It is difficult to overstate just how out of touch Democrats are with reality right now. When you’re as unpopular as they are it makes sense – you can’t admit reality, it’s too depressing, so you create a new one in your head. That’s a survival mechanism everyone has employed, to one degree or another, and at some point in their lives for short periods, and it’s perfectly normal. What isn’t normal is how Democrats have constructed this fantasy world and appear to live in it all the time.
I don’t know how you can watch Joe Biden stumble and bumble his way through the State of the Union Address and think he is well. Either he referred to the Ukrainian people as “Iranians” or “Urainians,” with neither option being good because what’s left of his brain didn’t notice whatever it was that came out of his mouth. A normal, healthy person will make mistakes, verbal gaffes, but our brains notice and we correct ourselves almost immediately. That does not happen with Joe Biden. He is so married to the teleprompter and going off script that he pays no attention to the words.
The media, naturally, ignored most of the gaffes because covering for their President is second nature to them. But it wasn’t just what he screwed up saying that was the problem, the parts of the speech he read accurately were just as disturbing.
“One way to fight inflation is to drive down wages and make people poorer,” Joe said. “I think I have a better idea to fight inflation: lower your costs, not your wages.” This is just one example of something that makes zero sense. None. It was not called out by anyone.
Over on MSNBC, one exchange between Stephanie Ruhle (who doesn’t get the credit she deserves as one of the dumbest people on cable news, probably because of misogyny) and former Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill, one of the richest Senators when she was in office, really exemplifies how out of touch the left is.
Ruhle started, “Claire, do you think when it comes to the voter, the president and this administration needs to do more talking about those economic wins? You know, because inflation is such a problem, often times it seems like Democrats are afraid to talk about how strong the economy is because they don’t want to be insensitive to people who are left out but the thing is if they do not sell their wins they can’t win in the midterms and then they can’t help anyone.”
This “you don’t know how good you’ve got it” argument is not the stuff successful campaigns are made of. More than that, however, is how Democrats insist their policies “leave no one behind,” except maybe the rich. Except what Democrats advance always benefits their rich donors. People for whom inflation means next to nothing. Ruhle isn’t impacted in any meaningful way by inflation, she’s rich, and McCaskill has a net worth north of $60 million.
McCaskill’s answer was every bit as bad as you’d expect. “This is not complicated,” she started. “The Democrats are very bad at being repetitive and disciplined on message. This president in one year created more jobs than any president in the history of the United States of America, say it over and over and over again. Real wages are up, saving is up yes there is inflation but overall if you don’t remind people how much better it is now than it was before then you leave the field open for the Republicans to distort and not tell the truth like frankly the governor of Iowa did tonight, she distorted the economic record of this president. And he brought down the deficit. So all of this is really important for them to just keep hammering over and over again. they get distracted by wanting to do so much for so many instead of keeping it simple and making sure voters understand who is really in their corner.”
Joe Biden didn’t create a single job, he just happened to be in office when the jobs Democrats shut down were allowed to return. New companies were not formed, nor have they expanded – people laid off were called back to work. No matter how many times that lie is repeated, it will never ring true to the public. We know.
Along those lines, the economy being allowed to reopen leads to increased economic activity, which leads to increased revenue to the government. That is not “cutting the deficit,” especially when your spending is loaded up in the future, an accounting gimmick if there ever was one.
These people live in a different world, a completely strange reality unfamiliar to anyone not currently on hallucinogenic drugs. Maybe we’re secretly being ruled by Hunter Biden?
“If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with Bull…” W. C. Fields
and, flying a bomber over Berlin.
In late February 2015, Willie Soon was accused in a front-page New York Times article by Kert Davies (Gillis & Schwartz, 2015) of failing to disclose conflicts of interest in his academic journal articles. It isn’t mentioned in the Gillis and Schwartz article, but the timing suggests that a Science Bulletin article, “Why Models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model” (Monckton, Soon, Legates, & Briggs, 2015) was Davies’ concern. We will abbreviate this paper as MSLB15. Besides Soon, the other authors of the paper are Christopher Monckton (senior author, Lord Monckton, Viscount of Brenchley), David Legates (Professor of Geography and Climatology, University of Delaware), and William Briggs (Mathematician and statistician, former professor of statistics at Cornell Medical School). In the January 2015 article, the authors “declare that they have no conflict of interest.”
MSLB15 was instantly popular and devastating to the climate alarmist cause and to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC, 2013). The IPCC is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a research organization set up by the United Nations in 1988. MSLB15 was published online January 8, 2015 and downloaded 22,000 times in less than two months, an outstanding number of downloads. The New York Times article appeared less than two months after MSLB15 hit the internet, it was a “fake news hit job.”
The paper caused a stir because it explained that the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report or “AR5” reduced its near-term warming projections substantially, but left its long-term, higher, projections alone. This was because the IPCC central, CO2 feedback-based, estimate of the climate sensitivity to CO2 was reduced from 3.2°C (5.8°F) to 2.2°C (4°F) per doubling of CO2 concentration. The sensitivity to CO2 is often abbreviated “ECS” for Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity. The MSLB15 calculation was done the way the IPCC used in their Fourth Assessment Report, abbreviated “AR4.”
If the new estimate is correct, the projected rise in temperature for the 21st century is less than one-degree C. Another implication of the change is that the combustion of all fossil fuels estimated to exist would only cause a temperature increase of 2.2°C (4°F). This amount of warming is trivial, good for humanity, but bad for the climate alarmists.
The organization that models climate projections for the IPCC is the CMIP, or the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. It was created in 1995 to consolidate climate models from around the world into a set of projections that could form the basis for the IPCC reports. The CMIP climate models used for the IPCC fourth and fifth assessment reports overestimate global warming by a substantial amount as shown in John Christy’s plot from a previous post and shown again here as Figure 1.
Figure 1. John Christy’s famous graph comparing the AR5 IPCC climate models to weather balloon and satellite observations for the mid-troposphere. The satellite and weather balloon observations are independent of one another and surface measurements. From Christy’s 2016 Congressional testimony (Christy, 2016).
AR5 was essentially a repeat of AR4 with respect to the computation of human influence on climate. Yet, MSLB15 tells us that deep in AR5 a dramatic change was made in the model calculations that lowers the computed climate impact of CO2. But the change was not reflected in the AR5 long-term climate projections. Monckton points out that the IPCC made the changes due to pressure from expert reviewers to bring their climate projections and model parameters into line with observations (Monckton, 2015b). The IPCC made the change, then ignored it in their longer-term projections.
Modern computer climate models are expensive “general circulation” models that model thermal energy moving through the atmosphere and the upper part of the oceans. The models break the atmosphere into 3D grid boxes that are assumed to be in local thermodynamic equilibrium and only change at their edges where they contact neighboring boxes. The older models, such as the 1979 Charney model (Charney, et al., 1979), were simpler and modeled the whole atmosphere and upper ocean conceptually.
As discussed in our last post, the complexity of modern models has not changed the estimated climate sensitivity to CO2 or made it more accurate. The 1979 Charney Report model computed the same range of sensitivity to CO2 as AR5 reported in 2013. This range (1.5° to 4.5°C) has survived intact for forty years despite the efforts of thousands of researchers spending over one-hundred billion U.S. 2014 dollars between 1993 and 2015 (U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), 2016) in the U.S. alone.
So, when MSLB15 showed up online, explaining that the AR5 model’s feedback estimates suggested an ECS of 2.2°C (4°F), rather than the AR4 estimate of 3.26°C (5.9°F) (IPCC, 2007, p. 798) it caused a huge uproar. As Rud Istvan noted in a post, at the time, “If you are taking heavy flak, you are over the target.” The B-27 or Avro Lancaster being flown by Christopher Monckton, Willie Soon, David Legates and William Briggs must have been directly over central Berlin given the response by the alarmists and the news media.
The direct warming from CO2 or ECS is small, around one-degree Celsius for a doubling of CO2. This slight warming will cause a feedback, generally assumed to be due to an increase in absolute humidity, caused by warmer temperatures. Water vapor is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, so this reduction in feedback, from AR4 to AR5, is what the climate alarmists are worried about. Why is the range of ECS in AR5 the same as in AR4 when such an important component of CO2-caused warming was reduced? Did politics overrule the scientific findings?
Adding fuel to the fire was the fact that no best estimate of ECS was given in AR5. There are many ways to compute ECS and they disagree so much, that the IPCC did not give a best estimate. Both TAR (the IPCC third assessment report) and AR4 provided a best estimate of 3°C (5.4°F), so if AR5 had stated their feedback-implied ECS of 2.2°C (4°F), the precipitous decline would have been obvious and politically damaging. So, they were silent. The obvious question is why? Did they think no one would notice the intellectual dishonesty?
To estimate ECS, one can use climate model results, analysis of feedbacks (like in AR4 or MSLB15), observed temperature and CO2 changes (Lewis & Curry, 2018), or paleoclimate studies. The dilemma the IPCC faced in AR5 was that these estimates did not agree and many of them were far below those given in AR4 and previous assessment reports, as shown in our previous post. One wonders why the IPCC is so sure that humans control the climate with their greenhouse gas emissions, when the impact of the main greenhouse gas, CO2, is so poorly understood? Since no best estimate of ECS was given in AR5, one can argue that our understanding is diminishing with time.
Once Christopher Monckton and his co-authors, including Willie Soon, noticed that the CO2 feedback forcing was lowered in AR5, they created a simple model to investigate this difference and published their assessment. It is virtually impossible to attack the “Irreducibly simple climate model” presented in the paper, it is too basic. As Istvan reports the derivation of the MSLB15 model is impeccable. So, the alarmist cabal initially said that Science Bulletin was an obscure journal, therefore the paper cannot be any good. Predictably, that didn’t work, besides, the Science Bulletin is the Chinese version of Nature or Science.
Criticism of MSLB15 Rud Istvan’s post on the paper is illuminating and interesting, as is Monckton’s reply. Many traditional climate scientists, even Judith Curry, are somewhat dismissive of MSLB15. They think this simple approach to climate modeling doesn’t provide any insights into why the climate models do not agree with observations. Kevin Trenberth complains that the model is too simple (Briggs, 2015). Istvan comments that: “Trenberth’s comments to the NYTimes are indefensibly misleading in my opinion, and provide a vivid object lesson about consensus climate ‘science’ and its reporting” (Istvan, 2015). We agree with this assessment. MSLB15 explicitly recognize that their model is simple:
“[The MSLB15 model] is not, of course, intended to replace the far more complex general-circulation models; rather, it is intended to illuminate them.” (Monckton, Soon, Legates, & Briggs, 2015)
The irreducibly simple model is simple, it is in the title of the paper and Trenberth’s statement to the New York Times (Briggs, 2015) is vacuous. MSLB15 is important, not as an advance in climate science, but because it illuminates the serious flaws and internal contradictions in the IPCC/CMIP climate models. Further evidence that the IPCC models are seriously flawed is that they are no more accurate in predicting the climatic impact of CO2 now than they were in 1979, the MSLB15 model merely drives this painfully obvious point home. Billions have been spent; one would think we would have seen some progress by now.
The subtitle of this post, a quote from W. C. Fields, “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with Bull…” says it perfectly. The IPCC computer models and the ludicrous idea that averaging them provides us with a reliable and useful prediction of future climate is an attempt to “baffle us with bull….” This human-caused climate change perpetual money-squandering machine must start producing answers or be cut off from funding.
The MSLB15 model reduces the nonsense to its essence and shows this deception, if not clearly as we would like, at least more clearly and succinctly than the IPCC does. Compared to the real world, the IPCC models are too simple, their complexity doesn’t help us understand the human impact on climate, it merely provides a way to hide their inadequacies and push a chosen agenda. This was what I took away from reading MSLB15.
Rud Istvan thinks the simple model could be made simpler and have the same effect. Monckton thinks the model needs the all the elements it has, to be useful. Either way, Istvan found the model to be useful and we agree. I have no problem with the model as a useful way to understand the more complicated general circulation models. It is not, as MSLB15 readily admits, a replacement for them. It sheds light on them and provides a useful reality check.
The point MSLB15 makes, is that the IPCC model based ECS estimates are inflated. They could add that they are inaccurate and are not improving with time and money spent. Monckton says in his rebuttal to Istvan, we must let “the daylight in on the magic” (Monckton, 2015b, p. 6). We agree.
Mark Richardson and colleagues (Richardson, Hausfather, Nuccitelli, Rice, & Abraham, 2015) try to show that the MSLB15 model underestimates global mean temperatures. Richardson, et al. do not refute MSLB15, they simply refute a strawman of their own creation. Further, the only period that Richardson, et al. use, that is long enough to be considered “climate,” is 1900 to 2010. For this period, both CMIP5 and MSLB15 have errors that are well within the margin of error for the temperature datasets they cite, HadCRUT4, Cowtan & Way, and Berkeley Earth. Their shorter periods, 1970-2010 and 2000-2010 are too short to be meaningful.
Next, the alarmists, possibly including John Holdren, senior advisor to President Obama, began to attack Willie Soon, one of the authors, through his employer, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. John Holdren had already attacked Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas’ 2003 papers (Soon & Baliunas, 2003) and (Soon, Baliunas, Idso, Idso, & Legates, 2003b) when he was still at Harvard according to The Harvard Crimson (Sanchez, 2003). He claimed the papers were a “flawed analysis.” They were not flawed and MSLB15 was not flawed either. MSLB15 might be overly long and a difficult read, but it is not flawed, as far as we can tell.
Unable to attack the science, the alarmists wanted the skeptics in the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics silenced. The Smithsonian responded with new directives on conduct that contained a “loyalty to the Smithsonian” clause. The Smithsonian’s Inspector General investigated Soon and found no wrongdoing on his part, but this simply enraged the critics and didn’t settle anything (Arnold, 2016). Attacks on climate skeptics were common in 2015 and 2016 and the Obama administration was not alone, some of the harassment came from Congress, particularly from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Congressman Raúl Grijalva.
The New York Times and the other news organizations covering the story should have written about what MSLB15 said, the story isn’t that complicated or hard to explain. But they didn’t. The fact they attacked the authors, without discussing what they wrote in their peer-reviewed paper, speaks volumes, as stated in the web site “Bishop Hill” by Andrew Montford (Montford, 2015). The news media didn’t care about climate science, after all, the “science is settled,” isn’t it?
The 2015 Attack As mentioned at the top of the post, the height of the attacks on Willie Soon, by the New York Times (Gillis & Schwartz, 2015) was on February 21, 2015. They attacked Willie Soon personally. They relied upon false information from Kert Davies (Davies, 2020), the founder of the secretive Climate Investigations Center or CIC. Davies suggested that Willie Soon had a conflict of interest and lied in MSLB15 when he said he didn’t. Davies and the New York Times claimed that Soon had received undisclosed money from ExxonMobil and the Southern Company.
Most of the New York Times article is either wrong or misleading and in our new book, Politics and Climate Change: A History, we address each of their accusations. Here we will just cover a few of the most egregious lies. The basis for the attack was a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) to obtain internal documents from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, where Soon is employed as an astrophysicist. The FOIA was filed by Davies and Greenpeace.
As he had previously done in 2010 (see our book for details of the 2010 FOIA request), the director, Charles Alcock, made a crucial mistake and ordered Willie Soon to comply with the request. Unlike departments in the Executive branch of the government, a government trust, like the Smithsonian Institution, does not have to comply with FOIA requests. Thus, Alcock’s order is persecution of an employee. Alcock is specifically allowing Davies, the New York Times, and Greenpeace to intimidate and harass one of his employees. The documents (New York Times, 2015) include research proposals from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory that were written by Soon to The Southern Company (NYSE: SO) a leading natural gas and electric utility company, ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM), the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, and Donor’s Trust.
Science is a process for challenging the consensus view. Science cannot prove anything, the scientific process is about disproving things, particularly consensus opinions. For example, both Copernicus and Galileo disproved the idea that the Sun revolves around Earth. Science uses observations, analysis, and logic to disprove erroneous assumptions made by the public.
The New York Times obviously does not understand this 9th Grade definition of the scientific method and their article asserts:
“The documents shed light on the role of scientists like Dr. Soon in fostering public debate over whether human activity is causing global warming. The vast majority of experts have concluded that it is, and that greenhouse emissions pose long-term risks to civilization.” (Gillis & Schwartz, 2015)
This unsupported assertion is laughably anti-scientific. As we have seen, “the vast majority” or a consensus of scientists is a political thing. A scientist looks at the conclusion of the “vast majority” and asks, “Is that true? How can I test that idea?” Challenging the consensus view is the whole idea of science. A true scientist wants to foster “public debate.”
The premise of the New York Times article is quite disturbing for several reasons. Firstly, they assume the so-called “consensus” view that climate is controlled by humans is true, even though no direct evidence supporting it exists. The computer model projections relied upon by the IPCC are not direct evidence. In fact, MSLB15 suggests the models are not even accurate. Let us not quibble over the words “causing climate change” and “controlling climate.” Everyone agrees that humans have some influence on climate, the debate is over how much. The alarmists clearly believe that CO2 is the “control knob” for climate change (Lacis, Schmidt, Rind, & Ruedy, 2010).
Secondly, they assume that privately funded research, by an established and very credible astrophysicist, working for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is somehow tainted by donations to the Smithsonian. Thirdly, they seem to think that since Soon “has received little federal research money over the past decade” that this somehow makes him inferior to other researchers. All three assumptions are horrible. Do they really think that private companies should not be allowed to fund scientific research? Or, if they do, that the research should be discounted based only on the source of funding?
These views are not only juvenile, they are anti-scientific and possibly violate the free speech portion of the first amendment of the U.S Constitution. It is illegal to attempt to take away a person’s constitutional rights through intimidation or other means (Columbia Law School, 2020).
One of the Smithsonian studies, partially funded, by ExxonMobil, Donor’s Trust and the Southern Company was “Understanding Solar Variability and Climate Change: Signals from Temperature Records of the United States.” For one interested in climate change this would seem to be an important topic to investigate. The checks from these organizations were made out to the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory or the Smithsonian Institution (see my book for photocopies of the checks). No money was paid to Willie Soon, who is a government employee and paid a salary. He wrote the proposals for the Smithsonian Institution as one of his duties as a Smithsonian employee (Arnold, 2016).
Science stands on its own, the conclusions either follow from the evidence and analysis presented, or they do not. The study can be replicated, or it cannot. Funding has nothing to do with it. Just because the New York Times reporters cannot understand Soon’s papers, does not mean no one can. Other scientists will read his papers with a properly skeptical eye and let him, or others, know if there is a problem. The papers survive or fail on their own merits.
The first amendment grants people and through them corporations, the right to free speech and the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. This concept is supported by the Supreme Court in rulings like Citizens United (Smith, 2020). The New York Times article complains that Soon presented his research, funded through the Smithsonian, by the Southern Company, ExxonMobil and the Donor’s Trust, to Congress. Are they saying that Soon and the people who funded some of his research should have their first amendment rights taken away because they disagree with “most” scientists or the New York Times? That is not the way science, or the United States works. In general, the article was anti-science and anti-American.
The scientific community provides a place for scientists to debate ideas. The scientific playground contains thousands of peer-reviewed journals that allow all sides an opportunity to present their data, analysis, and conclusions for inspection. Unfortunately, once politicians and the news media became involved in the human-caused climate change debate it became a disaster. Politicians used personal attacks, suppression of opposing views, ridicule, harassment, and intimidation, rather than reason to push their views on scientists. All of these were used against Willie Soon and his former supervisor Sallie Baliunas. His friends and colleagues, David Legates, Christopher Monckton, and William Briggs, were also attacked unfairly. Politics and a scientifically ignorant news media corrupt science to an unacceptable degree. We are opposed to all government funding of scientific research for this reason. My next post and my new book discuss this viewpoint further.
People sometimes ask me why I don’t believe the endless climate/energy use predictions of impending doom and gloom for the year 2050 or 2100. The reason is, neither the climate models nor the energy use models are worth a bucket of warm spit for such predictions. Folks concentrate a lot on the obvious problems with the climate models. But the energy models are just as bad, and the climate models totally depend on the energy models for estimating future emissions. However, consider the following US Energy Information Agency (EIA) predictions of energy use from 2010, quoted from here (emphasis mine):
In 2010, the U.S. Energy Information Administration projected that in 2019, the U.S. would be producing about 6 million barrels of oil a day. The reality? We’re now producing 12 million barrels of oil a day.
Meanwhile, EIA projected oil prices would be more than $100 a barrel. They’re currently hovering around $60 a barrel.
EIA had projected in 2010 that the U.S. would be importing a net eight million barrels of petroleum by now, which includes crude oil and petroleum products like gasoline. In September, the U.S. actually exported a net 89 thousand barrels of petroleum.
In 2010, EIA projected that the U.S. would be producing about 20 trillion cubic feet of natural gas by now. In 2018, the last full year of annual data, we produced more than 30 trillion.
The EIA had projected that coal electricity would remain dominant in the U.S. and natural gas would remain relatively stable — even drop slightly in its share of power supply. The opposite is happening. Coal-fired power is plummeting and natural gas has risen significantly.
Now remember, we are assured that these energy projections are being made by Really Smart People™, the same kind of folks making the climate predictions … and they can’t predict a mere ten years ahead? Forget about predicting a century from now, they are wildly wrong in just one decade. The EIA projections above missed the mark by 100% or more and sometimes didn’t even get the sign of the result correct … but as St. Greta the Shrill misses no opportunity to remind us, we’re supposed to totally restructure our entire global economy based on those same shonky predictions.
But I digress … Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. recently posed an interesting question—how can we fix what he called “apocalyptic” projections of future climate?
My response was:
My fix would be for all climate scientists to stop vainly trying to predict the future and focus on the past.
Until we understand past phenomena such as the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period, etc. to the point where we can tell why they started and stopped when they did and not earlier or later, pretending to understand the future is a joke.
For example, the Milankovich astronomical cycles that have correlated well with episodes of glaciation in the past say we should be in a full-blown “Ice Age” today. These cycles change the amount of sunlight in the northern hemisphere. And when the world went into the Little Ice Age (LIA) around the year 1600, there was every indication that we were headed in that direction, towards endless cold. The same fears were raised in the 1970s when the earth had been cooling for thirty years or so.
Gosh … another failed climate prediction. Shocking, I know …
Regarding why the Milankovich cycles indicated an ice age, here are Greenland temperature and solar changes in the Northern Hemisphere for the past 12,000 years or so.
But instead of the Little Ice Age preceding us plunging into sub-zero temperatures and mile-thick ice covering Chicago, the earth started to warm again towards the end of the 1700s … why?
Well, the ugly truth is, we are far from understanding the climate well enough to answer why it was warmer in Medieval times; why we went from that warmth into the LIA in the first place; why the LIA lasted as long as it did; why it didn’t continue into global glaciation; or why we’ve seen gradual slight warming, on the order of half a degree per century, from then to the present day.
And until scientists can answer those and many similar questions about the past, why on earth should we believe their climate/energy predictions for a century or even a decade from now?
The only thing that seems clear about all of those questions is that the answer is not “CO2”. Here’s another look at Greenland, this time with CO2 overlaid on the temperature:
My Dad used to say “Son, if something seems too good to be true … it probably is”. I never realized until today that there was a climate corollary to that, which is “Son, if something seems too bad to be true … it probably isn’t”.
So my advice is to take all such predictions of impending Thermageddon, drowned cities, endless droughts, and other horribly bad outcomes by 2100, 2050, or even 2030, with a grain of salt. Here’s what I’d consider to be the appropriate size of salt grain for the purpose …
Those who support the Green New Deal (GND) want what they claim to be the only real solution to the global warming problem which is solar power, and other so-called renewables to save our planet from the ravages of fossil fuel.
They insist our dependence on fossil fuels can be ended by having the world become fully dependent on green energy they wrongly claim to be environmentally friendly, producing no pollution. None of which is true or possible. But their real motivation for climate change delusion is to shift control of all energy from oil and gas companies to the government. It is a move toward the socialist goal of the Green New Deal.
With the exception of hydropower, all so-called “renewable” energy is expensive and inefficient. They are only thought to be economical and competitive through massive government subsidies which are hidden in our tax burden. Let’s try and show the real costs of rooftop solar power.
The US Department of Energy (DOE) Lawrence Livermore Laboratory says that as of 2015 the total energy consumed in America was the energy equivalent to 17 billion barrels of oil, 38% is used for electricity, 29% for transportation and the remaining 33% as onsite power for business and industry. Only 11% is used domestically. Fossil fuels provide 82% of that power, nuclear 9% and hydropower 2.5% (IBID). Of the renewable energy sources preferred by the GND, biofuels such as ethanol in gasoline provides 5%, wind power 2%, and solar one half of one percent. Yet in light of these government-generated statistics, the GND calls for all fossil fuel burning power plants to be shut down over the next 12 years, along with all Nuclear plants as anything radioactive is considered inherently evil. In addition, it demands that as many hydroelectric power plants as possible be closed to protect fish spawning grounds. (No this is not a joke). Finally, it eliminates gasoline-powered vehicles switching to electric cars and public transportation.
According to the 2017 Solar Electric Handbook (www.solarelectricityhandbook.com/solar-radiation.html) the maximum amount of sunlight hitting one square meter (roughly a square yard) of the Earth’s surface, delivers 1000 watts of power ( that would light 10, 100-watt bulbs). But the shifting angles of the sun drops that number to 600 watts. Commercial photovoltaic cells can only harvest 15% of that energy dropping us to only 90 watts under ideal conditions or lighting about one 100 watt bulb. But the sun does not shine at night so we are down to 45 watts. But solar collectors only take up a little over 50% of the land area of a solar farm bringing us to 25 watts, and then average clouds, smoke, and dust could drop us all the way down to zero. The average output across the US of a typical solar power facility is in fact between 5 and 7.5 watts per square meter (Electric Power Monthly, U.S. Energy Information Administration, Dec.22,2017. https://www.eia.gov.electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?/t=epmt_6_07_b)). Is the problem getting clearer, but wait there is more.
Photoelectric cells used to create electric energy consume more energy in their production than they collect. The complex steps required to create raw quartz used to eventually make the wafers that become the collectors surface, require 3370 kilowatt-hours of energy per square meter of collector material produced ( Williams,E.D.,Ayres.R.U., and Heller,M., “The 1.7 Kilogram Microchip: Energy and Material Use in the Production of Semiconductor Devices”, Environ.Sci. Technology., 36, 5504-5510 (2002). )
But wait there is still more. Solar energy can’t be turned on and off to meet shifts in energy. The sun shines during the day but power needs peak in the morning and evening. Less energy is collected in winter than summer due to shorter days and lower sun angles. One solution is to have backup fossil fuel power plants and now you are paying for two systems instead of one and the use of fossil fuel continues. The other solution is to store extra energy in batteries. A typical lead-acid car battery has a storage capacity of one kilowatt-hour, according to McGraw-Hill’s Handbook of Batteries
(Linden,D., Reddy, T.B..,Eds., Handbook of Batteries, Third Edition, McGraw-Hill, New York , 2002, Chapter 23).
A total replacement of fossil fuels by solar energy and a battery storage component would require many trillions of such batteries. Lithium batteries would offer more storage but at twice the price.
While a solar farm can be built anywhere, sunny areas of the country are not evenly distributed requiring transmission lines from the sunniest areas to the less sunny areas. As the distance increase the cost of solar skyrockets.
Finally, the land areas required for solar farms are extraordinary. Using the most generous capacity numbers for photovoltaic cells in the sunniest areas, a 1000 megawatt solar farm (the standard output of most fossil fuel plants) would require 51 square miles which is the approximate area of San Francisco (Land Requirements for Carbon-Free Technologies, Nuclear Energy Institute Policy Paper, July 9 2015, https://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/Policy/Paper/Land_Use_Carbon_Free_Technologies.pdf?ext=pdf)
Where is the land to be sacrificed in the name of the GND to come from? In fact, there is not enough land in the United States to harvest the Solar energy to play a major role in the nation’s energy requirements.
Solar energy is too expensive for most countries or individuals to afford. The World Bank says that over 1.5 billion people live without electricity
Although coal is vilified while producing a third of the world’s energy, it’s use continues to increase as it costs only 7 cents a kilowatt-hour (Coal International Energy Agency https://www.iea.org/about/faqs/coal/.). Natural gas costs are even less at 6 cents a kilowatt-hour. The costs reported for solar operations have dropped to 16 cents a kilowatt-hour, but government subsidies come to 24 cents a kilowatt-hour giving it a real cost of 40 cents (Hansen,M.E., Simmons,R.T., Yonk,R.M., The Unseen Costs of Solar-Generated Electricity, The Institute of Political Economy, Utah State University, April 2016,www.usa.edu/ice.)
Few Americans could afford this to save the planet let alone people living in poor countries. Both widespread solar energy and the Green New Deal are but a fantasy of those who truly wish to destroy the nation as envisioned by our founding fathers.
Portions of this article have been excerpted with permission of the publisher and author of the 2018 book THE MYTHOLOGY OF GLOBAL WARMING by Bruce Bunker, Ph.D.. Publisher: Moonshine Cove. The author of this article strongly recommends that book as the very best source of detailed accurate information on the climate change debate.
Dr. Jay Lehr contributes posts at the CFACT site. Jay Lehr is the author of more than 1,000 magazine and journal articles and 36 books. He is an internationally renowned scientist, author, and speaker who has testified before Congress on dozens of occasions on environmental issues and consulted with nearly every agency of the national government, as well as many foreign countries. He is a leading authority on groundwater hydrology.
House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump is all but “Kabuki theater at this point,’ former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andy McCarthy said Friday.
“For example, this whole idea that there is an impeachment inquiry: there’s not. The idea that there are subpoenas: there aren’t. And, I think a lot of people are consuming it as if it were true on face value and I really think if I were the White House what I would be worried about is breaking through that,” McCarthy told Hemmer.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is joined by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., at a news conference as House Democrats move ahead in the impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump, at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2019. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
In an op-ed in The Hill, McCarthy wrote that congressional Democrats, to the contrary, are instead conducting the 2020 political campaign: “Democrats are mulishly determined to ram through an article of impeachment or two, regardless of whether the State Department and other agencies cooperate in the farce.
Their base wants the scarlet-letter ‘I’ (impeachment) attached to Trump. The party hopes to rally the troops for the 2020 campaign against Trump…
If Democrats truly thought they had a case, they wouldn’t be in such a rush—they’d want everyone to have time to study it. But they don’t have a case, so instead they’re giving us a show.”
House Democrats launched a formal impeachment inquiry into the president after a whistleblower complaint suggested the president, during a July phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart, tried to induce officials there to investigate Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden, his son Hunter, and their business dealings in that country.
“The question here is, was there a corrupt quid pro quo?” the Fox News contributor asked.
The letter will say that the White House won’t comply with the Democrats’ investigation because Pelosi hasn’t codified the probe with a formal vote on the House floor.
McCarthy said it would actually benefit the House if it wanted to go into court and try to enforce any information demands: “The first thing a court’s going to want to know is, ‘Has the House voted to have an impeachment inquiry?’
And, a lot hinges on that, including how much expansion a court would give a president’s claim of executive privilege and privilege over matters that are in the president’s duties under Article II.
“If they really have grounds to seek the president’s impeachment, they not only should have a vote because it’s in their interests when they go to court to have a vote, they should be proud to have a vote,” McCarthy added.
He concluded: “If [House Democrats] really think they have grounds to remove the President of the United States from power, then the House should speak as one as an institution and vote that way.”
Some think better than other and for the most part, they tend to be on the right of the political spectrum.
I never cease to be amazed at mans ability to deify the unknown.
When it is coming from the left, it tends to be delusional and not based on factual data based on scientific rigor.
Albert Gore Jr. is a special kind of leftist fraud.
He refuses to debate his phony belief system and will not answer questions from those who attend his brainwashing sessions.
Since his blather is scientifically unproven and always will be, it would be a nice gesture on Attorney General, William Barr’s behalf to subpoena him to sit before a grand jury when it goes to trial, which is likely, the fine would be to make him pay all the money to the U.S, Treasury to help bring down the national deficit.
“Do Americans Need Air-Conditioning?”
A New York Times piece asked in July.
Air conditioning, it argued, is bad for the environment and makes us less human.
It ran quotes suggesting that “first world discomfort is a learned behavior”, and urging “a certain degree of self-imposed suffering.
If environmentalists ruled the world, air conditioning wouldn’t exist.
And there’s a place like that.
90% of American households have air conditioning.
As do 86% of South Koreans, 82% of Australians, 60% of Chinese, 16% of Brazilians and Mexicans, 9% of Indonesians and less than 5% of Europeans.
A higher percentage of Indian households have air conditioning than their former British colonial rulers.
Temperatures in Paris hit 108.6 degrees.
Desperate Frenchmen dived into the fountains of the City of Lights with their clothes on.
Parisian authorities announced that they were deploying heat wave management plan orange, level three, which meant setting up foggers in public parks and distributing heat wave kits.
The kits consist of leaflets telling people to go to libraries which have air conditioning.
France24, the country’s state-owned television network, advised people suffering from temperatures rising as high as 110 degrees to take cold showers and stick their feet in saucepans of cold water.
A 2003 heat wave killed 15,000 people in France.
And, in response, the authorities have deployed Chalex, a database of vulnerable people who will get a call offering them cooling advice.
The advice consists of taking cold showers and sticking their feet in saucepans of cold water.
Desperate Frenchmen trying to get into any body of water they can have led to a 30% rise in drownings.
The dozens of people dead are casualties of the environmentalist hatred of air conditioners.
Only 5% of French households have air conditioning.
Even in response to the crisis, the authorities are only deploying temporary air conditioning to kindergartens.
The 2003 heat wave killed 7,000 people in Germany.
And, today, only 3% of German households have air conditioning.
Germany’s Ministry of the Environment refused to back air conditioning as a response to global warming.
Temperatures in Dusseldorf hit 105 degrees.
Officials in Dusseldorf had recently rejected proposals to install air conditioning systems because they’re bad for the environment.
The climate action head at Germany’s Institute for Applied Ecology explained that air conditioning wouldn’t work because there’s not much wind during heat waves, and the country can’t end reliance on coal and run air conditioners at the same time.
You can have air conditioners or save the planet.
But not both.
The issue isn’t poverty, in Greece, one of the poorest countries in Europe, 99% of households have air conditioning.
What it comes down to is a willingness to choose comfort over environmental dogma.
In Europe, people are dying because they’ve been told that their sacrifices will save the planet.
The 2003 heat wave killed 70,000 people in Europe.
That’s more than Islamic terrorists have.
When environmentalists claim that global warming is a greater threat than Islamic terrorism, they’re half-right.
Global warming isn’t real, but the measures taken to fight it are killing thousands of people.
And it doesn’t have to be this way.
In 2007, only 2% of Indian households had air conditioning.
Those numbers have more than doubled. India is expected to field a billion air conditioning units by 2050.
“I am not rich,” an Indian laundryman earning $225 a month, who had just put in air conditioning, told a disapproving Agence France-Presse, but we all aspire to a comfortable life.”
Some of us do.
The 2003 heat wave killed 2,000 Brits.
The current heatwave has led to London being placed on a Level 3 health watch.
But air conditioning in the UK still hovers at 3% of households.
And every summer, the local media lectures Brits on the evils of air conditioning.
Every heat wave is treated as a compelling argument for reducing power to save the planet.
The heat and its accompanying misery are treated as heralds of a global warming apocalypse.
Soon, we are told, it’ll be hot all the time, the waters will rise, the icebergs will melt, and life will perish from the earth.
When a heat wave consumed Europe in 1540, leading to the hottest temperatures on record and the deaths of thousands, the people blamed a higher power.
In England, where the River Trent dried up, the mega-drought was blamed on Henry VIII’s sacrilegious crackdown on monasteries.
Modern Europeans have a simple, rational explanation.
Mother Earth is angry because we’re using air conditioners.
Or other people are.
China has 569 million installed air conditioners.
More than any other country in the world.
South Korea has 59 million air conditioners.
That’s more than France, Germany and the UK combined.
Europe’s sacrifice is not only senseless, it’s also meaningless.
Vietnam has become a booming market for air conditioners.
17% of Vietnamese households now have one.
Indonesia is leading its own boom in air conditioning.
As is much of Asia and the Middle East.
Europe can go on letting its people die for the environment, but it won’t make any difference.
Air conditioning isn’t some American fetish, as European elitists sneer. It’s a worldwide movement.
Every country that can manage it is getting air conditioners.
Meanwhile people are dying in France.
While the rest of the world is cooling off, Europe is in thrall to a pagan pseudo-scientific cult.
Its tenets insist that the planet is a living entity, but fail to understand its true implications.
The climate is part of a living entity which changes on a timescale that challenges human understanding.
For a thousand years of recorded history, Europe has undergone alternate warming and cooling periods.
The Medieval Climate Anomaly was an example of how complicated those cyclical changes could be.
A heat wave isn’t proof that we’ve sinned against Mother Earth by heating and cooling our homes.
We can cut down forests and build dams.
But so can beavers.
We cannot change the climate.
The bones of hippos have been found under Trafalgar Square.
The Chauvet Cave in France includes pictures of rhinos.
The Little Ice Age killed off England’s vineyards in the 14th century.
The Thames began to freeze over in the 17th century.
The Viking colonization of America collapsed under the wave of cold.
Air conditioning and heating are not how we change the climate. They’re how we cope with it.
Environmentalism has so hopelessly tangled human civilization and the environment that we are no longer able to understand the planet on its own
terms, instead of as a Luddite eschatology in which the climate is a deity punishing us for our civilizational ingenuity with hot weather and natural disasters.
And that makes it extremely difficult to adapt to the changes in a healthy way.
A century ago, Americans beat the heat by wading in fountains, sleeping on roofs and fire escapes, and escaping the city.
Air conditioning has made it possible for us to live and work across the entire country.
In 1896, a heat wave killed thousands of Americans. New York City authorities resorted to the same measures as their modern Parisian counterparts, turning on fire hydrants and handing out ice.
Those temperatures amounted to a mere 90 degrees.
In 1902, Willis Carrier invented the air conditioner in Brooklyn.
He imagined a world in which, “The average businessman will rise, pleasantly refreshed, having slept in an air-conditioned room.
He will travel in an air-conditioned train, and toil in an air-conditioned office.” We live in that world now.
At the New York World’s Fair, while temperatures outside hit 90 degrees, Carrier debuted an Igloo display.
Two giant thermometers contrasted “Nature’s temperature” with “air conditioning”.
It sold itself.
Air conditioning allows New Yorkers to shrug off 90-degree weather and go on living and working.
Today, New York is the home of the Green New Deal which believes in following Europe’s trends.
If New York adopts Europe’s environmentalism, it will discover what living in 1896 really felt like.
Environmentalists have killed thousands of Europeans. They can kill thousands of Americans too.
The massive liberal community that thrives off of the paint-by-numbers record of their almighty Obama is currently up in a fuss because their arguing points about all of the so-called Obama accomplishments keep getting proven wrong. Well, when we saw this article we figured we could maybe cut them a small break for once and help them out a little bit. So, here you go liberals, this one’s for you!
Quit trashing Obama’s accomplishments. He has done more than any other President before him. Here is a list of his impressive accomplishments:
-First President to apply for college aid as a foreign student, then deny he was a foreigner.
-First President to have a social security number from a state he has never lived in.
-First President to preside over a cut to the credit-rating of the United States. First President to violate the War Powers Act.
-First President to be held in contempt of court for illegally obstructing oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. –
-First President to require all Americans to purchase a product from a third party.
-First President to spend a trillion dollars on “shovel-ready” jobs when there was no such thing as “shovel-ready” jobs.
-First President to abrogate bankruptcy law to turn over control of companies to his union supporters.
-First President to by-pass Congress and implement the Dream Act through executive fiat.
-First President to order a secret amnesty program that stopped the deportation of illegal immigrants across the U.S., including those with criminal convictions.
-First President to demand a company hand-over $20 billion to one of his political appointees.
-First President to tell a CEO of a major corporation (Chrysler) to resign. First President to terminate America’s ability to put a man in space.
-First President to cancel the National Day of Prayer and to say that America is no longer a Christian nation.
-First President to have a law signed by an auto-pen without being present.
-First President to arbitrarily declare an existing law unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it.
-First President to threaten insurance companies if they publicly spoke out on the reasons for their rate increases.
-First President to tell a major manufacturing company in which state it is allowed to locate a factory.
-First President to file lawsuits against the states he swore an oath to protect (AZ, WI, OH, IN).
-First President to withdraw an existing coal permit that had been properly issued years ago.
-First President to actively try to bankrupt an American industry (coal).
-First President to fire an inspector general of AmeriCorps for catching one of his friends in a corruption case.
-First President to appoint 45 czars to replace elected officials in his office.
-First President to surround himself with radical left wing anarchists.
-First President to golf more than 150 separate times in his five years in office.
-First President to hide his birth, medical, educational and travel records.
-First President to win a Nobel Peace Prize for doing NOTHING to earn it.
-First President to go on multiple “global apology tours” and concurrent “insult our friends” tours. First President to go on over 17 lavish vacations, in addition to date nights and Wednesday evening White House parties for his friends paid for by the taxpayers.
-First President to have personal servants (taxpayer funded) for his wife.
-First President to keep a dog trainer on retainer for $102,000 a year at taxpayer expense.
-First President to fly in a personal trainer from Chicago at least once a week at taxpayer expense.
-First President to repeat the Holy Quran and tell us the early morning call of the Azan (Islamic call to worship) is the most beautiful sound on earth First President to side with a foreign nation over one of the American 50 states (Mexico vs Arizona).
-First President to tell the military men and women that they should pay for their own private insurance because they “volunteered to go to war and knew the consequences.”
-Then he was the First President to tell the members of the military that THEY were UNPATRIOTIC for balking at the last suggestion. (Thank God he didn’t get away with THIS one.)
–First president to allow Iran to inspect their own facilities. First president to have blood on his hands from Benghazi to the assassinations of several police officers.
-First president to trade 5 terrorist for a traitor
-First president to facilitate the Iranians to acquire nuclear weapons.
-First president to light up the White House in rainbow colors to honor men that lust after other men’s rear ends.
-First president to put young children in danger by forcing states to allow men in women’s restroom and showers.
-First president to marry a man.
-First president to smoke crack cocaine in the White House.
I could go on for days but you get the point. How is this hope and change’ working out for you?
Wait, that didn’t work out to well for them, now did it?
Oh my goodness! Maybe we should have done an article on Obama’s ACTUAL accomplishments; it would have been A LOT shorter! Seriously though, the man is a disgrace to America and only makes those who deify him look ignorant beyond belief.
Despite Democrats’ cataclysmal framing of every weather event, Americans are safer than ever.
Climate isn’t the same as weather—unless, of course, weather happens to be politically useful. In that case, weather portends climate apocalypse.
So warns Elizabeth Warren as she surveyed Iowan rainstorms, which she claims, like tornadoes and floods, are more frequent and severe. “Different parts of the country deal with different climate issues,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–Malthusia) cautioned as she too warned of extreme tornadoes. “But ALL of these threats will be increasing in intensity as climate crisis grows and we fail to act appropriately.”
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D–Ore.) recently sent a fundraising email warning Democrats that climate change was causing “growing mega-fires, extremely destructive hurricanes, and horrific flooding” in which “American lives are at stake.”
Even if we pretend that passing a bazillion-dollar authoritarian Green New Deal would do anything to change the climate, there is no real-world evidence that today’s weather is increasingly threatening to human lives. By every quantifiable measure, in fact, we’re much safer despite the cataclysmal framing of every weather-related event.
How many of those taken in by alarmism realize that deaths from extreme weather have dropped somewhere around 99.9 percent since the 1920s? Heat and cold can still be killers, but thanks to increasingly reliable and affordable heating and cooling systems, and other luxuries of the age, the vast majority of Americans will never have to fear the climate in any genuine way.
It’s true that 2019 has seen a spike in tornadoes, but mostly because 2018 was the first year recorded without a single violent tornado in the United States. Tornadoes killed 10 Americans in 2018, the fewest since we started keeping track of these things in 1875, only four years after the nefarious combustion engine was invented.
There has also been a long-term decline in the cost of tornado damage. In 2018, we experienced near-lows in this regard. The only better years were 2017, 2016, and 2015.
After a few devastating hurricanes around a decade ago, we were similarly warned that it was a prelude to endless storms and ecological disaster. This was followed by nine years without a single major hurricane in the United States. Or, in other words, six fewer hurricanes than we experienced in 1908 alone.
According to the U.S. Natural Hazard Statistics, in fact, 2018 saw below the 30-year average in deaths not only by tornadoes and hurricanes (way under average) but also from heat, flooding, and lighting. We did experience a slight rise in deaths due to cold.
Pointing out these sort of things usually elicits the same reaction: Why do you knuckle-dragging troglodytes hate science? Well, because science’s predictive abilities on most things, but especially climate, have been atrocious. But mostly because science is being used as a cudgel to push leftist policy prescriptions without considering economic tradeoffs, societal reality, or morality.
There are two things in this debate that we can predict with near certitude: First, that modern technology will continue to allow human beings to adapt to organic and anthropogenic changes in the environment. Second, that human beings will never surrender the wealth and safety that technology has afforded and continues to afford them.
People who deny these realities are as clueless as any “denier” of science. That brings me back to Democrats.
There have been a number of stories predicting that 2020 will finally be the year politicians start making climate change an important issue. One can only imagine these reporters started their jobs last week.
It’s true that a number of Democrat presidential hopefuls have taken “no fossil fuel money” pledges—as if they were going to get any of that cash anyway—as they spew carbon into the atmosphere searching for another bad-weather photo-op. Kevin Curtis, the executive director of NRDC Action Fund, told BuzzFeed News that all of this was “really wicked cool.”
The 2018 midterm elections, adds Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, are when “climate change was beginning, for the first time, to play a significant role in a few races across the country.”
A poll conducted by that very same Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that even for the most left-wing voters, climate change—an imminent planetary tragedy that threatens the existence of all humanity and most animal species—ranked third on the list of most important issues. It ranked 17th among all voters, behind things like border security, tax reform, and terrorism.
Maybe one day the electorate will finally buy in. Climate change, though, didn’t even make a blip on exit polls of 2018. That is why Democrats keep ratcheting up the hysteria over every environmental tragedy.
“Climate chaos is here,” declares Merkley, “but it’s not too late to act.” Remember: When disaster is perpetually ten years away, it’s never too late to send Democrats some of your money.
WalMart vs. The Morons 1. Americans spend $36,000,000 at WalMart Every hour of every day. 2. This works out to $20,928 profit every minute! 3. WalMart will sell more from January 1 to St. Patrick’s Day (March 17th) than Target sells all year. 4. WalMart is bigger than Home Depot + Kroger + Target +Sears + Costco+ K-Mart combined. 5. WalMart employs 1.6 million people, is the world’s largest private employer,and most speak English. 6. WalMart is the largest company in the history of the world. 7. WalMart now sells more food than Kroger and Safeway combined, and keep in mind they did this in only fifteen years 8. During this same period, 31 big supermarket chains sought bankruptcy 9 WalMart now sells more food than any other store in the world. 10. WalMart has approx 3,900 stores in the USA of which 1,906 are Super Centers; this is 1,000 more than it had five years ago. 11. This year 7.2 billion different purchasing experiences will occur at WalMart stores. (Earth’s population is approximately 6.5 Billion.) 12. 90% of all Americans live within fifteen miles of a WalMart. You may think that I am complaining, but I am really laying the groundwork or suggesting that MAYBE we should hire the guys who run WalMart to fix the economy. This should be read and understood by all Americans… Democrats, Republicans, EVERYONE!! To the 535 voting members of the Legislature : It is now official that the majority of you are corrupt morons: a. The U.S. Postal Service was established in 1775. You have had 234 years to get it right and it is broke. b. Social Security was established in 1935. You have had 74 years to get it right and it is broke. c. Fannie Mae was established in 1938. You have had 71 years to get it right and it is broke. d. War on Poverty started in 1964. You have had 45 years to get it right; $1 trillion of our money is confiscated each year and transferred to “the poor” and they only want more. e. Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965. You have had 44 years to get it right and they are broke. f. Freddie Mac was established in 1970. You have had 39 years to get it right and it is broke. You have FAILED in every “government service” you have shoved down our throats while overspending our tax dollars !!!
AND YOU WANT AMERICANS TO BELIEVE YOU CAN BE TRUSTED WITH A GOVERNMENT-RUN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM??
Folks, keep this circulating. It is very well stated. Maybe it will end up in the e-mails of some of our “duly elected’ (they never read anything) and their staff will clue them in on how Americans feel. AND : I know what’s wrong. We have lost our minds to “Political Correctness” !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Someone, please tell me what the HELL’s wrong with all the people that run this country!!!!!! We’re “broke” & can’t help our own Seniors, Veterans, Orphans, Homeless, etc.,??????????? In the last few months, we have provided aid to Haiti, Chili , and Turkey..And now Pakistan ……..previous home of bin Laden. Literally, BILLIONS of DOLLARS!!!
Our retired seniors living on a ‘fixed income’ receive no aid nor do they get any breaks… AMERICA: a country where we have homeless without shelter, children going to bed hungry, elderly going without ‘needed’ meds, and mentally ill without treatment -etc, etc.
Imagine if the *GOVERNMENT* gave ‘US’ the same support they give to other countries. Sad isn’t it?
By Benjamin Arie Published March 26, 2019 at 1:16pm Modified March 26, 2019 at 4:35pm
You’ve probably heard the alarmed scientists and politicians before: Global warming is causing glaciers to melt, serving as the proverbial canary in the mine shaft of a planet on the brink of disaster — and the world could end in just over a decade as a result.
But many of those same scientists are now scratching their heads and scrambling to come up with an explanation after an important glacier in Greenland was found to be growing again.
The Jakobshavn glacier is a massive ice sheet that’s about a mile thick. This frozen wonder has influenced history in the past, with many experts believing that the iceberg that famously sunk the Titanic broke off from this ice sheet before drifting into the North Atlantic.
Over the last few years, climate experts pointed to retreating ice on the Jakobshavn glacier as Exhibit A in the global warming debate.
“The Jakobshavn glacier around 2012 was retreating about 1.8 miles and thinning nearly 130 feet annually,” The Associated Press reported.
That is, until now. Despite climate experts and politicians alike insisting that massive, economy-changing regulations were needed to stop glaciers from melting, it seems the Earth had other plans.
Over the last two years, the Jakobshavn glacier has been growing again at the same rate it was previously shrinking.
“Ocean temperatures in the bay’s upper 250 m have cooled to levels not seen since the mid-1980s,” the glacier study found.
Yes, despite human population growth and fossil fuel use bemoaned by figures like Al Gore over the last few decades, ocean temps in that region have been going down.
Has the media exaggerated climate change fears?
Yes No
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“That was kind of a surprise. We kind of got used to a runaway system,” said Jason Box, a scientist who works with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.
Other scientists admitted that the new ice being added to the glacier was likely part of a natural process largely outside of human control.
“A natural cyclical cooling of North Atlantic waters likely caused the glacier to reverse course, said study lead author Ala Khazendar, a NASA glaciologist on the Oceans Melting Greenland project,” the AP reported. “The water in Disko Bay, where Jakobshavn hits the ocean, is about 3.6 degrees cooler than a few years ago.”
It’s worth pointing out the Greenland-sized elephant in the room here: If “natural cyclical cooling” is a major factor in glacier density, wouldn’t that imply that the inverse — natural cyclical warming — also sometimes occurs?
This seems a bit like a shell game. When there appears to be a cooling pattern, it’s cyclical and natural; when there’s a warming pattern, it’s all the fault of humans and we need massive government takeovers to stop it.
Scientists seem to be talking out of both sides of their mouths when it comes to explaining the unexpected shift in the Jakobshavn glacier. Experts were quick to breathe a sigh of relief that ice was expanding, but went on to still call the glacier expansion “bad news.”
“(T)his is bad news on the long term because it tells scientists that ocean temperature is a bigger player in glacier retreats and advances than previously thought,” the AP said.
A University of Washington ice scientist named Ian Joughin called it “a temporary blip” and predicted that the glacier would continue to melt even after the last few years of data showed the opposite.
“In the long run we’ll probably have to raise our predictions of sea level rise again,” NASA climate scientist Josh Willis said.
Again, those same climate scientists failed to predict that the glacier was going to grow over the last two years and called it a “surprise.”
And that’s the big point here: Scientists have a pretty poor track record at making large-scale predictions years into the future. Climate models are useful, but as this unexpected glacier growth just showed, they’re also deeply flawed.
“We conclude that projections of Jakobshavn’s future contribution to sea-level rise that are based on glacier geometry are insufficient,” the glacier study said.
That is exactly why caution and conservatism should be the watchwords when experts preach doom and gloom. We simply don’t know enough about the climate and the planet to gamble entire economies on predictions, and we should be wary when only one side of the facts are used to push big-government expansion.
Good science will acknowledge that there are far more unknowns than knowns — which is exactly why there’s far less of a consensus on global warming than the political left wants to admit.
By Dr. Jay Lehr ~
They insist our dependence on fossil fuels can be ended by having the world become fully dependent on green energy they wrongly claim to be environmentally friendly, producing no pollution. None of which is true or possible. But their real motivation for climate change delusion is to shift control of all energy from oil and gas companies to the government. It is a move toward the socialist goal of the Green New Deal.
Gds44's Blog 