Links in “Middle Column”
- Biden’s Climate Team: Climate Change Is Happening Because of ‘Systemic Racism ’
- Noam Chomsky compares anti-maskers to mass shooters
Chomsky claimed that people who oppose wearing masks are an “epidemic” in American politics, more concerned about protecting their freedoms than following science:
“I mean, do you have an individual right to take an assault rifle and go to the supermarket or mall and start shooting randomly?” he questioned. “That’s what it means not to wear a mask. It’s a strange kind of individualism.”
- Angst over climate impact of COVID vaccinations – ‘CO2-spewing airplanes & trucks needed’ to distribute – ‘Hospitals got creative, using bike delivery to reduce the environmental footprint’
- Greenpeace’s actual claim: ‘Historic record’ low cold temps & snow blamed on ‘climate change’ – ‘Can we afford not why we need to fight climate change’
Greenpeace: 'This is no coincidence. The climate is changing, and it's affecting our weather in a variety of ways all across the globe. Let’s demand world leaders to take this #ClimateCrisis seriously and act to stop it!'
- Burning Yen: Japanese Government Scraps Last Wind Turbines in Failed $580 Million Offshore Project
It’s hardly news that the true cost of generating electricity using wind power is staggering; the cost of doing so offshore is astronomical.
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The government said Thursday it will remove the two remaining wind power turbines it installed off Fukushima Prefecture citing lack of profit in the project, which cost ¥60 billion ($580 million).
- Justice Alito fails climate reality again: ‘Recuses himself from climate case because he owns oil company stocks…like most everyone else’ – Pressure now on Justice Barrett b/c her dad worked for Shell
- Electric vehicle mandates will require massive rare-earth elements to achieve
In 2018, about 5.1 million EVs were in use around the globe. That means that cutting domestic gasoline demand by a third would require the U.S. to deploy roughly 20 times as many EVs as are now being used around the world. That’s a tall order. ... Richard Herrington, the head of earth sciences at the Natural History Museum in London, and seven of his colleagues sent a letter to the British government that underscored the scale of the challenge. Herrington and his colleagues calculated the amount of commodities, including rare earth elements, that would be needed to convert all the United Kingdom’s 31 million motor vehicles to electric drive. (Rare earths are a group of 17 elements that includes neodymium, an essential ingredient in electric motors.) They found that doing so would require “two times the total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three-quarters of the world’s lithium production and at least half of the world’s copper production during 2018.”
The U.S. has about 276 million registered motor vehicles, or roughly nine times as many vehicles as the U.K. Thus, if Herrington’s numbers are right, electrifying all of U.S. motor vehicles would require roughly 18 times the world’s current cobalt production, about nine times global neodymium output, nearly seven times global lithium production, and about four times world copper production.
- UK PM Boris Johnson all in for Great Reset: Promotes ‘Build Back Better’ to ‘create a fairer, greener & more prosperous future’
- 2020 Hottest Year!?: ‘There has been no significant warming trend for 5 years’ – ‘2020 is statistically identical to 2016’ – ‘Thousandths of a degree’ difference
AP: 'Hottest year on record': 2020 sets yet another global temperature record
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Rebuttal: David Whitehouse of The Global Warming Policy Forum: "A temperature anomaly for 2020 of 0.98 +/- 0.15 °C compared to 1.00 +/- 0.15 °C for 2016 (which was the year with the strongest recorded El Nino). The difference is trivial, especially since the precision of the mean is reported to thousandths of a degree. Looking at NOAA’s data for previous years you can see that every year since 2015 falls within one standard deviation of the mean. Such a simple and unbiased view of the data leads to a much more justifiable headline for the data: There has been no significant warming trend for 5 years, as NOAA has confirmed." ...
"A number of months in early 2020 were affected by El Niño conditions, very different from what the WMO Secretary-General has claimed. It is true that 2016 would have been cooler but for the El Nino and 2020 warmer but for the La Nina. However, as I pointed out in my previous post, the El Nino effect can be seen over several years making estimates for greenhouse gas forcing problematic." ...
"The increase in atmospheric CO2 between 2015-2019 made no difference to global temperatures and neither has the 7% fall in global CO2 emissions observed in 2020."
Also see: Here we go again: 2020 claimed to be ‘tied with 2016’ for ‘Hottest year’ declaration
- UN’s ‘Harmony with Nature’ project: Urge need to ‘shift from a human-centered to an Earth-centred society’ – ‘COVID-19 pandemic was linked to the poor health of ecosystems’
UN touts being 'the champion of non-anthropocentrism'
"The Nonhuman Rights Project in the United States instituted court proceedings on behalf of elephants and chimpanzees, arguing that they should be treated as “persons” and freed from captivity." ...
"In Sweden, the organizations Swedish Earth Rights Lawyers and Rights of Nature Sweden have drafted a declaration for the rights of Lake Vattern." ...
"The need for jointly imagining and creating a new normalcy that prioritizes planetary health and human well-being for all." ...
"The process of recovery from COVID-19 provides us with a unique opportunity to build back better, together, so as to transform the world into one where humans truly live in harmony with Nature."
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Another New Study Says Warming & CO2-Induced Greening Leads To COOLING Of Land Surface Temperatures
Since the 1980s, 29% of human CO2 emissions were cancelled out by the CO2-induced greening of the Earth. The post-2000 vegetative greening expansion has been so massive (5.4 million km²) its net areal increase is equivalent to a region the size of the Amazon rainforest.
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Arctic Cool Off: Canada, Greenland & Iceland Have Seen Almost No Warming So Far This Century
Canada: no warming in a quarter century
Greenland stations have cooled off
Iceland has cooled since 2001
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Bill Gates & UN Launch New Climate Agenda – Seeks ‘to kick start a transformational decade’ of climate ‘action’
Boris Johnson, Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, and Narendra Modi will apparently gather in the Netherlands. There, along with Bill Gates, UN head Antonio Guterres, and personnel associated with the European Union, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, they’ll attend a climate summit hosted by the Global Center on Adaptation. ...
We’re told this summit "will launch a comprehensive Adaptation Action Agenda to kick start a transformational decade."
Donna Laframboise: "The chutzpah is astonishing. The global economy is in tatters. Billions face an uncertain future. Health care workers are exhausted. Yet this Clique of Self-Important People™ is full speed ahead, determined to impose its climate vision on the rest of us."
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The Return of the Dead: Countering Species Extinction Claims – The most aggressive claims rest on shaky foundations’
In the last 500 years only some 80 mammals are recorded as having gone extinct. In his book, More From Less, Andrew McAfee, a board member of HumanProgress.org, discusses how relatively rare recorded extinctions are – with some 530 across all species in the last five centuries. More importantly, he notes, the rate of extinction “appear[s] to have slowed down in recent decades; for example, no marine creatures have been recorded as extinct in the last fifty years.”
Matt Ridley, another board member and frequent contributor to this site, argues that despite the human population doubling in the last half-century, “the extinction rate of wild species, especially in the most industrialized countries,” seems to have fallen rather than increased. While absence of evidence isn’t the same as evidence of absence, and there might be millions of unrecorded species in the world’s oceans and tropical forests, the most aggressive claims rest on shaky foundations.
