GWPF Newsletter: UK Govt Axes Electric Cars Subsidies

Richard Lindzen: ‘Warming Of Any Significance Ceased 20 Years Ago’

In this newsletter:

1) British Government Axes Electric Cars Subsidies
Huffington Post, 13 October 2018

2) Richard Lindzen: ‘Warming Of Any Significance Ceased 20 Years Ago’
Alison Bevege, Daily Mail, 12 October 2018


3) Senior U.S. Policy Makers Question IPCC Climate Alarmism
The Washington Post, 15 October 2018 

4) Florida’s Major Hurricane Strikes: No Change In 120 Years
Roy Spencer, 11 October 2018

5) Green Campaigners Defeated In Attempt To Block UK Fracking
Financial Times, 13 October 2018

6) Green Madness: EU Climate Targets Threaten 100.000 Volkswagen Jobs
Spiegel Online, 11 October 2018

7) Blow To Merkel As Far-Right AfD Enters Bavarian State Assembly
Reuters, 15 October 2018

8) Rex Murphy: The UN Climate Panel That Cried Wolf Too Often
National Post, 12 October 2018

9) John Constable: The IPCC's Special Report: Global Warming Of 1.5℃
GWPF Energy, 10 October 2018

Full details:

1) British Government Axes Electric Cars Subsidies
Huffington Post, 13 October 2018

Bad news if you want to go green but don’t have thousands of pounds to spend on a car – the Department for Transport has cut a grant for new electric and hybrid cars making them even more expensive.



The UK government had been funding a subsidy to make them more affordable, with the most eco-friendly cars eligible for a £4,500 and a discount of up to £2,500 for cars considered category two and three eco-friendly cars.

But it has announced discounts on category two and three cars will be axed altogether, and that the discount for the most eco-friendly cars on the market will be reduced to £3,500 from November 12.

The AA and the RAC have hit out at the move, slamming it as a “major blow” to plans to encourage consumers to buy more efficient cars and slash air pollution by ending the sale of petrol and diesel cars.
 
Nicholas Lyes, the RAC’s head of roads policy, told Sky News that the up-front cost of buying a greener car was a “huge barrier for those hoping to switch to an electric vehicle.”

“This move from the government is a big step backwards and is in stark contrast to countries like Norway, where generous tax incentives have meant that it has one of the highest ownership levels of ultra-low emission vehicles of anywhere in the world,” he said. “This announcement will simply put more drivers off from buying greener cars.”

And because electric cars are not mainstream, and relatively new, there is also a limited second-hand market. Whereas you could buy a petrol or diesel car for a few hundred pounds, a second hand electric car will cost in the thousands.

And when it comes to the practicalities, unlike petrol or diesel cars, electric cars take hours to fully charge, while a petrol car which can be filled up in minutes.

Full post

2) Richard Lindzen: ‘Warming Of Any Significance Ceased 20 Years Ago’
Alison Bevege, Daily Mail, 12 October 2018

Professor Lindzen said the IPCC report this week had reduced the alleged tipping point from 2C to 1.5C because there had been no significant warming for 20 years. ‘Warming of any significance ceased about 20 years ago, and 2C warming was looking increasingly unlikely.’



Professor Richard Lindzen slammed conventional thinking on global warming as ‘nonsense’ in a lecture for skeptical think tank Global Warming Policy Foundation — click on image above to watch full lecture

A climate scientist said Australia’s coral reefs are not in danger in the wake of a UN report on climate change that he says is helping to overturn industrial civilisation.

An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released earlier this week forecast doom if coal-fired power is not ended within 32 years, worldwide.

It predicted up to 90 per cent of coral reefs would be lost if the earth warmed by 1.5 degrees Celcius by 2100, prompting fears for Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.


The latest IPCC report said coral such as Australia's Great Barrier Reef (pictured) would vanish unless the world phases out coal power 32 years. Professor Lindzen says this is nonsense
 
But meteorology professor Richard Lindzen said the more alarmist climate claims were false and that there had been no significant warming for 20 years.

‘They aren’t in danger,’ said the US Academy of Sciences member who has written more than 200 papers on climate change and meteorology.

‘Ocean acidification actually means that the oceans might become a little less basic. Coral’s regularly survive such fluctuations.’

‘Moreover, it is well known that corals recover from bleaching.’

Professor Lindzen said Australia’s political class had gone completely bonkers in their response to climate change alarmism and hadn’t taken the time to actually read and understand the science.

‘I can’t imagine what suicidal instincts reside in Australia’s political class.’

‘In asking me to comment on the Australian response, you are asking the wrong person. You need to speak to someone specializing in abnormal psychology.’



These stacks are emitting water vapour, not carbon dioxide which is an invisible gas but it has become an iconic picture to show climate risk. Professor Lindzen is sick of misleading claims

Professor Richard Lindzen slammed conventional global warming thinking warming as ‘nonsense’ in a lecture for the Global Warming Policy Foundation on Monday.

‘An implausible conjecture backed by false evidence and repeated incessantly … is used to promote the overturn of industrial civilization,’ he said in London.

‘What we will be leaving our grandchildren is … a landscape degraded by rusting wind farms and decaying solar panel arrays.’

The IPCC report, authored by 91 climate scientists, forecast doom if coal-fired power is not ended within 32 years, worldwide.

In August alone, coal was Australia’s second biggest export behind iron ore, in dollar terms, with a market value of $5.5 billion, Australian Bureau of Statistics international trade figures showed.

Professor Lindzen said the IPCC report this week had reduced the alleged tipping point from 2C to 1.5C because there had been no significant warming for 20 years.

‘Warming of any significance ceased about 20 years ago, and 2C warming was looking increasingly unlikely,’ he wrote in an email to Daily Mail Australia.

‘There was an obvious need for something more plausible to ‘sustain’ the renewables bubble.’


Professor Lindzen tells London that man-made climate change does not appear to be a serious problem. He was Professor of Meteorology for Massachusetts Institute of Technology until he retired in 2013, and says that much of accepted ‘politically correct’ knowledge is nonsense

‘In Australia as elsewhere there is no evidence that anything other than the usual disasters that nature hurls our way are likely.’

The IPCC report said that warming of 2 degrees Celsius would see the Arctic Circle free of sea ice in summer once every 10 years.

Figures from the Ocean and Sea Ice Satellite Application Facility (OSI SAF) High Latitude Processing Center show Arctic sea ice last month had reached its greatest extent since 2014.

Full story

3) Senior U.S. Policy Makers Question IPCC Climate Alarmism
The Washington Post, 15 October 2018

After the devastation of Hurricane Michael and a recent United Nations report warning of a looming climate crisis, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow and Sen. Marco Rubio on Sunday questioned the extent of human contribution to rising global temperatures.

“I think they overestimate,” Kudlow said of the U.N. report, which found that policy changes must proceed at an unprecedented pace in the next 12 years to stop temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above Earth’s preindustrial temperature.

“I’m not denying any climate-change issues,” Kudlow said on ABC’s “This Week.” “I’m just saying, do we know precisely . . . things like how much of it is manmade, how much of it is solar, how much of it is oceanic, how much of it is rain forest and other issues?”

Rubio (R-Fla.), speaking on CNN about the effects of Hurricane Michael, said that sea levels and ocean temperatures have risen in a “measurable” way and that humans have played some role. But he questioned how big that role is.

“I think many scientists would debate the percentage of what is attributable to man versus normal fluctuations,” Rubio said on “State of the Union.”

Full post

4) Florida’s Major Hurricane Strikes: No Change In 120 Years
Roy Spencer, 11 October 2018

I’ve updated a plot of Florida major hurricane strikes since 1900 with Hurricane Michael, and the result is that there is still no trend in either intensity or frequency of strikes over the last 118 years:

This is based upon National Hurricane Center data. The trend line in intensity is flat, and the trend line in number of storms (not shown) is insignificantly downward.

Nevertheless, the usual fearmongers are claiming Hurricane Michael is somehow tied to climate change.

After all, the Gulf of Mexico is unusually warm, right?

Yes, but if you look at the history of Jul-Aug-Sept average sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies over the eastern Gulf (available here, 25N-30N, 80W-90W), you will see that since 1860, this summer is only the 9th warmest in the eastern Gulf of Mexico.

Even more astounding is that out of the top 10 warmest Gulf years since 1860, 7 occurred before 1970, which is before we experienced any significant warming.

So, all the “experts” can do is make vague claims about how major hurricanes like Michael are what we can expect more of in a warming world, but the data show that – so far at least – the data do not support the theory.

Major hurricanes are part of nature. As evidence of this, I will also remind people of the study of lake bottom sediments in Western Lake in the Florida panhandle, not far from where Michael made landfall, that showed the last 1,000 years have been relatively quiet for Category 4 to 5 hurricanes, but the period from 1,000 to 3,400 years ago was a “hyperactive” period for intense landfalls at that location.

Hurricane strikes in the U.S. are notoriously variable, as evidenced by the recent (and unprecedented) 11+ year “drought” in major hurricane landfalls, which was finally broken in 2017.

Where were the claims that the hurricane drought was due to global warming?

Crickets.

Attributing the latest hurricane in any way to global warming is the ultimate in cherry-picking the data. In fact, they don’t even show the data.

Which brings us back to those vague claims by the experts.

UPDATE:

I also included Michael in the count of ALL U.S. landfalling major hurricanes, again from NHC data. The marked downward trend since the 1930s, 40s, and 50s is quite evident:

Where is the news story about THAT?

Full post

5) Green Campaigners Defeated In Attempt To Block UK Fracking
Financial Times, 13 October 2018

An environmental campaigner has failed in a High Court challenge to temporarily block energy firm Cuadrilla from fracking the UK’s first horizontal shale gas well.

A High Court judge has ruled against an injunction sought by environmental campaigner Robert Dennett who had tried to obtain a last minute court order against Cuadrilla to prevent the start of shale gas fracking.

Cuadrilla is due to test gas to see whether it is viable but if the operation is a success then up to 20 wells could be built. Mr Dennett tried to get an injunction and argued that the emergency planning and response functions of Lancashire county council in relation to shale gas fracking are inadequate.

However Mr Justice Supperstone refused his application for an interim injunction.

Full story

6) Green Madness: EU Climate Targets Threaten 100.000 Volkswagen Jobs
Spiegel Online, 11 October 2018

Volkswagen, Germany’s most important carmaker, has intervened in the discussion about EU plans for new CO2 targets. VW boss Herbert Diess has issued a sharp public warning and predicts dramatic job losses in Europe’s car industry.



Within the next ten years about 100,000 jobs would have to be eliminated at VW alone should EU environment ministers not abandon their plan to lower CO2 emission limits for cars by 35 percent, he said. VW currently employs about 400,000 workers in the EU. According to Diess a quarter of these jobs could be affected.

“The transition in speed and impact is almost impossible to manage,” Diess told “Süddeutsche Zeitung”. He added: “The car industry could crash faster than many believe.”

Full story (in German)
 

7) Blow To Merkel As Far-Right AfD Enters Bavarian State Assembly
Reuters, 15 October 2018

Berlin: Chancellor Angela Merkel's Bavarian allies suffered their worst election result since 1950 on Sunday, bleeding votes to the far-right in a setback that risks widening divisions within Germany's crisis-prone national government.

The Christian Social Union (CSU) won 37.3 per cent of the vote, preliminary results showed, losing its absolute majority for only the second time since 1962 – an outcome sure to stoke infighting in the party, already a difficult partner for Merkel in Berlin.

The result, which saw the pro-immigration Greens come second and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) enter the state assembly for the first time, means the CSU will need to form a coalition – a humiliation for a party used to ruling alone.

The Greens, who more than doubled their share of the vote to 17.8 per cent, attracted support from more liberal CSU voters and from those who traditionally vote for the left-leaning Social Democrats (SPD), who won just 9.5 per cent.

"The political earthquake was in Bavaria, but the aftershocks will be felt in Berlin ... Talk will increase ever more about the end of the Merkel era," said Fred Kempe, president of the Washington-based Atlantic Council think tank.

Full story

8) Rex Murphy: The UN Climate Panel That Cried Wolf Too Often
National Post, 12 October 2018

You can’t set multiple deadlines for Doomsday. It’s a kind of one-off by nature. Do it too often and people cease to take notice or even care.

Everybody loves the Apocalypse. The idea of the end of the world, the more imminent the better, has always had enthusiastic popular support. For as long as we’ve enjoyed life on this delightful Earth there has been a morose and righteous sect of one sort or another telling us the lease was nearly up, the doomsday bailiff coming any minute now to shut things down forever. And whether from the abrasive thrill of the message, or the melodrama of the scenario, people have lapped it up.

Indeed there is a whole category of philosophy devoted to that time when the world in flame and fire renders itself into ash, when time stands still, life evaporates into eternity and all is dead and cold. It is impressively called eschatology — the study of The Four Last Things. Not, as might be facilely assumed, Feminism, Ecowarts, Don Lemon and WE Day, but the rather more appetizing quartet of Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. It is the four last things, not the four most annoying.

As an attention-getter, The End is Near is right up there with the fabled cry of “Fire” in a crowded theatre. Identical really, as claiming the world is about to end any moment now is the loudest possible cry of “Fire” in the largest possible theatre of all. The call does gather a crowd. Under the spell of lunatic prophets belching Armageddon, people have done the craziest things — crowded on mountain tops or gone off into the torrid desert — to await the end, only, of course, in the end (that never happens) to be disappointed.

Its enchantment never fades. However often it proves hollow, there is always another set ready to take it up. (It’s like the Quebec referendum: if at first you don’t secede, try, try again. Sorry.) Summoning the shadow of universal doom has advanced many a fretful cause, spawned numerous sects, and wrought tribulation and anxiety in the minds of men since ancient times.

Religious pretenders, in particular, have demonstrated a fondness for the imagery and idea of extinction and collapse and none quite so gluttonously as the modern sectarians of the environmental movement. They have been throwing out scares of population bombs, famine, extinction, wars, world floods, vast migrations and — the favourite — imminent and absolute global ecological collapse for decades now. It would take a master of the abacus to tot up how many “deadlines” and “last chances” and “tipping points” and “if-we-don’t-act-NOW-it-will-be-too lates” the world has been teased with, whether from Prince Charles on his private train, sundry ecological anchorites, or the pursed pious lips of the “we’re-here-to-save-you, send-in-your-money-now” megacorp fundraising machines of Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and all their green ilk.

None however, have more versatility with the alarm bells of the apocalypse than the annual gatherings of the Gotterdammerung club, the Infinite Projectors of Climate Collapse, the assembly of existential dread known as the IPCC. For them, as Paris was for terse Hemingway, the end of the world is a moveable feast. For near three decades now they have held their annual jumbo jamborees. And every year the news is worse, the threats are greater, and it is always just a hair’s breadth from being too late. The scene is always the same. A keening goes around the assembled multitude of worshippers as a fresh and even more definitive deadline than any of the past 20 or 30 for Saving the Planet as inscribed in The Book of Climate Revelations.

The IPCC enjoys a delightfully recurrent state of despair over the world’s imminent collapse, which happily coincides with the release of each annual report. This is not without some burden of paradox. Had the world come close to ending when and as many times as its green sages have foretold, there wouldn’t be enough of it left to hold their next conference. An extinction event “devoutly to be wished.”

Things are looking, unsurprisingly, down. 2100 used to be the final frontier. It’s been moved up some 70 years to 2030. And we’ve lost half a degree. The new threshold is 1.5, where we used to have the full comforts of a whole two degrees. Other good news. No one is living up to their commitments. Even the most sanctimonious on the subject. […]

The trouble with apocalypses is that they can’t be plural. You only get one by definition. Neither can you set multiple deadlines for Doomsday. It’s a kind of one-off by nature. Do it too often and people cease to take notice or even care.

Everyone knows the sad story of Cassandra, the woman given the gift of true prophecy by the gods and simultaneously cursed to have no one believe her. The IPCC’s problem, up to now, is like that but reversed. Always off, but generously credited. I think that string has run out. They can play Wagner and whistle the Ride of the Valkyries all they want from here on. People are tired of that music, and sick of the band.

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9) John Constable: The IPCC's Special Report: Global Warming Of 1.5℃
GWPF Energy, 10 October 2018
Dr John Constable: GWPF Energy Editor

The details of the IPCC’s Special Report, Global Warming of 1.5℃, if thoughtfully read, should oblige policy makers to conclude that the obstacles to limiting global warming to this level, and indeed even to higher temperatures, are not just arbitrary blockages, rocks in the road to be removed, but fundamental and structural problems with the policy options currently available, which are almost certainly more harmful than the climate change they set out to mitigate.

Most of the press coverage of the IPCC’s Special Report, Global Warming of 1.5℃ (henceforth SR1.5),has so far focused on the threats posed by climate change at higher temperature levels, and very little on what is required to contain warming below 1.5℃. But in fact the UNFCC request to the IPCC was quite specifically that “the report […] should not only assess what a 1.5°C warmer world would look like but also the different pathways by which global temperature rise could be limited to 1.5°C” (IPCC SR1.5, 1-43, “FAQ 1.1 “Why are talking about 1.5℃?”).

Even a glance at the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) will show that the authors have not neglected their duty, and much of the study is consequently concerned with these pathways, as well as the hazards. From a reader’s point of view these two elements have to be considered together if the study is to have any significance. It is not, after all, remotely surprising that SR1.5 finds that a 1.5℃ increase is less hazardous than an increase of 2℃. That is obviously and trivially true, and we did not need an IPCC Special Report to reach such a conclusion.The crucial consideration is whether the cost of that reduction is proportional to the benefit, and the answer to that question is most certainly neither obvious nor trivial. Steps toward such an answer are the core payload of SR1.5. However, it is precisely this issue that is conspicuously evaded in general publicity around the IPCC’s findings.

What then does SR1.5 actually say about the measures, the emissions pathways needed to limit temperature increase to 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels? Professor Jim Skea of Imperial College, one of the Report’s authors, and Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group III, is quoted in the Press Release as follows:

“Limiting warming to 1.5℃ is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics but doing so would require unprecedented changes.”

This is not too difficult to decode. It is “within the laws of chemistry and physics” for the computer on which I am writing to suddenly pass through the library table on which it is currently resting, thanks to a fortunate coincidence of empty spaces in their respective atomic structures, but experience and theory tells us that this is vanishingly unlikely and consequently empirically “unprecedented”. By the same token, Professor Skea is saying that the emissions pathway required to restrain temperature increases to 1.5℃ is theoretically possible, but would require a synchronised transformation of technology, economy, and society of a scale and character that has never occurred in human history. Bluntly, it’s possible but it won’t happen.

This point is in fact also clearly implied in Section C of the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM), “Emission Pathways and System Transitions Consistent with 1.5℃ Global Warming”, particularly in sections C2 to C2.7, which consider the various sectoral transformations required.

In overview, C2 notes that the pathways required to deliver the limit “would require rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban infrastructure (including transport and buildings), and industrial systems (high confidence)”. No area is untouched, and “deep emissions reductions” in “all sectors” are necessary. Translation: This a tall order.

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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.