Tag: climate

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national politics & policies

End in Ice?

ice, frozen, energy

When I was young, some folks worried about a return to Ice Age conditions. The climate alarm, in the decades since, prophesies hotter conditions, not colder.

So, with this cold snap hitting North America — ice storms from Washington State to Texas and now heading east by northeast — climate change has emerged in the back (or even front) of our minds.

It’s just not necessarily Fire we fret about. It’s Ice. (Cue recitation of the great Robert Frost poem, now.)

“The arctic air that poured into Texas resulted in a record-​breaking demand for power that caused the state’s electric grid to fail,” the Weather Channel reports. “Suppliers had planned to use rolling blackouts, but the system was overwhelmed” — effecting an “estimated 75% of Texas power generation capacity.”

Millions in Mexico are also without power, because natural gas pipelines from Texas froze.

The main hit to the electric grid sure looks like it has been directly* to the distribution — if what I glean from Georgetown’s electric outage page is a good indication.

But that town went heavy into alternative forms of energy production (as has the whole of the state, along with many others). Did that investment help them when the cold came? Former Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette says the problem is that alternative energy sources are not “base load electricity” but “intermittant and sometimes unreliable.”

Just as batteries under-​perform in the cold, windmills don’t turn well when covered in ice. When we really need power, energy production that flakes out is not an energy alternative at all — it’s non-energy.

And if an Ice Age does come back, we’ll need more energy, not less than were global warming to remain the trend.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The reason there was no weekend podcast from me is that my partner in podcasting was without power simply because an ice storm brought down trees on multiple power lines in his area.

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ideological culture

Mad Prophetess?

GretaThurnberg

The latest scandal of the How Dare You Say That!?! variety features The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, who is banned from Fox News, we learn, because he characterized the celebrated “climate activist” Greta Thunberg as “mentally ill.”

He said it while serving as one of those invited talking heads. The other guest immediately cried “how dare you?” 

And censoriousness ensued, with high moral dudgeon and nasty put-​downs and the whole shebang.

While I don’t really know much about Miss Thunberg’s mental health going into all this, I do not believe it can be much improved by playing Prophetess on the world stage. 

Which also gives too much cultural power to someone so young. And since power corrupts … that’s not good for Greta, and it makes her promoters corruptors.

And that is the point Mr. Knowles appeared to be trying to make. Reasonable people can disagree on the propriety of how “the execrable Michael Knowles” (as his fellow Daily Wire colleagues jovially refer to him) referred to the Swedish prophetess, of course. But it nevertheless remains rather shocking to witness 

  1. activist adults abuse 
  2. one child to 
  3. scare millions of children to 
  4. pressure powerful adults to 
  5. engage in precipitous policy action.

“Adults sometimes like to use children to carry their messages,” vidcaster and Dilbert creator Scott Adams points out, “because it makes it hard for the other side to criticize them without seeming like monsters.”

How can we “listen to the scientists,” as Miss Thunberg recently implored, if the talking is being done by a young teenage non-scientist?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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GretaThurnberg

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national politics & policies Popular

Greener Pastures

CO2, Carbon DiOxide, green, greenhouse, warming, climate,

There is climate change going on. And some of it is attributable to increasing levels of Carbon dioxide (CO2). 

It is uncontroversial and quite politically convenient to say that — despite Al Gore’s infamous propaganda positing climate change dogma as An Inconvenient Truth. The worldwide “green” movement to “fight climate change” has been supported by trillions of tax dollars and the eager, lip-​smacking glee of major media mavens as they trot out story after improbable story, linking every storm, warm spell, cold spell, and summer ice melt to “man-​made global warming.”

But there is no real “settled science” as non-​scientists like to term the case for anthropogenic global warming, because there are

  1. troubles with the temperature data, 
  2. difficulties separating weather events from climatic trends, 
  3. problems identifying CO2 level variations as the cause of climate change rather than as a result,
  4. a certain amount of dunderheadedness using a statistical construct of “average global temperature” to track actual trends, and 

so much more. But we do know about one extremely positive effect of increasing atmospheric carbon: it makes the deserts bloom.

Or, at least, greener.

Six years ago a study of satellite data concluded that arid regions have gone greener. Increased atmospheric CO2 levels makes photosynthesis more efficient, allowing plants to use less water, thereby creating more leaves.

Earlier this year, however, Forbes reported that a NASA study had just demonstrated that expanded agriculture and silviculture in India and China were responsible for most of that greening — but if you compare the Forbes article with the original paper, the CO2 contribution persists. 

Atmospheric carbon is plant food, so to speak, and without it, life on the planet would die.

An awkward truth?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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CO2, Carbon DiOxide, green, greenhouse, warming, climate,

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general freedom media and media people nannyism too much government

When Push Comes to Nudge

Ireland, global warming, authoritarian, totalitarian, control, climate,

Ireland’s prime minister — or “Taoiseach” — is enthusiastic. “Speaking at the launch of the Climate Action Plan in Grangegorman today,” the Independent reported last week, “Mr [Leo Eric] Varadkar said the government would establish a Climate Action Delivery Board in the Department of the Taoiseach to oversee its implementation.”

The plan will deeply affect “almost every aspect” of Irish life. “The Government plans to force petrol and diesel cars off our roads,” the Independent elaborates, “introduce new buildings regulations and change the school curriculum in a bid to counteract climate change.”

Though the scope of the effort is breathtaking, Mr. Varadkar pretends he is being oh-​so-​humble and cautious, “nudging” citizens rather than going for a “coercive” approach.

Typical politician’s whopper, of course. Higher taxes on fuel and plastics, banning oil and gas boilers in new buildings, forcing private cars off city roads — this is all force.

Pretending otherwise is something akin to a Big Lie.

And all in service to the cause of reducing “greenhouse gas emissions by two per cent a year each year for the next ten years.”

Varadkar says he is doing it for the young and at the behest of the young … who have been propagandized to believe “that the world will be destroyed in a climate apocalypse.”

Well, the Taoiseach didn’t use the word “propagandized,” and insists that disaster is “not inevitable, it can be stopped, action can be taken.”

But Ireland’s contribution to the planet’s “greenhouse gases” is negligible. If all the Irish held their breaths and keeled over for the cause, they wouldn’t make a carbon dioxide burp of a difference.

It is a power grab. Not anything like a “nudge.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

Ireland, global warming, authoritarian, totalitarian, control, climate,

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Accountability general freedom individual achievement Popular

Settling the Science

climate, global warming, climate change, science, mistake

A paper in the august science journal Nature,* on the oceans’ “thermal inertia” and the ominous temperature rise therein, has been corrected. But not before the BBC (and other media outlets) ballyhooed the results in the usual “climate change”/“global warming” narrative: “Climate change: Oceans ‘soaking up more heat than estimated’” (Nov. 1).

The paper’s initial new (and alarming) estimate, however, proved wrong.

Over at Real Climate, one of the co-​authors clarified the changes that had to be made: “The revised uncertainties preclude drawing any strong conclusions with respect to climate sensitivity or carbon budgets … but they still lend support for the implications of the recent upwards revisions in” … well, I will let you make sense of it.

I am not a climate scientist, nor do I pretend to be one on the Internet.

What is important to note is that the “strong conclusions” reported on were found to be groundless. 

Mistakes were made.

How were those mistakes identified?

They were caught at the ClimateEtc. — not an “august science journal” — published online at judithcurry​.com.**

Nic Lewis, the astute blogger, identified a major source of the inaccuracy in the original paper as having arisen “primarily because of the inappropriate assumption of a zero error in 1991.”

We have just witnessed science in action — the public testing of published findings.

“The bad news,” Dr. Roy Spencer reminds us on his Global Warming blog, “is that the peer review process, presumably involving credentialed climate scientists” — note the dig — failed to catch the error “before publication.”

The crucial science happened afterwards, online. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* “Quantification of ocean heat uptake from changes in atmospheric O2 and CO2 composition,” by L. Resplandy, R. F. Keeling, et al.

** I have had occasion to mention climate scientist Judith Curry in the past.

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Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall tax policy

The Green in the Evergreen State

money, global warming, carbon, tax, climate

We’re told of the scientific consensus on global warming. Whatever you may say about that consensus (I’ve expressed extreme skepticism), no such consensus exists for what steps would be best to take to deal with the identified problem — which is usually understood in terms of the “carbon footprint,” of carbon put into the atmosphere in excess of what is taken out.

Most proposals for curbing carbon emissions have been shown to be far more costly than efficacious.

Nevertheless, without such a consensus, activists in Washington State are pushing Initiative 1631, a measure to tax carbon.

They had pushed a very similar measure two years ago, as science writer Ronald Bailey notes at Reason. The measure failed, however, because environmental lobbies opposed it. You see, the collected funds were given back to taxpayers. Environmental groups didn’t get a cut of the action.

This time that defect has been alleviated, and those groups are on board.

Ah, money, money, money! 

The Evergreen State, indeed.

Would the tax be effective? The goal of the measure is “to reduce, by 2035, [the state’s] emissions by 25 percent below their levels in 1990,” Bailey explains. The state had “emitted about 88 million metric tons that year, so that implies a reduction of around 22 million tons by 2035. Assuming today’s emissions, that would mean that Washington State’s planned reductions would amount to 0.42 percent and 0.06 percent of U.S. and global emissions respectively.”

Not much bang.

Sure, the measure may win on hope … and bucks.

But will it do any appreciable good? I mean, other than creating a constituency with the green of dollars.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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