EPA Takes First Steps To Repeal Obama’s Climate Regulation
In this newsletter:
1) New Study: Global Warming Standstill Confirmed, Climate Models Wrong
GWPF Science, 3 October 2017
2) EPA Takes First Steps To Repeal Obama’s Climate Regulation
Reuters, 4 October 2017
3) Heather Heying: The Post-Modern Left Is Destroying Freedom Of Thought And Science
Heather Heying, The Wall Street Journal, 2 October 2017
4) Rupert Darwall: Green Tyranny -- Exposing The Totalitarian Roots Of The Climate Industrial Complex
Encounter Books
5) Tesla Is Immune To Bad Financial Data Because Logic Is Officially Dead In Silicon Valley
Thornton Mcenery, Above The Law, 3 October 2017
Full details:
1) New Study: Global Warming Standstill Confirmed, Climate Models Wrong
GWPF Science, 3 October 2017
Nicola Scafetta, Aberto Mirandola and Antonio Bianchin, International Journal of Heat and Technology 35(1), September 2017
Natural climate variability: Interpretation of the post 2000 temperature standstill
ABSTRACT
The period from 2000 to 2016 shows a modest warming trend that the advocates of the anthropogenic global warming theory have labeled as the “pause” or “hiatus.” These labels were chosen to indicate that the observed temperature standstill period results from an unforced internal fluctuation of the climate (e.g. by heat uptake of the deep ocean) that the computer climate models are claimed to occasionally reproduce without contradicting the anthropogenic global warming theory (AGWT) paradigm. In part 1 of this work, it was shown that the statistical analysis rejects such labels with a 95% confidence because the standstill period has lasted more than the 15 year period limit provided by the AGWT advocates themselves. Anyhow, the strong warming peak observed in 2015-2016, the “hottest year on record,” gave the impression that the temperature standstill stopped in 2014. Herein, the authors show that such a temperature peak is unrelated to anthropogenic forcing: it simply emerged from the natural fast fluctuations of the climate associated to the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon. By removing the ENSO signature, the authors show that the temperature trend from 2000 to 2016 clearly diverges from the general circulation model (GCM) simulations. Thus, the GCMs models used to support the AGWT are very likely flawed. By contrast, the semi-empirical climate models proposed in 2011 and 2013 by Scafetta, which are based on a specific set of natural climatic oscillations believed to be astronomically induced plus a significantly reduced anthropogenic contribution, agree far better with the latest observations.
1. INTRODUCTION
As explained in part 1 of this study [1], in the last decade future climate scenarios have been used to develop and politically enforce energy expensive policies to contrast catastrophic climate warming expectations for the 21st century. This has been done mostly by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [2, 3, 4]. Several studies based on general circulation model (GCM) simulations of the Earth’s climate concluded that the 20th century climate warming and its future development depend almost completely on anthropogenic activities. Humans have been responsible of emitting in the atmosphere large amount of greenhouse gases (GHG) such as CO2 throughout the combustion of fossil fuels. This paradigm is known as the Anthropogenic Global Warming Theory (AGWT).
However, before trusting GCM projections about future climatic changes, it is necessary to validate these models by testing whether they are able to properly reconstruct past climate changes. In Ref. [1], the authors have argued that since 2001 AGWT was actually supported by the belief that the “hockey stick” proxy temperature reconstructions, which claim that an unprecedented warming occurred since 1900 in the Northern Hemisphere, were reliable [2,5] and could be considered an indirect validation of the available climate models supporting the AGWT [6]. However, since 2005 novel proxy temperature reconstructions questioned the reliability of such hockey stick trends by demonstrating the existence of a large millennial climatic oscillation [7-10]. This natural climatic variability is confirmed by historical inferences [11] and by climate proxy reconstructions spanning the entire Holocene [12, 13]. A millennial climatic oscillation would suggest that a significant percentage of the warming observed since 1850 could simply be a recovery from the Little Ice Age of the 14th – 18th centuries and that throughout the 20th century the climate naturally returned to a warm phase as it happened during the Roman and the Medieval warm periods [9, 11, 14- 16].
To test the reliability of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) GCMs, in Ref. [1] it was shown that for the period 1860-2016 they predict an excessive warming relative to four independent global surface temperature reconstructions. This was a first significant discrepancy between observations and models. Then, it was noted that AGWT advocates had claimed that discrepancies between observation and modeled predictions could occur because of an unforced internal variability of the climate system that the same GCMs are able to predict [17].
These people were very explicit by providing the following scientific criterion to validate the models: “The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 year or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate” [18].
Full paper
2) EPA Takes First Steps To Repeal Obama’s Climate Regulation
Reuters, 4 October 2017
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will propose repealing the Clean Power Plan – the Obama administration’s centerpiece regulation to fight climate change – and plans to solicit input on a rule to replace it, according to an EPA document seen by Reuters.
The decision marks the agency’s first formal step to sweep away the rule intended to cut carbon emissions from power plants, after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March launching the EPA’s review.
The Republican president has expressed doubts about the science of climate change and has blamed former Democratic President Barack Obama’s efforts to cut carbon emissions for hurting the coal mining and oil drilling industries.
The Clean Power Plan, or CPP, was challenged in court by 27 states after Obama’s administration launched it in 2015. It is currently suspended by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which set a deadline of Friday for a status report from the EPA on how it plans to proceed.
The EPA document, distributed to members of the agency’s Regulatory Steering Committee, said the EPA “is issuing a proposal to repeal the rule.”
The agency now intends to issue what it calls an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to solicit input as it considers “developing a rule similarly intended to reduce CO2 emissions from existing fossil fuel electric utility generating units.”
The document did not provide any details of the potential new rule.
Full story
3) Heather Heying: The Post-Modern Left Is Destroying Freedom Of Thought And Science
Heather Heying, The Wall Street Journal, 2 October 2017
The postmodernist left on campus is intolerant not only of opposing views, but of science itself.
Who would have guessed that when America cleaved, the left would get the National Football League and the right would get uncontested custody of science?
The revolution on college campuses, which seeks to eradicate individuals and ideas that are considered unsavory, constitutes a hostile takeover by fringe elements on the extreme left. Last spring at the Evergreen State College, where I was a professor for 15 years, the revolution was televised—proudly and intentionally—by the radicals. Opinions not fitting with the currently accepted dogma—that all white people are racist, that questioning policy changes aimed at achieving “equity” is itself an act of white supremacy—would not be tolerated, and those who disagreed were shouted down, hunted, assaulted, even battered. Similar eruptions have happened all over the country.
What may not be obvious from outside academia is that this revolution is an attack on Enlightenment values: reason, inquiry and dissent. Extremists on the left are going after science. Why? Because science seeks truth, and truth isn’t always convenient.
The left has long pointed to deniers of climate change and evolution to demonstrate that over here, science is a core value. But increasingly, that’s patently not true.
The battle on our campuses—and ever more, in K-12 schools, in cubicles and in meetings, and on the streets—is being framed as a battle for equity, but that’s a false front. True, there are real grievances. Gaps between populations exist, for historical and modern reasons that are neither honorable nor acceptable, and they must be addressed. But what is going on at institutions across the country is—yes—a culture war between science and postmodernism. The extreme left has embraced a facile fiction.
Postmodernism, and specifically its offspring, critical race theory, have abandoned rigor and replaced it with “lived experience” as the primary source of knowledge. Little credence is given to the idea of objective reality. Science has long understood that observation can never be perfectly objective, but it also provides the ultimate tool kit with which to distinguish signal from noise—and from bias. Scientists generate complete lists of alternative hypotheses, with testable predictions, and we try to falsify our own cherished ideas.
Science is imperfect: It is slow and methodical, and it makes errors. But it does work. We have microchips, airplanes and streetlights to show for it.
In a meeting with administrators at Evergreen last May, protesters called, on camera, for college president George Bridges to target STEM faculty in particular for “antibias” training, on the theory that scientists are particularly prone to racism. That’s obvious to them because scientists persist in using terms like “genetic” and “phenotype” when discussing humans. Mr. Bridges offers: “[What] we are working towards is, bring ’em in, train ’em, and if they don’t get it, sanction them.”
Despite the benevolent-sounding label, the equity movement is a highly virulent social pathogen, an autoimmune disease of the academy. Diversity offices, the very places that were supposed to address bigotry and harassment, have been weaponized and repurposed to catch and cull all who disagree. And the attack on STEM is no accident.
Once scientists are silenced, narratives can be fully unhooked from any expectation that they be put to the test of evidence. Last month, Evergreen made it clear that they wanted two of its scientists gone—my husband, Bret Weinstein, and me, despite our stellar reputations with the students they claimed to be protecting. First, they came for the biologists.
Science has sometimes been used to rationalize both atrocity and inaction in its face. But conflating science with its abuse has become a favorite trope of extremists on the left. It’s a cheap rhetorical trick, and not, dare I say, very logical.
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4) Green Tyranny: Exposing The Totalitarian Roots Of The Climate Industrial Complex
Encounter Books
New book by Rupert Darwall
Climate change was political long before Al Gore first started talking about it. In the 1970s, the Swedish Social Democrats used global warming to get political support for building a string of nuclear power stations. It was the second phase of their war on coal, which began with the acid rain scare and the first big UN environment conference in Stockholm in 1969.
Acid rain swept all before it. America held out for as long as Ronald Reagan was in the White House, but capitulated under his successor. Like global warming, acid rain had the vocal support of the scientific establishment, but the consensus science collapsed just as Congress was passing acid rain cap-and-trade legislation. Rather than tell legislators and the nation the truth, the EPA attacked a lead scientist and suppressed the federal report showing that the scientific case for action on curbing power station emissions was baseless.
Ostensibly neutral in the Cold War, Sweden had a secret military alliance with Washington. A hero of the international Left, Sweden’s Olof Palme used environmentalism to maintain a precarious balance between East and West. Thus Stockholm was the conduit for the KGB-inspired nuclear winter scare. The bait was taken by Carl Sagan and leading scientists, who tried to undermine Ronald Reagan’s nuclear strategy and acted as propaganda tools to end the Cold War on Moscow’s terms.
Nuclear energy was to have been the solution to global warming. It didn’t turn out that way, most of all thanks to Germany. Instead America and the world are following Germany’s lead in embracing wind and solar. German obsession with renewable energy originates deep within its culture. Few know today that the Nazis were the first political party to champion wind power, Hitler calling wind the energy of the future.
Post-1945 West Germany appeared normal, but anti-nuclear protests in the 1970s led to the fusion of extreme Left and Right and the birth of the Greens in 1980. Their rise changed Germany, then Europe and now the world. Radical environmentalism became mainstream. It demands more than the rejection of the abundant hydrocarbon energy that fuels American greatness. It requires the suppression of dissent.
About the Author
Rupert Darwall is strategy consultant and policy analyst. He read economics and history at Cambridge University and subsequently worked in finance as an investment analyst and in corporate finance before becoming a special adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
5) Tesla Is Immune To Bad Financial Data Because Logic Is Officially Dead In Silicon Valley
Thornton Mcenery, Above The Law, 3 October 2017
Tesla is not so much a car company as it is a cult of personality mixed with a quasi-religious belief in the disruptive superiority of Silicon Valley.
Late yesterday, Tesla Motors reported that it did not produce even close to the number of Model 3 cars that it predicted it would in the third fiscal quarter of 2017.
That is objectively not good news for Tesla. The company has put a staggeringly high amount of pressure on itself to increase production on the Model 3 with a speed that is literally unprecedented in the history of manufacturing. Essentially, Elon Musk has staked the future of his car company on the notion that he can make one million cars a year by 2020. Tesla made 83,922 in 2016… total.
So in the cutthroat world of public market trading it stands to reason that Elon cannot afford even the merest suggestion of a hiccup in a manufacturing ramp-up plan that he has actually referred to as “Production Hell.”
Cue yesterday:
The automaker built only 260 Model 3s during the quarter ended in September, less than a fifth of its 1,500-unit forecast. Output of the sedan that starts at $35,000 — roughly half the cost of the least expensive Model S — was lower than expected because of unspecified “bottlenecks,” according to the company.
Ah, so more a production “shart” than a “hiccup.”
A major miss on production goes to the heart of Tesla’s notional value. If it can’t come close to delivering on its primary goal, logic holds that Tesla cannot survive.
Therefore trading on Tesla stock must have been disastrous today, right?
SO WRONG!
Wondering where this thought experiment lost its way? We’ll give you a hint: it was somewhere between “Elon” and “Musk.”
See, Tesla is not so much a car company as it is a cult of personality mixed with a quasi-religious belief in the disruptive superiority of Silicon Valley. In the eyes of Tesla believers, Elon Musk is a prophet and Tesla is his church. Tesla’s stock doesn’t trade on data, it trades on the current of faith and doubt among the Tesla faithful.
Like all public companies, Tesla has to deal with financial projections on a quarterly basis, but unlike almost any other public company, it has gamed the system so that Elon always revels in the accretive bigotry of low expectations. Just last week, Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas wrote a note on Tesla that was more of a Tesla fanboy Reddit post than it was flinty-eyed financial analysis. Tesla’s results today fly in the face of Jonas’s predictions. We can guarantee you that his faith is not shaken.
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The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.
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