GWPF Newsletter: Europe's Green Suicide

EU Climate Targets To Cost Carmakers €7.4 Billion UBS Warns

In this newsletter:

1) India: Droughts Declining & Famine Eliminated Despite Global Warming
Vimal Mishra et al., Geophysical Research Letters, January 2019

2) The Sun’s Magnetic Field Is Ten Times Stronger Than Previously Believed, Scientists Reveal
Queen’s University Belfast, 29 March 2019


3) Europe’s Green Suicide: EU Climate Targets To Cost Carmakers €7.4 Billion UBS Warns
Financial Times, 4 April 2019

4) Climate Alarm Bombs In Elections Down Under
Michael Baume, The Spectator, 30 March 2019 

5) Global Warming Accelerating? Only In The BBC’s Imagination
The Conservative Woman, 4 April 2019

6) Susan Crockford Interview On The Tucker Carlson Tonight Show Scheduled For Tonight At 8 pm ET
Polar Bear Science, 3 April 2019 

7) Christopher Booker: My Last Column After 60 Wonderful Years
The Sunday Telegraph, 31 March 2019 
 
 Full details:
 
1) India: Droughts Declining & Famine Eliminated -Despite Global Warming
Vimal Mishra et al., Geophysical Research Letters, January 2019

“Overall, our analysis shows that the frequency and severity of major soil moisture drought periods was greatest before 1924.”

Drought and famine in India, 1870-2016 

Abstract

Millions of people died due to famines in India in the 19th and 20th centuries; however, the relationship of historical famines with drought is complicated and not well understood. Using station-based observations and simulations, we reconstruct soil moisture (agricultural) drought in India for the period 1870-2016. We show that over this century and a half period, India experienced seven major drought periods (1876-1882, 1895-1900, 1908-1924, 1937-1945, 1982-1990, 1997-2004, and 2011-2015) based on severity-area-duration (SAD) analysis of reconstructed soil moisture. Out of six major famines (1873-74, 1876, 1877, 1896-97, 1899, and 1943) that occurred during 1870-2016, five are linked to soil moisture drought, and one (1943) was not. The three most deadly droughts (1877, 1896, and 1899) were linked with the positive phase of El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Five major droughts were not linked with famine, and three of those five non-famine droughts occurred after Indian Independence in 1947. […]

A series of famines from 1870 through 1943 killed well over ten million people in India. All but one of the major famines in this period are linked to soil moisture drought. Out of five major droughts that caused famines in India, three were driven by the positive SST anomalies (El Niño) in the tropical Pacific Ocean. India has experienced soil moisture droughts that were as severe as those that accompanied the deadly pre-1900 famines (for instance, 1918 and 1920). The fact that these droughts did not lead to famine deaths appears to be the result mostly of more effective government responses. Despite substantial population growth between 1900 and 2016, famine deaths have been essentially eliminated in modern India. The primary reasons are better food distribution, and buffer food stocks, rural employment generation, transportation, and groundwater-based irrigation (Aiyar, 2012). Rapid depletion of groundwater in northern India (Asoka et al., 2017; Rodell et al., 2009) raises concerns for food and fresh water security in India. Our results showing the linkage between droughts and famine in India have implications for food and fresh water security of the region.

Full paper
 
2) The Sun’s Magnetic Field Is Ten Times Stronger Than Previously Believed, Scientists Reveal
Queen’s University Belfast, 29 March 2019

The sun’s magnetic field is ten times stronger than previously believed, new research from Queen’s University Belfast and Aberystwyth University has revealed.



The new finding was discovered by Dr. David Kuridze, Research Fellow at Aberystwyth University. Dr. Kuridze began the research when he was based at Queen’s University Belfast and completed it when he moved to Aberystwyth University in 2017. He is a leading authority on the use of ground-based telescopes to study the sun’s corona, the ring of bright light visible during a total eclipse.

Working from the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope at Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, La Palma in the Canary Islands, Dr. Kuridze studied a particularly strong solar flare which erupted near the surface of the sun on 10 September 2017.

A combination of favourable conditions and an element of luck enabled the team to determine the strength of the flare’s magnetic field with unprecedented accuracy. The researchers believe the findings have the potential to change our understanding of the processes that happen in the sun’s immediate atmosphere.

Speaking about the find, Dr. Kuridze said: “Everything that happens in the sun’s outer atmosphere is dominated by the magnetic field, but we have very few measurements of its strength and spatial characteristics.

“These are critical parameters, the most important for the physics of the solar corona. It is a little like trying to understand the Earth’s climate without being able to measure its temperature at various geographical locations.

“This is the first time we have been able to measure accurately the magnetic field of the coronal loops, the building blocks of the sun’s magnetic corona, which such a level of accuracy.”

Measuring 1,400,000 kilometres across (109 times larger than Earth) and 150,000,000 kilometres from Earth, the sun’s corona extends millions of kilometres above the surface.

Solar flares appear as bright flashes and occur when magnetic energy that has built up in the solar atmosphere is suddenly released.

Until now, successful measurement of the magnetic field has been hindered by the weakness of the signal from the sun’s atmosphere that reaches Earth and caries information about the magnetic field, and limitations in the instrumentation available.

The magnetic fields reported in this study are similar to those of a typical fridge magnet and around 100 times weaker than the magnetic field encountered in an MRI scanner.

However, they are still responsible for the confinement of the solar plasma, which make up solar flares, as far as 20,000 km above the sun’s surface.

Full post
 
3) Europe’s Green Suicide: EU Climate Targets To Cost Carmakers €7.4 Billion UBS Warns
Financial Times, 4 April 2019

Implications of CO2 rules continue to be underestimated, according to report

Europe’s largest carmakers face a €7.4bn hit to profits from the costs of meeting the EU’s CO2 regulations, UBS warned on Wednesday, as it cautioned the implications of the bloc’s emissions rules were being underestimated.

In order to meet European targets of 95 grammes CO2 per kilometre by 2021, carmakers will have to reduce emissions by around a fifth in just two years, the report said.

“All European carmakers are still well above where they need to be in 2021,” wrote analyst Patrick Hummel.

Complying with regulations will knock earnings before interest by around €7.4bn across the industry, with Peugeot expected to take the biggest hit, at around 25 per cent of earnings per share, because of its high EU focus, followed by Fiat Chrysler at 20 per cent and Volkswagen at 13 per cent.

Full story
 
See also: Germany Suffers Double Blow on Factory Slump, Downgrade
 
Crunch For Germany As Manufacturing Enters Freefall 
 
4) Climate Alarm Bombs In Elections Down Under
Michael Baume, The Spectator, 30 March 2019 

Climate change played no role in determining the NSW election outcome. The Greens, the Coalition and Labor all of which had climate policies – all lost ground.

It was utter bunkum; but typical self-delusion by those ideological crusaders determined to do whatever it takes ‘to save the planet’ – at whatever the cost.

‘Climate change is now a more pressing matter for New South Wales voters than hospitals, schools and public transport’ asserted the green-left Sydney Morning Herald in the run-up to NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s outstanding victory.

And to reinforce the message against carbon emissions, it added that among the top environment concerns was coal. Other media within this inner-city bubble of group-think unreality included SBS which warned pre-election that ‘Climate change will be a vote changer’, while the ABC inevitably listed environment on top, claiming that ‘Voters in dozens of seats appear to be signalling to parties that without a clear plan to address climate change they will be punished at the polling booth’.

But climate change played no role in determining the outcome. The Greens, the Coalition and Labor all of which had climate policies that, to differing degrees, imposed heavy cost burdens on the economy and energy consumers involving job losses in industry, all lost some ground. The Coalition, especially the Nationals, should heed the lesson that the only big election winners were the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party that won three lower house seats despite the New Zealand gun massacre news. And, contrary to the warnings from the left media, the SFF election policy took strong objection to the major parties’ anti-emissions rhetoric.

‘Environment laws should not be aimed at appeasing minority city-based extreme green viewpoints… Affordable and reliable energy is the key to success… Government should not divert large sums of public money into intermittent energy sources; with the increasing saturation of renewable energy comes greater risks to energy reliability that is best provided by large coal-fired generators. We believe that it is logical to construct two new baseload High Efficiency Low Emission (HELE) coal-fired power stations in the Hunter Valley’.

If the Nationals were unhappy before the election with the Liberals’ ‘Labor-lite’ emissions limitation policies (the NSW Liberal target is zero net emissions by 2050 as against Labor’s 100 per cent by then and 50 per cent by 2030) it is unlikely they will wear them after losing seats to the SFF. And the federal Nationals have every reason to be worried about the threat to their regional seats of the SFF energy policy.

The outcome of the coming federal election may depend on whether the Nats’ concerns and pressure for reliable affordable energy (including coal) will have a greater impact on Morrison than the fears of Josh Frydenberg that Kooyong could turn into another climate-dominated Wentworth unless due obeisance is made to the emissions gods. And, unlike the USA, that the government will stick with the Paris Agreement targets, despite their having inconsequential effects on the world’s greenhouse gasses.

Full post
 
5) Global Warming Accelerating? Only In The BBC’s Imagination
The Conservative Woman, 4 April 2019
Kathy Gyngell

THE last few days, as temperatures dropped back down to the forties and we all pulled on our overcoats and scarves again, I was amused to hear the BBC call it ‘typical April weather’. Not, mind you, an example of global cooling, though whenever we have a warm spell (seasonal or unseasonal) the climate warming alarm bells are immediately sounded.

That’s because the BBC, whose mission was once to inform, educate and entertain, now has overriding goals – to blame and to frighten. Especially when it comes to climate. And the facts can go hang.

Don’t expect to hear from them that the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) may have been misleading the public by suggesting that global warming and its impacts are accelerating.

Don’t expect to see Roger Harrabin, the BBC’s environment analyst, dedicating a programme to the climate scientist who’s called out the WMO’s conclusions.

Norwegian Professor Ole Humlum, whose annual review of the world’s climate is published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, says the data tells a very different story:

‘You would think that global warming was getting worse. But in fact it is carefully worded to give a false impression. The data are far more suggestive of an improvement than a deterioration.’

Furthermore, the lack of anything to be alarmed about is clear across a range of measures:

‘After the warm year of 2016, temperatures last year continued to fall back to levels of the so-called warming “pause” of 2000-2015. There is no sign of any acceleration in global temperature, hurricanes or sea-level rise. These empirical observations show no sign of acceleration whatsoever.’

These are the key findings that are not allowed to be spoken on the BBC since it anointed itself the climate god….

You can download the whole report here. And while you are about it, how about forwarding the link to the head teacher and the geography and science staff at your child’s school?

Full post
 
6) Susan Crockford Interview On The Tucker Carlson Tonight Show Scheduled For Tonight At 8 pm ET
Polar Bear Science, 3 April 2019 

Susan Crockford will be talking with Tucker Carlson at Fox News about her new book and the part polar bears play in the on-going climate change debate. The segment will be live at 8pm ET.

Carlson draws a huge audience and Susan is looking forward to chatting with him.

Full post
 
7) Christopher Booker: My Last Column After 60 Wonderful Years
The Sunday Telegraph, 31 March 2019 

Sadly, for health reasons, this is my last column for the Telegraph, marking an end to my links with the newspaper which, in various guises, dates back exactly 60 years.

In 1959, when I was still at university, I was invited by John Warrack, the distinguished music critic of The Daily Telegraph, to review jazz records; and in 1961, with the launch of The Sunday Telegraph I joined it as its first jazz critic.

But later that year, I became the first editor of Private Eye and soon a full-time satirist, and also, by the end of 1962, the chief political scriptwriter, along with my old Cambridge friend David Frost, of the BBC’s ground-breaking satire show TW3 (That Was The Week That Was).

In 1969, The Sunday Telegraph serialised my first book, The Neophiliacs: a highly critical “study of the revolution in English life in the Fifties and Sixties”, which helped it to become quite a bestseller. And in 1972, I began a monthly “Saturday Column” in The Daily Telegraph, which was to last for 20 years, where I was free to write about a whole range of subjects, from politics and religion to our destruction of the natural world and the psychology behind storytelling.

Very much another theme of my writing in the early Seventies was the havoc being wrought on our cities by the make-believe of the Modern Movement in architecture and town planning, originally inspired by the utopian Twenties visions of Le Corbusier, which was then reaching its crazy climax, as in the plans to turn almost the whole of historic Covent Garden into a “space-age city” of concrete tower blocks and sunken motorways.

In 1979, after much of the worst of this madness had ended in disillusionment, I began several years as one of The Sunday Telegraph’s lead book reviewers. Then in 1988, when the great satirist Michael Wharton took semi-retirement as “Peter Simple” of The Daily Telegraph’s long-running “Way of the World” column, I was chosen to follow him as “Peter Simple II”.

But in 1990 this came to an abrupt end when I mocked the irascible Auberon Waugh for having written an unfortunate article loftily dismissing those “tiresome protesting students” clogging the streets of Beijing just two days before the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Waugh, then a columnist on The Sunday Telegraph, issued an ultimatum to the Telegraph’s then-editor-in-chief Max Hastings, demanding that he should be given the “Way of the World” column in my place. My response was to suggest to Peregrine Worsthorne, then The Sunday Telegraph’s editor, that I should take over Waugh’s Sunday column in exchange.

In a “job interview” over lunch at the Garrick, Worsthorne and his deputy Frank Johnson asked me: “How do you see Britain’s future?” After a studied pause – this was the year of Mrs Thatcher’s downfall – I replied: “Sinking slowly into a sub-Marxist fog”.
This seemed to please them so much that I was given the job, and thus began my 30 years as a Sunday Telegraph columnist, which are finally coming to an end this week.

One of my guiding principles as a journalist had long been to bring to light what I considered to be some shockingly important story which was not being properly covered elsewhere. And one of the reasons I have been very grateful to The Sunday Telegraph is the unusual freedom it gave me to pursue a long succession of such campaigning stories, if necessary for years on end.

One of the first examples I uncovered in the early days of my column, soon with the aid of thousands of letters from Telegraph readers, was the hidden revolution then taking place in the way Britain was governed, evident in the sudden, immensely damaging impact on every kind of business of a newly officious type of bureaucracy.

This was notably but not exclusively due to the avalanche of directives now coming from the EU with the advent of the single market. But what it reflected was an unprecedented shift of power from our own elected politicians to an anonymously unaccountable new system of law-making, which I soon discovered from discussions with ministers even they did not begin to understand.

Thus in the Nineties, among countless other examples, I was gradually able to expose the disaster being imposed on our fishermen by the Common Fisheries Policy. Another was the Government’s ruthless cover-up of the terrifying damage being inflicted on the health of thousands of sheep farmers and many others by forcing them to be unwittingly exposed to highly toxic nerve-agent organophosphate (OP) pesticides.

By 1996, based largely on what I had written in The Sunday Telegraph, my expert colleague Dr Richard North and I were able to co-author a book The Castle of Lies, subtitled “Why Britain Must Get Out of Europe”, at a time when this was still scorned as just a ridiculously eccentric thing to suggest. By 2003 we were able to follow this up with The Great Deception, an exhaustively researched history of “the European project” which for the first time revealed the true story of how the attempt to create a “United States of Europe” had come about, much of which had never been brought to light before.

In more recent years, as we have watched our entire system of government – both in “Europe” and Britain – becoming ever more dysfunctional, ever more out of touch with reality and those it rules over, I fear the tone of my column has become ever more apocalyptic.
I have found even grander themes to write about, such as our suicidal national energy policy, based on the “decarbonising” of our economy, which can only end in our lights going out and much else; and the even greater self-deception which lies behind it: the West’s obsession with catastrophic global warming, at a time when the rest of the world, led by China and India, is taking not the slightest notice, as it continues to build thousands more coal-fired power stations.

This is only one symptom of the way in which the societies of the West, spoiled by decades of the greatest material prosperity the world has ever known, fuelled by a mounting sea of debt, have been showing all the signs of what, in another age, would have been seen as “decadence”.

Another symptom has been the unprecedented unleashing of every kind of individual and collective egotism, expressed not just in the anger and exhibitionism of the “anti-social media” but in the astonishing pressure to conform with the intolerant puritanical groupthink behind every kind of “political correctness”.

We have seen not only the wholesale disintegration of traditional family life but also that horrifying scandal which for nine years was another theme of my column, as I tried to expose the dehumanising way in which our ultra-secretive state “child protection” system has gone so tragically off the rails.

And now, to add to all this, we watch aghast at how our infantilised politicians are sleepwalking us towards disaster over Brexit. It was way back in the Nineties, long before it was fashionable, that I first began using the term “the Westminster bubble” to describe how our political class had begun to cut itself off from the real world into a self-regarding little world of its own.

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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.