Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

CLUELESS! NY Gov. Cuomo Says There Were No Hurricanes Before Global Warming

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | November 5, 2019

If you thought the BBC were bad enough, check out this MSNBC interview with NY Governor Cuomo following some floods in the State:

https://lidblog.com/clueless-gov-cuomo/

Note how he is allowed to get away with such blatantly and obviously false claims that “we did not use to have hurricanes, we did not have super storms, we did not have tornadoes”.

The Lid takes apart such ridiculous claims, with a collection of old newspaper stories of just such events in NY State:

https://lidblog.com/clueless-gov-cuomo/

The National Hurricane Center have this graphic, showing tropical cyclone tracks since 1851. (The reds and oranges are hurricanes).

There is nothing unusual about hurricanes hitting the northeast:

https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/climo/images/1851_2017_allstorms.jpg

https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/climo/images/1851_2017_allstorms.jpg

Same story with tornadoes in NY:

https://www.spc.noaa.gov/wcm/#data

Cuomo also implied that extreme rainfall was getting much worse in NY State.

However there is absolutely no evidence of that at all at the long running Ithaca station, or New York itself:

chart

chart-1

Highest Daily Precipitation by Year

http://climod2.nrcc.cornell.edu/

Why don’t the media do the job they are supposed to do?

November 5, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Protecting Society From ‘Science’

Scientific research, published in influential places, can change the world. For ill as well as for good.

By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | November 4, 2019

The New York Post ran a fascinating article this weekend, titled Stanford professor who changed America with just one study was also a liar. It’s written by journalist Susannah Cahalan, and is about her new book, The Great Pretender.

I haven’t read the book yet, the Kindle edition becomes available tomorrow, but she appears to be the real deal – a journalist who discovered something disturbing, unwelcome, and contrary to her expectations, yet told the truth.

The book is about a professor from a famous university. In 1973 he published a paper in a famous journal, Science. That paper changed history. It fuelled a backlash against institutions for the mentally ill, leading to their widespread closure.

Only now, more than four decades later, are we learning that David Rosenhan, who taught psychology and law, appears to have invented a great deal of what he described in that paper. That’s called fraud. He also suppressed contrary evidence.

The study claimed to describe the profoundly negative experiences of eight individuals who faked serious illness, were admitted to mental institutions, and then had a difficult time convincing the staff they were actually sane and stable. In the New York Post, Calahan tells us she:

started to uncover serious inconsistencies between the documents I had found and the paper Rosenhan published in Science.

… I looked for the seven other pseudopatients and spent the next months of my life chasing ghosts. I hunted down rumors, pursuing one dead end after the next. I even hired a private detective, who got no further than I had.

After years of searching, I found only one pseudopatient who participated in the study and whose experience matched that of Rosenhan…

… The only other participant I discovered, Harry Lando, had a vastly different take. Lando had summed up his 19-day hospitalization at the US Public Health Service Hospital in San Francisco in one word: “positive.”

Even though he too was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, Lando felt it was a healing environment that helped people get better.

… instead of incorporating Lando into the study, Rosenhan dropped him from it… His data – the overall positive experience of his hospitalization – didn’t match Rosenhan’s thesis that institutions are uncaring, ineffective and even harmful places, and so they were discarded.

Fake news isn’t new. It turns up in prestigious, peer-reviewed scientific journals. It gets spread far and wide by newspapers, magazines, and television news. It makes its way into textbooks and introductory college courses.

We have few defences against it, few ways to prevent society from being highjacked by ‘research’ conducted by people who have agendas as well as PhDs.

The Great Pretender is another cautionary tale. Skepticism. Always skepticism.

November 4, 2019 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Ancient air challenges carbon dioxide explanation for a shift in glacial cycles

Tall Bloke’s Talk Shop | November 3, 2019

This might rattle a few cages in climate-land.

An analysis of air up to 2 million years old, trapped in Antarctic ice, shows that a major shift in the periodicity of glacial cycles was probably not caused by a long-term decline in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, writes Eric W. Wolff in Nature.

– – –

During the past 2.6 million years, Earth’s climate has alternated between warm periods known as interglacials, when conditions were similar to those of today, and cold glacials, when ice sheets spread across North America and northern Europe.

Before about 1 million years ago, the warm periods recurred every 40,000 years, but after that, the return period lengthened to an average of about 100,000 years.

It has often been suggested that a decline in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was responsible for this fundamental change.

Writing in Nature, Yan et al.1 report the first direct measurements of atmospheric CO2 concentrations from more than 1 million years ago.

Their data show that, although CO2 levels during glacials stayed well above the lows that occurred during the deep glacials of the past 800,000 years, the maximum CO2 concentrations during interglacials did not decline.

The explanation for the change must therefore lie elsewhere.

Understanding what caused the shift in periodicity, known as the mid-Pleistocene transition (MPT), is one of the great challenges of palaeoclimate science.

The 40,000-year periodicity that dominated until about 1 million years ago is easily explained, because the tilt of Earth’s spin axis relative to its orbit around the Sun varies between 22.1° and 24.5° with the same period. In other words, before the MPT, low tilts led to cooler summers that promoted the growth and preservation of ice sheets.

But after the MPT, glacial cycles lasted for two to three tilt cycles. Because the pattern of variation in Earth’s orbit and tilt remained unchanged, this implies that the energy needed to lose ice sheets2 had increased.

One prominent explanation is that atmospheric levels of CO2 were declining, and eventually crossed a threshold value below which the net cooling effect of the decline allowed ice sheets to persist and grow larger.

Full article here.

November 3, 2019 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Nigel Farage Exposes Extinction Rebellion’s Plan to Topple Representative Democracy

By Eric Worrall | Watts Up With That? | November 2, 2019

According to Extinction Rebellion’s Sarah Lunnon, representative democracy, at least on climate policy and economic management, should be subordinated to citizens assemblies composed of people who are already running citizens assemblies, and people nominated by organisations invited to participate. […]

Citizens assemblies would advise on the “grim” task of imposing wartime levels of rationing, and would decide what economic activity would be allowed to continue, to fulfil their paramount goal of drastically cutting Britain’s carbon footprint to address the climate crisis by 2025.

Sarah compares citizens assemblies to court jurors, who once decided on whether people could live or die, before Britain abolished the death penalty.

Extinction Rebellion’s intention is that “advice” provided by the assemblies would be very difficult for elected politicians to refuse.

Breaking news: the British Conservative Government has just agreed Extinction Rebellion’s demand to form a climate change citizen’s assembly. 30,000 invitations will be sent at random, then 110 of the respondents will be chosen to sit on the assembly. The budget allocated for the assembly is £520,000. £120,000 will be provided by the government, the rest will provided by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the European Climate Foundation.

November 2, 2019 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | | Leave a comment

Climate change denial is the new ‘flat Earth’ & causes WILDFIRES, California ex-governor testifies

RT | October 30, 2019

Add California’s wildfires to the list of problems caused by US President Donald Trump. The state’s former governor has warned Trump and his fellow Republicans that “the blood is on your soul”… for denying climate change.

“California’s burning while the deniers make a joke out of the standards that protect us all. The blood is on your soul here and I hope you wake up,” former governor Jerry Brown snarled, during a House Oversight Committee hearing on the Trump administration’s recent decision to bar California from setting its own auto emissions standards. “This is not politics, this is life, this is morality… this is real,” he continued.

“Climate change is real, it’s happening, and you and everyone else will recognize that.”

Brown likened Trump and his fellow climate change skeptics to believers in “flat Earth,” claiming climate change is directly responsible for the wildfires currently engulfing swathes of California. While at least two of this year’s fires are actually believed to have been caused by malfunctioning PG&E power lines – like last year’s devastating Camp Fire, which wiped out an entire town – Brown has glossed over the notoriously mismanaged utility to pin the blame on hotter, drier weather. The only solution? “Limiting our carbon pollution,” he told reporters in 2015, defying climate scientists who suggested that that year’s fires were not caused by anything of the sort.

The House called Brown and other “experts” to testify against the White House’s decision to quash the waiver that had allowed California to set its own vehicle emissions standards and effectively control the whole country’s auto industry. Car companies can hardly afford to manufacture two separate versions of the same vehicle, and California has more drivers than any other state, so they can’t ignore the stricter emissions rules either.

Democrats, including current California governor Gavin Newsom, have slammed the move as “reckless and politically motivated,” a symbol of Big Oil’s iron grip on the Environmental Protection Agency and other regulators. The White House, however, has claimed that stricter emissions standards make vehicles more expensive, meaning fewer people will drive these energy-efficient cars. The rule change is due to take effect next month.

October 30, 2019 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Is it climate socialism – or eco-fascism?

Green New Deal climate alarm socialism is really intolerant, totalitarian eco-fascism

By Paul Driessen | Watts Up With That? | October 28, 2019

Green New Dealers have convinced themselves that our planet faces an imminent, existential, manmade climate cataclysm – that can be prevented solely and simply by government edicts replacing fossil fuels with biofuel, wind, solar and battery energy. They achieve this state of absolute certainty largely by propagating constant scare stories, while ignoring and suppressing contradictory evidence and viewpoints.

They deliberately and deceptively talk about “carbon pollution.” Carbon is soot – what our cars, factories and power plants now emit in very small quantities. The honest, accurate term is carbon dioxide: the colorless, odorless, invisible gas that we exhale and plants need to grow, by using the tiny but growing 0.04% of Earth’s atmosphere that is CO2 to grow faster, better and with greater resistance to droughts.

They are climate change deniers, who say Earth’s climate is stable and can be kept stable by controlling minor factors (human carbon dioxide and methane emissions) and ignoring water vapor (the dominant greenhouse gas) and fluctuations in solar energy, cosmic rays, clouds, oceanic circulation, volcanoes, planetary orbits and other powerful natural forces that have brought climate changes throughout history.

They insist that even another half-degree increase in planetary temperatures since Earth emerged from the Little Ice Age (1350-1850) would be cataclysmic. That’s absurd. They also rely on computer models that project rapidly soaring temperatures – but already claim average global temperatures should be 0.9 degrees F higher than they actually are, according to satellite and weather balloon measurements.

Climate Crisis True Believers say tornadoes and hurricanes are becoming more frequent and intense. In reality, from 1950-1984, the US averaged 55 violent (F4 to F5) tornadoes every year; but over the next 33 years (1985-2018) only 35 per year. And in 2018, for the first time in recorded history, not one F4-F5 tornado touched down anywhere in the United States. (Is this due to rising atmospheric CO2 levels?)

Similarly, from 1920 through 2005, fifty-two Category 3 to 5 hurricanes made US landfall (1.6/year on average). And then, from October 2005 until August 2017 – a record twelve years – not one Category 3 to 5 ’cane struck the US mainland. Harvey and Irma ended that hurricane drought in 2017, but were hardly unprecedented in their intensity or rainfall. (Was that drought due to rising atmospheric CO2 levels?)

The Washington Post reported that “the Arctic Ocean is warming up … and in some places seals are finding the water too hot.” That was in 1922, and explorers wrote about Arctic ice cycles long before that. “We were astonished by the total absence of ice in Barrow Strait,” Sir Francis McClintock wrote in 1860, whereas at this time in 1854 it was “still frozen up.” As to continental USA weather, a commentator said “Snows are less frequent and less deep, and the rivers scarcely ever [freeze over] now.” That was Thomas Jefferson, in 1799. The 1970s manmade global cooling scare was replaced by today’s warming crisis.

After rising some 400 feet since the last ice age ended about 12,000 years ago, oceans are rising at 7 to 10 inches per century. That’s a minimal threat to coastal communities, some of which are more seriously threatened by land subsidence – including Chesapeake Bay lands (Maryland), Hampton Roads (Virginia), Houston and Miami. There has been no increase in the rate of sea level rise in more than a century.

Seawaters cannot become “more acidic.” They are slightly alkaline. They may be getting slightly less alkaline, depending on where and when pH levels are measured. But they are not becoming acidic.

Coral bleaching can result from pollution but is mostly natural, caused by coral animals ejecting their symbiotic zooxanthellae single-celled dinoflagellates, when seawaters become warmer or colder. Corals replace them with new species better adapted to the new temperatures – and then recover their former color and glory, as they have in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, Hawaii’s reefs and elsewhere. Corals also grow as seas rise, just as they have since the last Pleistocene Ice Age, creating today’s splendid reefs.

Polar bears are at their highest population levels in memory: as many as 31,000 of them. They’ve survived multiple ice ages, interglacial periods and warming episodes. They are hardly endangered.

We face no climate crisis, no unprecedented warming, climate or extreme weather threat – manmade or natural. Equally important, proposals to replace fossil fuels with biofuel, wind, solar and battery power would be far more ecologically destructive than their climate crisis – and would severely harm food supplies, nutrition, jobs, living standards, health and life spans, in rich and poor countries alike.

For the United States alone, replacing 100% of US gasoline and petrochemical feed stocks with ethanol would require some 700 million acres of biotech corn. That’s four times the land area of Texas turned into biofuel corn plantations – or soy/canola farms for biodiesel – leaving little land for food and wildlife.

Let’s suppose we’re going to use wind power to replace: the 3.9 billion megawatt-hours of electricity that Americans consumed in 2018, coal and gas-fired backup power plants, natural gas for home heating, coal and gas for factories, and gasoline-powered vehicles. We’ll also use wind turbines to generate enough extra electricity, every windy day, to charge batteries for just seven straight windless days.

We’ll also account for electricity loss along lengthy transmission lines, and every time we charge and discharge batteries. As we erect turbines in steadily lower quality wind locations, instead of generating full nameplate power maybe 33% of the year, on average, they will do so only 16% of the year.

Instead of the 58,000 we have now, the United States would need some 14 million 400-foot-tall turbines, each one capable of generating 1.8 megawatts at full capacity, when the wind is blowing at the proper speed. Each turbine would need about 120 acres of open space and access roads, as at BP’s 50,000-acre Fowler Ridge wind energy factory in Indiana. That would total 1.7 billion acres – ten times the area of Texas … or most of the Lower 48 United States! Plus thousands of miles of new transmission lines!

Their bird-butchering blades would wipe out raptors, other birds and bats across much of America. Would Extinction Rebellion go apoplectic? or not give a spotted owl hoot, since wind turbines are “eco-friendly”?

Manufacturing those wind turbines would require something on the order of 15 billion tons of steel, copper, rare earth metals, concrete, petroleum-based composites, gravel and other raw materials. Extracting them would require a hundredfold increase in global mining: removing hundreds of billions of tons of earth and rock overburden, and crushing and processing tens of billions of tons of ore.

Imagine the cumulative land use, eminent domain, property rights, environmental and wildlife impacts.

Using batteries to replace coal and gas-fired backup power plants for intermittent, weather-dependent wind facilities would require some one billion 100-kilowatt-hour, 1,000-pound lithium and cobalt-based Tesla battery packs – and still more mining and raw materials. And that doesn’t include extra battery storage for the cars, trucks and buses that Green New Dealers want to replace with electric vehicles.

Climate Crisis True Believers proudly proclaim themselves environmental socialists, while obstinately ignoring and suppressing these climate and energy realities. They certainly promote a political-economic system under which central government controls the means of production, while limiting private property rights or replacing them with communal ownership. That’s classic socialism.

But what they really want is eco-fascism: an even more extreme and intolerant system under which an authoritarian national or international government does not own businesses and industries outright, but dictates what they can make, do, sell and say – while redistributing wealth and property, employing laws, intimidation, and Antifa-style violence to control people’s thinking, speech and access to information.

Along with Google, Face Book, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, universities and the “mainstream” media – they try to censor, marginalize, ostracize, disinvite, shadow-ban, electronic book burn, and algorithm-eradicate differing, alternative, contrarian evidence, analyses and viewpoints on energy and climate.

They got Dr. Peter Ridd fired for exposing fabrications about the Great Barrier Reef’s demise – and Dr. Susan Crockford cashiered for daring to challenge bogus claims about polar bears. Robert Kennedy Jr., Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and others even want climate and energy dissenters prosecuted and jailed.

We must keep speaking truth to power – to ensure that our future is not compromised by climate lies.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of many books, reports and articles on energy, climate and environmental issues.

FIGURE 1. This graph compares the average temperature predictions of 102 climate models relied on by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) versus actual temperature measurements by satellites and weather balloons, and reanalyses of those measurements. Based on John Christy and Roy Spencer; updated September 2019.

clip_image002[4]

FIGURE 2. America’s unexpected 12-year reprieve from Category 3-5 hurricanes making landfall, by far the longest such “hurricane drought” in US history. Based on official government hurricane records.

clip_image004[4]

October 30, 2019 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

The Myth of the Apolitical Scientist

It’s absurd to say scientists are only now speaking up. Reuters publishes egregious climate propaganda.

By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | October 28, 2019

Matthew Green is not a naive teenager. He’s a seasoned journalist who has worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and who has written a book about a Ugandan warlord. So how do we explain the Reuters story he filed earlier this month, headlined Scientists endorse mass civil disobedience to force climate action?

Its major theme is that there’s something new going on, that the climate situation is so dire scientists have begun behaving in an extraordinary manner. 400 scientists from 20 countries have broken “with the caution traditionally associated” with their profession, he says. Having previously “shunned overt political debate,” they’ve now discovered “a moral duty” to “defy convention.”

Green quotes Julia Steinberger, an ecological economist:

We can’t allow the role of scientists to be just to write papers and publish them in obscure journals and hope somehow that somebody out there will pay attention. We need to be rethinking the role of the scientist… We can’t allow science as usual.

Lordy, where have these people been? Living in a cave for the past 50 years? Activist scientists who insist that “incalculable human suffering” will result if the world doesn’t prioritize their opinions above all else, are nothing new. Not even close.

In his 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, biology professor Paul Ehrlich declared that “the time of famines” had arrived. The only “hope for survival” was “drastic worldwide measures.” His book was a political treatise that advocated “brutal and heartless decisions” to solve a problem that never did materialize.

The 1972 bestseller, titled A Blueprint for Survival, similarly proclaimed that “a succession of famines, epidemics, social crises and wars” were inevitable if governments didn’t take specific, dramatic actions. Politicians and the public were urged to pay attention since “34 distinguished biologists, ecologists, doctors and economists” had attached their names to that blueprint.

Steinberger’s comments to the contrary, it has been a long time since we’ve had ‘science as usual.’ Here’s a quote from a book published in 1976:

In the past, specialists have often been reluctant to engage in political debate or to share their knowledge and fears with the general public… This generalization no longer holds true. In many branches of science there are radical movements. Increasingly, both in the rich and poor worlds, scientists are involved in active advocacy which they see as an intellectual and ethical duty.” [bold added]

In 1988, climatologist and activist James Hansen mainstreamed global warming as a planetary crisis. Since then, rather than expressing his political opinions lawfully, he has behaved in a manner that has resulted in his arrest on at least four occasions: June 2009, September 2010, August 2011, and February 2013. His actions have produced headlines such as Top NASA scientist arrested (again) in White House protest.

Canadian geneticist and household name David Suzuki has similarly declared it “crystal clear that the planet is losing a battle with the deadliest predator in the history of life on Earth” – humanity. That statement, and many others characteristic of a drama queen, appeared in his 1990 book, It’s a Matter of Survival. 29 years ago, the message from this scientist was unambiguous: adopt his advice or really bad things would happen.

In 2003, environmental biologist Stephen Schneider boycotted a scientific conference because the presentations made there would afterward be published by Cambridge University Press. Schneider said he’d only participate if that publisher withdrew Bjorn Lomborg’s book, The Skeptical Environmentalist. Far from being neutral and dispassionate, this major figure in climate science was demanding the equivalent of book burning.

In 2007, Mark Serreze, a “senior scientist at the U.S. government’s National Snow and Ice Data Center,” told the Associated Press: “The Arctic is screaming.” Within the same article, a second scientist, Jay Zwally, was equally over-the-top with his language. Global warming had already become so serious, he said, “the canary has died.”

Elsewhere, I’ve explained how 5 of the 10 lead authors of a crucial chapter in a 2007 climate report had documented links to the activist lobby group, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Indeed, 79 individuals with ties to the WWF helped write that report.

In 2009, hundreds of Canadian scientists, as well as several scientific organizations, signed an open letter published in a national newspaper promoting particular responses to climate change. The letter was orchestrated by the WWF. And let’s not forget UK economist Nicholas Stern’s insistence that a 2009 climate meeting was absolutely our “last chance to save the planet.”

click for full article

In 2010, climate modeller Andrew Weaver (who went on to become the leader of the Green Party in the province of British Columbia), called Canada’s democratically elected Prime Minister a “dictator,” and compared Canada to Zimbabwe in a media interview that was anything but an example of dispassionate science.

In 2012, Canadian economist and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) author Mark Jaccard was among 13 people arrested after blockading a coal train. Meanwhile, a powerful member of the Obama administration, scientist Jane Lubchenco, flew to Australia to deliver a speech that urged other scientists to become passionate, engaged activists.

In 2014, when the IPCC released a portion of its new report, it didn’t stick carefully to neutral language. Instead, it presented itself as the planet’s saviour (see the image at the top of this post).

In 2015, twenty US academics publicly urged President Obama to target dissenting scientists with organized crime-type investigations. Also that year, dozens of “members of the scientific community” issued an open letter urging museums to spurn donations from people alleged to be large “contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.”

I could go on. And on. And on. For at least half a century, numerous scientists have spoken publicly about issues of the day. They have scolded and threatened us. They have frightened our children, and consumed police resources.

Do scientists who work hard at being neutral and dispassionate still exist? Of course. But it is laughably wrong for journalist Green to suggest that, only now in 2019, have matters become so urgent that scientists are crossing a hitherto uncrossed line.

That premise is so patently incorrect, it makes this Reuters news story look like pure propaganda.

October 30, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

CLIMATE CHANGE – THE FACTS

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | October 28, 2019

1) Global Temperatures

It is generally reckoned that global temperatures have risen by about 1C since the late 19thC. This however is only a guesstimate at best, as most of the world had very little climate data in those days

According to satellite data, temperatures have not increased since 1998.

2) Little Ice Age

Any discussion of temperature rise since the 19thC needs to be put in the context of the Little Ice Age, which lasted around 500 years and ended in the late 19thC.

Scientists believe that this was the coldest period since the end of the Ice Age, and evidence shows that it was a worldwide event, although timings were not always the same.

The Little Ice Age succeeded the Medieval Warm Period, which again appears to have been a global event, during which temperatures were at similar levels as today.

3) Glaciers

Melting of glaciers is often held up as “proof” of global warming. But in fact they began retreating in the 19thC, long before current “man-made” global warming. There is particularly strong evidence of this fact, as Alaskan and Alpine glaciers were already being closely surveyed as early as the late 18thC.

As the glaciers in Alaska retreat, they are uncovering the remains of ancient forests, which have been carbon dated back to the Middle Ages, indicating the glaciers were much smaller then. Exactly the same has occurred in Patagonia.

Evidence from around the world, including South America and New Zealand, confirms that there was a massive growth in  the size of glaciers between the Middle Ages and the end of the Little Ice Age.

Glaciologists have established that many glaciers in both Greenland and Iceland reached their post ice age maxima during the 18th and 19thC.

4) Arctic

We hear a lot about temperatures rising in the Arctic, and icecaps melting.

In fact, temperatures around the Arctic are little different now to what they were in the 1930s and 40s. Subsequently they fell sharply in the 1970s and 80s, before rising again. This cycle appears to be connected to multi-decadal ocean cycles

Arctic sea ice retreated as a result until 2007, since when it has remained stable. Satellite data for sea ice extent is only available since 1979, in the middle of the colder interlude, and therefore cannot provide reliable long term trends.

The ice cap in Greenland has also been slowly melting, but the amounts involved are extremely tiny in relation to the total ice mass. Again, long term temperature records in Greenland show that temperatures were as high in the 1930s and 40s.

On a longer timescale, scientists also know that temperatures throughout the Arctic have been much higher than now for the last 10,000 years.

5) Antarctica

Sea ice around Antarctica has been stable since 1979, if anything increasing slightly.

NASA have established that the Antarctic ice cap has actually been growing since 1992, because snowfall has more than offset thinning glaciers.

6) Sea levels

Since the ending of the Little Ice Age in the late 19thC, global sea levels have risen by about 8 inches. Sea levels around the UK give a similar result, after allowing for vertical land movement. (Most of England has been sinking since the ice age).

The recent rate of rise has been slightly higher, about 10 inches per century, but sea levels were also rising at a similar rate in the mid 20thC.

7) Extreme weather

There is no persuasive evidence that extreme weather is getting either more common or severe:

a) According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there is no evidence of any long term increase in hurricane activity.

b) US data confirms that tornado activity has declined since the 1970s, when proper records began. Notably data also shows that there are now fewer of the most violent tornadoes.

c) The IPCC also report little evidence that flooding is getting worse.

d) Equally they find little proof that droughts are becoming worse globally, though there are inevitably regional differences.

e) Wildfires, contrary to popular myth, are claiming many less acres than they did in the past.

One of the biggest sources for the myth of extreme weather is 24/7 media coverage, which now brings events into our homes which would have gone unreported not long ago.

In the UK, long term data also provides no evidence of an increase in extreme weather, such as storms, floods and droughts.

8) UK climate trends

According to official Met Office data, UK temperatures stopped rising about fifteen years ago. The summer of 1976 remains the hottest on record, as well as having the most intense heatwaves.

Furthermore there is no evidence of any significant changes in rainfall trends, other than in Scotland which has experienced higher rainfall in recent decades.

9) Climate projections

All of the scary forecasts concerning temperatures, sea level rise etc are based on computer modelling of the climate. However these models have consistently grossly overestimated the small rise in temperatures actually experienced.

10) UK Climate Change Act

The 2008 Climate Change Act committed the UK to reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by 80% from 1990 levels by 2050.

Since the Act was passed, the UK’s CO2 emissions have reduced by 183 Mt, representing 31% of 1990 levels. However this has come at a great cost.

This year, subsidies for renewable energy are forecast to hit £12.2bn, equivalent to about £450 per household.

This year however, Parliament approved changes to the Act which alter the target  from an 80% cut to 100%. Official estimates put the cost of  this at £50bn a year by 2050, some £1800 per household.

11) Global emissions

While UK emissions have dropped by 183 Mt since 2008, global emissions have increased by 3,389 Mt. UK emissions are now only a tiny 1% of global ones.

Despite the hype, the Paris Climate Agreement, signed in 2015, won’t do anything to reduce emissions, as most countries plan to carry on increasing them until at least 2030. Notably these include China and India, who account for 35% of the world’s carbon dioxide.

October 29, 2019 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Washington FDA Says, ‘Let Them Eat Cotton’

Gossypol, “in most animals, provokes infertility”

By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 29.10.2019

US Government regulators have approved a genetically modified cotton variety as a “potential solution to human hunger.” The radical decision is to permit consumption by humans, in addition to animals, of seeds of a GMO cotton developed at Texas A&M University, with no independent long-term testing. It opens grave new concerns about the safety of our food chain. Soon, as a result, the world food chain may well be contaminated with the GMO cottonseeds whose dangers have been simply ignored by authorities.

The USA Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has just approved a new type of GMO cotton for unregulated release. The type, called TAM66274, has been genetically modified supposedly to make the seeds fit for human or animal feed by suppressing the presence of a dangerous toxin in the seed, while allegedly leaving the toxin only in the rest of the cotton plant.

With FDA approval the GMO cottons seeds will now be allowed as food for people or animals. The project has been led by Keerti Rathore, a plant biotechnology protégé of the late Norman Borlaug, at the Texas A&M AgriLife Research Center.

Rathore says the group will now seek approval in other countries starting with Mexico. He calculates that, “There are approximately 10.8 trillion grams of protein locked up in the annual global output of cottonseed. This is enough to meet the basic protein requirements of over 500 million people at a rate of 50 grams of protein per person per day.” He says the GMO cottonseeds can also be used to feed pigs, poultry or farmed fish or shrimp. His group sees it as a major new source of protein for consumption, as well as profit for cotton growers. It is not surprising that Cotton Inc., the US cotton lobby group is sponsoring the GMO project.

Cotton Inc. and Monsanto have a history of cooperation as well. Rathore says for every pound of cotton fiber, the plant produces about 1.6 pounds of seed. The annual global cottonseed production equals about 48.5 million tons. If that can now be turned into cottonseed oil or meal for human and animal consumption and sold, it adds a huge profit boost to cotton producers. The world’s largest purveyor of cotton seeds for planting cotton is Monsanto, now part of Bayer AG.

The kernels from the safe seed could be ground into a flour-like powder after oil extraction and used as a protein additive in food preparations or perhaps roasted and seasoned as a nutritious snack,” Rathore said.

On October 1 the FDA released its summary of findings for the Texas application which had been made in 2017. That gives the impression the Government researchers were making an intensive testing of the highly controversial issue of whether to permit human consumption of the GMO cotton seeds or not. Far from the case. As the FDA states in their findings of October, 2019, the FDA declaration was simply copied from the tests given them by the producer, Texas A&M and its biotech research group, funded by the US cotton industry group, Cotton Inc.

Highly toxic gossypol

The FDA approval, made with no apparent independent testing of the results given them by the group at the A&M AgriLife Research center, is notable given the fact that cottonseeds contain a highly toxic substance in the seeds known as gossypol. Because of gossypol, previously much of the weight of cotton plants was wasted or usable only for limited animal feed only after special treatment. The seeds were deemed unsuitable for human consumption.

The A&M GMO cotton was modified using what is called RNA interference technology, RNAi, to “silence” a gene that supposedly, again according to its developers, “greatly” reduces gossypol from the cottonseed. Rathore claims to have suppressed the gene of a cotton plant to produce cotton with gossypol in everything but its seeds: “We have eliminated this gossypol from the seed without affecting its levels in other parts of the plant,” said Rathore. “With the toxin removed from the cottonseed, it can potentially feed 500 to 600 million people per year.” Well, almost eliminated it, to be more accurate. They admit that about 3% gossypol remains in the seeds.

Now we are entitled to eat the “low” gossypol seeds which are said to be protein rich and supposedly safe. There are several alarming aspects to this FDA decision to release the GMO cotton variety for human and animal consumption.

Not Adequately Tested For Safety

First of all, as researcher Claire Robinson points out in an excellent analysis, the RNAi procedure for cotton is hardly proven to be safe. She notes scientific research that shows risks of GMO RNAi crops. One study found that RNAi molecules in food plants can survive digestion and enter the body of the human or animal eating it, and even affect the gene expression of the human or animal with unpredictable side effects. Robinson stresses that the FDA made no adequate thorough tests for safety of the GMO cotton, nor did Texas researchers. She notes, “No toxicity testing in animals has been done on the seeds that are intended for consumption. The application only refers to testing in mice of the NPTII antibiotic resistance gene product, though it does not mention how long the tests lasted.”

Not only are the range of tests submitted by the Rathore group deficient or inadequate, they admit that their GMO variety has not entirely eliminated the presence of toxic gossypol in the cottonseeds, hence they term it “low” gossypol cotton seed, with an estimated 3% gossypolAbsent are any tests long-term on mice or other animals of effects of 3% or low gossypol GMO cottonseeds.

Population Reduction?

Gossypol among other traits is a human contraceptive. A study published in the journal Contraception notes that gossypol, “in most animals, provokes infertility, and in man it causes spermatogenesis arrest at relatively low doses… Gossypol should be prescribed preferably to men… who would accept permanent infertility after a few years of use.” It seems to be irreversible for many.

Another study published in The Scientific World Journal notes that among other toxic effects, “… free gossypol may be responsible for… respiratory distress, impaired body weight gain, anorexia, weakness, apathy, and death after several days. However, the most common toxic effect is the impairment of male and female reproduction. Another important toxic effect of gossypol is its interference with immune function, reducing an animal’s resistance to infections…”

Now according to the FDA, we humans are animals too for purposes of consuming GMO cottonseeds. Is a presence of 3% gossypol in now “edible” GMO cottonseeds enough to cause stealth contraception in humans, or any of the other grave symptoms? We simply don’t know as none of the responsible US regulators, neither at USDA nor FDA, have apparently bothered to seriously test.

What has the FDA done to safeguard the health and safety of potential human or animal consumers of the GMO cotton? A careful reading of the FDA testing summary of October 1 shows the entirety of their evaluation, as noted, is lifted directly from the test results given them by Rathore’s group at Texas A&M. And Rathore omits details of the length of their testing, which can conceal negative effects that only show up after longer time tests. Other tests are superficial and inconclusive.

Speaking of his hopes for the application of his new GMO cotton type, Rathore declares, “My personal preference as we move forward would be to follow the ‘Golden Rice’ example in terms of its use for humanitarian purposes.” The only problem with that example is that the Philippines project financed by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1990s to develop Golden Rice, supposedly high in Vitamin A, was a colossal failure that was later abandoned by its creators. It was simply used as a GMO PR stunt. It could well be that the inadequately tested GMO cottonseeds end up blended into our food like so many such ingredients with us being none the wiser. The precautionary principle seems to have been shredded by scientists at FDA.

October 29, 2019 Posted by | Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Expertology

Corbett • 12/03/2011

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

The experts always know best…or do they? Join us today on The Corbett Report podcast as we scrutinize the media’s ready reliance on “experts” to say what the establishment wants to be said, and what this practice means for the rise of the scientific dictatorship.

October 27, 2019 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Australian legislator uncovers Bureau of Meteorology fiddling with temperature records to hype warming

By Thomas Lifson | American Thinker | October 26, 2019

If global warming is real and a threat to the world, why do people keeping temperature records keep “adjusting” or “rectifying” the data to make it look like warming is increasing?

From Down Under, a member of the federal House of Representatives named Craig Kelly — a member of the Liberal Party, which is conservative — has caught that nation’s Bureau of Meteorology altering graphs showing the number of very hot days so as to obscure the fact that 1952 had more of them than recent years and adding a newly “discovered” hot day to a more recent year to make it appear that they are increasing.

I quote and use graphics from his Facebook account:

Not only did the Bureau’s graph showing the year 1952 as having the highest ‘number of very hot days’ (and the year 2011 with the lowest number) disappear down a memory hole — but a new ‘rectified’ graph has appeared in another section of their website.

And surprise, surprise — the year 1952 no longer has the highest ‘number of very hot days’. The old graph recorded 21 very hot days in 1952, while the new ‘rectified’ graph shows only 16 very hot days.

Further, for the year 2011 — which embarrassingly for Alarmists previously had the lowest ‘number of very hot days’ going back to 1910 — the Bureau has skilfully been able to find another very hot day for 2011, (I wonder where it was hiding ?) so that year no longer holds the lowest record !

As Orwell foretold in the novel 1984:

”There were the vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored, and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed. And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.

October 26, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Pentagon Grants Earth Another 20 Year Reprieve

By Tony Heller | Real Climate Science | October 24, 2019

The Pentagon says the world could end in 20 years because of global warming.

U.S. Military Could Collapse Within 20 Years Due to Climate Change, Report Commissioned By Pentagon Says – VICE

This is good news, because in 2004 they said the world would end in 2020.

Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us | Environment | The Guardian

And the new date is 65 years after the CIA said global cooling was going to kill us.

Daily News – Google News Archive Search

October 24, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment