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.
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.
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]](https://i0.wp.com/wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/clip_image0024.png?resize=616%2C348&ssl=1 "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]](https://i1.wp.com/wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/clip_image0044.png?resize=616%2C348&ssl=1 "clip_image004[4]")
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.
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% gossypol. Absent 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.
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.
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.
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.
Has climate change jumped the shark?
Climate Discussion Nexus | October 23, 2019
You might not think so, with time running out for deniers (again) except perhaps as psychiatric patients. But there are signs of fatigue with it in the political system. In Australia, a senior Labour figure has caused turmoil in his party by suggesting they not run in the next election on the hugely ambitious plans that cost them the last one. And when CNN and the New York Times sponsored the 4th, 3-hour debate among contenders for the Democratic nomination, the moderators didn’t ask a single question about climate and the candidates didn’t make it an issue. You might think it’s because everyone agrees. But what if it’s because nobody has anything useful to suggest and most people secretly don’t care?
Voters claim to be anti-global-warming, of course. But as we learned including from the Yellow Vest upheaval in France, and Canadians’ views on carbon taxes, and any number of similar issues in other countries, citizens aren’t willing to pay any significant price to take action against greenhouse gases, suggesting they don’t really think there’s a problem.
Except when all-in politicians push the agenda too far. For instance deep blue California’s governor is now in big political trouble over high gas prices and unreliable power. And remember, high prices for less available energy is a feature not a bug of the climate alarmist movement, soothing talk of wind power notwithstanding.
The problem isn’t really the cost of alternative energy, because except by accident politicians are not willing to raise the price of energy to levels that would discourage its use. There was some kerfuffle over a study finding that green energy policies cost Britain £9 billion per year, or £340 per household. But while an increase in energy bills means hardship to the poor, Britain is rich, and most households may resent the extra cost but are not unable to pay it. The problem is how much more it’s going to cost to try to get renewables up from their current trivial share… or what happens when you just can’t. (Wind farms, like solar farms, have thus far been cherry-picking sites.) On which politicians have little to say that is not both stale and unconvincing.
The hardcore believe that if voters are not willing to pay high carbon taxes and otherwise do without the conveniences of modern life, they are short-sighted idiots and democracy itself must give way in this climate emergency. Meanwhile most voters are happy just to virtue-signal, if only to avoid fights with their grade-schoolers trained to correct their pronunciation of Thunberg (it’s Toon-BUIY not THUN-berg). But they simply aren’t convinced that it’s the end of the winter and the world as we know it because out their window things are going pretty much as they always have. And since politicians are repeating implausible mantras about what’s supposedly happening and how to fix it painlessly, a lot of them just tune it out and go about their business.
Passionate opposition to climate change coupled with timid or nonexistent proposals to fight it must inevitably become a stale punchline.
Clouds ain’t so cool
Climate Discussion Nexus | October 23, 2019
Some climate models say greenhouse gases cause a lot of warming and others don’t. Yet they all fit 20th century temperature data equally well. How is that possible? Simple: They all have an offsetting fudge factor based on the cooling effects of tiny pollution particles called aerosols. Not the observed effects, you understand. The high-sensitivity models simply assume aerosols do a lot of cooling by promoting extra cloud formation, and the low sensitivity models assume they don’t. So the key question is how much cooling aerosols actually do. If it’s not much, then greenhouse gases can only cause a little warming, given how little warming happened over the 20th century. And now we know it’s not much.
New evidence published in July is truly devastating. It doesn’t just say the cloud response to aerosols is very weak, though it does say so. It says aerosols do the opposite of what has been assumed and what they must do to make the models work. Instead of bundling liquid water up inside the clouds, which would lead to strong cooling of the Earth’s surface that might counteract a hypothetical strong impact of warming from GHGs, extra pollution aerosols cause clouds to expel water, weakening their overall cooling properties. Here is the authors’ exact wording (emphasis added).
The cooling of the Earth’s climate through the effects of anthropogenic aerosols on clouds offsets an unknown fraction of greenhouse gas warming. An increase in the amount of water inside liquid-phase clouds induced by aerosols, through the suppression of rain formation, has been postulated to lead to substantial cooling, which would imply that the Earth’s surface temperature is highly sensitive to anthropogenic forcing. Here we provide direct observational evidence that, instead of a strong increase, aerosols cause a relatively weak average decrease in the amount of water in liquid-phase clouds compared with unpolluted clouds. Measurements of polluted clouds downwind of various anthropogenic sources—such as oil refineries, smelters, coal-fired power plants, cities, wildfires and ships—reveal that aerosol-induced cloud-water increases, caused by suppressed rain formation, and decreases, caused by enhanced evaporation of cloud water, partially cancel each other out. We estimate that the observed decrease in cloud water offsets 23% of the global climate-cooling effect caused by aerosol-induced increases in the concentration of cloud droplets. These findings invalidate the hypothesis that increases in cloud water cause a substantial climate cooling effect and translate into reduced uncertainty in projections of future climate.
If this study is correct, and science we remind everyone proceeds skeptically by challenging findings including congenial ones, it is one more piece of evidence that most climate models predict too much warming in response to greenhouse gas emissions. The models with high sensitivity only get to stay in the game by having a big cooling offset in the form of aerosol-induced cloud formation, otherwise they’d have predicted so much warming over the 20th century we’d be fried to a crisp by now.
Up to now no one has been sure how much cooling happens from aerosol pollution because it is hard to measure (although there has previously been research showing that aerosol cooling is weaker than modelers usually assume). This new study knocks the legs out from under the modelers who want to keep a high climate sensitivity in their models.
And since the paper was published in Nature magazine, it will be hard for the IPCC folks to dismiss, though we don’t doubt they’ll try to find a way.
Facebook’s False Fact Check
There’s no guarantee scientific research is credible or accurate just because it has been peer-reviewed. Why is Facebook promoting this lie?
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | October 23, 2019
Much of what we read, online and elsewhere, is incorrect. That’s life. But Facebook, a platform that helps people socialize, thinks it’s in the business of setting the record straight. It calls this process fact checking, but its fact checkers don’t know what they’re talking about.
A story from NaturalNews.com recently appeared in my Facebook feed. I don’t consider that website a reliable source of information, but that’s beside the point. The story was titled Climate change hoax COLLAPSES as new science finds human activity has virtually zero impact on global temperatures. It begins by talking about a paper written by two Finish academics who say there’s “no experimental evidence” for the idea that humanity significantly affects the climate.
Facebook inserted two “related articles” directly after that Natural News story in my feed, describing it as “incorrect” and “false” (see the screengrab at the top of this post). The first was from ClimateFeedback.org, which talks loftily about accurate information being “the foundation of a functioning democracy.”
According to ClimateFeedback,
Some news outlets are publishing articles stating that this claim is based on a new study. In reality, there is no new published study. The claim comes from a six-page document uploaded to arXiv, a website traditionally used by scientists to make manuscripts available before publication. [my italics]
Ideas exist independently of whether or not they’ve been published somewhere. They exist even if people dismiss them as a six-page document. Peter Ratcliffe, one of three individuals who shared this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine, had his research rejected because a reviewer didn’t think his findings were sufficiently significant.
click to enlarge
Was his Nobel-quality research wrong just because Nature chose not to publish it? Of course not.
ClimateFeedback neglects to mention that the availability of the Finnish research on ArXiv.org is a good sign. That platform is used by mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, and others who are seeking feedback from the wider community. People post their work there specifically so that others can help them strengthen and sharpen it prior to submission to a scientific journal.
ClimateFeedback carries on:
This means that this article has not been peer-reviewed, so there is no guarantee to its credibility. [my bold]
I’m sure they intended to say there’s no guarantee of its accuracy. But either formulation is nonsense. I recently wrote about research that navigated the peer review process and got published in Nature. A mere 19 days later, the authors conceded it contained multiple errors. It has since been fully and formally retracted.
RetractionWatch.org provides ongoing coverage of faulty and fraudulent research that nevertheless made it through the peer review process. In other words: PEER REVIEW IS NOT A GUARANTEE. Not of credibility. And not of accuracy. Fact checkers who say otherwise are profoundly misleading the public.
Facebook labels the Natural News article false – and then promulgates a gigantic falsehood of its own.
But since we’re on the topic of unpublished research, this is a good time to recall that, when James Hansen delivered his famous global warming testimony back in 1988, he cited unpublished research. The larger scientific community had been given no opportunity to scrutinize his work, to decide if it was brilliant or bollocks. It had been accepted by a journal, but it hadn’t yet appeared.
Similarly, the anti-aerosol movement was kick-started by a 1974 New York Times front page story. It quoted a Harvard scientist who claimed aerosol products were destroying the Earth’s ozone layer. Lots of people apparently didn’t notice the sentence that said no one had yet taken “a hard look at the Harvard calculations,” since the research was still in the process of being submitted to a scientific journal.
Then there’s the world’s most influential climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It has long relied on unpublished research when writing its reports (see here, here, here, here, and here).
There is a history, in other words, of taking research findings seriously before they’ve been published in scientific journals. But this only seems to apply when people are preaching doom, gloom, and alarm.
According to Facebook and ClimateFeedback.org, those Finns are just too audacious. No one should pay them the slightest attention. Heavens, their work is still unpublished!
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From the Archives
Secret document reveals plans for civil war in Lebanon, Israeli false flags, and invasion
By Randi Nord | Geopolitics Alert | April 5, 2019
Beirut – During his visit with US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, Lebanese President Michael Aoun reportedly received a US-Israeli document detailing plans for creating a civil war in Lebanon with covert false flag operations and possible Israeli invasion.
Although the source of the document is Israeli and created in partnership with Washington, no one knows who presented it to Aoun. The Lebanese TV station, Al-Jadeed, initially reported the document on Lebanese TV and a video on its website. Geopolitics Alert translated the report for this article. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- There’s a drought in academia: A drought in honest research on the subject of drought and other weather extremes
- Department of War Awards $20.7 Billion Contract to Raytheon for Air-to-Air Missiles
- ‘Distance yourselves from Israel’: IRGC urges US population to question govt policies
- America’s Greenland deal has a radioactive backstory
- The RAF Fairford ‘terror plot’: Unpacking escalation in the UK echo-chamber
- EU Council Advances Chat Control 2.0 Scanning Proposal
- Ex-Greek MEP files complaint against Israeli spyware firm over alleged Pegasus surveillance
- Troubling ideas throughout the Torah, Talmud, Mishneh Torah and Tanya
- ‘Grave, alarming’: Iran mission on Trump’s UNGA ‘annihilation’ threats
- Najaf airport to reopen to Iranian flights within 24 hours: Ambassador
- If Americans Knew
- New Report: “Scholasticide and Genocide in Gaza: Assessment, Testimonies and Legal Analysis”
- Ex-Biden officials are desperate for a Gaza scapegoat
- Israeli “settlers” Invade Al-Aqsa; Pour Boiling Water on 75-Year-Old
- Israel Has Kidnapped Another American Teenager
- US arms sales to Israel worth $21.6 billion in 20 months
- Three Palestinians Killed in Israeli Attacks on Gaza
- Revealed: German “Anti-Semitism Expert” Driving Crackdown on Palestine Solidarity is Former Israeli Spy
- Egypt’s Warning to Israel Before Oct 7
- Israel’s siege signals another cruel winter for 1.8 million Gazans – Daily Update
- Netanyahu Asked UAE Leader to Deny Report on Oct. 7 Warning in Secret Visit, Sources Say
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
- Climate Extremists Target, Attack Large-Scale Power Grid Infrastructure In Germany!
- New Study: Antarctic Ice Melt Has Contributed Less Than 1 Centimeter To Sea Level Rise In The Last 30 Years
