Climate Madness 3

Scanning the news, we find both amusing and politically ominous stories about global warming. Climate alarmists may be painting themselves into a corner: Australian Attorney General George Brandis has stirred the climate pot down under, by asking a simple yet devastating question. “If the science is settled, why do we need research scientists to continue inquiring into the settled science?” “Wouldn’t it be a much more useful allocation of taxpayers’ money and research capacity …to allocate its resources to an area where the science isn’t settled?” (Source)

Brandis is right: this whole global warming scam is diverting taxpayer dollars from useful research and projects. It is a colossal waste.

Here are some global warming stories that caught my eye.

Proposals and claims from academia where research grants and salaries may depend upon there being a climate crisis:

This month’s winner for craziest proposal:

Ecosystem Translocation: The latest Climate Engineering Brainstorm

Stephanie Boyer, senior lecturer at UNITEC Institute of Technology (New Zealand) is worried that plants and animals can’t move fast enough to survive climate change. His solution: give nature a helping hand, by digging up entire ecosystems, and moving them hundreds of miles, to maintain optimum climatic conditions. Read more

Claim: Climate Change will Stop Women from Wanting Sex

Women don’t like to sweat while having sex, so they are less likely to have sex in warm weather, according to the latest climate health claim. While it is very difficult to isolate and measure the impact of temperature on our sexual patterns, an American academic said this connection could become increasingly important. Alan Barreca, an associate professor at Tulane University in New Orleans, is one of three economists who studied almost 80 years of weather and birth data between 1931 and 2010, and found a strong link between weather and birth rates. Read more

(If that claim is true why are the highest birthrates in the world in the tropics?)

Politics and National Security:

Climate Change Politics Threaten National Security

By Leigh Thompson

The EPA’s Clean Power Plan makes carbon reduction, not reliability, price, or safety the priority of the electric grid. But, forced closure of coal-fired power plants, making up nearly 40 percent of the nation’s electric generation, will undermine the stability of the entire electric grid and present a significant threat to our national security. Read more

Former Army General Completely Dismantles Claim Global Warming Causes War

by Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller

Former U.S. Army Gen. Robert Scales took on claims by the Obama administration that global warming is America’s biggest national security threat and that rising temperatures will cause more violent conflict to break out around the world. “The administration’s new-found passion to connect climate change to war is an example of faulty theories that rely for relevance on politically-correct imaginings rather than established historical precedent,” Scales told senators during a hearing on environmental policy. “The point is that in today’s wars, politically-correct theories inserted into a battle plan might well extend war needlessly and get soldiers killed.” Read more

Costs of Paris Agreement

According to a new Heritage Foundation study by Kevin Dayaratna, Nicolas Loris, and David Kreutzer, implementing the Paris climate agreement would result in $2.5 trillion in lost GDP by 2035. Possible impact on climate: using the Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Induced Climate Change developed by researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, even if all carbon dioxide emissions in the United States were effectively eliminated, there would be less than two-tenths of a degree Celsius reduction in global temperatures. In fact, the entire industrialized world could cut carbon emissions down to zero, and the climate impact would still be less than four-tenths of a degree Celsius in terms of averted warming by the year 2100. Read study

Another Climate Alarmist Admits Real Motive Behind Warming Scare

From former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer:

“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole,” said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015. So what is the goal of environmental policy? “We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” said Edenhofer.

Read more from Investors Business Daily.

Environment:

Judge Orders U.S. to Address Climate Threat to Wolverines

By REUTERS

SALMON, Idaho — A federal judge rejected a decision by U.S. wildlife managers to deny wolverines Endangered Species Act protection, ruling the government erred in discounting the threat posed by climate change to the weasel-like predator of the Northern Rockies.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2013 proposed an endangered species listing for the estimated 300 wolverines believed to still inhabit the Lower 48 states, most of them in the snowy peaks of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. The Interior Department agency said then that human-caused global warming was lessening mountain snows needed by wolverines for building dens and storing food. But the Fish and Wildlife Service abruptly reversed itself in 2014, deciding against special protections for wolverines on grounds that it lacked sufficient evidence that climate change was harming the animals.

Read more This one can set a dangerous precedent if it proceeds.

Runner-up for craziest scheme:

US Senate Considering Albedo Modification Geoengineering Proposal

The US Senate is considering funding for albedo modification geoengineering experiments – pumping particles or aerosols into the stratosphere, to reflect sunlight back into space, and counter the alleged impact of elevated CO2 levels on global climate. In essence, this proposal would put more pollution into the atmosphere . It is difficult to imagine a more ridiculous waste of taxpayer’s money. The US spends taxpayer’s money regulating coal plants, forcing any coal plants which survive Obama’s war on energy, to fit expensive scrubbers, to remove particulates from their emissions. (Source)

Free Speech:

Attack on Free Speech: CEI Subpoenaed over Global Warming Skepticism

by Eric Worrall

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has just been subpoenaed, as part of Al Gore’s Climate Witch hunt. This is a move which so blatantly reeks of McCarthyite abuse of power, even some proponents of climate action are horrified at the attack on freedom which this subpoena represents.

CEI has long been a champion of sound climate change policy, and opposed previous attempts to use McCarthy-style tactics by officials aiming to limit discussions between nonprofit policy groups and the private sector regarding federal policies. CEI has not broken any laws, they just disagree with official policy and are being punished for that disagreement.

You don’t have to be a climate skeptic, to recognize that an attack on freedom of speech, in whatever guise, is an attack on everything which America stands for.

More than anything, this authoritarian, un-American attempt to silence dissent betrays the weakness of those perpetrating this attack on the CEI. In a Republic, people who have a compelling case to offer, don’t have to intimidate their political opponents into silence, to win the argument. Read more

Related:

Criticizing the mainstream is highly risky: Young scientists forced to conform to established models to avoid putting careers at risk

By Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt

Young university researchers are quasi forced to submit themselves to the trends of the day, i.e. the overriding mainstream in any particular scientific field:

The principle is ultimately always the same: Foremost one has to be an often published and often cited figure in his/her scientific field in order to be able to contribute to the ranking of a university. But how does one often publish or become often cited in respected journals of his own field? The most important principles are: Adaptation to the mainstream and do not question any established theories or models. All submitted articles first must go through a peer-review process where champions of the scientific discipline evaluate it. Under these circumstances a young researcher has no option but to go along with the mainstream theories represented in the top journals and to use the empirical processes that are currently in trend. Only in this way does he/she have any chance of having enough publications to make him/herself eligible to be a professor. Through this very kind of pressure to conform applied by top journals is science obstructed rather than promoted. (source)

More junk science:

An Overheated Climate Alarm 

by Bjorn Lomborg

The Obama administration released a new report this week that paints a stark picture of how climate change will affect human health. Higher temperatures, we’re told, will be deadly—killing “thousands to tens of thousands” of Americans. The report is subtitled “A Scientific Assessment,” presumably to underscore its reliability. But the report reads as a political sledgehammer that hypes the bad and skips over the good. It also ignores inconvenient evidence—like the fact that cold kills many more people than heat. (Read more from WSJ)

See also:

Climate madness 2

Global Warming – The Madness of our Age

The Bankruptcy of Climate Science

Note to readers: I have constructed a linked index to more than 400 of my ADI articles. You can see it at: https://wryheat.wordpress.com/adi-index/

You can read my comprehensive, 28-page essay on climate change here: http://wp.me/P3SUNp-1bq