyed a record 18 feet of snow last month. Yosemite National Park set a snowfall record, also, last month. Even further south, Mammoth, California set snowfall records as recently as May, 2019.
Indeed, in the beginning of January, data showed snowpack in Oregon’s portion of the Cascades was 126 percent above normal for this time of year. In late December, Newsweek reported snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains was between 145 and 161 percent of the normal amount of snow for this time of year.
Despite former Vice-President Al Gore claiming in his 2006 docuganda An Inconvenient Truth that “within the decade there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro,” the mountain has had snow cover every single day since Gore made his movie. So much snow fell in 2018 there were record increases in snow depth on the mountain, and in mid-December 2021, which is summer in Tanzania, where Kilimanjaro is located, the mountain received seven straight days of snow, with the temperatures each day hovering around 10 degrees below zero.
Sometimes the reporting on climate is simply idiotic. For instance, in a recent story, the Washington Post displayed a map of the United States purportedly showing every county in the country hit by a climate-related disaster in 2021. Among the eye-opening disasters the Post claimed were caused by climate change was one the public may have missed: the hurricane that hit upstate Vermont and Buffalo, New York. Oh wait, you didn’t miss it: as the people living there and the weatherpersons for the area can attest, no hurricane struck either location.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirms no hurricanes or even tropical storms hit or even approached either region in 2021.
With no apparent sense of irony or self-awareness, alarmists regularly cite highly localized weather effects as proof of a climate emergency. In late October, within the space of 24 hours, news reports highlighted both that Lake Tahoe had fallen below its natural rim, threatening water flows to the Truckee River and the Truckee-Carson Irrigation District, and that in response to rain and snowfall in the region the lake had risen above its rim once again, resuming water flows. This climate whiplash showed the reporters and editors either didn’t understand or don’t care about the difference between climate and weather. Both reports also ignored the significant population growth in the region exploiting Lake Tahoe, which makes increasing demands on that body of water.
Drought in the region surrounding Lake Tahoe is not unusual, nor are wildly fluctuating water levels in the lake. My colleague, award-winning meteorologist Anthony Watts, pointed out in Climate at a Glance: Water Levels—Lake Tahoe as recently as 2019, water levels in the lake were regularly exceeding its maximum allowable levels, forcing the agency charged with managing the dam on Lake Tahoe to release water from it. Lake Tahoe reached the maximum allowable water level each year from 2017 through 2019, requiring special water releases into the Truckee River.
As the climate alarmists’ apparent desperation increases, their warnings become shriller and less believable, yet hardly a day goes by without some media outlet parroting their false assertions, such as that Michigan is becoming so hot farmers will soon be unable to grow fruit there (tell that to farmers in Florida or Texas) and global warming is producing late-season frost events and freezes.
Folks, I can’t make this stuff up. My imagination just isn’t that good. Michigan too hot to grow fruit, really! Unrecorded hurricanes in western New York and Vermont! Warmer growing seasons plagued by more freezing nights, as a result of global warming! It is all too fantastic, yet the news media daily swallow such fairy tales hook, line, and sinker and publicize them, giving them undeserved credence.
Sadly, this is what passes for journalism these days. Keep that in mind when you read the next headline claiming some extreme weather event or anomalous occurrence is becoming the norm because of climate change, and check Climate Realism, Climate at a Glance, and other outlets devoted to presenting the facts on climate change before you start stocking up on food or building a bunker in the mountains far from the supposedly fast-rising seas.
SOURCES: Climate Change Weekly; Climate at Glance: Snowpack; Climate Realism; Climate Realism
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Podcast of the Week
President Joe Biden wants everyone driving an electric car, and every home powered by wind turbines and solar panels, but these technologies require rare earth elements and other critical minerals to function. China and other geopolitical rivals dominate raw and refined rare earth and critical mineral markets. President Joe Biden’s green energy mandates makes the U.S. even more dependent upon China’s good will for technologies critical to national defense. No good will come from trading dependence on OPEC to dependence on China, the Congo or Afghanistan.Subscribe to the Environment & Climate News podcast on Apple Podcasts, iHeart, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And be sure to leave a positive review!
Higher Carbon Dioxide Levels Don’t Threaten Human Health
Recent research confirms indoor carbon dioxide levels are much higher than any reasonably expected atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, yet they pose no threat to human health.
“Every year there are several papers published attempting to establish CO2 as a pollutant in indoor settings,” writes Kenneth Richard at No Tricks Zone. “This has likely served to scare people to regard elevated CO2 levels as dangerous—which is almost certainly the intent.”
Research definitively refutes any claims indoor carbon dioxide harms human health.
Research from 2002 found schoolkids in 120 randomly selected classrooms across two school districts in Texas experienced no ill health when peak carbon dioxide concentrations exceeded 1,000 parts per million (ppm) in 88 percent of the classrooms and 3,000 ppm in 21 percent of the classrooms.
Two articles from 2021 confirm much higher carbon dioxide levels do not harm peoples’ health, impose measurable negative physiological changes, or decrease cognitive functioning.
The first study, published by InderScience, a global academic publisher based in Geneva, notes even at the most extreme projections, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are not expected to exceed 690 ppm by the end of 2100. In this study, Alberto Boretti, Ph.D., dean of research at Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University in Saudi Arabia, found people showed no reduction of cognitive abilities at indoor CO2 concentrations exceeding 1,000 ppm. Boretti writes,
It has been claimed that the dangerous rise in atmospheric CO2 levels will impede our brain functions, and namely that the continued fossil fuel emissions will impair cognition. … It is shown as even continuing at the present rate the atmospheric CO2 concentration is not expected to exceed 690 p.p.m. by 2100. Since no significant effects on cognitive performance are seen also for indoor CO2 levels much higher than 1,000 p.p.m., opening the window of crowded spaces could be a simple but effective mitigation strategy better than building up wind and solar capacity.
The second study from 2021, published in the peer-reviewed journal Indoor Air, examined the effect of greatly elevated indoor carbon dioxide levels on a broad array of health indicators such as blood chemistry, heart rate, respiratory rate, flexibility, and long-term and short-term measurements of cognitive ability. The results speak for themselves:
Blood pH decreased and partial pressure of carbon dioxide (pCO2) increased significantly when exposed to 20,000 ppm [emphasis mine] CO2 compared to 770 ppm. However, the values remained within the normal range. In addition, respiratory rate increased slightly but significantly at 20,000 ppm CO2. No significant changes in heart rate, CFF, task performance or acute health were found. In sum, the findings suggest that the observed changes in acid-base balance and ventilation can be classified as physiological adaptation responses. Impairment of cognitive performance is not expected from exposure to 20,000 ppm CO2, neither as direct effect on central nervous system function nor as a distraction related to perception of health effects.
If much-higher CO2 levels have no measurable harmful effect on human health and are not worsening weather extremes, as is demonstrated amply at Climate at a Glance, I’m left wondering what climate crisis the world faces. What’s all the fuss about?
SOURCES: No Tricks Zone; Inder Science Online; Indoor Air
Heartland’s Must-read Climate Sites
Holland Shows Handling Rising Seas Is a Technical Challenge, Not an Existential Threat
An article in the publication Human Progress demonstrates Holland’s long experience in dealing with rising seas and populations living at or below sea level shows any threatened increase in sea levels due to climate change poses at most technical challenges, certainly not an existential threat to continued human existence (even on the coasts, much less inland).
Author Joakim Book notes the Dutch, “trapped between some of Europe’s largest rivers and the violent North Sea waves,” have been battling rising seas for the entirety of the country’s existence, and they have consistently won the war, reclaiming land and building cities and ports even as seas continued rising:
Holland is a flat, low-lying country on the edge of a stormy sea. To make matters worse, between 20 and 40 percent of its land area is at, or below, sea level. Yet, as the Dutch have shown for centuries, it is possible to live below the water level with appropriate water management and technology.
The water level on Dutch shores has increased steadily for over 3,000 years (and even more rapidly for 7,000 years before that). In other words, long before the Industrial Revolution, modern capitalism, or the burning of fossil fuels, the Dutch had to adapt—a strategy reviled by purist climate change activists.
Despite the challenge of ever-rising seas, the Dutch have thrived to the extent of playing “an outsized role in the history of the world—in foreign trade, economic growth, and financial development,” Book writes. “Their tolerant ethics may have kicked off the Great Enrichment, thus producing the world’s first modern economy. The Dutch also invented central banking and perfected the art of public debt and securities markets. Most impressively, they accomplished all that while under constant siege from the ocean.”
The people of Holland have even exacerbated the problem of encroaching seas by draining swamps and reclaiming land for agriculture, which has resulted in rapid land subsidence. Land in the Netherlands was sinking by up to two centimeters per year in the late Middle Ages, five times the rate sea levels are currently rising around the world and more than double the rate projected in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s worst-case scenario through 2100. Still the Dutch thrived.
The Netherlands is a relatively wealthy, technologically sophisticated country. Should climate change contribute to rising seas in the future, the best evidence is that Holland can handle it, and doing so would be less expensive and disruptive than eschewing fossil fuel use or attempting to “reverse centuries of carbon emissions.”
What’s true for the Netherlands is equally true for the rest of us.
“Fortifying our societies against the climate is a constant challenge,” concludes Book. “But like the Dutch war against the waves, fortification against nature’s whims is a technical problem that requires engineering and adaptation, not fearmongering.”
The best evidence suggests he is right.
SOURCE: Human Progress
Video of The Week: Indiana Jones and the Cheeseburger Crusade
Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is currently trending on Twitter. Why? Ford gave an impassioned, and likely dishonest, speech at the Global Climate Action Summit. The speech focused on the supposed climate crisis.
There’s a minor problem. Harrison Ford is very well known for being an avid pilot. Ford goes as far as to say he’ll fly planes down the coast to pick up a cheeseburger.
Can you call yourself a climate activist while living such an exuberant lifestyle? Climate activists claim both flying and meat devastate the environment. Harrison Ford has combined the two.
BONUS Video of The Week: Chinese Dominance of Rare Earth Elements
James Taylor, president of The Heartland Institute, and Linnea Lueken, research fellow for The Heartland Institute, give testimony in Pennsylvania regarding the mining of rare Earth elements.
Construction of renewable energy sources including wind and solar require rare Earth elements. When we push policies advancing renewables, we subsequently are creating greater demand for rare Earth elements. Rare Earth elements are also critical to the United States military. China controls much of the global supply of rare Earth elements. Thus, our reliance on China is only growing as we push ill-advised policies.
James and Linnea’s testimony covered the economic impacts, and legislative feasibility, of beginning new domestic rare Earth element mining operations.
Climate Comedy
Sterling, climate change has become religion. Expect no honesty.
Where is all that global warming we’ve been promised?
And what about the promised disappearance of snow?
YAKUTAT, ALASKA DECLARES SNOW EMERGENCY–ROOFS COLLAPSING; HUNGA TONGA-HUNGA HA’APAI ERUPTS TO 55,000 FEET; SNOWCAT BURIED IN COLORADO; + “BIG FREEZE” ON THE WAY FOR U.S.
January 14, 2022 Cap Allon
…this is shaping-up to be a record-setting snow event.
FOOT OF SNOW IN 3 HOURS HITS NORTHERN JAPAN, STILL COMING DOWN; RECORD LOWS SWEEP KASHMIR; EASTERN EUROPE IS AN ICE BOX, + U.S. NATGAS JUMPS HIGHER ON “EXTREME COLD” FORECAST FOR LATE-JAN
January 13, 2022 Cap Allon
Truly exceptional scenes are coming out of Northern/Eastern Japan right now, as the COLD TIMES return…
NOAA: WINTER STORMS WERE THE DEADLIEST CLIMATE DISASTERS IN 2021; MT SHASTA RECOVERS; RECORD COLD HITS MT WASHINGTON; + ‘GREEN IDEALS’ CAUSED EUROPE’S ONGOING ENERGY CRISIS
January 12, 2022 Cap Allon
To my mind, they want a collapse, a global civil war. And from the resulting ashes they plan to ‘build back better’, but in their name, not ours.
I updated my latest paper today. I suggest that I have the best predictive track record on Climate-and-Energy, which is my expertise, and one of the best on Covid-19.
SCIENTIFIC COMPETENCE – THE ABILITY TO CORRECTLY PREDICT
by Allan M.R. MacRae, B.A.Sc., M.Eng., October 20, 2021, Update November 8, 2021, Update January 14, 2022
https://correctpredictions.ca
Excerpt re the above article on the greens dismal, failed predictive track record:
THE GREENS’ PREDICTIVE CLIMATE AND ENERGY RECORD IS THE WORST
The ability to predict is the best objective measure of scientific and technical competence.
Climate doomsters have a perfect NEGATIVE predictive track record – every very-scary climate prediction, of the ~80 they have made since 1970, has FAILED TO HAPPEN.
“Rode and Fischbeck, professor of Social & Decision Sciences and Engineering & Public Policy, collected 79 predictions of climate-caused apocalypse going back to the first Earth Day in 1970. With the passage of time, many of these forecasts have since expired; the dates have come and gone uneventfully. In fact, 48 (61%) of the predictions have already expired as of the end of 2020.”
By the end of 2020, the climate doomsters were proved wrong in their scary climate predictions 48 times. At 50:50 odds for each prediction, that is like flipping a coin 48 times and losing every time! The probability of that being mere random stupidity is 1 in 281 trillion! It’s not just global warming scientists being stupid.
These climate doomsters have not been telling the truth – they displayed a dishonest bias in their analyses that caused these extremely improbable falsehoods, these frauds.
The global warming alarmists have a perfect NEGATIVE predictive track record – they have been 100% wrong about every scary climate prediction – so nobody should continue to believe them.
There is a powerful logic that says no rational person or group could be this wrong for this long – they have followed a corrupt agenda – in fact, they knew from the beginning of their catastrophic global warming narrative that they were lying.
The radical greens have NO credibility, make that NEGATIVE credibility – their core competence is propaganda, the fabrication of false alarm.
The alleged global warming crisis is a decades-old scam that is past its due date – as global cooling happens and people freeze, even the most obtuse warmists will realize they have been conned.
___________________________________________
Typical alarmist hypocrisy, makes me blood boil!
Being a Climate Alarmist Means Never Having to Admit You’re Wrong
Just ask griff
or Michael Mann.
The workers in cell block 39, unit 24 western China concur whole heartedly with Mr. B$den and the NYT. We will meet quotas set by Chairman Xi and the UN this year and welcome our new team members from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Thank you Mr. Guterres and Dr. Mann for unwavering support. Mr. Griff, we thank you too for the donation of our new ping pong table.
You can only persuade someone to change their mind with facts, data and reason only to the extent their current opinions are formed by facts, data and reason. In other words, only emotional appeals will work with the climate alarmists and their minions.
When I was a pup, some folks were praised for their wisdom. I haven’t heard anything like that for quite a few years.
Iain McGilchrist makes the point that the brain’s bullshit detector exists in the right hemisphere. link The left hemisphere, on the other hand, doesn’t understand context, has a model of reality that it won’t change, and is incapable of admitting that it’s wrong. Sounds like the loony left to me.
The modern version of education thinks thinking skills are the same as the ability to make up plausible bs. There is a dismal lack of scholarship in the grievance studies programs but the problem also exists in most MBA programs. (Physics programs too. String theory … give me a break.)
MBA case studies are exercises where students read a brief case study of a business problem. They know nothing about the industry but are assigned the task of proposing a solution. Marks are assigned according to the apparent sophistication of the bs. All they get out of their education is extreme overconfidence.
Henry Mintzberg did a study of Harvard’s best MBA graduates. Most of them were dismal failures when they were unloosed on the business community. When bs meets reality, it’s not a pretty sight.
Defund the universities.
To be fair to String Theory, the people that created it thought they were on the right track. That isn’t true of Climate Change, which came out of Global Warming when it was obvious that the globe wasn’t warming. Where Global Warming was a failed theory that just didn’t work, Climate Change was never even a proper theory, just an attempt to milk the public for a bit more money, at least until they could retire.
Being a climate alarmist means you get to lie, make stuff up, and misinform to your hearts content, and get paid for it. Cool!
And make lots of £$€ in the process!
“Climate alarmists have nothing to fear from so-called fact checkers in corporate or social media, because the “fact checkers” are either true believers themselves or fellow beneficiaries of the climate alarm gravy train.”
In particular, nothing to fear from the skeptical science web site- they’re only skeptical of people who are skeptical of climate science.
“….North American snowpack extent is virtually unchanged in recent years compared to the late 1960s…”
it does seem like the snow was deeper in the mid ’50s, but then again, I was only 3′ tall at the time :-}
I recall one day in the early 1950s when I celebrated my birthday in mid-March playing in the sand across the street from my parent’s house in central NH on a warm, sunny day. It will be interesting to hear how that area is doing come this March.
“President Joe Biden wants everyone driving an electric car…”
Got stuck in a traffic jam today- I was glad I wasn’t in an EV.
I’m always astonished when I see northern hemisphere protesters demanding an end to civilisation because they’re scared of a few degrees of warming (predicted, not real warming). Look at how heavily they’re rugged up against the cold. These are people that should be welcoming a few degrees more heat. Is everybody in the world as stupid as them?
“The people of Holland have even exacerbated the problem of encroaching seas by draining swamps…”
In America, enviros consider draining any swamp, for any reason, an unpardonable crime against their pagan gods. And many states have laws against such an heinous act. In Massachusetts, they and the state forestry agencies don’t mind if loggers mess up a forest, as long as they don’t mess with the swamps. Go figure.
The hurricane that hit upstate Vermont and Buffalo was so traumatic no one can remember it happening. 🙃
I often fly “down the coast” to pick up a cheeseburger. The great thing is that global warming keeps it hot longer on the flight back.
The $100 Hamburger is a long tradition in general aviation. Although it’s more like a $1000 Hamburger at today’s prices. FBOs are well known for having great restaurants. It’s one of the ways they attract traffic to their operation and is a local profit center. If you have a small GA airport near you the restaurant is probably worth checking out.
It’s somewhat surprising that Harrison Ford is still alive and has a pilot’s license given his poor track record and poor decision making that he’s demonstrated on several flights.
He’s been in two plane crashes and has had several mishaps, including wrongly crossing a runway endangering those on a commercial airliner.
Sad to say but true – Climate Alarmists on the pay of Big Government.
Warmunists can never be “wrong”, because all they do is spout propaganda. The point of propaganda is not to make factual arguments, but rather is to persuade the foolish and the credulous that obvious untruths are true.
Submarines routinely have elevate levels of CO2, over 5,000 ppm. This is done to help fire suppression.
Uhhh nope.
Modern submarines all use CO2 scrubbers to keep breathing air at concentrations similar to atmospheric concentrations. Any CO2 concentration sufficient to extinguish fires (32-78%) would be lethal to humans (over 8%). The 5,000 ppm concentration is considered the maximum safe continuous exposure limit that does not produce health effects, such as dizziness, which is the last thing a submarine crew needs or wants.
“This is done to help fire suppression.”
Source ,please .
First hand experience. You have any?
‘Another hellish day’: South America sizzles in record summer temperatures | Climate crisis | The Guardian
Australia equals hottest day on record at 50.7C – BBC News
More than 400 weather stations beat heat records in 2021 | Extreme weather | The Guardian
You getting it yet?
Oh and this:
Why did Alaskan officials coin the term ‘icemageddon’? | Ice | The Guardian
In December, Alaska experienced record-breaking temperatures, up to an unprecedented 19.4C (66.9F) followed by the heaviest rainfall in decades.
And your point is…? Do record cold events count?
I and others have explained how weather events are normally distributed, meaning that any record will be broken eventually. You seem too dim to grasp this elementary concept.
In griff’s mind, record low events don’t happen.
Just re-read my last response to griff.
Australia equals hottest day on record at 50.7C
So it was as hot as it was in 1962.
Why do you continue to insult our intelligence, Griff?
He’s not smart enough to answer that question.
First off, there are millions of recording stations around the world. The fact that a few of them are setting records is not remarkable.
Secondly, with the pathetically short records available for most stations, the fact that record highs or record lows occasionally happen, is not remarkable.
Finally, I notice that little griff is completely ignoring all the record low temperatures being set in the northern hemisphere. It’s almost as if what ever is left of his mind simply is incapable of comprehending any data that doesn’t support what he wants to believe.
I would have called it “Indiana Jones and the Cheeseburger of Doom”.
Regarding hurricanes in Vermont. I was born 2 weeks after Hurricane Hazel hit my home state so I have always been interested in the history of that storm. It was not till this century that I learned about the terrible Hurricane Hazel flood death toll in the Toronto area