Climate scientists fly more than other researchers, first global study suggests

Climate conference transport

It takes more than a ‘climate emergency’ to keep climatologists on the ground. It’s almost like they don’t take their own theories seriously, although professors not travelling isn’t going to make any difference anyway. Do as they say, not as they do.
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Climate change researchers, especially professors, fly more than other researchers—but are also more likely to have taken steps to reduce or offset their flying, a new study has found.

Climate change researchers, especially professors, fly more than other researchers—but are also more likely to have taken steps to reduce or offset their flying, a new study has found.

The large, international survey of more than 1,400 university researchers was carried out by the UK Centre for Climate and Social Transformation (CAST), which is coordinated by Cardiff University, reports Phys.org.

A follow-up experiment with more than 350 researchers found that providing information about the impacts of aviation and support for workplace policies increases intentions to fly less.

The large-scale study—the first of its kind to survey climate academics about their travel for conferences, fieldwork and meetings—is published in the journal Global Environmental Change.

Director of CAST Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh, who led the study, said the findings were “unexpected” but said it also suggested “knowledge alone is not enough” to tackle global warming.

Russell Cook: BBC ( sort of … ) Corrects Radio 4’s “How They Made Us Doubt Everything”

Guest post by Russell Cook, who for a long time has been setting the record straight on the lies propagated by climate alarmists about the oil and gas industry. Check out his website at http://gelbspanfiles.com/

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And in doing so, they inadvertently dug a deeper hole for themselves.

The longer backstory to this situation is in my July 31, 2020 “BBC Radio 4 vs Rush Limbaugh” blog post, and in my August 5 followup, concerning unsupportable claims in a BBC podcast report about Limbaugh’s alleged involvement with a fossil fuel industry-orchestrated disinformation campaign that supposedly targeted a specific ethnic group, and Limbaugh’s outrage over the false accusation and the silliness of the ‘targeted people’ line.

Reducing the root problem to one paragraph: back in the late 1990s, the otherwise long-forgotten environmentalist group Ozone Action gained fame for its ‘bombshell report’ about a so-called leaked memo set which were alleged guidelines for an industry conspiracy to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” through an informational campaign targeting “older, less-educated males” and “younger, lower-income women.” Kert Davies, formerly at Ozone Action and Greenpeace who’s currently heading Climate Investigations Center / Climate Files, has been telling and retelling the narrative of how that memo set proves the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns. He did so in an obscure podcast back in late 2018, and he did so again in this two month-old BBC podcast report.

Facebook launches a ‘climate change information’ centre

Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy

Facebook, accountable only to its investors, now intends to pose as a proxy authority on the world’s present and future climate. But the author of the article below wants Facebook to go further and impose its own views on people, while hiding behind the usual catch-all accusation of ‘climate change denialism’ but offering no definition of it. Presumably suggesting that a carbon dioxide level of 0.04% in the atmosphere might not be a massive climate problem is beyond the pale, and should be suppressed? Without clarity about what is out of bounds in discussion, the risk of unfair censorship is obvious.
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Even as Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform, admits that climate change “is real” and that “the science is unambiguous and the need to act grows more urgent by the day” the platform appears unwilling to take steps to really stand up to the climate change denialism that circulates on its platform, says Techcrunch. 

The company is set to achieve net zero carbon emissions and be supported fully by renewable energy in its own operations this year.

But as the corporate world slaps a fresh coat of green paint on its business practices, Facebook is looking to get out in front with the launch of a Climate Science Information Center to “connect people with science-based information.”

The company is announcing a new information center, designed after its COVID-19 pandemic response. The center is designed to connect people to factual and up-to-date climate information, according to the company.

Council ‘sorry’ as energy company collapses

This scheme trumpeted: “Since July 2018 all of the electricity we supply to our customers is 100% green*. Whichever tariff you take from us all of the electricity we provide is certified as being sourced from UK based wind and solar generators.”
But now comes the real cost – a loss of many millions of pounds incurred by local ratepayers as it all goes pear-shaped. If anyone is surprised, they shouldn’t be.
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The council leader admits selling the customer base will not make back the millions it invested, reports BBC News.

Robin Hood Energy (RHE) is shutting with the loss of 230 jobs despite millions poured into it by Nottingham City Council.

British Gas will take on its customer base of thousands of homes in England.

The council said the sale will not make up all its losses, which leaked documents suggest are £38.1 million.

Hypocrisy claim as scientists call on EU to ‘correct’ biomass carbon accounting rules

Carbophobes discover biomass burning is far from ‘carbon neutral’. It’s taken some of them a long time to admit that it’s one of their clumsiest attempts to ‘tackle’ the phantom that is human-caused climate change.
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Europe’s academies of science have called on EU lawmakers to introduce a “radically new standard” in the blocs’ Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) to ensure net carbon emissions from biomass power stations are “properly accounted for and declared”, reports Euractiv.

The ETS is the EU’s flagship tool for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and obliges power generators, industrial emitters as well as airlines to buy CO2 permits on the market to cover some of the pollution they emit.

But although the ETS currently assumes that all biomass is carbon neutral, Europe’s academies of science say this is mostly not the case.

New model proposed to reduce carbon footprint of mega-conferences

Yet another climate conference?

Carbophobes tell conference goers to tie themselves in knots over a minor trace gas in the atmosphere that’s essential to plants, trees, vegetation etc. It’s climate alarm time again.
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Prior to the global pandemic, climate researchers identified an uncomfortable truth: the very meetings and events meant to support the fight against climate change were themselves causing vast greenhouse gas emissions through international air travel, says Phys.org.

Building on learnings from the COVID-19 pandemic, the University of Otago’s Professor James Higham, of the Department of Tourism, and his Oxford University colleagues Ph.D. student Milan Klöwer, Professor Myles Allen and Associate Professor Debbie Hopkins have identified new measures that may reduce the carbon footprint of conference travel by up to 90%.

The study is published this week in the journal Nature.

EU Embroiled In €24 Billion Bogus Climate Accounting Scandal

H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

The EU is no stranger to audit problems and accounting stories, let’s say, and this one maintains the tradition. Pretending to ‘tackle climate change’ can be expensive of course.
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Brussels has been dragged into a bogus accounting scandal after it was claimed climate change spending had been overblown by at least €24 billion, reports the Daily Express.

The European Court of Auditors has questioned the European Commission’s claims about its climate-change programmes.

It was found the European Union’s powerful executive had substantially overestimated the amount it spent on preventing global warming through the use of clever-accounting.

Energy minister declares UK fracking dead.

Utterly misguided and spineless UK Govt. decision.

UK consumers face £2-3bn annual bill to prevent green-energy blackouts

Price gouging on the grand scale to keep the ruinables show on the road, regardless of electricity grid stability. But our leaders love this fiasco and label it as climate policy, so that’s OK? No, but they seem to face few obstacles to their blinkered obsession, even though the problems look bound to get worse.
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Lockdown reveals the UK’s power grid is fragile, costly, and failing – because of renewables, says Dr. Benny Peiser @ Climate Change Dispatch.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is today publishing a collection of papers by energy expert Dr. John Constable, documenting the rapid decay of the UK electricity system, with system balancing costs spiraling out of control over the last few weeks.

The cost of balancing the grid over the Bank Holiday weekend amounted to £50m, and National Grid has predicted additional costs of £700m from May to August alone.

Conservative Council Borrowed £1 Billion From Taxpayers To Bet On British Sunshine

Borrowed from ratepayers, strictly speaking. But there seems to be something rotten here anyway. Are solar farms an ‘investment’ of public money? Even if they are, they have an unfortunate reputation for going bust in some cases.
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A major investigation has revealed how Thurrock Council got into more than £1billion in debt, borrowing the money from around 150 local authorities across the UK, reports The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

But instead of funding council services, the council gambled at least £604million in solar farms located outside of the borough.

Among Thurrock’s rundown council estates and neglected public parks, typical of many towns after a decade of austerity, there is nothing to suggest that over the past three years the local council has borrowed and then invested hundreds of millions of pounds of other councils’ money.

Under the direction of a senior council officer Thurrock borrowed from about 150 local authorities across the UK with little public scrutiny. These loans were not for direct funding of council services, or investing in infrastructure – instead they financed solar farms more than a hundred miles away.

Spain seeks to pass new climate law to reach net zero by 2050

It looks as if most European countries intend to learn the hard way that industrial economies can’t run successfully on expensive and intermittent electricity supplies. If their governments are happy to de-industrialise they should say so, then voters working in power-hungry industries would know the score. The price of climate superstition could be high for a lot of people.
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Spain has announced it is seeking to pass a new climate law to ensure it can cut its emissions to net zero by 2050, reports Energy Live News.

The draft law proposals would ban all new coal, oil and gas projects with immediate effect in order to rapidly reduce Spain’s greenhouse gas emissions by a fifth before 2030, relative to 1990 levels, as well as increase the renewable share of the country’s energy mix from around 50% to 70% by this time.

COVID 19: Computer Models Reveal Their Limitations

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Relying on computer models to forecast events is a precarious business, as we’re now being reminded.

PA Pundits - International

By Peter Murphy~

Computer models compiled by scientists, statisticians and public health experts to predict the number of deaths resulting from COVID-19 have been drastically scaled back this past week. This is hopeful news, but has wider implications. There also should be a serious look-back, given the wildly inflated early predictions of numbers of deaths in the United States.

Computer models are only as good as the assumptions built into them. If the inputs are faulty, the predictions will have shown to be flawed based on real life outcomes. This is playing out with the coronavirus models, and wreacking economic havoc worldwide. This modeling problem has ample precedent.

Flawed computer models have long been rampant in predicting planetary global warming for at least the last 30 years, even as they continue to influence public policy. Perhaps the most famous falsehood was the “hockey stick” prediction of rapid…

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CLINTEL President Says Zero Carbon Is A Crime Against Humanity

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Making electricity unreliable and expensive when it used not be — sounds idiotic, but seems to be the norm with climate-obsessed governments these days.

PA Pundits - International

By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~

I recently got an intriguing email from Professor Guus Berkhout, president of the Climate Intelligence Foundation or CLINTEL. It contained this striking paragraph and the last sentence really got me thinking:

“The past 150 years show that affordable and reliable energy is the key to prosperity. The past 150 years also show that more CO2 is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth and increasing the yields of crops. Why do governments ignore these hard facts? Why do they do the opposite and lower the quality of life by forcing high-cost, dubious low-carbon energy technologies upon their citizens? The zero-emission act is a crime against humanity.” (Emphasis added.)

So I looked into the law on crimes against humanity and Professor Berkhout may have a strong case. At its simplest, a crime against humanity is a government policy that systematically and knowingly harms a specific group…

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Ben Pile: There’s nothing democratic about this ‘climate assembly’

The first two meetings of Climate Assembly UK, dubbed a ‘citizens’ assembly’ on climate change, have taken place in Birmingham over the course of a couple of weekends in January and February.

The climate assembly has brought together 110 randomly selected members of the public to discuss a range of climate issues and policies with a range of experts, including David Attenborough. The task of the assembly, which will meet over two more weekends this spring, is to decide on a set of recommendations for how the government can best meet its pledge to achieve Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Lithium extraction for e-mobility robs Chilean communities of water

Salar de Atacama, Chile [image credit: Francesco Mocellin @ Wikipedia]

Wikipedia says: ‘Salar de Atacama is the world’s largest and purest active source of lithium, containing 27% of the world’s lithium reserve base…Extraction of lithium-rich brines is causing conflict with water use by local communities and is damaging the ecosystem, including the Andean flamingo.’ Do self-styled planet savers approve of this?

Global demand for lithium is expected to triple in six years.

But mining companies are increasingly coming into conflict with indigenous communities who are worried about the future of their ecosystems, says DW.com.

In the middle of the world’s driest desert is a vast expanse of turquoise basins, each one like a colossal swimming pool, up to 20 times the size of a football field.

The pools are filled with a salty brine pumped up from ancient reservoirs under the desert. It also contains lithium carbonate, the raw material for a light, silvery metal that happens to be a component of the batteries now used by virtually all computers, phones and electric cars.

Terrorism police list Extinction Rebellion as extremist ideology: But soon back down

After their unlawful antics costing taxpayers millions of pounds and disrupting thousands of people trying to go about their daily lives, anti-terrorism police included XR in a booklet they send to statutary partners.

UK energy firms to pay £10.5m over August power cut

Image credit: steelguru.com

Guess who ends up paying that bill? National Grid may yet be broken up as the inquest into the fiasco goes on, and a vague comment says wind power needs to be ‘more secure’.

Three energy firms are to pay a total of £10.5m following August’s power cut that left over a million people without electricity and caused travel chaos, reports BBC News.

Although the power cut lasted for less than an hour, it affected homes, businesses and hospitals, while rail services were disrupted for days.

RWE Generation, Orstead and UK Power Networks will pay into a redress fund run by the UK’s energy watchdog, Ofgem.

Ofgem says it will continue to look into the role National Grid played.

Goldman Sachs operative Carney slithers from BoE to UN climate con job.

Bank of England governor Mark Carney, who previously served as Canada’s top central banker, will be taking on a new role as the United Nations’ special envoy on climate action and climate finance.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres made the announcement while speaking to reporters in Madrid on Sunday, adding the move will take effect next year.

Quotes from COP25: It’s a nothing-burger

Here are key quotes from leaders, experts and activists on the UN Climate Change Conference (COP25) outcome.

Antonio Guterres, UN secretary general

“I am disappointed with the results of COP25. The international community lost an important opportunity to show increased ambition on mitigation, adaptation and finance to tackle the climate crisis.”

The U.N. is running out of money to pay it’s 40,000 bureaucrats with.

Facing a massive hole in its budget, the United Nations is implementing “emergency measures” to avoid missing payroll and other obligations before the end of the year. Unsurprisingly, UN bosses are demanding that taxpayers in America and other nations hand over more money now or face global catastrophe. Even UN officials and apologists, though, have blasted the “bloated” organization for squandering massive amounts of money on everything from luxurious air travel and fancy hotels to globalist propaganda promoting its own agenda. Trump reacted to the whining by calling on the UN to go look for money elsewhere.