GWPF Newsletter - Ignore Climate Hysteria: World Grain Crop Set To Break Record

English Summer Failing To Meet Alarmist Expectations (Again)

In this newsletter:

1) Ignore Climate Hysteria: World Grain Crop Set To Break Record
The Weekly Times, 30 July 2019
 
2) French 2019 Soft Wheat Crop 2nd Largest In History
Business Recorder, 30 July 2019

 
3) English Summer Failing To Meet Alarmist Expectations (Again)
Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That, 1 August 2019
 
4) Child Prophets And Proselytizers Of Climate Catastrophe
Andy West, Climate Etc., 29 July 2019
 
5) Sanjeev Sabhlok: Maximise The Current Generation’s Wealth And Review Any CO2 Issues In 2050
The Times of India, 1 August 2019
 
6) Ruth Lea: Global Warming: The Uk’s Expensive And Futile Gesture Politics
The Conservative Woman, 1 August 2019
 
7) And Finally: Experts Warn We Have Only 12 Years Left Until They Change The Timeline On Global Warming Again
Babylon Bee, 1 August 2019

Full details:

1) Ignore Climate Hysteria: World Grain Crop Set To Break Record
The Weekly Times, 30 July 2019

WORLD grain production is set to reach record levels in 2019-20, despite a recent report scaling production back by 8 million tonnes.


A French farmer and agricultural contractors harvest a wheat field, with two tracked combine harvester of 12 and 9 metres wide, in the hilly fields of “Le Perche”, in Combre, northwestern France, on July 23, 2019. (Photo by Jean-Francois MONIER / AFP)

The International Grains Council July report lowered total grain production to 2.148 billion tonnes this season, with wheat production downgraded across the European Union, Russia and Canada.

The IGC report put total global wheat production at 763 million tonnes for the 2019-20 season, down on last month’s forecast of 769 million tonnes, but still higher than the 2018-19 production figure of 733 million tonnes.

“ … the global wheat outturn is seen at a record, while maize is placed at the second largest ever and barley at the highest in a decade,” the report said.

The Rabobank July agricommodity market research report, released last week, reported global wheat production to have been reduced by 9 million tonnes between last month and this month.

“With major exporter production reduced by 10 million tonnes amid a modest increase in production in the US, hot and dry weather across Europe, the Black Sea region, and Australia having pushed yields down,” the report said.

Full story

2) French 2019 Soft Wheat Crop 2nd Largest In History
Business Recorder, 30 July 2019

PARIS: Farmers in France, the European Union’s largest grain producer, will harvest their second largest soft wheat crop in history this year at 39.17 million tonnes, as a record-breaking heatwave failed to hurt yields, consultancy Agritel said on Tuesday.

That would be up 14.9% from last year’s weather-hit crop.

Agritel projected the national yield of the ongoing harvest at 7.82 tonnes per hectare, 12% above last year’s poor crop and 7.5% above the average of the past five years when excluding the exceptionally high and low harvests in 2015 and 2016.

“Although the harvest is not fully over in the regions near the Channel, reported yields remain particularly good, completely wiping out concerns of an impact of the end-of-cycle heatwave on grain filling,” Agritel Director General Michel Portier said in a statement.

Full story

3) English Summer Failing To Meet Alarmist Expectations (Again)
Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That, 1 August 2019

After all of the fuss about a couple of days of sunshine in Britain, reality brings us back down to earth with the monthly CET figures:

 https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/cetml1659on.dat

Average mean temperatures for July ended up at 17.5C, meaning that last month was an unremarkable 45th warmest since 1660, tying with years like 1847, 1870 and 1923. It was also 1.3C cooler than July 1783.

This is known as CLIMATE CHANGE.

Taking both June and July together, this year’s ranking drops even further, to 82nd, in a tie with 1706 and 1878.

Top ranking goes to 1976, followed by 2006 and 1826:

With disappointing numbers like these, it is no surprise that the Met Office were so desperate to trumpet one day’s weather.

Full post

4) Child Prophets And Proselytizers Of Climate Catastrophe
Andy West, Climate Etc., 29 July 2019

The role of children in the culture of climate catastrophism



1.1 Frightening our children: When do we find it acceptable to institutionally frighten children? While our first thought is perhaps that this should never happen, in practice there are at least two scenarios where it’s considered morally acceptable. The first is where dangerous hard realities beyond adult control, require that children must be taught a respect of such realities. This may often involve a certain amount of fear among other techniques, in hope that this will help children autonomously keep themselves safe. An example is gas-mask training in WW2¹, because adults can’t be everywhere at once to assist all children with their masks in time. The second scenario is where it’s morally acceptable by virtue of supporting a culture that has defined the moral landscape (or an up-and-coming culture that is attempting so to do). In this second case, instilling culturally approved fears is considered normative, to achieve desired social behavior, grant access to group benefits, and provide supposed cultural rewards. An example is scaring children about sin or Hell or the Crucifixion², in order to reinforce Christian social behavior and introduce the partnering carrot of going to Heaven (instead of Hell) for conformance.

1.2 Children Protesting: When do children band together to try and make a communal voice of protest heard by society? As above, there are at least two scenarios where this happens. The first is a reaction to an existing and widespread serious wronging of children (and possibly adults too) of some kind. The second is in reaction to strong culturally instilled fears, which have incorrectly been interpreted as a real and present threat or harm (section 5). In both cases some action is sought from adults, in order to remove or mitigate the problem. Some adults are typically involved in the organization of a children’s movement, having aligned interests; anything from genuinely safe-guarding their children (or children’s interests) to virtue signaling. Example scenarios follow later.

1.3 Children in charge: When do society’s leaders advocate and implement (or attempt to) main policy expressed by a child? Once again, there are at least two scenarios where this happens. The first is where a widespread wronging such as in the paragraph immediately above, promoted to social leadership by a representative child victim, is deemed to cry out for redress. Whether children are seriously disadvantaged or suffering psychologically or physically or all of these, and indeed whether or not causation involves cultural elements, this is essentially a hard reality issue of present harm. The second scenario is where leaders are emotively disabled from resisting / contradicting the child’s policy, even if impacts are likely net very negative, because this expresses some culturally approved fear that the former are already primed for. Or at least for an up-and-coming culture, resisting is still a major challenge for leadership.

Cultural bias blinds folks to downsides, and our ingrained instincts to avoid stigma are likely sharpened in those who want to retain leadership; a lack of support risks serious cultural stigma, including shame for failing to acknowledge moral censure by a ‘wronged’ (i.e. according to the accepted cultural narrative) child. Example scenarios follow later.

1.4 Which is which? A secular, reasoning and reasonable society should aspire to avoid the cultural scenarios from all these cases, which lead to needless fears, trauma, false hopes and inappropriate social actions. A reasonable religious society should aspire to limit context to core values, and prevent alarmist / extremist leverage of our emotive concern for children, plus damage to children who are pushed beyond benign religious participation. Yet for any given protest, or policy expressed to leadership, or instilling of fear, how can we know which scenario is which? And so indeed whether the constant fear about climate change instilled into our children (section 5, last para), the consequent children’sclimate strikes, and the dramatic aspirations expressed by Greta Thunberg, fall into the reality bracket or the cultural bracket? Is Greta’s pitch to the UN as reality based as Malala Yousafzai’s pitch, yet needing from them immensely more support for worldwide change? Is the nature of the school climate strikes ultimately as material and justifiable as the 1963 children’s crusade, yet where the scope of the problem being protested by children is hugely more extensive? Large swathes of society enthusiastically support the school strikes and Greta; they’d surely say ‘yes’ to the latter two questions. But how do detailed comparisons actually pan out?

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5) Sanjeev Sabhlok: Maximise The Current Generation’s Wealth And Review Any CO2 Issues In 2050
The Times of India, 1 August 2019

As a rule of thumb, 80 per cent of policy development should be about understanding the problem. Once a problem is understood, the solution generally commends itself.

But in the case of climate change, policymakers have bypassed this step and are insisting on “fixing” the “problem”. They forget that the IPCC’s own reports show that there is no problem. Even in its extreme scenario (highly speculative), the worst that could happen is that our hugely richer future generations will become 2 per cent less rich. But the IPCC fails to emphasise that without using fossil fuels today, our future generations won’t become even half as rich.

Our party wants the Modi government to identify the optimal level of CO2 in the atmosphere beyond which it becomes a proven pollutant. The Earth’s geological history should be used as a basis for this determination and not the hugely speculative climate models.

There is overwhelming evidence that today’s CO2 level of 400 ppm is simply too low. Commercial greenhouse farmers insist on 1500 ppm of CO2 to get the best plant output. That makes sense because most of today’s plants evolved over the past 250 million years when average CO2 levels were around 1200 ppm. We also know that at 150 ppm of CO2 plants struggle to survive. It seems sensible, therefore, to aim for a minimum level of 1200 ppm of CO2 in the air.

At what level will CO2 start harming us? A simple calculation can answer this. At 21 per cent of the atmosphere, oxygen is currently 500 times the concentration of CO2. We also know that millions of Tibetans and Ladakh residents routinely live at 60 per cent of this oxygen level. This means there is “space” in the air for up to 200 times more CO2 without reducing oxygen availability. While submariners routinely operate at 5000 ppm, they could easily do so also at higher levels if necessary.

In summary, CO2 levels of 1500 ppm are hugely beneficial and CO2 levels up to 200 times higher than today’s levels won’t harm us. So where exactly is the problem?

It is all about the greenhouse effect. But there are many proofs that the impact of this effect is grossly exaggerated. First, plants evolved to love 1500 ppm of CO2, which means the Earth did not burn up at that stage since we are all happily here today. Second, there is conclusive geological evidence of far higher CO2 levels in the past, even as the Earth was much hotter (the Earth has been cooling down since its creation). There was never any runaway greenhouse effect even at those much higher CO2 levels.

Climate change alarmists call those who question their false claims, “climate deniers” but they are the real climate deniers since they deny all proven biological and geological evidence. They rely, instead, on an entirely speculative impact.

The nature of the greenhouse effect is such that its “power” or “sensitivity” cannot be measured inside a lab. There are only two ways to do so: first, through geological studies which have already declared CO2 to be perfectly harmless even at much higher levels. The second is through climate models. So far, within just 30 years, the models have dramatically overshot reality. I expect them to even more badly overshoot reality by 2050.

Based on this, and following in the footsteps of Julian Simon I have offered to put my money where my mouth is – by wagering with IPCC that the Earth’s temperature will not rise by two additional degrees by 2100 if mankind does nothing whatsoever about CO2.

Even for those who are not convinced by the analysis, I have provided over the course of four articles, by 2050 everything will become clear as day. By 2050, as well, fusion energy would have become commercially viable, thereby making fossil fuels largely redundant and this debate irrelevant.

People forgot today the passionate “peak oil” debates of the past fifty years, and although peak oil remains well into the distant future, there is no doubt that mankind needs to switch to non-fossil-fuel energy sources in the next few decades. That is an imperative unrelated to the CO2 alarm.

As far as CO2 is concerned, we should take a policy holiday and shut down the IPCC. Instead, the best policy today is to (a) abandon socialism (Why does IPCC not talk about this ideology which is causing mankind the most harm?), and (b) to do everything possible to maximize the wealth of the current generations. Then review the situation in 2050 when more data and new technologies become available.

In the meanwhile, there’s no harm in installing as many nuclear plants as are viable and growing more trees (but, of course, how can India grow more trees when the Modi government insists on blocking GM crops that can produce more from the same amount of land?).

And we can keep researching alternative energy technologies. However, interventions to divert precious resources into uneconomic solar and wind energy are the surest way to harm future generations.

The climate change alarm movement is driven by extremist socialists. Ultra-socialist Saikat Chakrabarti, who prepared Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal exposed the underbelly of climate change alarmism when he confessed that “The Green New Deal wasn’t originally a climate thing at all. We think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing”. The CO2 panic is a socialist harangue dressed in a veil of bad science.

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6) Ruth Lea: Global Warming: The Uk’s Expensive And Futile Gesture Politics
The Conservative Woman, 1 August 2019

How have we got to where we are now?

In recent notes for The Conservative Woman, I described the UK’s in effect unilateral zero emissions target as ‘futile gesture politics’, and concluded that international initiatives to ‘control’ climate change by curbing CO2 emissions cannot succeed. In this brief background piece I discuss the main policy developments behind our ‘decarbonisation’ policies: how have we got to where we are now.

The EU’s climate change policies

As a member of the EU, the UK has, of course, been subject to the EU’s climate policy. The EU has undertaken many climate-related initiatives since 1991, when it issued the first Community strategy to limit carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and improve energy efficiency. Later, the EU was an active participant in the Kyoto climate change conference in 1997, signing the Kyoto Protocol by which the EU committed to an 8 per cent decrease in emissions between 1990 and 2008-2012. The EU and its member states have met this commitment, according to the European Commission. The Kyoto Protocol’s second commitment period was agreed at the Doha conference in 2012. The EU countries (with Iceland) agreed to meet, jointly, a 20 per cent reduction target by 2020 compared with the 1990 baseline.

This 20 per cent reduction target was in line with the EU’s own target of 20 per cent by 2020, as set out in the EU’s 2020 Climate and Energy Package, agreed in 2007. This package set three key targets:

1. The aforementioned 20 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions, compared with 1990 levels.

2. 20 per cent of EU energy from renewables, which was, arguably, included under pressure from Germany which was concerned its renewable energy policies would put German business at a competitive disadvantage.

If the EU had been just concerned about climate change, it would not have specified how the GHG emissions target should be met. It would not have specified a renewables target. Incidentally, PM Tony Blair committed to a target of 15 per cent of the UK’s energy consumption (not just electricity generation) from renewable sources by 2020, which has significantly raised the costs of meeting the emissions targets.

3. A 20 per cent improvement in energy efficiency.

The EU emissions trading system (EU ETS), the EU’s key tool for reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), principally CO2, was established in 2005. The EU ETS works on the ‘cap and trade’ principle. A cap is set on the total amount of certain greenhouse gases that may be emitted by installations covered by the system. Within the cap, companies receive or buy emission allowances, which they can trade with one another as needed. Auctioning is currently the default method for allocating allowances. The cap is being reduced over time so that total emissions fall in line with the EU’s targets. The European Commission estimates that it covers around 45 per cent of the EU’s emissions.

The ETS has evolved since its introduction and is currently in Phase 3 (2012-2020). Phase 1 ran from 2005 to 2007 and Phase 2 ran from 2008 to 2012 (the initial Kyoto commitment period). One of the major changes introduced in Phase 3 was the single EU-wide cap on emissions, in place of the previous system of national caps. Phase 4 is planned to run from 2021 to 2030 (in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement, under which the EU committed to reduce GHG emissions by at least 40 per cent by 2030 compared with 1990).

The UK remains subject to the EU’s climate change policies, including the ETS, whilst it is a member of the EU. Given the single EU-wide cap, this implies that the overall impact on the EU’s total traded emissions of any UK cuts in traded emissions could well be zero, other things being equal.

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7) And Finally: Experts Warn We Have Only 12 Years Left Until They Change The Timeline On Global Warming Again
Babylon Bee, 1 August 2019

WORLD—Climate experts have solemnly warned that we only have twelve years left until they change the dates on global warming again.



"If we don't take action, then in 12 years we will have to explain why the world hasn't ended and come up with a new number," one UN scientist warned. "This is a very serious threat, and we urge everyone to hand control of the economy to the government immediately before we have no more time left to change the timeline again."

The scientific consensus is that roughly 10-12 years from now, the world will be flooded with new doomsday predictions. This can all be avoided if we overhaul the economy and become socialists, according to non-political, unbiased sciencey type guys.

"Should we not change our ways, our old predictions will melt, dangerously raising the chance of us having to move the goalposts again," said Al Gore. "Do you really want me to write another book, film another movie, and go on another tour in my private jet just because you dingbats couldn't be bothered to alter your lifestyles? I don't think so. Let's all get on board with this 12-year figure, or we'll have to push back the date again."

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.