The Eco-Fascists Strike Again
In this newsletter:
1) Boris Johnson Confirmed As Next British Prime Minister
The Daily Telegraph, 23 July 2019
2) How The Left Sees Boris Johnson’s Climate Change Record
New Scientist, 23 July 2019
3) Good Old Boris: Ignore The Doom Merchants, Britain should get fracking
Boris Johnson, The Daily Telegraph, 9 December 2012
4) Urban Heat Island Effect Caused 50% Of Warming In China, New Study Finds
Global Warming Policy Foundation, 22 July 2019
5) Joe Oliver: We Should Prepare For Extreme Weather, But Tying It To Climate Change Is A Mistake
Financial Post, 23 July 2019
6) Manipulation Of Carbon Emissions Trading System Threatens EU Climate Targets
Tilburg University, 23 July 2019
7) And Finally: The Eco-Fascists Strike Again
Steven Hayward, PowerLine, 22 July 2019
Steven Hayward, PowerLine, 22 July 2019
Full details:
1) Boris Johnson Confirmed As Next British Prime Minister
The Daily Telegraph, 23 July 2019
Boris Johnson has been announced as leader of the Conservative party and the next Prime Minister of Britain.
The Daily Telegraph, 23 July 2019
Boris Johnson has been announced as leader of the Conservative party and the next Prime Minister of Britain.
Mr Johnson won by a comfortable margin, securing 92,153 votes compared to Jeremy Hunt's 46,656.
The new Conservative Party leader used his victory speech at the event in London to promise that he would meet the October 31 Brexit deadline with a "new spirit of can do", releasing the country's "guy ropes of self-doubt and negativity".
He said it was an "extraordinary honour and privilege" and insisted that "we are going to unite this amazing country and we are going to take it forward".
Mr Johnson said: "We are going to get Brexit done on October 31, we are going to take advantage of all the opportunities that it will bring in a new spirit of can do.
"And we are once again going to believe in ourselves and what we can achieve, and like some slumbering giant we are going to rise and ping off the guy ropes of self-doubt and negativity."
Full story
2) How The Left Sees Boris Johnson’s Climate Change Record
New Scientist, 23 July 2019
Boris Johnson will be the next prime minister of the UK after winning the Conservative party leadership campaign. Theresa May is expected to resign tomorrow and hand over power. Here's what Johnson has said and done about climate change
With stints as mayor of London and the UK’s foreign secretary, Johnson has never held a government position specifically related to science and technology, but he has often spoken out on matters like climate change and the environment.
As mayor of London, Johnson shrank the city’s congestion charge zone, counter to efforts to reduce carbon emissions and air pollution, but he did encourage cycling by rolling-out a public bike hire scheme. He said in 2016 that he wished he had built “more segregated cycling routes for London.”
In 2013 he announced plans for an Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), but was criticised for delaying the implementation period until after he had left power and for limiting the affected area to the Congestion Charge Zone. His successor Sadiq Khan implemented a much wider reaching version of the ULEZ which will eventually include all vehicles within the north and south circular roads.
In a 2014 interview with New Scientist, during his time as mayor, Johnson said that he thought the London of 2034 would no longer have any vehicles powered by fossil fuels. He also said London should “definitely, absolutely” have a nuclear power station, though it is unclear if these remarks were intended seriously.
Johnson has generally voted against measures to prevent climate change. In 2013, during a snowy UK winter, he highlighted a factually incorrect claim by Piers Corbyn (a weather forecaster who, coincidently, is the brother of Johnson’s would-be rival, the current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn) that low solar activity could lead to a mini ice age.
He came out against the expansion of the UK’s largest airport, Heathrow, though ultimately missed a key vote to block it as he was in Afghanistan conducting his duties as foreign secretary.
During the BBC’s Conservative party leadership debate, Boris was challenged about the plans to expand Heathrow airport and said he continued to have reservations about a third runway, and claimed that London’s CO2 emissions were cut during his time in power.
Full story
3) Good Old Boris: Ignore The Doom Merchants, Britain should get fracking
Boris Johnson, The Daily Telegraph, 9 December 2012
It’s green, it’s cheap and it’s plentiful! So why are opponents of shale gas making such a fuss??
If it were not so serious there would be something ludicrous about the reaction of the green lobby to the discovery of big shale gas reserves in this country. Here we are in the fifth year of a downturn. We have pensioners battling fuel poverty. We have energy firms jacking up their prices. We have real worries about security of energy supply – a new building like the Shard needs four times as much juice as the entire town of Colchester.
Our nukes are so high-maintenance that the cost of disposing of their spent fuel rods is put at about £100 billion – more than the value of all the electricity they have produced since the Fifties. The hills and dales of Britain are being forested with white satanic mills, and yet the total contribution of wind power is still only about 0.4 per cent of Britain’s needs. Wave power, solar power, biomass – their collective oomph wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding. We are prevented from putting in a new system of coal-fired power stations, since that would breach our commitments under Kyoto. We are therefore increasingly and humiliatingly dependent on Vladimir Putin’s gas or on the atomic power of the French state.
And then in the region of Blackpool – as if by a miracle – we may have found the solution. The extraction of shale gas by hydraulic fracture, or fracking, seems an answer to the nation’s prayers. There is loads of the stuff, apparently – about 1.3 trillion barrels; and if we could get it out we could power our toasters and dishwashers for the foreseeable future. By offering the hope of cheap electricity, fracking would make Britain once again competitive in sectors of industry – bauxite smelting springs to mind – where we have lost hope.
The extraction process alone would generate tens of thousands of jobs in parts of the country that desperately need them. And above all, the burning of gas to generate electricity is much, much cleaner – and produces less CO2 – than burning coal. What, as they say, is not to like?
In their mad denunciations of fracking, the Greens and the eco-warriors betray the mindset of people who cannot bear a piece of unadulterated good news. Beware this new technology, they wail. Do not tamper with the corsets of Gaia! Don’t probe her loamy undergarments with so much as a finger — or else the goddess of the earth will erupt with seismic revenge. Dig out this shale gas, they warn, and our water will be poisoned and our children will be stunted and our cattle will be victims of terrible intestinal explosions. Yesterday the Observer found some political support for the gloomsters, in the form of a German MEP. His name is Jo Leinan, and it seems he is a prominent member of the Euro-parliament’s energy committee. There were only two countries interested in this procedure, he said – Poland and Britain.
And according to Herr Leinan, neither of us knows what we are getting ourselves into. We are about to release the pent-up shale gas of Britain from its sinister cavities beneath Lancashire and Sussex, and anything can happen. Before we touch the integuments of the planet, he says, the European parliament will produce some regulations to “discipline” the operation.
Regulations? From the Euro-parliament? And these people wonder why we in Britain are increasingly determined to have a referendum on our membership of the EU. I am sure that the SPD politician means well, but just what in the name of hell has it got to do with him? Before he draws up any regulations for the British fracking market, he might care to look at what has been going on in America in the past four years, where the discovery of large quantities of shale gas is turning into one of the most significant political events since the end of the Cold War.
In 2008 the cost of natural gas in the US was $8 a unit. It is now $3 a unit. In China it is still up at $12 a unit – and the result is that the US is now competitive in industries such as fertilisers and chemicals that American politicians had long since assumed were lost to low-cost economies of the East. As a result of the use of gas, the Americans have cut their CO2 emissions to levels not seen since the Nineties, in spite of a growing population.
Indeed, the Americans have now actually met their obligations under the Kyoto protocol on climate change – and they never even signed up for it. The shale gas industry is a huge employer, and has so far contributed $50 billion in tax. As for the anxieties about water poisoning or a murrain on the cattle, there have been 125,000 fracks in the US, and not a single complaint to the Environmental Protection Agency.
It is no wonder that some of the more heroic spirits in the Coalition Government are saying that we should get our act together, and make use of what nature has bestowed on Lancashire and elsewhere. As soon as he became Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson announced that he was going to make life easy for potential frackers, with a one-stop permit system. He has the support of George Osborne, who hailed the potential of fracking in the Autumn Statement.
Alas, we are in a Coalition, and the Liberals run the Department of Energy and Climate Change. They have announced a moratorium on fracking, claiming that there have been earthquakes in the Blackpool area – even though there are tiny quakes every day. In what they thought was a cunning move, the Lib Dems also leaked the location of two big reserves of shale gas – in Tatton and Shropshire North. Much to his credit, Owen Paterson immediately announced that he was all in favour of fracking his constituency if it would deliver jobs and growth, and he is dead right. The shale gas discovery is hateful to the Libs and the Greens, because it destroys their narrative about the ever rising cost of hydrocarbons. It is glorious news for humanity. It doesn’t need the subsidy of wind power. I don’t know whether it will work in Britain, but we should get fracking right away.
4) Urban Heat Island Effect Caused 50% Of Warming In China, New Study Finds
Global Warming Policy Foundation, 22 July 2019
New study finds that past temperature records have failed to accurately detect urbanisation biases, which may account for about 50% of the recorded warming in China since the 1940s.
Urban Heat Island China
The new Conservative Party leader used his victory speech at the event in London to promise that he would meet the October 31 Brexit deadline with a "new spirit of can do", releasing the country's "guy ropes of self-doubt and negativity".
He said it was an "extraordinary honour and privilege" and insisted that "we are going to unite this amazing country and we are going to take it forward".
Mr Johnson said: "We are going to get Brexit done on October 31, we are going to take advantage of all the opportunities that it will bring in a new spirit of can do.
"And we are once again going to believe in ourselves and what we can achieve, and like some slumbering giant we are going to rise and ping off the guy ropes of self-doubt and negativity."
Full story
2) How The Left Sees Boris Johnson’s Climate Change Record
New Scientist, 23 July 2019
Boris Johnson will be the next prime minister of the UK after winning the Conservative party leadership campaign. Theresa May is expected to resign tomorrow and hand over power. Here's what Johnson has said and done about climate change
With stints as mayor of London and the UK’s foreign secretary, Johnson has never held a government position specifically related to science and technology, but he has often spoken out on matters like climate change and the environment.
As mayor of London, Johnson shrank the city’s congestion charge zone, counter to efforts to reduce carbon emissions and air pollution, but he did encourage cycling by rolling-out a public bike hire scheme. He said in 2016 that he wished he had built “more segregated cycling routes for London.”
In 2013 he announced plans for an Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), but was criticised for delaying the implementation period until after he had left power and for limiting the affected area to the Congestion Charge Zone. His successor Sadiq Khan implemented a much wider reaching version of the ULEZ which will eventually include all vehicles within the north and south circular roads.
In a 2014 interview with New Scientist, during his time as mayor, Johnson said that he thought the London of 2034 would no longer have any vehicles powered by fossil fuels. He also said London should “definitely, absolutely” have a nuclear power station, though it is unclear if these remarks were intended seriously.
Johnson has generally voted against measures to prevent climate change. In 2013, during a snowy UK winter, he highlighted a factually incorrect claim by Piers Corbyn (a weather forecaster who, coincidently, is the brother of Johnson’s would-be rival, the current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn) that low solar activity could lead to a mini ice age.
He came out against the expansion of the UK’s largest airport, Heathrow, though ultimately missed a key vote to block it as he was in Afghanistan conducting his duties as foreign secretary.
During the BBC’s Conservative party leadership debate, Boris was challenged about the plans to expand Heathrow airport and said he continued to have reservations about a third runway, and claimed that London’s CO2 emissions were cut during his time in power.
Full story
3) Good Old Boris: Ignore The Doom Merchants, Britain should get fracking
Boris Johnson, The Daily Telegraph, 9 December 2012
It’s green, it’s cheap and it’s plentiful! So why are opponents of shale gas making such a fuss??
If it were not so serious there would be something ludicrous about the reaction of the green lobby to the discovery of big shale gas reserves in this country. Here we are in the fifth year of a downturn. We have pensioners battling fuel poverty. We have energy firms jacking up their prices. We have real worries about security of energy supply – a new building like the Shard needs four times as much juice as the entire town of Colchester.
Our nukes are so high-maintenance that the cost of disposing of their spent fuel rods is put at about £100 billion – more than the value of all the electricity they have produced since the Fifties. The hills and dales of Britain are being forested with white satanic mills, and yet the total contribution of wind power is still only about 0.4 per cent of Britain’s needs. Wave power, solar power, biomass – their collective oomph wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding. We are prevented from putting in a new system of coal-fired power stations, since that would breach our commitments under Kyoto. We are therefore increasingly and humiliatingly dependent on Vladimir Putin’s gas or on the atomic power of the French state.
And then in the region of Blackpool – as if by a miracle – we may have found the solution. The extraction of shale gas by hydraulic fracture, or fracking, seems an answer to the nation’s prayers. There is loads of the stuff, apparently – about 1.3 trillion barrels; and if we could get it out we could power our toasters and dishwashers for the foreseeable future. By offering the hope of cheap electricity, fracking would make Britain once again competitive in sectors of industry – bauxite smelting springs to mind – where we have lost hope.
The extraction process alone would generate tens of thousands of jobs in parts of the country that desperately need them. And above all, the burning of gas to generate electricity is much, much cleaner – and produces less CO2 – than burning coal. What, as they say, is not to like?
In their mad denunciations of fracking, the Greens and the eco-warriors betray the mindset of people who cannot bear a piece of unadulterated good news. Beware this new technology, they wail. Do not tamper with the corsets of Gaia! Don’t probe her loamy undergarments with so much as a finger — or else the goddess of the earth will erupt with seismic revenge. Dig out this shale gas, they warn, and our water will be poisoned and our children will be stunted and our cattle will be victims of terrible intestinal explosions. Yesterday the Observer found some political support for the gloomsters, in the form of a German MEP. His name is Jo Leinan, and it seems he is a prominent member of the Euro-parliament’s energy committee. There were only two countries interested in this procedure, he said – Poland and Britain.
And according to Herr Leinan, neither of us knows what we are getting ourselves into. We are about to release the pent-up shale gas of Britain from its sinister cavities beneath Lancashire and Sussex, and anything can happen. Before we touch the integuments of the planet, he says, the European parliament will produce some regulations to “discipline” the operation.
Regulations? From the Euro-parliament? And these people wonder why we in Britain are increasingly determined to have a referendum on our membership of the EU. I am sure that the SPD politician means well, but just what in the name of hell has it got to do with him? Before he draws up any regulations for the British fracking market, he might care to look at what has been going on in America in the past four years, where the discovery of large quantities of shale gas is turning into one of the most significant political events since the end of the Cold War.
In 2008 the cost of natural gas in the US was $8 a unit. It is now $3 a unit. In China it is still up at $12 a unit – and the result is that the US is now competitive in industries such as fertilisers and chemicals that American politicians had long since assumed were lost to low-cost economies of the East. As a result of the use of gas, the Americans have cut their CO2 emissions to levels not seen since the Nineties, in spite of a growing population.
Indeed, the Americans have now actually met their obligations under the Kyoto protocol on climate change – and they never even signed up for it. The shale gas industry is a huge employer, and has so far contributed $50 billion in tax. As for the anxieties about water poisoning or a murrain on the cattle, there have been 125,000 fracks in the US, and not a single complaint to the Environmental Protection Agency.
It is no wonder that some of the more heroic spirits in the Coalition Government are saying that we should get our act together, and make use of what nature has bestowed on Lancashire and elsewhere. As soon as he became Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson announced that he was going to make life easy for potential frackers, with a one-stop permit system. He has the support of George Osborne, who hailed the potential of fracking in the Autumn Statement.
Alas, we are in a Coalition, and the Liberals run the Department of Energy and Climate Change. They have announced a moratorium on fracking, claiming that there have been earthquakes in the Blackpool area – even though there are tiny quakes every day. In what they thought was a cunning move, the Lib Dems also leaked the location of two big reserves of shale gas – in Tatton and Shropshire North. Much to his credit, Owen Paterson immediately announced that he was all in favour of fracking his constituency if it would deliver jobs and growth, and he is dead right. The shale gas discovery is hateful to the Libs and the Greens, because it destroys their narrative about the ever rising cost of hydrocarbons. It is glorious news for humanity. It doesn’t need the subsidy of wind power. I don’t know whether it will work in Britain, but we should get fracking right away.
4) Urban Heat Island Effect Caused 50% Of Warming In China, New Study Finds
Global Warming Policy Foundation, 22 July 2019
New study finds that past temperature records have failed to accurately detect urbanisation biases, which may account for about 50% of the recorded warming in China since the 1940s.
Urban Heat Island China
Fig. 6. Map of the divergence (ΔTMin − ΔTMax) between the warmings registered by the minimum and maximum temperature records (CRU TS4) between 1945 and 1954 and 2005–2014. The cyan dots indicate the 200 most populated cities in China according to the Free World City Database.
Highlights
* Mean surface temperature in China has warmed by 0.8 °C since 1950.
* Atmospheric boundary layer physics predicts higher UHI warming during night.
* The divergence between Tmin and Tmax is used to detect urbanization biases.
* The China regions with the strongest Tmin-Tmax divergence are also the most populated.
* Thus, the temperature warming in China is partially due to UHI biases.
Abstract
Near-surface temperature records show that China warmed by about 0.8 °C from 1950 to 2010. However, there exists an ongoing debate about whether this warming might have been partially due to urbanization bias. In fact, homogenization approaches may be inefficient in densely populated provinces that have experienced a significant urban development since the 1940s. This paper aims to complement previous research on the topic by showing that an alternative approach based on the analysis of the divergence between the minimum (Tmin) and maximum (Tmax) near-surface temperature records since the 1940s could be useful to clarify the issue because urban heat island (UHI) effects stress the warming of nocturnal temperatures more than the diurnal ones. Then, the significance of the divergence observed in the data could be evaluated against the expectations produced by the CMIP5 general circulation model simulations. From 1945–1954 to 2005–2014, on average and over China, these models predict that Tmin had to warm 0.19 ± 0.06 °C more than Tmax. However, during the same period, the climatic records show that Tmin warmed 0.83 ± 0.15 °C more than Tmax. A similar analysis demonstrates that the effect is more pronounced during the colder months from November–April than during the warmer ones from May to October. A comparison versus China urbanization records demonstrates that the regions characterized by a large Tmin-Tmax divergence are also the most densely populated ones, such as north-east China, that have experienced a diffused and fast urbanization since the 1940s. The results are significant and may indicate the presence of a substantial uncorrected urbanization bias in the Chinese climate records. Under the hypothesis that Tmax is a better metric for studying climatic changes than Tmean or Tmin, we conclude that about 50% of the recorded warming of China since the 1940s could be due to uncorrected urbanization bias. In addition, we also find that the Tmax record from May to October over China shows the 1940s and the 2000s equally warm, in contrast to the 1 °C warming predicted by the CMIP5 models.
Reference
Nicola Scafetta and Shenghui Ouyang (2019) Detection of UHI bias in China climate network using Tmin and Tmax surface temperature divergence. Global and Planetary Change, Volume 181. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2019.102989
5) Joe Oliver: We Should Prepare For Extreme Weather, But Tying It To Climate Change Is A Mistake
Financial Post, 23 July 2019
The harm caused by extreme weather merits a national action plan, whatever its cause and whether or not it is increasing in severity or frequency. Policies that only address climate change won’t do the job.
Canadians are bombarded with images of forest fires, tornadoes and torrential rain, all attributed to manmade climate change. We are warned that these calamities will get much worse and that catastrophes will soon be irreversible unless we urgently reduce our carbon dioxide emissions.
But the causes of extreme weather and whether it’s bound to become more common are still being debated by scientists. In a paper just published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Professor Judith Curry, President of the Climate Forecast Applications Network, concludes that “recent international and national climate assessment reports have reported low confidence in any link between manmade climate change and observations of wildfires, hurricanes, floods and droughts.” As a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and a distinguished academician who has authored over 190 scientific papers, she should know. Dr. Curry notes further that, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “there is not yet evidence of changes in the global frequency or intensity of hurricanes, droughts, floods or wildfires.”
To put it in layman’s terms, climate change is probably not responsible for extreme weather, which in any case has not increased over time, in spite of its evident variability. Yet we keep hearing the very opposite from numerous doomsayers, most with no scientific background — including the prime minister, his hyperbolic minister of environment and climate change, the mainstream media and the climate-industrial complex.
Let’s do a thought-experiment. Assume for a moment, contrary to conventional wisdom, that Dr. Curry is correct and what you hear from so many politicians and social media outlets doesn’t stand up to the evidence. Would that mean we don’t face a serious threat? Not at all. As Dr. Curry also makes clear, our vulnerability to extreme weather has increased with population growth, the movement of people, goods and infrastructure to areas susceptible to extreme weather, questionable land-use practices and continuing ecosystem degradation. As we have all seen, the risks to life and property can be severe and may well be growing. Thankfully, there are policies, strategies and adaptations that can lessen the harm. Whether you are a climate change alarmist, an agnostic, a skeptic or an outright denier you should still support adaptation and mitigation strategies.
Unfortunately, as Dr. Curry writes, attributing extreme weather to manmade climate change can keep us from understanding the variability of extreme weather events and reducing our vulnerability to them. Tying these events to climate change can lead us to adopt inappropriate policies and ignore practical approaches that would lessen personal injury and the destruction of physical assets.
We have an opportunity to be proactive in preparing for weather disasters, reducing our vulnerability and increasing our survivability. Doing so means strengthening our infrastructure, as well as changing our policies and practices.
What is Justin Trudeau’s response to all this? To impose a controversial carbon dioxide tax that, because of the relative inelasticity of demand, is too low to change consumer behaviour. Even if it did eventually work at much higher levels, which the government now claims it will not impose, its impact on global climate would be so small as to be unmeasurable. Even if climate change were the source of extreme weather, Trudeau’s signature carbon solution would be certain to fail.
Under the circumstances, it makes more sense to focus on adaptations and policies that will reduce or protect against the frequency and intensity of fires, floods and tornadoes. Yet Justin Trudeau persists in feel-good virtue signalling and promoting hugely expensive and divisive policy innovations that accomplish nothing.
Canada badly needs leadership that will unite the country in common cause. A good start would be a co-ordinated federal-provincial-municipal action plan that realistically confronts the risks that extreme weather poses.
Joe Oliver was federal minister of finance and minister of natural resources.
6) Manipulation Of Carbon Emissions Trading System Threatens EU Climate Targets
Tilburg University, 23 July 2019
Manipulation of European Union Emissions Trading system (EU ETS) by the buy, bank, burn program compensates unregulated emissions while regulated sectors carry a large part of the burden. This distorts the balance between regulated firms and non-regulated projects, so parties outside the EU ETS can be virtuous at the cost of others. Environmental economists Reyer Gerlagh and Roweno Heijmans of the Tilburg School of Economics & Management discovered a leak in the system.
The EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) is an important system to reduce CO2 emissions in the Netherlands and Europe in order to achieve the climate targets (zero emissions by 2060). But is it effective? And can we, citizens, consumers, contribute? Yes, indeed. However, the system is leaking, the authors discovered. Their findings were recently published in Nature Climate Change.
Full story
For example, back in 2009 I noted the work of an Australian philosopher who wrote that “When the chips are down I think democracy is a less important goal than is the protection of the planet from the death of life, the end of life on it.” (And there are more such statements at the link.)
This week Foreign Policy offers the straightforward headline: “Democracy Is the Planet’s Greatest Enemy.” Nice to have freedom and self-government so openly attacked. From the article:
If electoral democracy is inadequate to the task of addressing climate change, and the task is the most urgent one humanity faces, then other kinds of politics are urgently needed. The most radical alternative of all would be to consider moving beyond democracy altogether. The authoritarian Chinese system has some advantages when it comes to addressing climate change: One-party rule means freedom from electoral cycles and less need for public consultation. Technocratic solutions that put power in the hands of unelected experts could take key decisions out of the hands of voters.
I’d almost think this was a parody if I didn’t know better. Check Woodrow Wilson’s grave to see if his ghost has escaped.
Full post
Highlights
* Mean surface temperature in China has warmed by 0.8 °C since 1950.
* Atmospheric boundary layer physics predicts higher UHI warming during night.
* The divergence between Tmin and Tmax is used to detect urbanization biases.
* The China regions with the strongest Tmin-Tmax divergence are also the most populated.
* Thus, the temperature warming in China is partially due to UHI biases.
Abstract
Near-surface temperature records show that China warmed by about 0.8 °C from 1950 to 2010. However, there exists an ongoing debate about whether this warming might have been partially due to urbanization bias. In fact, homogenization approaches may be inefficient in densely populated provinces that have experienced a significant urban development since the 1940s. This paper aims to complement previous research on the topic by showing that an alternative approach based on the analysis of the divergence between the minimum (Tmin) and maximum (Tmax) near-surface temperature records since the 1940s could be useful to clarify the issue because urban heat island (UHI) effects stress the warming of nocturnal temperatures more than the diurnal ones. Then, the significance of the divergence observed in the data could be evaluated against the expectations produced by the CMIP5 general circulation model simulations. From 1945–1954 to 2005–2014, on average and over China, these models predict that Tmin had to warm 0.19 ± 0.06 °C more than Tmax. However, during the same period, the climatic records show that Tmin warmed 0.83 ± 0.15 °C more than Tmax. A similar analysis demonstrates that the effect is more pronounced during the colder months from November–April than during the warmer ones from May to October. A comparison versus China urbanization records demonstrates that the regions characterized by a large Tmin-Tmax divergence are also the most densely populated ones, such as north-east China, that have experienced a diffused and fast urbanization since the 1940s. The results are significant and may indicate the presence of a substantial uncorrected urbanization bias in the Chinese climate records. Under the hypothesis that Tmax is a better metric for studying climatic changes than Tmean or Tmin, we conclude that about 50% of the recorded warming of China since the 1940s could be due to uncorrected urbanization bias. In addition, we also find that the Tmax record from May to October over China shows the 1940s and the 2000s equally warm, in contrast to the 1 °C warming predicted by the CMIP5 models.
Reference
Nicola Scafetta and Shenghui Ouyang (2019) Detection of UHI bias in China climate network using Tmin and Tmax surface temperature divergence. Global and Planetary Change, Volume 181. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2019.102989
5) Joe Oliver: We Should Prepare For Extreme Weather, But Tying It To Climate Change Is A Mistake
Financial Post, 23 July 2019
The harm caused by extreme weather merits a national action plan, whatever its cause and whether or not it is increasing in severity or frequency. Policies that only address climate change won’t do the job.
Canadians are bombarded with images of forest fires, tornadoes and torrential rain, all attributed to manmade climate change. We are warned that these calamities will get much worse and that catastrophes will soon be irreversible unless we urgently reduce our carbon dioxide emissions.
But the causes of extreme weather and whether it’s bound to become more common are still being debated by scientists. In a paper just published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Professor Judith Curry, President of the Climate Forecast Applications Network, concludes that “recent international and national climate assessment reports have reported low confidence in any link between manmade climate change and observations of wildfires, hurricanes, floods and droughts.” As a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and a distinguished academician who has authored over 190 scientific papers, she should know. Dr. Curry notes further that, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “there is not yet evidence of changes in the global frequency or intensity of hurricanes, droughts, floods or wildfires.”
To put it in layman’s terms, climate change is probably not responsible for extreme weather, which in any case has not increased over time, in spite of its evident variability. Yet we keep hearing the very opposite from numerous doomsayers, most with no scientific background — including the prime minister, his hyperbolic minister of environment and climate change, the mainstream media and the climate-industrial complex.
Let’s do a thought-experiment. Assume for a moment, contrary to conventional wisdom, that Dr. Curry is correct and what you hear from so many politicians and social media outlets doesn’t stand up to the evidence. Would that mean we don’t face a serious threat? Not at all. As Dr. Curry also makes clear, our vulnerability to extreme weather has increased with population growth, the movement of people, goods and infrastructure to areas susceptible to extreme weather, questionable land-use practices and continuing ecosystem degradation. As we have all seen, the risks to life and property can be severe and may well be growing. Thankfully, there are policies, strategies and adaptations that can lessen the harm. Whether you are a climate change alarmist, an agnostic, a skeptic or an outright denier you should still support adaptation and mitigation strategies.
Unfortunately, as Dr. Curry writes, attributing extreme weather to manmade climate change can keep us from understanding the variability of extreme weather events and reducing our vulnerability to them. Tying these events to climate change can lead us to adopt inappropriate policies and ignore practical approaches that would lessen personal injury and the destruction of physical assets.
We have an opportunity to be proactive in preparing for weather disasters, reducing our vulnerability and increasing our survivability. Doing so means strengthening our infrastructure, as well as changing our policies and practices.
What is Justin Trudeau’s response to all this? To impose a controversial carbon dioxide tax that, because of the relative inelasticity of demand, is too low to change consumer behaviour. Even if it did eventually work at much higher levels, which the government now claims it will not impose, its impact on global climate would be so small as to be unmeasurable. Even if climate change were the source of extreme weather, Trudeau’s signature carbon solution would be certain to fail.
Under the circumstances, it makes more sense to focus on adaptations and policies that will reduce or protect against the frequency and intensity of fires, floods and tornadoes. Yet Justin Trudeau persists in feel-good virtue signalling and promoting hugely expensive and divisive policy innovations that accomplish nothing.
Canada badly needs leadership that will unite the country in common cause. A good start would be a co-ordinated federal-provincial-municipal action plan that realistically confronts the risks that extreme weather poses.
Joe Oliver was federal minister of finance and minister of natural resources.
6) Manipulation Of Carbon Emissions Trading System Threatens EU Climate Targets
Tilburg University, 23 July 2019
Manipulation of European Union Emissions Trading system (EU ETS) by the buy, bank, burn program compensates unregulated emissions while regulated sectors carry a large part of the burden. This distorts the balance between regulated firms and non-regulated projects, so parties outside the EU ETS can be virtuous at the cost of others. Environmental economists Reyer Gerlagh and Roweno Heijmans of the Tilburg School of Economics & Management discovered a leak in the system.
The EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) is an important system to reduce CO2 emissions in the Netherlands and Europe in order to achieve the climate targets (zero emissions by 2060). But is it effective? And can we, citizens, consumers, contribute? Yes, indeed. However, the system is leaking, the authors discovered. Their findings were recently published in Nature Climate Change.
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7) And Finally: The Eco-Fascists Strike Again
Steven Hayward, PowerLine, 22 July 2019
The open anti-democratic and pro-authoritarian stance of the climatistas is becoming increasingly evident.
Steven Hayward, PowerLine, 22 July 2019
The open anti-democratic and pro-authoritarian stance of the climatistas is becoming increasingly evident.
As I’ve been pointing our for more than a decade, the most ominous contradiction of the environmental left these days is the way in which they champion the rights of nature while going along with the rest of the left in denying human nature, let alone the natural rights of humans—which is the central premise of democratic self-government. The result, as I have been warning, is the increasingly open anti-democratic and pro-authoritarian stance of the climatistas.
For example, back in 2009 I noted the work of an Australian philosopher who wrote that “When the chips are down I think democracy is a less important goal than is the protection of the planet from the death of life, the end of life on it.” (And there are more such statements at the link.)
This week Foreign Policy offers the straightforward headline: “Democracy Is the Planet’s Greatest Enemy.” Nice to have freedom and self-government so openly attacked. From the article:
If electoral democracy is inadequate to the task of addressing climate change, and the task is the most urgent one humanity faces, then other kinds of politics are urgently needed. The most radical alternative of all would be to consider moving beyond democracy altogether. The authoritarian Chinese system has some advantages when it comes to addressing climate change: One-party rule means freedom from electoral cycles and less need for public consultation. Technocratic solutions that put power in the hands of unelected experts could take key decisions out of the hands of voters.
I’d almost think this was a parody if I didn’t know better. Check Woodrow Wilson’s grave to see if his ghost has escaped.
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