Climate change: Technology no silver bullet, experts tell PM

Ever tighter control of human lifestyles seems to be the latest battle cry of climate propagandists. Meanwhile, wind and solar power always seem to need vast subsidies despite supposedly ‘plummeting costs’. Where’s the affordability, even if any of the advocated ideas made sense in terms of the climate, which they don’t? Millions of tons of toxic and other industrial waste will be produced in vain attempts to change the weather.
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Boris Johnson’s techno-optimism ignores the need for big societal changes, experts warn.

Can we fix climate change with the “silver bullet” of technology? asks BBC News.

The prime minister seems to think so.

Blowing in the wind: are Boris’s renewable ambitions realistic?

Boris Johnson wants us to set our gaze beyond the coronavirus pandemic to contemplate a future when our homes are powered by wind alone.

Is he tilting at windmills like Don Quixote? Victor Hill @ Master Investor is asking.

The vision thing

Right now, the British prime minister’s in-tray is full – but one of the items requiring his keen attention is the UK’s commitment to transition to a net carbon neutral economy by 2050, as decreed by his predecessor, Mrs May.

During his digital address to the virtual reality Conservative Party Conference 2020, beamed through cyberspace on 06 October, one of the key themes was to build back better by harnessing a valuable resource which Britain possesses in abundance: wind.

Delingpole: Doom Pixie Greta Thunberg spurned AGAIN by Nobel Prize

The world has something far more pressing to be miserable about, this time for good reasons, and attention-hungry climate doomsters hate that.
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For a second year running Greta Thunberg has failed to win the Nobel Peace Prize, notes James Delingpole @ Breitbart.

This year she was beaten by the UN World Food Program.

In 2019 she was beaten by Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed as his reward for securing peace with neighbouring Eritrea.

Perhaps the Nobel prize committee has noticed something increasingly apparent to the rest of us: that the world has long since reached Peak Greta; the Doom Pixie has delighted us all quite enough.

Part of Thunberg’s problem may be that her cause has been superseded by that of Chinese coronavirus.

Earlier in the pandemic, Thunberg made a bid for ongoing relevance by co-authoring an angry letter to European Union leaders, demanding that climate be taken seriously as coronavirus.

It screeched:

The last few months the world has watched with horror how the COVID-19 pandemic has hit people all over the globe. During this tragedy, we are seeing how many – not all – world leaders and people around the world stepped up and acted for the greater good of society.

It is now clearer than ever that the climate crisis has never once been treated as a crisis, neither from the politicians, media, business, nor finance.

The letter’s petulant tone is an indication of the growing frustration among climate activists that their thunder has been stolen by COVID-19.

Full article here.

Ecologist journal: The unsustainability of the electric car

The only viable option for carbophobes is significant degrowth (their term) according to this article. With present delusional plans to control global warming the numbers just don’t add up for ‘greenhouse gas’ obsessives, so even greater futile sacrifices are demanded.
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Shifting to electric vehicles while maintaining current travelling habits will not deliver emissions reductions required by the European Green Deal and Paris Agreement.

The European Green Deal sets ambitious targets for decarbonising the European economy.

This includes a European Commission proposal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55 percent by 2030, with the European Parliament’s Environment Committee demanding a more ambitious 60 percent cut.

The EGD also calls for the EU to become carbon-neutral by 2050.

Nuclear power: Suffolk’s Sizewell C is too expensive says ex-energy minister Ed Davey

As someone until last month involved with a renewables company, he would say that, wouldn’t he? The green jobs claim may also be over-optimistic, if Scotland’s experience is anything to go by.
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Ed Davey, who approved a nuclear plant in 2013, says the “economic case” is no longer there, reports BBC News.

Instead the new Liberal Democrat leader argues the government should invest more in renewable energy to help boost the economy.

“The economic case for nuclear power is not there any more,” said Mr Davey.

Energy firm EDF, which is behind the £20bn proposals, said the plant on the Suffolk coast would deliver low-carbon electricity.

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.

Ross McKitrick: Save the economy, ditch the ‘green recovery’ plans

Any ‘green’ ideas were never about economic sanity anyway, but that problem is now even more acute.

H/T The GWPF
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Green technologies that were known money-losers before the pandemic are still money-losers today.

There’s a curious idea floating around that the COVID crisis undid the principles of economics, says Ross McKitrick.

Nobody puts it exactly like that, but it’s implied in the various proposals for restructuring the post-pandemic economy so that it will look very different from the one we experienced up to the end of January.

Amid the buzzwords about “Resilient Recovery” and “Building Back Better” are proposals for an investment push into green technologies and new environmental policies, including initiatives that failed to pass standard economic tests before the pandemic.

So how, exactly, did the pandemic change the criteria for evaluating policies, investments and major public projects?

The short answer is: it didn’t, and any claim otherwise is untrue.

Ian Plimer: The Australian Press Council is a hive of climate zealots

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide

Truth-starved climate propaganda and its backers get a good going-over from the ever-robust Professor.

H/T Climate Change Dispatch
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As a result of an activist campaign, the Australian Press Council took exception to my article in The Australian on November 22, 2019, says Ian Plimer @ Spectator AU.

They claimed that my statement that there “are no carbon emissions. If there were, we could not see because most carbon is black. Such terms are deliberately misleading, as are many claims” was false.

Journalists in the Press Council should know basic English and the difference between an element (carbon) and a compound (carbon dioxide).

This is elementary schoolkid’s science. For the Press Council to claim that this is factually incorrect shows breathtaking ignorance.

Fossil fuels becoming ‘socially challenged’, says BP boss

The greenblob marches on, regardless of the real climate. Message to BP boss: water vapour is by far the major so-called greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide is a minor sidekick. Ergo you are merely playing games.
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The chief executive of BP says he understands why people view the industry as “bad” and that fossil fuels are becoming the subject of social challenge, reports Aol.

Bernard Looney, who took on the role at the oil and gas giant in February, said the industry had “a challenge… with trust” but BP was determined to be a net zero carbon company by 2050.

Report suggests SUVs are a health risk, or equivalent to one

Image credit: Carbuyer

A ‘climate think tank’ proposes trying to choke off SUV demand by banning adverts, but the most obvious advert is the vehicle that’s already on the road, visible to all. This report claims ‘soaring sales for electric vehicles’, but the actual numbers are tiny compared to total sales of all propulsion types – especially SUVs.
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A new report draws parallels between the ban on tobacco advertising and changed behaviors, says Greenbiz.

The United Kingdom should ban the advertising of sports utility vehicles (SUVs) in order to help drive down transport emissions and accelerate progress towards the country’s net zero goals, a study published this week has urged, drawing parallels with the ban on tobacco advertising and its success in changing behaviors.

Produced by climate think tank the New Weather Foundation, the report highlights how average emissions for new cars sold in the U.K. increased in 2019 for the fourth year in a row.

The same trend has been documented across much of Europe, as soaring sales for electric vehicles and low emission models are more than offset by increased demand for heavier and more polluting SUVs, which made up four in 10 of the U.K.’s new car sales last year.

By contrast, while sales of electric and plug-in hybrid models are growing exponentially, they are doing so from a low base with data from the European Environment Agency showing that fewer than two in every 100 new cars are fully electric.

The growth in SUV sales comes alongside increased advertising expenditure to promote the vehicles, the study adds, a marketing strategy that appears to run in conflict with the stated decarbonization ambitions of some of the world’s biggest car firms.

The study highlights the example provided Ford, which has set a net zero emissions target and promised to invest $11.5 billion in developing electric models through to 2022, but has at the same time stepped up efforts to promote its most high carbon models.

From September 2016 to September 2018, Ford went from a roughly 50/50 split in U.S. advertising spend between cars and SUVs/pickup trucks, to spending 85 percent on the latter, in pursuit of the higher profit margins provided by larger vehicles, the study notes.

Full article: We banned advertising for cigarettes. Should we do the same for SUVs?

Climate Fork In The Road This November

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For US citizens of course. Do they want to saddle themselves with $trillions of extra debt in pursuit of a mirage?

PA Pundits - International

By Peter Murphy~

National elections are about many things, ranging from policy issues, candidates’ personalities and the conditions of the country. The upcoming presidential election between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden in November will continue that reality.

No single issue or event will decide who will be elected president for the next four years. There are simply too many swirling for one to be decisive. One issue that will be decided, whether or not voters realize, is the direction of climate policies since the two presidential candidates have polar opposite views.

President Trump has never embraced “man-made” climate change has having any significant impact on the planet’s temperature trajectory. He has condemned the proposed Green New Deal in its various multi-trillion dollar iterations, and withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Accords that committed (some) signatory nations to reduce carbon emissions.

Among the reasons…

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The biofuel boom was doomed from the start

That’s the verdict of OilPrice.com. Climate catastrophists seem more interested in other supposed panaceas these days.
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Why haven’t biofuels taken off? For years they have been touted as the fuel of the future, with high-profile commercial aircraft making headlines for pioneering all-biofuel international flights and promising a greener future for air travel.

The first transatlantic flight powered solely by biofuel, a Gulfstream G450 owned by Honeywell International Inc., took place nearly a decade ago, in 2011, and was lauded as a harbinger of green jet fuel for all.

At that time, Honeywell Vice President Jim Rekoske told the world, “We’re ready to go to commercial scale and commercial use.”

But now, nine years later, the biofuel revolution that we were promised, both in the air and on our highways, is nowhere to be seen.

Exploiting Calamities And Climate To Push Socialism

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Unfortunately ‘the science’ of the climate is at most a sideshow in political circles.

PA Pundits - International

By Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris~

It should be no surprise to our readers that climate change was never a scientific issue, though politicians and well—financed scientists promoted it as such. It has always been a political movement aimed at increasing the size of government and installing a Socialist system. Such a system would eliminate individual freedom while enhancing the control of the elites to achieve their ultimate goal: power over the people.

It was a very transparent plan: convince the public that life—giving carbon dioxide is a danger to humanity and that, were the Earth to be a few degrees warmer, disaster would necessarily follow. You buy this dystopian fantasy and you give your government control of the very breathe you exhale, the number of children you are allowed and every kilowatt of energy your life may consume. As fantastically absurd as this fiction is, those who…

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Shellenberger: On behalf of environmentalists, I apologize for the climate scare

Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy

An IPCC reviewer says the public have been misled. Whether self-styled environmentalists go along with this is debatable of course. Cynics may say the writer has a book to sell, but an opinion piece in Forbes carries some weight. The definition of climate change is left open to interpretation.
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On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years, says Michael Shellenberger @ Forbes [pdf link].

Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world.

It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.

IPCC and Sceptics Agree: Climate Change Is Not Causing Extreme Weather

Climate theory used to hold that there was a link between the amount of extreme weather and the equator-pole temperature gradient, meaning that warming poles should mean less of it, not more. But nowadays almost anything unusual can be labelled extreme weather by alarmists, creating headlines but no understanding of the climate.
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A new Global Warming Policy Foundation report from retired physicist Ralph Alexander, Ph.D. (Oxford University) supports the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s conclusion there is limited scientific evidence linking human-caused climate change to increases in extreme weather, says H.Sterling Burnett.

Alexander’s conclusions are also confirmed by recent documents produced by Heartland Institute Senior Fellow and meteorologist Anthony Watts on the Climate at a Glance website.

Alexander’s paper begins by remarking, “The purported link between extreme weather and global warming has captured the public imagination and attention of the mainstream media far more than any of the other claims made by the narrative of human-caused climate change.”

This is odd because data and analyses from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N. body that climate alarmists in academic, political, and media circles continually cite as the authoritative source of information on climate change, confirm that “if there is any trend at all in extreme weather, it’s downward rather than upward.

Our most extreme weather, be it heat wave, drought, flood, hurricane or tornado, occurred many years ago, long before the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere began to climb at its present rate,” writes Alexander.

“Recent atmospheric heat waves in western Europe,” writes Alexander, “pale in comparison with the soaring temperatures of the 1930s, a period when three of the seven continents and 32 of the 50 US states set all-time high temperature records, which still stand today.”

Nor has the IPCC discerned or identified any long-term trend in drought patterns, either in the United States or globally.

And even though rainfall has modestly increased in recent years, there is no evidence floods are becoming more frequent or severe.

Many recent flood events can be traced almost entirely to land-use changes such as channelization, deforestation, the destruction of wetlands, and the building of dams, Alexander notes.

Continued here.

Journalist claims carbon dioxide is ‘slowly but surely killing us all’

Electric ferry Ellen [image credit: Erik Christensen @ Wikipedia]

No evidence is offered, of course. The article is about an electric ferry, but the temptation to lapse into lurid climate propaganda was obviously too great. As for the ferry, the article implies the batteries will last for 30 years, which looks ambitious to say the least.
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Ellen, Denmark’s first all-electric ferry, has completed its first 10 months of revenue service, reports CleanTechnica.

Passengers like its silent running and absence of diesel fumes.

The operator likes that it costs less to run than a diesel-powered ferry.

Delingpole: Britain Unleashes a Green New Deal to Kill What’s Left of the Economy

Green blob [credit: storybird.com]

Unsurprisingly the author is not impressed with the UK government’s plans for a post-COVID job creation scheme. Where’s the wealth creation in subsidised jobs within subsidised industries?

The Chancellor has found an ingenious scheme to ensure the UK never recovers from the lockdown: a ‘green industrial revolution’, says James Delingpole @ Breitbart News.

According to The Times of London:

Hydrogen cars won’t overtake electric vehicles – due to laws of science

Hydrogen-powered Toyota Mirai [image credit: Nikkei Asian Review]

A tank of hydrogen is obviously lighter than an equivalent fixed-weight battery pack, and filling up is much quicker than any recharge, but in many ways hydrogen cars struggle to compete, according to The Conversation. Very few manufacturers are interested in them any more, and list prices look higher even than EVs.
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Hydrogen has long been touted as the future for passenger cars.

The hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV), which simply runs on pressurised hydrogen from a fuelling station, produces zero carbon emissions from its exhaust.

It can be filled as quickly as a fossil-fuel equivalent and offers a similar driving distance to petrol.

Climate Wars: David v. Goliath in Cyberspace

The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) brings this critique of the big beasts of social media to our attention. Fake impartiality and bullying tactics get exposed again.
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Silicon Valley Goliaths, using the technology and market forces at their disposal, have shut out of the marketplace Davids opposed to their preferred opinions on climate change, says Clarice Feldman @ The Pipeline.

In his 2007 book, An Army of Davids, Glenn Reynolds, the founder of Instapundit, wrote optimistically that an army of ordinary people (“Davids”) could use technology and the market to beat the Goliaths of “Big Media, Big Government and other Goliaths.”

Thirteen years later, big media is on the ropes but the Silicon Valley Goliaths, using the technology and market forces at their disposal, have shut out of the marketplace Davids opposed to their preferred opinions.

Following Arrhenius on global warming

Svante Arrhenius

The eternal question – was the Arrhenius climate theory erroneous? Still looking for convincing evidence of it, the author concludes.
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But he did change his mind …

This 1912 newspaper article (here) shows that a century ago the worthy citizens of Warkworth were followers of Svante Arrhenius’s new theory that global warming would be caused by mankind’s emissions of greenhouse gases, says Richard Treadgold @ Climate Conversation (NZ).

Forty years earlier Tyndall had identified CO2 as a greenhouse gas.

Arrhenius followed up with newly available data in 1896 and calculated that doubling CO2 would increase temperatures by 5°C or 6°C. In 1906 he reduced it to 4.0°C.