Links tagged “mkey”

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“Birds have evolved over hundreds of years to fly certain paths to migrate,” said New Hampshire-based environmentalist Lisa Linowes. “You can’t throw a turbine up in the way and expect them to adapt. It’s not happening.” “Democrats have been sold a false narrative by the industrial wind industry,” said Kevon Martis, a Michigan-based environmentalist and co-founder of the Energy and Wildlife Coalition with Linowes.

“Many Democrats somehow imagine that industrial wind farms, which take hundreds of times more land than a natural gas plant, are better for the environment,” he added.

...

The wind industry claims house cats kill more birds than wind turbines. But cats mainly kill small, common birds like sparrows, robins, and jays, whereas wind turbines kill big, threatened, slow-to-reproduce species like hawks, eagles, owls, and condors. 

The rapidly spinning blades of wind turbines act like an apex predator that big birds never evolved to deal with. And because big birds have much lower reproductive rates than small birds, their deaths have a far greater impact on the overall population of the species.  For example, golden eagles will have just one or two chicks in a brood, and usually less than once a year, whereas a songbird like a robin could have up to two broods of three to seven chicks each year.

Donna Laframboise: "RCP8.5, I think of it as Ridiculous Climate Prophecy" - "Fairy tales to describe how humans might impact the climate by the year 2100." 

It can’t become reality, they point out, unless humanity burns five times more coal than we currently do, “an amount larger than some estimates of recoverable coal reserves.” Whenever RCP8.5 gets mentioned, they say, it should be clearly labelled as an “unlikely worst case.”

Incredibly, that ‘major scientific report’ (National Climate Assessment) takes RCP8.5 seriously. Calling it a “core scenario,” page 6 of the report presents it as a realistic possibility rather than a farfetched hallucination:

"RCP8.5 is generally associated with higher population growth, less technological innovation, and higher carbon intensity of the global energy mix."

This means the report is junk. No matter how many federal agencies were involved in its creation. But the New York Times didn’t tell readers that.

Green Guru Michael Shellenberger, formerly Time Magazine's “Hero of the Environment': "On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem. I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.

But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public."

...

I further hope that you’ll accept my apology. ...

Some people will, when they read this imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution...I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network...In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them...

Scientific institutions including WHO and IPCC have undermined their credibility through the repeated politicization of science.

Until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist...I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding.

But then, last year, things spiraled out of control. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said “The world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “Climate Change Kills Children.”

Grist Mag: "According to a recent update of a study originally published in Nature Climate Change, fossil fuel pollution has bounced back rapidly as lockdowns have started to lift around the world. In early April, when billions of people were sheltering in place, global daily carbon dioxide emissions were 17 percent lower than they were in 2019; now, it’s almost as if the lockdowns never happened." ...

"Fear of the coronavirus is also pushing people to get in their cars, instead of taking public transit. Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released guidelines encouraging people to drive to work solo, instead of taking the bus or the subway...Last Monday, 800,000 people rode the New York City subway, the highest number since March — but that’s still only 15 percent of normal." ...

"The researchers still expect emissions for the whole of 2020 to be down 4 to 7 percent compared with last year, depending on the pace of reopening. But that’s not even close to enough to slow down climate change. Keeping global warming below dangerous levels would require a 7.5 percent drop in emissions every year."

Moment of Clarity: “People want to move on with their lives,” Jackson said. “We can’t reduce emissions just by locking people at home.”

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Flashback: ‘Fantastic’ for the climate: Activists See Coronavirus Lockdowns As Dress Rehearsal for ‘Climate Emergency’ – Special Report

Andreas Malm is in the human ecology division at Lund University: "The whole strategic direction of Lenin after 1914 was to turn World War I into a fatal blow against capitalism. This is precisely the same strategic orientation we must embrace today — and this is what I mean by ecological Leninism. We must find a way of turning the environmental crisis into a crisis for fossil capital itself." ...

"There was a moment in March 2020 when many of us in the climate justice movement felt a degree of surprise to find that governments in Europe and elsewhere were prepared to basically shut down their entire economies in an effort to contain the pandemic. This is striking, given that the same states had never contemplated undertaking any kind of intervention in the economy for the sake of the climate crisis."

COVID 'is an opportunity": "This is an opportunity in the sense that it has brought about a temporary cessation of many of the most environmentally damaging activities, mass aviation has been suspended, carbon emissions have declined, fossil fuels are remaining in the ground, and so on. This is a moment where we can say to governments: “If you were able to intervene to protect us from the virus, you can intervene to protect us from the climate crisis as well, the implications of which are much worse.” The current juncture therefore provides us with an opportunity to oppose the return to business as usual, to push for the transformation of the global economy and the launch of something like a Green New Deal."...

"State power should definitely be used to prevent luxury emissions perpetrated by the rich — private jets should be banned outright, as should SUVs and other vehicles that consume completely indefensible amounts of fuel. This is low-hanging fruit for the climate justice movement, as these sources of emissions are among the least socially necessary." ...

"Some forms of consumption will indeed have to be limited or abolished outright — this cannot be done through markets or appeals to ethical consumption, but only through state regulation." ...

"While it may seem utopian at this stage, it is important to make the proposition of closing down institutions designed to survey and control populations and repurpose them to attack capital, closing down the sources of global warming and zoonotic transmission. In the book, for example, I propose that we abolish border agencies and turn them into institutions for cracking down on the wildlife trade."

MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen's new study published in The European Physical Journal: 

The "doubled-CO2 effect has less than 1/5th of the impact that the net cloud effect has. And yet we are asked to accept the “implausible” claim that change in one variable, CO2, is predominantly responsible for altering global temperatures."

"A causal role for CO2 'cannot be claimed' for the glacial-to-interglacial warming events because CO2 variations follow rather than lead the temperature changes in paleoclimate records and the 100 ppm total increase over thousands of years produce “about 1 W/m²” of total radiative impact."

"Climate science didn’t used to be alarmist prior to the late 1980s. Scientists were instead sufficiently skeptical about claims of climatically-induced planetary doom. That changed during the years 1988-1994, when climate research centered on CO2 and global warming received a 15-fold increase in funding in the US alone. Suddenly there was a great financial incentive to propel alarming global warming scenarios."

"Concepts like 'polar amplification' are 'imaginary'."

“The only way that a 2015 agreement can achieve a 2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy," Yvo de Boer, former UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) executive secretary said in 2013. 

Yvo de Boer's words sound prophetic when compared to the comments of climate campaigners in 2020 excited about the impact of the COVID lockdowns.

Climate activist Eric Holthaus said on April 22, 2020, about the impact of lockdowns on global CO2 emissions: “This is roughly the same pace that the IPCC says we need to sustain every year until 2030 to be on pace to limit global warming to 1.5C and hit the Paris climate goals. This is what ‘rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’ looks like.”