Record-High World Grain Production For Second Year In A Row
In this newsletter:
1) The Benefits Of Global Warming: Record-High World Grain Production For Second Year In A Row
Successful Farming, June 2020
2) Climate Crisis? What Climate Crisis?
Fresh Plaza News, 3 July 2020
3) Hot Summer Epic Fail: New Climate Models Exaggerate U.S. Midwest Warming by 6X
Roy Spencer, 3 July 2020
4) Coronavirus Derails EU’s Climate Focus
EUobserver, 30 June 2020
5) Dominic Lawson: Is Boris Johnson On The Side Of The Broke Or The Woke?
Daily Mail, 6 July 2020
Daily Mail, 6 July 2020
6) Ross Clark: The Next Culture War Will Be Over Climate Change
The Spectator, 4 July 2020
7) Bjorn Lomborg’s ‘False Alarm’ Brings Reason to Climate Change Debate
Richard Trzupek, The Epoch Times, 1 July 2020
Richard Trzupek, The Epoch Times, 1 July 2020
8) And Finally: The ‘Teenage God of Global Warming’ Feeling Sudden Lack Of Relevance
Sky News Australia, 29 June 2020
Sky News Australia, 29 June 2020
Full details:
1) The Benefits Of Global Warming: Record-High World Grain Production For Second Year In A Row
Successful Farming, June 2020
With production surging by 4.4%, corn will drive world cereal grain production to record levels in 2020/2021, said the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in its first forecast of the new crops.
It was the second forecast in a week of record global output as the planting season ends in the northern hemisphere.
The FAO forecast cereal grain production of 2.781 billion tonnes, up 2.6% from the record set in 2019/2020.
In spite of uncertainties posed by the pandemic,” it said, prospects point to “a comfortable supply and demand situation…
Maize would account for the bulk of the predicted increase, with an expected expansion of 64.5 million tonnes to a record level of 1,207 million tonnes, boosted by record harvests in the United States of America (USA), Canada, and Ukraine, and near-record harvests in Brazil and Argentina.”
Rice production of 508.7 million tonnes would be the highest ever, up 1.6% from 2019/2020, while wheat “is forecast to decline from the previous year’s good level, largely on likely downturns in the European Union (EU), Ukraine, and the USA more than offsetting expected production increases in the Russian Federation and Australia,” said the FAO Cereal Supply and Demand Brief, issued last week.
Full story
see also GWPF report by Indur Goklany: Carbon Dioxide: The Good News
2) Climate Crisis? What Climate Crisis?
Fresh Plaza News, 3 July 2020
South Africa’s farms are producing near-record amounts of food right now
According to Tonie Fuchs, Managing Director at Capespan Group Limited, it’s been a good season for South Africa so far. He claims that South Africa’s wildly productive farms’ are keeping the nation afloat.
“Large harvests are the order of the day right now, and agriculture is thriving – it grew by 28% in the first quarter of 2020 while the economy shrunk by 2%.
Agricultural economists expect the second-largest grain harvest in the country’s history while the maize harvest is forecast to be 38% larger than in 2019.”
“The country’s fruit farms are also having good harvests, with citrus production up 13%. … With Europe starting to open, exports are increasing, despite problems at the ports.”
Full post
3) Hot Summer Epic Fail: New Climate Models Exaggerate U.S. Midwest Warming by 6X
Roy Spencer, 3 July 2020
What I find particularly troubling is that the climate modelers are increasingly deaf to what observations tell us.
For the last 10 years I have consulted for grain growing interests, providing information about past and potential future trends in growing season weather that might impact crop yields. Their primary interest is the U.S. corn belt, particularly the 12 Midwest states (Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma, the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Michigan) which produce most of the U.S. corn and soybean crop.
Contrary to popular perception, the U.S. Midwest has seen little long-term summer warming. For precipitation, the slight drying predicted by climate models in response to human greenhouse gas emissions has not occurred; if anything, precipitation has increased. Corn yield trends continue on a technologically-driven upward trajectory, totally obscuring any potential negative impact of “climate change”.
What Period of Time Should We Examine to Test Global Warming Claims?
Based upon the observations, “global warming” did not really begin until the late 1970s. Prior to that time, anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions had not yet increased by much at all, and natural climate variability dominated the observational record (and some say it still does).
Furthermore, uncertainties regarding the cooling effects of sulfate aerosol pollution make any model predictions before the 1970s-80s suspect since modelers simply adjusted the aerosol cooling effect in their models to match the temperature observations, which showed little if any warming before that time which could be reasonably attributed to greenhouse gas emissions.
This is why I am emphasizing the last 50 years (1970-2019)…this is the period during which we should have seen the strongest warming, and as greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, it is the period of most interest to help determine just how much faith we should put into model predictions for changes in national energy policies. In other words, quantitative testing of greenhouse warming theory should be during a period when the signal of that warming is expected to be the greatest.
50 Years of Predictions vs. Observations
Now that the new CMIP6 climate model experiment data are becoming available, we can begin to get some idea of how those models are shaping up against observations and the previous (CMIP5) model predictions. The following analysis includes the available model out put at the KNMI Climate Explorer website. The temperature observations come from the statewide data at NOAA’s Climate at a Glance website.
For the Midwest U.S. in the summer (June-July-August) we see that there has been almost no statistically significant warming in the last 50 years, whereas the CMIP6 models appear to be producing even more warming than the CMIP5 models did.
Successful Farming, June 2020
With production surging by 4.4%, corn will drive world cereal grain production to record levels in 2020/2021, said the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in its first forecast of the new crops.
It was the second forecast in a week of record global output as the planting season ends in the northern hemisphere.
The FAO forecast cereal grain production of 2.781 billion tonnes, up 2.6% from the record set in 2019/2020.
In spite of uncertainties posed by the pandemic,” it said, prospects point to “a comfortable supply and demand situation…
Maize would account for the bulk of the predicted increase, with an expected expansion of 64.5 million tonnes to a record level of 1,207 million tonnes, boosted by record harvests in the United States of America (USA), Canada, and Ukraine, and near-record harvests in Brazil and Argentina.”
Rice production of 508.7 million tonnes would be the highest ever, up 1.6% from 2019/2020, while wheat “is forecast to decline from the previous year’s good level, largely on likely downturns in the European Union (EU), Ukraine, and the USA more than offsetting expected production increases in the Russian Federation and Australia,” said the FAO Cereal Supply and Demand Brief, issued last week.
Full story
see also GWPF report by Indur Goklany: Carbon Dioxide: The Good News
2) Climate Crisis? What Climate Crisis?
Fresh Plaza News, 3 July 2020
South Africa’s farms are producing near-record amounts of food right now
According to Tonie Fuchs, Managing Director at Capespan Group Limited, it’s been a good season for South Africa so far. He claims that South Africa’s wildly productive farms’ are keeping the nation afloat.
“Large harvests are the order of the day right now, and agriculture is thriving – it grew by 28% in the first quarter of 2020 while the economy shrunk by 2%.
Agricultural economists expect the second-largest grain harvest in the country’s history while the maize harvest is forecast to be 38% larger than in 2019.”
“The country’s fruit farms are also having good harvests, with citrus production up 13%. … With Europe starting to open, exports are increasing, despite problems at the ports.”
Full post
3) Hot Summer Epic Fail: New Climate Models Exaggerate U.S. Midwest Warming by 6X
Roy Spencer, 3 July 2020
What I find particularly troubling is that the climate modelers are increasingly deaf to what observations tell us.
For the last 10 years I have consulted for grain growing interests, providing information about past and potential future trends in growing season weather that might impact crop yields. Their primary interest is the U.S. corn belt, particularly the 12 Midwest states (Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma, the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Michigan) which produce most of the U.S. corn and soybean crop.
Contrary to popular perception, the U.S. Midwest has seen little long-term summer warming. For precipitation, the slight drying predicted by climate models in response to human greenhouse gas emissions has not occurred; if anything, precipitation has increased. Corn yield trends continue on a technologically-driven upward trajectory, totally obscuring any potential negative impact of “climate change”.
What Period of Time Should We Examine to Test Global Warming Claims?
Based upon the observations, “global warming” did not really begin until the late 1970s. Prior to that time, anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions had not yet increased by much at all, and natural climate variability dominated the observational record (and some say it still does).
Furthermore, uncertainties regarding the cooling effects of sulfate aerosol pollution make any model predictions before the 1970s-80s suspect since modelers simply adjusted the aerosol cooling effect in their models to match the temperature observations, which showed little if any warming before that time which could be reasonably attributed to greenhouse gas emissions.
This is why I am emphasizing the last 50 years (1970-2019)…this is the period during which we should have seen the strongest warming, and as greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, it is the period of most interest to help determine just how much faith we should put into model predictions for changes in national energy policies. In other words, quantitative testing of greenhouse warming theory should be during a period when the signal of that warming is expected to be the greatest.
50 Years of Predictions vs. Observations
Now that the new CMIP6 climate model experiment data are becoming available, we can begin to get some idea of how those models are shaping up against observations and the previous (CMIP5) model predictions. The following analysis includes the available model out put at the KNMI Climate Explorer website. The temperature observations come from the statewide data at NOAA’s Climate at a Glance website.
For the Midwest U.S. in the summer (June-July-August) we see that there has been almost no statistically significant warming in the last 50 years, whereas the CMIP6 models appear to be producing even more warming than the CMIP5 models did.
Fifty years (1970-2019) of U.S. corn belt summer (JJA) warming since 1970 from observations (blue); the previous CMIP5 climate models (42 model avg., green); and the new CMIP6 climate models (13 model avg., red). The three time series have been vertically aligned so their trend lines coincide in the first year (1970), which is the most meaningful way to quantify the long-term warming since 1970.
The observed 50-year trend is only 0.086 C/decade (barely significant at the 1-sigma level), while the CMIP5 average model trend is 4X as large at 0.343 C/decade, and the CMIP6 trend is 5.7X as large at 0.495 C/decade. While the CMIP6 trend will change somewhat as more models are added, it is consistent with the report that the CMIP6 models are producing more average warming than their CMIP5 predecessors.
I am showing the average of the available models rather than individual models, because it is the average of the models which guides the UN IPCC reports and thus energy policy. It is disingenuous for some to claim that “not all IPCC models disagree with the observations”, as if that is some sort of vindication of all the models. It is not. If there are one or two models that agree the best with observations, why isn’t the IPCC just using those to write its reports? Hmmm?
Full post & comments
4) Coronavirus Derails EU’s Climate Focus
EUobserver, 30 June 2020
Germany’s EU presidency faces staunch opposition to climate protection measures.
Expectations for climate protection were heaped onto 2020. The Paris Climate Convention means that Germany and its fellow signatories must sign up for higher climate targets before the year end.
The EU’s Green Deal, a package of pro-climate measures, is on the drawing board.
Against this backdrop, there were hopes that the Germany’s rotating council presidency would turn into a “climate presidency”.
But national and international priorities have been upended by the coronavirus pandemic, which ushered in an inevitable focus on healthcare and bids to insulate economies from sharp recession.
There has been a clear shift in sentiment.
Even in late April in her weekly video podcast, chancellor Angela Merkel, acknowledged that the German EU presidency would focus on dealing with the social and economic impact of the new coronavirus as well as environmental issues, but admitted: “It will be clearly dominated by the issue of combating the pandemic and its consequences”. […]
Despite these glimmers of hope, there remain precious few clues on the detail of what is in store during the upcoming German leadership.
Climate-minded observers bemoaned the lack of specifics during this year’s Petersberg Climate Dialogue – an annual meeting which includes about 30 environment ministers from around the world.
This year it was particularly closely watched as the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow at the end of the year has been cancelled amid COVID-19.
Speaking at the Petersberg Climate Dialogue, Merkel notably did not talk about the presidency at all, instead she talked in general terms about the Green Deal but she did endorse the commission’s proposal to raise the EU’s 2030 emissions reduction target from 40 percent, to 50-55 percent. […]
As the countdown to the German presidency picks up speed, it is clear that not all member nations are fans of pro-climate policies.
Amid the urgent need to react to the pandemic, a Polish government official has spoken out in favour of removing the EU emissions trading scheme while the Czech prime minister Andrej Babis has urged for the European Green Deal to be shelved.
This suggests a double challenge during Germany’s stint at the top, beyond the all-encompassing issue of COVID-19.
Full post
6) Ross Clark: The Next Culture War Will Be Over Climate Change
The Spectator, 4 July 2020
The aim of activists now is not to engage with political opponents but to attempt to put them beyond the pale
It is steadily becoming clear where the woke brigade will go once the current moral panic over racism has run its course (which can’t be long, following the news that London estate agents have stopped using the term ‘master bedroom’ to avoid its connotations with slavery). A week ago Andrew Willshire wrote here of how the activist group Hope Not Hate has now decided that climate change ‘denialism’ is now a hate crime.
Now comes another sign that climate change is becoming the next woke battleground. Earlier this week, an environmental campaigner, Michael Shellenberger wrote a mea culpa on the website of Forbes.com. ‘On behalf of environmentalists everywhere I would like to formally apologise for the climate scare we have created over the past 30 years,’ it began. ‘Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.’
Shellenberger, who has been campaigning against the destruction of the rainforest since the age of 16, has not given up his campaign. On the contrary, that is the very reason he has changed his mind. Previously, he worked as an advocate for renewable energy – persuading the Obama administration to invest $90bn (£72bn) into renewables, he says. But he has now changed his mind. He has calculated that at present, 0.5 per cent of land on Earth is used for the production of energy. If the world switched to 100 per cent renewables, however, we would have to use 50 per cent of all land on Earth for wind farms, solar farms, growing biofuels or forest plantations to feed wood-burning power stations and so on. The devastation this would cause has led him to the conclusion that if we are going to reduce carbon emissions the only practical way is via nuclear power.
Now you may or may not agree with that conclusion. Personally, I have serious misgivings about using nuclear fission to provide the world’s energy needs, given the economic devastation that another Chernobyl or Fukushima would bring to a densely-populated country. Nuclear fusion, if we could get it to work on a commercial scale, would be a different story – although everyone has been promising that for the past half century, and there is a limit to how many billions you can throw at a technology in the hope of a breakthrough.
Anyway, that is by the by. What is surely true is that the world’s future energy needs, and the extent of the damage wrought on the climate by man-made carbon emissions, are areas of legitimate debate. If you do disagree with Shellenberger, you have every right to do so. But that is not, of course, how woke politics functions. The aim now is not to engage with political opponents but to attempt to put them beyond the pale, to try to delegitimise their opinions by making out that they belong on some far-right fringe from which the general public needs to be protected.
‘I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people,’ Shellenberger wrote prophetically in his Forbes piece. Not half. His piece has now been taken down by Forbes. A US journalist who tried to find out why was issued only with the following statement: ‘Forbes requires its contributors to adhere to strict editorial guidelines. This story did not follow those guidelines, and was removed.’
It is not hard to decode: a bunch of climate alarmists decided that Shellenberger is inconvenient to their cause and have tried to cancel him by complaining to the website – and the website caved in. Fortunately, Shellenberger has reposted his piece, so you can still read it here – and judge for yourself what ‘editorial guidelines’ Forbes judged it to breach (after initially passing it for publication).
The attempt to classify climate change ‘denialism’ as a hate crime has been coming for quite a while. The very use of the word ‘denial’ is an attempt to put anyone sceptical of climate alarmism in the same pigeonhole as holocaust deniers.
Incidentally, I recently wrote a novel, The Denial, about a meteorologist who falls foul of climate activists because he values observation over alarmist predictions. I intended it as a satire set in the near future, but by the time it is published in September it looks as if it may well have become the present.
The observed 50-year trend is only 0.086 C/decade (barely significant at the 1-sigma level), while the CMIP5 average model trend is 4X as large at 0.343 C/decade, and the CMIP6 trend is 5.7X as large at 0.495 C/decade. While the CMIP6 trend will change somewhat as more models are added, it is consistent with the report that the CMIP6 models are producing more average warming than their CMIP5 predecessors.
I am showing the average of the available models rather than individual models, because it is the average of the models which guides the UN IPCC reports and thus energy policy. It is disingenuous for some to claim that “not all IPCC models disagree with the observations”, as if that is some sort of vindication of all the models. It is not. If there are one or two models that agree the best with observations, why isn’t the IPCC just using those to write its reports? Hmmm?
Full post & comments
4) Coronavirus Derails EU’s Climate Focus
EUobserver, 30 June 2020
Germany’s EU presidency faces staunch opposition to climate protection measures.
Expectations for climate protection were heaped onto 2020. The Paris Climate Convention means that Germany and its fellow signatories must sign up for higher climate targets before the year end.
The EU’s Green Deal, a package of pro-climate measures, is on the drawing board.
Against this backdrop, there were hopes that the Germany’s rotating council presidency would turn into a “climate presidency”.
But national and international priorities have been upended by the coronavirus pandemic, which ushered in an inevitable focus on healthcare and bids to insulate economies from sharp recession.
There has been a clear shift in sentiment.
Even in late April in her weekly video podcast, chancellor Angela Merkel, acknowledged that the German EU presidency would focus on dealing with the social and economic impact of the new coronavirus as well as environmental issues, but admitted: “It will be clearly dominated by the issue of combating the pandemic and its consequences”. […]
Despite these glimmers of hope, there remain precious few clues on the detail of what is in store during the upcoming German leadership.
Climate-minded observers bemoaned the lack of specifics during this year’s Petersberg Climate Dialogue – an annual meeting which includes about 30 environment ministers from around the world.
This year it was particularly closely watched as the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow at the end of the year has been cancelled amid COVID-19.
Speaking at the Petersberg Climate Dialogue, Merkel notably did not talk about the presidency at all, instead she talked in general terms about the Green Deal but she did endorse the commission’s proposal to raise the EU’s 2030 emissions reduction target from 40 percent, to 50-55 percent. […]
As the countdown to the German presidency picks up speed, it is clear that not all member nations are fans of pro-climate policies.
Amid the urgent need to react to the pandemic, a Polish government official has spoken out in favour of removing the EU emissions trading scheme while the Czech prime minister Andrej Babis has urged for the European Green Deal to be shelved.
This suggests a double challenge during Germany’s stint at the top, beyond the all-encompassing issue of COVID-19.
Full post
5) Dominic Lawson: Is Boris Johnson On The Side Of The Broke Or The Woke?
Daily Mail, 6 July 2020
‘We need a Prime Minister with the guts to tell the privileged fools of Extinction Rebellion that importing coal creates more carbon dioxide.’
The Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, says his priority is: ‘Jobs, jobs, jobs.’ For Boris Johnson, it is: ‘Build, build, build.’
Last week, the Prime Minister declared his commitment to end unwarranted delays in the decision-making process, so as to make sure the planning system delivers the infrastructure and employment we all want.
Yet the Conservative Government has been deliberately obstructing a project that would safeguard hundreds of jobs in one of the most depressed areas of the North of England.
The secretary of state now responsible for the continued prevarication is Robert Jenrick — which is particularly ironic given his speedy go-ahead for a housing project proposed by the Conservative party donor Richard Desmond, a development which Jenrick’s own department had advised him to reject.
But the project over which Jenrick has been demonstrating masterly inactivity is not a property development in increasingly trendy East London: it is in Northumberland, and involves the development not of fashionable flats for yuppies working in the City of London, but a coal mine.
And what could be less fashionable or trendy than that?
Quashed
This is the Highthorn scheme, put before Northumberland County Council in 2015 and approved by both Conservative and Labour elected officials. Their decision was later backed by the national Planning Inspector, who declared that ‘the national benefits of the proposal would clearly outweigh the likely adverse impacts’.
But in 2018, the then Housing and Communities Secretary, Sajid Javid (in the job now occupied by Jenrick), rejected the national Planning Inspector’s report.
The company behind the project, Banks Mining, took the matter to the High Court. The judge quashed the secretary of state’s objections (which were based on ‘the very considerable weight he gave to the adverse effects of the emissions of greenhouse gases’) declaring them to be ‘significantly inadequate’.
In a forensic demolition of the Government’s arguments, Mr Justice Ouseley declared: ‘The Planning Inspector thought the evidence and his reasoning merited the grant of permission … The secretary of state does not indicate … what evidence he had for any conclusion he reached, or by what reasoning he arrived at it.’
That was in November 2018. But Sajid Javid didn’t comply with the judgment. Neither did his successor, James Brokenshire. And nor has the latest incumbent, the increasingly beleaguered Robert Jenrick.
For a Government which declares its determination to speed up planning decisions, this is hypocrisy on an industrial scale.
Jenrick’s officials had promised that its response would finally be made in April of this year, but we are now in July.
They blame the Covid-19 crisis for the continued delay, but this, of course, is a mere excuse. There is nothing in the effects of the virus that has the slightest relevance to this case, and nor are there any new ‘facts’ to be discovered.
No, the reason behind the Government’s obstruction and ill-will is that it likes to portray itself as the ‘world leader’ in the ‘battle against climate change’: and coal, of all forms of mass energy production, produces the greatest amount of CO2 emissions.
In particular, Downing Street has been obsessed with its role as host of COP26 (the next meeting of the UN’s climate change intergovernmental conference) which had been scheduled for November this year in Glasgow.
The pandemic has caused that to be postponed, but the Government continues to be fixated on its image on that stage, and the need (as No 10 sees it) to have some sort of ‘brand leadership’ in the drive to reduce CO2 emissions.
But this whole business is an elaborate British con trick, at least in carbon accounting terms.
The Government’s ‘net zero carbon’ commitment makes no account of the emissions created elsewhere to supply the energy-intensive manufactured goods that we no longer produce.
As Dieter Helm, Oxford University’s Professor of Energy Policy, told the BBC last year: ‘The story of the past 20 years is that … we have been de-industrialising, and we’ve been swapping home production for imports, so even though it looks to the contrary, [our policies] have been increasing global warming… There are no plans in the net zero carbon target which address that.’
Essential
Professor Helm’s point is that China, in particular, has a high proportion of coal in energy used for manufacture — much higher than we do — so our offshoring of production actually increases global emissions. Indeed, China is now building almost 260 gigawatts of new coal-fired power generating capacity — in itself about the size of the entire existing U.S. coal-fired capacity.
Perhaps even more absurdly, blocking the Northumberland open-cast mining project (we are not talking about men going down pits) means that we will simply be importing more of the coal we still need for what’s left of our steel industry.
Coal remains an essential mineral in the production of steel, acting as a chemical reductant in blast furnaces which reach temperatures in excess of 1,000 degrees centigrade: roughly, one tonne of coal is required to produce 1.25 tonnes of crude steel.
Tata Steel, our biggest remaining producer, has declared that coal from the Highthorn project would be ‘ideally suited’ to its requirements.
As it is, the coal we still need is being, to an ever-greater extent, imported.
Last year, 86 per cent of our coal was brought in from overseas — compared with an import component of 46 per cent as recently as 2016. The blocking of new domestic mines has led to 6.8 million tonnes of coal being imported in 2019, of which over a third came from Russia.
So not only is the world’s CO2 not reduced, emissions are actually increased because of those generated by transporting the coal from Russia, the U.S. and even as far away as Australia. And it means saving the jobs of miners in those countries, not our own. […]
In the case of Banks Mining (a diverse energy business, operating 14 wind farms) this is an entirely British owned company, set up by Harry Banks in 1976. Over the years he has run 115 surface mines in the North of England.
Yet Banks, who was awarded an OBE for services to industry, will next month be closing his — and England’s — last one.
Livid
It is especially infuriating to the newly-elected Tory MPs who in last December’s election seized seats from Labour’s former ‘Red Wall’ in the North-East.
They describe this battle as ‘broke versus woke’ — and broke the 250 people who currently work in Banks Mining will certainly be if the Government continues to block the Highthorn scheme (which would be worth an estimated £100 million to the area).
One of Banks’ miners, Graham Henderson, says: ‘If Robert Jenrick gives our jobs to Russian miners, we would be livid about the betrayal.
‘Most of the lads on site voted Conservative for the first time last year because they believed them when they said they would look after the North. The ones we sent to Westminster haven’t forgotten those promises, but the others in Westminster don’t care about us.
‘We need a Prime Minister with the guts to tell the privileged fools of Extinction Rebellion that importing coal creates more carbon dioxide.’
Full story
Daily Mail, 6 July 2020
‘We need a Prime Minister with the guts to tell the privileged fools of Extinction Rebellion that importing coal creates more carbon dioxide.’
The Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, says his priority is: ‘Jobs, jobs, jobs.’ For Boris Johnson, it is: ‘Build, build, build.’
Last week, the Prime Minister declared his commitment to end unwarranted delays in the decision-making process, so as to make sure the planning system delivers the infrastructure and employment we all want.
Yet the Conservative Government has been deliberately obstructing a project that would safeguard hundreds of jobs in one of the most depressed areas of the North of England.
The secretary of state now responsible for the continued prevarication is Robert Jenrick — which is particularly ironic given his speedy go-ahead for a housing project proposed by the Conservative party donor Richard Desmond, a development which Jenrick’s own department had advised him to reject.
But the project over which Jenrick has been demonstrating masterly inactivity is not a property development in increasingly trendy East London: it is in Northumberland, and involves the development not of fashionable flats for yuppies working in the City of London, but a coal mine.
And what could be less fashionable or trendy than that?
Quashed
This is the Highthorn scheme, put before Northumberland County Council in 2015 and approved by both Conservative and Labour elected officials. Their decision was later backed by the national Planning Inspector, who declared that ‘the national benefits of the proposal would clearly outweigh the likely adverse impacts’.
But in 2018, the then Housing and Communities Secretary, Sajid Javid (in the job now occupied by Jenrick), rejected the national Planning Inspector’s report.
The company behind the project, Banks Mining, took the matter to the High Court. The judge quashed the secretary of state’s objections (which were based on ‘the very considerable weight he gave to the adverse effects of the emissions of greenhouse gases’) declaring them to be ‘significantly inadequate’.
In a forensic demolition of the Government’s arguments, Mr Justice Ouseley declared: ‘The Planning Inspector thought the evidence and his reasoning merited the grant of permission … The secretary of state does not indicate … what evidence he had for any conclusion he reached, or by what reasoning he arrived at it.’
That was in November 2018. But Sajid Javid didn’t comply with the judgment. Neither did his successor, James Brokenshire. And nor has the latest incumbent, the increasingly beleaguered Robert Jenrick.
For a Government which declares its determination to speed up planning decisions, this is hypocrisy on an industrial scale.
Jenrick’s officials had promised that its response would finally be made in April of this year, but we are now in July.
They blame the Covid-19 crisis for the continued delay, but this, of course, is a mere excuse. There is nothing in the effects of the virus that has the slightest relevance to this case, and nor are there any new ‘facts’ to be discovered.
No, the reason behind the Government’s obstruction and ill-will is that it likes to portray itself as the ‘world leader’ in the ‘battle against climate change’: and coal, of all forms of mass energy production, produces the greatest amount of CO2 emissions.
In particular, Downing Street has been obsessed with its role as host of COP26 (the next meeting of the UN’s climate change intergovernmental conference) which had been scheduled for November this year in Glasgow.
The pandemic has caused that to be postponed, but the Government continues to be fixated on its image on that stage, and the need (as No 10 sees it) to have some sort of ‘brand leadership’ in the drive to reduce CO2 emissions.
But this whole business is an elaborate British con trick, at least in carbon accounting terms.
The Government’s ‘net zero carbon’ commitment makes no account of the emissions created elsewhere to supply the energy-intensive manufactured goods that we no longer produce.
As Dieter Helm, Oxford University’s Professor of Energy Policy, told the BBC last year: ‘The story of the past 20 years is that … we have been de-industrialising, and we’ve been swapping home production for imports, so even though it looks to the contrary, [our policies] have been increasing global warming… There are no plans in the net zero carbon target which address that.’
Essential
Professor Helm’s point is that China, in particular, has a high proportion of coal in energy used for manufacture — much higher than we do — so our offshoring of production actually increases global emissions. Indeed, China is now building almost 260 gigawatts of new coal-fired power generating capacity — in itself about the size of the entire existing U.S. coal-fired capacity.
Perhaps even more absurdly, blocking the Northumberland open-cast mining project (we are not talking about men going down pits) means that we will simply be importing more of the coal we still need for what’s left of our steel industry.
Coal remains an essential mineral in the production of steel, acting as a chemical reductant in blast furnaces which reach temperatures in excess of 1,000 degrees centigrade: roughly, one tonne of coal is required to produce 1.25 tonnes of crude steel.
Tata Steel, our biggest remaining producer, has declared that coal from the Highthorn project would be ‘ideally suited’ to its requirements.
As it is, the coal we still need is being, to an ever-greater extent, imported.
Last year, 86 per cent of our coal was brought in from overseas — compared with an import component of 46 per cent as recently as 2016. The blocking of new domestic mines has led to 6.8 million tonnes of coal being imported in 2019, of which over a third came from Russia.
So not only is the world’s CO2 not reduced, emissions are actually increased because of those generated by transporting the coal from Russia, the U.S. and even as far away as Australia. And it means saving the jobs of miners in those countries, not our own. […]
In the case of Banks Mining (a diverse energy business, operating 14 wind farms) this is an entirely British owned company, set up by Harry Banks in 1976. Over the years he has run 115 surface mines in the North of England.
Yet Banks, who was awarded an OBE for services to industry, will next month be closing his — and England’s — last one.
Livid
It is especially infuriating to the newly-elected Tory MPs who in last December’s election seized seats from Labour’s former ‘Red Wall’ in the North-East.
They describe this battle as ‘broke versus woke’ — and broke the 250 people who currently work in Banks Mining will certainly be if the Government continues to block the Highthorn scheme (which would be worth an estimated £100 million to the area).
One of Banks’ miners, Graham Henderson, says: ‘If Robert Jenrick gives our jobs to Russian miners, we would be livid about the betrayal.
‘Most of the lads on site voted Conservative for the first time last year because they believed them when they said they would look after the North. The ones we sent to Westminster haven’t forgotten those promises, but the others in Westminster don’t care about us.
‘We need a Prime Minister with the guts to tell the privileged fools of Extinction Rebellion that importing coal creates more carbon dioxide.’
Full story
6) Ross Clark: The Next Culture War Will Be Over Climate Change
The Spectator, 4 July 2020
The aim of activists now is not to engage with political opponents but to attempt to put them beyond the pale
It is steadily becoming clear where the woke brigade will go once the current moral panic over racism has run its course (which can’t be long, following the news that London estate agents have stopped using the term ‘master bedroom’ to avoid its connotations with slavery). A week ago Andrew Willshire wrote here of how the activist group Hope Not Hate has now decided that climate change ‘denialism’ is now a hate crime.
Now comes another sign that climate change is becoming the next woke battleground. Earlier this week, an environmental campaigner, Michael Shellenberger wrote a mea culpa on the website of Forbes.com. ‘On behalf of environmentalists everywhere I would like to formally apologise for the climate scare we have created over the past 30 years,’ it began. ‘Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.’
Shellenberger, who has been campaigning against the destruction of the rainforest since the age of 16, has not given up his campaign. On the contrary, that is the very reason he has changed his mind. Previously, he worked as an advocate for renewable energy – persuading the Obama administration to invest $90bn (£72bn) into renewables, he says. But he has now changed his mind. He has calculated that at present, 0.5 per cent of land on Earth is used for the production of energy. If the world switched to 100 per cent renewables, however, we would have to use 50 per cent of all land on Earth for wind farms, solar farms, growing biofuels or forest plantations to feed wood-burning power stations and so on. The devastation this would cause has led him to the conclusion that if we are going to reduce carbon emissions the only practical way is via nuclear power.
Now you may or may not agree with that conclusion. Personally, I have serious misgivings about using nuclear fission to provide the world’s energy needs, given the economic devastation that another Chernobyl or Fukushima would bring to a densely-populated country. Nuclear fusion, if we could get it to work on a commercial scale, would be a different story – although everyone has been promising that for the past half century, and there is a limit to how many billions you can throw at a technology in the hope of a breakthrough.
Anyway, that is by the by. What is surely true is that the world’s future energy needs, and the extent of the damage wrought on the climate by man-made carbon emissions, are areas of legitimate debate. If you do disagree with Shellenberger, you have every right to do so. But that is not, of course, how woke politics functions. The aim now is not to engage with political opponents but to attempt to put them beyond the pale, to try to delegitimise their opinions by making out that they belong on some far-right fringe from which the general public needs to be protected.
‘I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people,’ Shellenberger wrote prophetically in his Forbes piece. Not half. His piece has now been taken down by Forbes. A US journalist who tried to find out why was issued only with the following statement: ‘Forbes requires its contributors to adhere to strict editorial guidelines. This story did not follow those guidelines, and was removed.’
It is not hard to decode: a bunch of climate alarmists decided that Shellenberger is inconvenient to their cause and have tried to cancel him by complaining to the website – and the website caved in. Fortunately, Shellenberger has reposted his piece, so you can still read it here – and judge for yourself what ‘editorial guidelines’ Forbes judged it to breach (after initially passing it for publication).
The attempt to classify climate change ‘denialism’ as a hate crime has been coming for quite a while. The very use of the word ‘denial’ is an attempt to put anyone sceptical of climate alarmism in the same pigeonhole as holocaust deniers.
Incidentally, I recently wrote a novel, The Denial, about a meteorologist who falls foul of climate activists because he values observation over alarmist predictions. I intended it as a satire set in the near future, but by the time it is published in September it looks as if it may well have become the present.
7) Bjorn Lomborg’s ‘False Alarm’ Brings Reason to Climate Change Debate
Richard Trzupek, The Epoch Times, 1 July 2020
In a world where hyperbole and hysteria continue to displace reasoned discourse, Lomborg offers cogent, thoughtful arguments in an attempt to return perspective and reason to the climate change discussion.
No matter your predispositions regarding the climate change issue, you’re sure to find something alarmingly objectionable about skeptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg’s latest work, “False Alarm.”
That’s precisely what makes this book so important.
In a world where hyperbole and hysteria continue to displace reasoned discourse, Lomborg offers cogent, thoughtful arguments in an attempt to return perspective and reason to the climate change discussion. He does so by using science and economics as those disciplines should be used: as broad floodlights illuminating all facets of an issue, not as laser pointers focused only on the data that support a cherished thesis.
The subtitle to “False Alarm” is “How climate change panic costs us trillions, hurts the poor, and fails to fix the planet.” As subtitles go, that’s a bit clunkier than most, but it’s a fair summation of what follows.
Lomborg addresses his core mission statement early on: “We’re scaring kids and adults witless, which is not just factually wrong but morally reprehensible. If we don’t say stop, the current, false climate alarm, despite its good intentions, is likely to leave the world much worse off than it could be.”
Someone reading the above statement and who knows nothing about Lomborg might assume that this Danish professor is what one side of the climate change debate would call a “denier.” While he has been so labeled on occasion, thoughtful critics recognize Lomborg as something else, neither fish nor fowl within the climate change menagerie.
He acknowledges that our climate is changing, and he admits that mankind has been and will continue to play a role in that change. What he refuses to do, and what he wishes all of us would refuse to do, is panic.
Lomborg brings an accessible style to “False Alarm,” allowing a reader to digest facts and arguments without being overwhelmed. He talks tothe reader, in contrast to so many works on the subject that lecture and harangue. The nature of the climate change debate makes it impossible to have a wholly inclusive discussion in any single book, but Lomborg makes a valiant attempt.
Like any writer on the subject, he must pick and choose which facts, examples, and ideas to present, and these are, of course, designed to support his central thesis. That said, Lomborg makes a heroic effort to be fair to all points of view. When he rejects a popular argument, he generally does so without malice, although his understandable frustration with the performance of journalists and politicians when addressing climate change is evident.
“False Alarm” is full of quotable moments. Lomborg delivers one of the best early on as he makes what should be an obvious point: that the world—and particularly the developing world—faces a host of challenges that are much more immediate and potentially harmful than climate change and that it’s irresponsible to pretend that reducing carbon emissions is the key to solving all of them.
He concludes, “If we insist on invoking climate at every turn, we will often end up helping the world in one of the least effective ways possible.”
One of the bolder ideas Lomborg presents will surely draw the ire of critics: the idea that man may one day be able to manipulate the planet’s climate.
In a chapter titled “Geoengineering: A Backup Plan,” Lomborg argues that it may be possible to control the weather using heretofore undiscovered technologies. Citing the substantial drop in global temperatures that resulted from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, Lomborg says man may find ways to directly manage temperatures if needed. He doesn’t advocate implementing such a solution anytime soon, but argues that we should still research such approaches.
“It might just prove to be the earth’s best backup plan,” he says.
He criticizes the Paris Agreement as poorly conceived and, even if fully implemented, ineffective. He advocates for a (modest) carbon tax, is critical of solar power because of its cost and relative inefficiency, but is a strong advocate of funding research into alternative and renewable sources of energy.
Full post
Richard Trzupek, The Epoch Times, 1 July 2020
In a world where hyperbole and hysteria continue to displace reasoned discourse, Lomborg offers cogent, thoughtful arguments in an attempt to return perspective and reason to the climate change discussion.
No matter your predispositions regarding the climate change issue, you’re sure to find something alarmingly objectionable about skeptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg’s latest work, “False Alarm.”
That’s precisely what makes this book so important.
In a world where hyperbole and hysteria continue to displace reasoned discourse, Lomborg offers cogent, thoughtful arguments in an attempt to return perspective and reason to the climate change discussion. He does so by using science and economics as those disciplines should be used: as broad floodlights illuminating all facets of an issue, not as laser pointers focused only on the data that support a cherished thesis.
The subtitle to “False Alarm” is “How climate change panic costs us trillions, hurts the poor, and fails to fix the planet.” As subtitles go, that’s a bit clunkier than most, but it’s a fair summation of what follows.
Lomborg addresses his core mission statement early on: “We’re scaring kids and adults witless, which is not just factually wrong but morally reprehensible. If we don’t say stop, the current, false climate alarm, despite its good intentions, is likely to leave the world much worse off than it could be.”
Someone reading the above statement and who knows nothing about Lomborg might assume that this Danish professor is what one side of the climate change debate would call a “denier.” While he has been so labeled on occasion, thoughtful critics recognize Lomborg as something else, neither fish nor fowl within the climate change menagerie.
He acknowledges that our climate is changing, and he admits that mankind has been and will continue to play a role in that change. What he refuses to do, and what he wishes all of us would refuse to do, is panic.
Lomborg brings an accessible style to “False Alarm,” allowing a reader to digest facts and arguments without being overwhelmed. He talks tothe reader, in contrast to so many works on the subject that lecture and harangue. The nature of the climate change debate makes it impossible to have a wholly inclusive discussion in any single book, but Lomborg makes a valiant attempt.
Like any writer on the subject, he must pick and choose which facts, examples, and ideas to present, and these are, of course, designed to support his central thesis. That said, Lomborg makes a heroic effort to be fair to all points of view. When he rejects a popular argument, he generally does so without malice, although his understandable frustration with the performance of journalists and politicians when addressing climate change is evident.
“False Alarm” is full of quotable moments. Lomborg delivers one of the best early on as he makes what should be an obvious point: that the world—and particularly the developing world—faces a host of challenges that are much more immediate and potentially harmful than climate change and that it’s irresponsible to pretend that reducing carbon emissions is the key to solving all of them.
He concludes, “If we insist on invoking climate at every turn, we will often end up helping the world in one of the least effective ways possible.”
One of the bolder ideas Lomborg presents will surely draw the ire of critics: the idea that man may one day be able to manipulate the planet’s climate.
In a chapter titled “Geoengineering: A Backup Plan,” Lomborg argues that it may be possible to control the weather using heretofore undiscovered technologies. Citing the substantial drop in global temperatures that resulted from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, Lomborg says man may find ways to directly manage temperatures if needed. He doesn’t advocate implementing such a solution anytime soon, but argues that we should still research such approaches.
“It might just prove to be the earth’s best backup plan,” he says.
He criticizes the Paris Agreement as poorly conceived and, even if fully implemented, ineffective. He advocates for a (modest) carbon tax, is critical of solar power because of its cost and relative inefficiency, but is a strong advocate of funding research into alternative and renewable sources of energy.
Full post
8) And Finally: The ‘Teenage God of Global Warming’ Feeling Sudden Lack Of Relevance
Sky News Australia, 29 June 2020
Sky News Australia, 29 June 2020
The “teenage God of global warming” Greta Thunberg is now feeling a sudden lack of relevance following her recent calls on world leaders to remember they should feel ashamed according to Sky News host Andrew Bolt.
The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.
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