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Climate hysterics skyrocket by Paul Driessen Posted: 20 Jan 2019 11:01 PM PST Increasingly absurd disaster rhetoric is consistently contradicted by climate and weather reality  Call it climate one-upmanship. It seems everyone has to outdo previous climate chaos rhetoric. The “climate crisis” is the “existential threat of our time,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi told her House colleagues. We must “end the inaction and denial of science that threaten the planet and the future.” Former California Governor Jerry Brown solemnly intoned that America has “an enemy, though different, but perhaps very much devastating in a similar way” as the Nazis in World War II. Not to be outdone, two PhDs writing in Psychology Today declared that “the human race faces extinction” if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels. And yet “even people who experience extreme weather events often still refuse to report the experiences as a manifestation of climate change.” Psychologists, they lament, “have never had to face denial on this scale before.” Then there’s Oxford University doctoral candidate Samuel Miller-McDonald. He’s convinced the only thing that could save people and planet from cataclysmic climate change is cataclysmic nuclear war that “shuts down the global economy but stops short of human extinction.” All this headline-grabbing gloom and doom, however, is backed up by little more than computer models, obstinate assertions that the science is settled, and a steady litany of claims that temperatures, tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts et cetera are unprecedented, worse than ever before, and due to fossil fuels. And on the basis of these hysterics, we are supposed to give up the carbon-based fuels that provide over 80% of US and global energy, gladly reduce our living standards – and put our jobs and economy at the mercy of expensive, unreliable, weather dependent, pseudo-renewable wind, solar and biofuel energy. As in any civil or criminal trial, the burden of proof is on the accusers and prosecutors who want to sentence fossil fuels to oblivion. They need to provide more than blood-curdling charges, opening statements and summations. They need to provide convincing real-world evidence to prove their case. They have refused to do so. They ignore the way rising atmospheric carbon-dioxide is spurring plant growth and greening the planet. They blame every extreme weather event on fossil fuel emissions, but cannot explain the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age or extreme weather events decades or centuries ago – or why we have had fewer extreme weather events in recent decades. They simply resort to trial in media and other forums where they can exclude exculpatory evidence, bar any case for the fossil fuel defense, and prevent any cross-examination of their witnesses, assertions and make-believe evidence. Climate models are not evidence. At best, they offer scenarios of what might happen if the assumptions on which they are based turn out to be correct. However, the average prediction by 102 models is now a full degree F (0.55 C) above what satellites are actually measuring. Models that cannot be confirmed by actual observations are of little value and certainly should not be a basis for vital energy policy making. The alarmist mantra seems to be: If models and reality don’t agree, reality must be wrong. In fact, even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels climbed to 405 parts per million (0.0405% of Earth’s atmosphere), except for short-term temperature spikes during El Niño ocean warming events, there has been very little planetary warming since 1998; nothing to suggest chaos or runaway temperatures. Claims that tornadoes have gotten more frequent and intense are obliterated by actual evidence. NOAA records show that from 1954 to 1985 an average of 56 F3 to F5 tornadoes struck the USA each year – but from 1985 to 2017 there were only 34 per year on average. And in 2018, for the first time in modern history, not a single “violent” twister touched down in the United States.  Harvey was the first major (category 3-5) hurricane to make US landfall in a record twelve years. The previous record was nine years, set in the 1860s. (If rising CO2 levels are to blame for Harvey, Irma and other extreme weather events, shouldn’t they also be credited for this hurricane drought?) Droughts differ little from historic trends and cycles – and the Dust Bowl, Anasazi and Mayan droughts, and other ancient dry spells were long and destructive. Moreover, modern agricultural and drip irrigation technologies enable farmers to deal with droughts far better than they ever could in the past. Forest fires are fewer than in the recent past – and largely due to failure to remove hundreds of millions of dead and diseased trees that provide ready tinder for massive conflagrations. Arctic and Antarctic ice are largely within “normal” or “cyclical” levels for the past several centuries – and snow surface temperatures in the East Antarctic Plateau regularly reach  -90 °C (-130 F) or lower. Average Antarctic temperatures would have to rise some 20-85 degrees F year-round for all its land ice to melt and cause oceans to rise at faster than their current 7-12 inches per century pace. In fact, the world’s oceans have risen over 400 feet since the last Pleistocene glaciers melted. (That’s how much water those mile-high Ice Age glaciers took out of the oceans!) Sea level rise paused during the Little Ice Age but kicked in again the past century or so. Meanwhile, retreating glaciers reveal long-lost forests, coins, corpses and other artifacts – proving those glaciers have come and gone many times. Pacific islands will not be covered by rising seas anytime soon, at 7-12 inches per century, and because corals and atolls grow as seas rise. Land subsidence also plays a big role in perceived sea level rise – and US naval bases are safe from sea level rise, though maybe not from local land subsidence. The Washington Post did report that “the Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer, and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot.” But that was in 1922.  Moreover, explorers wrote about the cyclical absence of Arctic ice long before that. “We were astonished by the total absence of ice in Barrow Strait,” Sir Francis McClintock wrote in 1860. “I was here at this time in [mid] 1854 – still frozen up – and doubts were entertained as to the possibility of escape.” Coral bleaching? That too has many causes – few having anything to do with manmade global warming – and the reefs generally return quickly to their former glory as corals adopt new zooxanthellae.  On and on it goes – with more scare stories daily, more attempts to blame humans and fossil fuels for nearly every interesting or as-yet-unexplained natural phenomenon, weather event or climate fluctuation. And yet countering the manmade climate apocalypse narrative is increasingly difficult – in large part because the $2-trillion-per-year climate “science” and “renewable” energy industry works vigorously to suppress such evidence and discussion … and is aided and abetted by its media and political allies. Thus we have Chuck Todd, who brought an entire panel of alarmist climate “experts” to a recent episode of Meet the Press. He helped them expound ad nauseam on the alleged “existential threat of our time” – but made it clear that he was not going to give even one minute to experts on the other side. “We’re not going to debate climate change, the existence of it,” Todd proclaimed. “The Earth is getting hotter. And human activity is a major cause, period. We’re not going to give time to climate deniers. The science is settled, even if political opinion is not.” The only thing left to discuss, from their perspective was “solutions” – most of which would hugely benefit them and their cohorts, politically and financially. Regular folks in developed and developing countries alike see this politicized, money-driven kangaroo court process for what it is. They also know that unproven, exaggerated and fabricated climate scares must be balanced against their having to give up (or never having) reliable, affordable fossil fuel energy. That is why we have “dangerous manmade climate change” denial on this scale. That is why we must get the facts out by other means. It is why we must confront Congress, media people and the Trump Administration, and demand that they address these realities, hold debates, revisit the CO2 Endangerment Finding – and stop calling for an end to fossil fuels and modern living standards before we actually have an honest, robust assessment of supposedly “settled” climate science. Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and author of articles and books on energy, environmental and human rights issues.

Mathematical modelling illusions

Mathematical modelling illusions

By Jay Lehr and Tom Harris – posted Onlineopinion  Friday, 11 January 2019

For the past three decades, human-caused global warming alarmists have tried to frighten the public with stories of doom and gloom. They tell us that the end of the world as we know it is nigh as a result of carbon dioxide emitted into the air by the burning of fossil fuels.

They are exercising precisely what journalist H. L. Mencken, the sage of Baltimore, described early in the past century: "the whole point of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be lead to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

The human-caused climate change scare may well be the best hobgoblin ever conceived. It has half the world clamoring to be led to safety from a threat for which there is not a shred of meaningful physical evidence. Many of the statements issued to support these fear-mongering claims are presented in the U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment, a 1,656-page report released in late November. But none of their claims have any basis in real world observations.

What they do have are mathematical equations considered to be models of the Earth's climate. It is important to properly understand these models since they are the only basis for the climate scare.

Before we construct buildings or airplanes, we make physical, small-scale models and test them against the stress and performances that will be required of them when they are actually built. When dealing with systems that are largely, or entirely, beyond our control, such as climate, we try to describe them with mathematical equations. By altering the values of the variables in these equations, we then see how the outcomes are affected. This is called sensitivity testing, the very best use of mathematical models.

Today's climate models account for only a handful of the hundreds of variables that are known to impact climate, and the values inserted for the variables they do use are little more than guesses. Dr. Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysics laboratory lists the five most important variables in any climate model as follows:

(1) Sun-Earth orbital dynamics and relative positions and motions with respect to other planets in the solar system

(2) Distribution of sunlight intercepted in the atmosphere and near-surface

(3) The way in which the oceans and land store and distribute incoming solar energy

(4) How clouds influence climate

(5) How the biosphere reacts to the various climate drivers

Soon concludes that, even if the equations to describe these interactive systems were known (they are not) and properly included in computer models, it would still not be possible to meaningfully compute future climate states. This is because it would take longer for even the world's most advanced super-computers to calculate future climate than it would take for the climate to unfold in the real world. So, we could compute climate for, say, 40 years from now, but it would take more than 40 years for the models to make that computation.

Although governments have funded more than one hundred efforts to model the climate for the better part of three decades, with the exception of one Russian model which was fully 'tuned' and accidentally matched observational data, none have accurately predicted the known past.

In his February 2, 2016 testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space & Technology, Dr. John Christy of The University of Alabama in Huntsville compared the results of atmospheric temperatures as depicted by the average of 102 climate models with observations from satellites and balloon measurements. He concluded, "These models failed at the simple test of telling us 'what' has already happened, and thus would not be in a position to give us a confident answer to 'what' may happen in the future and 'why.'" As such, they would be of highly questionable value in determining policy that should depend on a very confident understanding of how the climate system works."

Although one of the most active areas for mathematical modeling is the economy and the stock market, no one has ever succeeded in getting it right. Consequently, until recently, we were never foolish enough to make economic decisions based on predictions derived from equations that we think describe how nature works.

Yet today's modelers tell us they can model the climate, which involves far more variables than the economy and stock market, decades or even a century into the future. They then expect governments to make multi-billion-dollar policy decisions based on the outputs of their models. Incredibly, the United Nations and governments around the world are complying. We are crazy to let them get away with it.

Not Before Time the World is Alerted to the Evils of the World Bank

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Press Release 09/01/19 World’s Poor Better Off Without Dr Kim As World Bank Head London, 9 January: The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) welcomes the imminent departure of Dr. Jim Yong Kim as president of the World Bank. Appointed by President Obama in 2012, Dr Kim turned the World Bank into a green think tank, betraying its core mission of lifting the world’s most disadvantaged populations out of poverty. Under Dr. Kim, the World Bank imposed an almost total ban on the financing of coal-fired power stations, despite coal being one of the most cost effective means of generating low cost, reliable electricity. Subsequently the financing ban was extended to the upstream oil and gas industries. In October, Dr. Kim announced that the World Bank was pulling out of the long-planned Kosovo coal project, arguing that Kosovo could make do with wind turbines, thus destabilising that fragile state’s economy. Commenting on Dr. Kim’s resignation, Rupert Darwall, author of the GWPF report The Anti-Development Bank: The World Bank’s regressive energy policies (2017), said: "Access to low cost, reliable electricity is critical to transforming the lives of those in poverty. During Dr. Kim’s tenure, the World Bank lost its way and sacrificed the interests of the poor to green ideology. It is essential Dr. Kim’s successor restores the World Bank to its former role as the world’s premier development bank and ceases to pander to the green lobby."

More Good Stuff!

The Wentworth Report

Questions in response to climate hysterics

by David Archibald

17 December 2018

The Carnarvon Petroleum AGM this year was marred by a greenie woman repeatedly asking questions about climate, as it was last year. In response, the company’s chairman waffled on about this and that, as he is paid to do. The gathering was getting exasperated by this greenie hijacking the occasion for leftie indoctrination.

The MD in his presentation mentioned that the company had planted trees to offset its carbon emissions. That got my goat up, so when the opportunity came I asked him this question:

I am extremely disappointed that the board has chosen to squander shareholders’ funds by planting trees in order to fight a make-believe problem. Can you tell us how many trees are involved, the cost, the tree species, and can shareholders visit their trees?

The room erupted in laughter and the greenie woman remained silent after that.

Last week Westpac held its AGM in Perth, in order to have less interaction with disgruntled shareholders and customers. There were plenty of greenies in attendance and they rotated up to the microphone to make statements on the Paris climate agreement and lending to coal mines, which they don’t like. They became very tedious indeed. The chairman of Westpac waffled back in response, and like St Augustine, said they would do some lending to coal mines, especially the metallurgical ones, but would definitely stop such nefarious activity by 2030 or some such other moveable date.

The greenies got me agitated so I asked this question:

Mr Chairman, given that the dire predictions of the climate hysterics have not come to pass and do not look like they are going to happen, is the board considering the possibility that the bank’s adherence to the Paris agreement could be wrong in fact and that the bank is damaging the Australian economy for no good reason, and beyond that denying shareholders exposure to a profitable line of business?

I was only part way through before the room erupted in applause. In his reply, the chairman changed his tune and talked about how fossil fuels had lifted so many people out of poverty and done so many other good things. The greenies asked no more fake questions and the meeting proceeded with its business.

Next week ANZ is holding its AGM in Perth on the Wednesday — also no doubt to have less interaction with their disgruntled.  NAB’s AGM is on the same day in Melbourne. It is easy enough to predict that greenies will be out in force at both meetings. And they will be very tedious indeed.

To be forewarned is to be fore-armed.  If you want to have a shorter meeting, a less tedious meeting, then each time a greenie gets up to make a statement about the bank’s sins on climate respond by asking a question that will work towards getting them to see the error of their ways -– both the banks and the greenies. Following are five questions to that end:

Mr Chairman, given that the dire predictions of the climate hysterics have not come to pass and are not on track to come to pass, has the board considered the possibility that supporting Paris etc is harming Australia unnecessarily, and, beyond that, denying the bank’s shareholders exposure to a profitable line of business in lending to coal mines?

Mr Chairman, given that the new Brazilian foreign minister has called global warming a Marxist hoax designed to stifle western economies and promote the growth of China, do you think that the board should give further consideration to the consequences of following the Paris dogma and its impact on the Australian economy?

Mr Chairman, given that a former head of the UN’s climate body, Christina Figueres, has been quoted as saying that the purpose of the Paris climate agreement is to transform the world economy away from capitalism to some sort of centralised socialism, can the board be certain that it is not following an ideological agenda rather than something that is based on pure and unsullied science?

Mr Chairman, given that the bank has decided to support the leftist side of politics in Australia by undertaking not to lend to coal mines, can you inform shareholders just how much profit the bank is denying its shareholders by taking that ideological stance?

Mr Chairman, given that China, one of the signatories to the Paris climate agreement, is burning half the coal consumed each year in the world and continues to build new thermal coal power stations, please take us through the leaps of logic required to justify not lending to coal mines in Australia, thereby damaging the Australian economy and the interests of ANZ shareholders?

Like the poor, the greenies — and other parasitic, non-productive elements of society — will be with us to the end of time. So attempts to hijack AGMs of listed companies for ideological ends will be with us to the end of time. If you want a shorter AGM and don’t want your time wasted, be prepared!

David Archibald is the author of American Gripe: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare

Climate Change/Global Warming

Good news about Climate Change

My name is Dr John McLean.  Some of you might know me from a landmark study into the main temperature data used by the IPCC.  The report, which was published in October, revealed more than 70 problem areas in that data. 

Since then I’ve been looking at other climate data and I have some good tidings and great joy for your Christmas or Holiday Season …

Climate change is nowhere near as bad as some people have predicted or claimed.

The amount of warming is tiny, regardless of what caused it, sea level isn’t rising fast, Arctic ice still exists all year and food production is increasing rather than decreasing.  Details can be found at http://mclean.ch/climate/Xmas2018/ but here’s a short summary:

1.      According to the most accurate temperature data, since 1979 (that’s almost 40 years ago) average global temperatures have risen about 0.4 Celsius (0.72 Fahrenheit).  Most people wouldn’t notice this temperature change if it occurred over 30 seconds, so over 40 years it’s nothing.

2.      The same temperature data shows that since 1998 there’s been very little warming, this despite more than 1/3^rd of the CO2 emitted by man since 1958 occurring in the last 20 years.  If we ignore the temperature spike in 2016, caused by a strong El Nino, the rate of warming is a tiny 0.4°C/100 years.

3.      Temperature predictions from climate models far exceed the temperatures reported by observations. This means the models are not accurate and we should ignore their predictions and their estimates of the amount of man-made warming. 

4.      Sea level is NOT rising faster than it did 30 or more years ago.  According to tidal gauges the average rise is just under 2mm/year. Unless you have very small hands, it will take almost 100 years to rise the distance from the tips of your fingers to the other end of your hand.  In the 1990s we were told that Kiribati, Tuvalu and Maldive islands would all soon shrink and disappear.  Not only are they all still with us but many islands in the Pacific are increasing in size.

5.      Several years ago, we were told that Arctic would be free of sea ice during summers very soon.  Arctic ice conditions have been fairly stable for the last seven years and there’s still ice there in summer. 

6.      We've often been told that higher temperatures will mean less food.  The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FOA) shows instead that annual production of four major food types - wheat, rice, coarse grains (all other cereals except wheat and rice, i.e. maize, barley, sorghum etc.) and meat – have all increased since 2001, and that’s through some supposedly warm years.

Data shows that the dire predictions about man-made warming are not happening.  If there is any man-made warming at all then it’s very small, and its impacts are tiny too

Why Is It So Cool To Be Gloomy?

Matt Ridley: Why Is It So Cool To Be Gloomy?
The Wall Street Journal, 17 November 2018

The world is in better shape than most people think, but we’re more inclined to focus on bad news than good. Psychology can help explain why.



Has the percentage of the world population that lives in extreme poverty almost doubled, almost halved or stayed the same over the past 20 years? When the Swedish statistician and public health expert Hans Rosling began asking people that question in 2013, he was astounded by their responses. Only 5% of 1,005 Americans got the right answer: Extreme poverty has been cut almost in half. A chimpanzee would do much better, he pointed out mischievously, by picking an answer at random. So people are worse than ignorant: They believe they know many dire things about the world that are, in fact, untrue.

Before his untimely death last year, Rosling (with his son and daughter-in-law as co-authors) published a magnificent book arguing against such reflexive pessimism. Its title says it all: “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.” As the author of a book called “The Rational Optimist,” I’m happy to include myself in their platoon, which also includes writers such as Steven Pinker, Bjorn Lomborg, Michael Shermer and Gregg Easterbrook.

For us New Optimists, however, it’s an uphill battle. No matter how persuasive our evidence, we routinely encounter disbelief and even hostility, as if accentuating the positive was callous. People cling to pessimism about the state of the world. John Stuart Mill neatly summarized this tendency as far back as 1828: “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.” It’s cool to be gloomy.

Studies consistently find that people in developed societies tend to be pessimistic about their country and the world but optimistic about their own lives. They expect to earn more and to stay married longer than they generally do. The Eurobarometer survey finds that Europeans are almost twice as likely to expect their own economic prospects to get better in the coming year as to get worse, while at the same time being more likely to expect their countries’ prospects to get worse than to improve. The psychologist Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania suggests a reason for this: We think we are in control of our own fortunes but not those of the wider society.

There are certainly many causes for concern in the world today, from terrorism to obesity to environmental problems, but the persistence of pessimism about the planet requires some explanation beyond the facts themselves. Herewith a few suggestions:

Bad news is more sudden than good news, which is usually gradual. Therefore bad news is more newsworthy. Battles, bombings, accidents, murders, storms, floods, scandals and disasters of all kinds tend to dominate the news. “If it bleeds, it leads,” as they used to say in the newspaper business. By contrast, the gradual reduction in poverty in the world rarely makes a sudden splash. As Rosling put it, “In the media the ‘newsworthy’ events exaggerate the unusual and put the focus on swift changes.”

Plane crashes have been getting steadily scarcer, but each one now receives vastly more coverage.

This is part of what psychologists call the “availability bias,” a quirk of human cognition first noticed by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in the 1970s. People vastly overestimate the frequency of crime, because crime disproportionately dominates the news. But random violence makes the news because it is rare, whereas routine kindness doesn’t make the news because it is so common.

Bad news usually matters; good news may not. In the prehistoric past, it made more sense to worry about risks—it might help you avoid getting killed by a lion—than to celebrate success. Perhaps this is why people have a “negativity bias.” In a 2014 paper, researchers at McGill University examined which news stories their subjects chose to read for what they thought was an eye-tracking experiment. It turns out that even when people say they want more good news, they are more interested in bad news: “Regardless of what participants say, they exhibit a preference for negative news content,” concluded the authors Mark Trussler and Stuart Soroka.

People think in relative not absolute terms. What matters is how well you are doing relative to other people, because that’s what determined success in the competition for resources (and mates) in the stone age. Being told that others are doing well is therefore a form of bad news. When circumstances get better, people take those improvements for granted and reset their expectations.

Such relativizing behavior affects even our most intimate relationships. An ingenious 2016 study by David Buss and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin found that “participants lower in mate value than their partners were generally satisfied regardless of the pool of potential mates; participants higher in mate value than their partners became increasingly dissatisfied with their relationships as better alternative partners became available.” Ouch.

As the world improves, people expand their definition of bad news. This recent finding by the Harvard psychologists David Levari and Daniel Gilbert, known as “prevalence-induced concept change,” suggests that the rarer something gets, the more broadly we redefine the concept. They found in an experiment that the rarer they made blue dots, the more likely people were to call purple dots “blue,” and the rarer they made threatening faces, the more likely people were to describe a face as threatening. “From low-level perception of color to higher-level judgments of ethics,” they write, “there is a robust tendency for perceptual and judgmental standards to ‘creep’ when they ought not to.”

Consider air travel: Plane crashes have been getting steadily scarcer—2017 was the first year with no commercial passenger plane crashes at all, despite four billion people in the air—but each one now receives vastly more coverage. Many people still consider planes a risky mode of transport.

We’re even capable of fretting about the bounty of prosperity, as “Weird Al” Yankovic highlights in his clever song, “First World Problems”: “The thread count on these cotton sheets has got me itching/My house is so big, I can’t get Wi-Fi in the kitchen.” Sheena Iyengar of Columbia Business School became a TED star for her research on the debilitating modern illness known as the “choice overload problem”—that is, being paralyzed by having to choose from among, say, the dozens of types of olive oil or jam on offer at the grocery store. North Koreans, Syrians, Congolese and Haitians generally have more important things to worry about.

Profound Comment from Angus Taylor -7th November,2018

"We also need a strong supply of affordable electricity when customers flick the switch. Electricity runs everything. Affordable electricity must be available on demand and not just when the wind blows and sun shines."