MICHAEL BASTASCH
10:00 PM 02/23/2017
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First Daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, intervened to get a pending executive order stripped of language critical of an international climate agreement signed by President Barack Obama.
Kushner and Ivanka “intervened to strike language about the climate deal from an earlier draft of the executive order,” sources familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal.
Ivanka and her husband “have been considered a moderating influence on the White House’s position on climate change and environmental issues,” WSJ reports. Now, the executive order will have no mention of the so-called Paris agreement.
President Donald Trump is expected to sign two executive orders in the coming days to begin dismantling Obama’s Climate Action Plan and other costly environmental regulations. The orders reportedly target the Clean Power Plan (CPP), a moratorium on new coal mining leases, and the “Waters of the U.S.” rule.…
On Thursday, Bette Midler, who uses so much hair spray she has personally engendered global warming, was panicked in New York as the temperature rose to a balmy 62 degrees in the middle of winter.
For conservatives, the “lunacy,” “wrongness,” and “criminality” of climate change theories is the gift that keeps on giving, the executive editor of the London branch of Breitbart News Service said Thursday during a panel discussion at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Three major strands characterize the climate change movement, James Delingpole said during the CPAC panel, sponsored by E&E Legal Institute and titled “Fake Climate News Camouflaging an Anti-Capitalist Agenda.”
Delingpole identified these three strands as a sort of religious view that sees man “as a cancer and blight to the planet,” a “follow the money” component in which well-placed individuals “make money off scams” at public expense, and a political component that exists, he said, because “the left has always wanted to find scientific justification to tax and regulate us and control our lives.”
Joining Delingpole were Steve Milloy, a lawyer and author who founded the web site JunkScience.com, and Tony Heller, who has written under the pseudonym Steven Goddard at the blog Real Science, which he founded. John Fund, a columnist for National Review, acted as moderator.…
Debunking claims of Antarctica’s ‘record’ sea ice loss
Antarctica is getting renewed focus for having ‘record’ summer sea ice loss, beating the old one by 0.1 percent.
Emperor penguins huddle on the ice. Siggy Nowak-Pixabay
The NSIDC announced #Antarctica’s #Sea Ice loss was the greatest it’s been since 1978 (when tracking began) despite a long-term trend showing the continent gaining in size. The sea ice, which shrinks every summer, contracted 883,015 square miles. The previous low was 884,173 square miles in 1997. That’s a difference of 0.1 percent or 1,158 square miles.
And predictably, the head of NSIDC (U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center), Mark Serreze, used the 0.1 percent change and asserted less summer sea ice is Antarctica’s reaction to a warming world, despite having grown in size by 33 percent since 1978 and covered almost entirely by snow. And Serreze said this record-breaking sea ice loss was making it “harder to deny” the “impact of #Climate Change on planet Earth.”
Antarctic Sea Ice Claims Don’t Stand Up To Scrutiny
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Antarctica’s weather
So, what’s happening in Antarctica? According to Paul Homewood, the simple answer was weather. Changing wind patterns, Homewood wrote on his site, caused by the Southern Annular Mode flipping negative allowed winds to penetrate from the north. That elevated temperatures while “pushing sea ice towards the coast.” Another issue was the accuracy of the satellites, also called the margin of error.
NSIDC admits on its site that calculating sea ice loss, especially in summer, can be difficult with large discrepancies. That’s because satellites have trouble distinguishing between melt ponds and ice, leading to a margin of error of plus or minus 15 percent. Accuracy is highest when the ice pack is thick and concentrated. It decreased when thin ice increased.
IPCC Intentionally Uses Catastrophic Non-Science To Incite Policy Action “The most striking feature of the present reconstruction is the absence of any warming trend in the 20th century” — Yadav et al., 1997 Bhattacharyya and Chaudhary, 2003 In 2007, IPCC Claimed The Himalayan Region Has Been Warming So Rapidly Its Glaciers Would ‘Disappear’ By 2035 IPCC (2007) “Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 km2 by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005).” IPCC’s Fake Glacier Melt Claim Came From Activists, Intentionally Put In To Spur Policymakers To Action David Rose, UK Daily Mail “The claim that Himalayan glaciers are set to disappear by 2035 rests on two 1999 magazine [phone] interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled without any further investigation in a 2005 report by the environmental [activist] group WWF. It was this report that Dr Lal and his team cited as their source.” 88% Of Himalayan Glaciers Are Stable Or Advancing — With Overall Negligible Change (0.2%) Since 2000 Bahuguna et al., 2014 (Himalayan Glaciers) “Two thousand and eighteen glaciers representing climatically diverse terrains in the Himalaya were mapped and monitored [between 2000-2010]. It includes glaciers of Karakoram, Himachal, Zanskar, Uttarakhand, Nepal and Sikkim regions. Among these, 1752 glaciers (86.8%) were observed having stable fronts (no change in the snout position and area of ablation zone), 248 (12.3%) exhibited retreat and 18 (0.9%) of them exhibited advancement of snout. The net loss in 10,250.68 sq. km area of the 2018 glaciers put together was found to be 20.94 sq. km or 0.2%.” Only 4 Gt Per Year Of ‘High Mountain Asia’ Glacier Loss For 2003-2010 Jacob et al., 2012 (‘High Mountains of Asia’) “The GIC [global glaciers and ice caps excluding the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets] rate for 2003–2010 is about 30 per cent smaller than the previous mass balance estimate that most closely matches our study period. The high mountains of Asia [Himalayan Region], in particular, show a mass loss of only 4 ± 20 Gt yr−1 for 2003–2010, compared with 47–55 Gt yr−1 in …
Claims that the planet is threatened by man-made global warming are based on science that is based on inadequate computer modelling. That is the conclusion of a new briefing paper published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). The report’s author, eminent American climatologist Professor Judith Curry, explains that climate alarm depends on highly complex computer simulations of the Earth’s climate. But although scientists have expended decades of effort developing them, these simulations still have to be “tuned” to get them to match the real climate. This makes them essentially useless for trying to find out what is causing changes in the climate and unreliable for making predictions about what will happen in the future. Professor Curry said: “It’s not just the fact that climate simulations are tuned that is problematic. It may well be that it is impossible to make long-term predictions about the climate – it’s a chaotic system after all. If that’s the case, then we are probably trying to redesign the global economy for nothing”. Prof Curry recently announced that she was abandoning academic life due to the attacks on her research and the “craziness” of the climate debate. Full paper (pdf)
President Trump is preparing executive orders aimed at curtailing Obama-era policies on climate and water pollution, according to individuals briefed on the measures. While both directives will take time to implement, they will send an unmistakable signal that the new administration is determined to promote fossil-fuel production and economic activity even when those activities collide with some environmental safeguards. Individuals familiar with the proposals asked for anonymity to describe them in advance of their announcement, which could come as soon as this week. One executive order — which the Trump administration will couch as reducing U.S. dependence on other countries for energy — will instruct the Environmental Protection Agency to begin rewriting the 2015 regulation that limits greenhouse-gas emissions from existing electric utilities. It also instructs the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to lift a moratorium on federal coal leasing. A second order will instruct the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers to revamp a 2015 rule, known as the Waters of the United States rule, that applies to 60 percent of the water bodies in the country. That regulation was issued under the 1972 Clean Water Act, which gives the federal government authority over not only major water bodies but also the wetlands, rivers and streams that feed into them. It affects development as well as some farming operations on the grounds that these activities could pollute the smaller or intermittent bodies of water that flow into major ones. Trump has joined many industry groups in criticizing these rules as examples of the federal government exceeding its authority and curbing economic growth. While any move to undo these policies will spark new legal battles and entail work within the agencies that could take as long as a year and a half to finalize, the orders could affect investment decisions within the utility, mining, agriculture and real estate sectors, as well as activities on the ground. Full post
German chancellor Angela Merkel is preparing to spring an ambush on President Trump at this year’s G-20 summit in July. And Trump’s response will determine whether his presidency plays out like George W. Bush’s second term or puts America’s energy exceptionalism at the service of reviving American greatness. Less than two months into his presidency, Bush shocked the world when he announced he was keeping his word: The U.S. would not be implementing the Kyoto Protocol signed by his predecessor. Referring to “the incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the causes of, and solutions to, global climate change and the lack of commercially available technologies for removing and storing carbon dioxide,” Bush declared that he could not sign an agreement that would “harm our economy and hurt our workers.” Instead, America would work with its allies and through international processes to “develop technologies, market-based incentives, and other innovative approaches.” It was a breath of fresh air in a fug of tired thinking on emissions cuts. But then, a strange thing happened. One by one, innovative approaches were discarded and the Bush administration found itself sucked back into U.N. climate-change negotiations. At the 2005 Gleneagles G-8, summit host Tony Blair cornered Bush. “All of us agreed that climate change is happening now, that human activity is contributing to it, and that it could affect every part of the globe,” Blair stated in his chairman’s summary. “We know that, globally, emissions must slow, peak and then decline, moving us towards a low-carbon economy.” This position was reflected in the summit communiqué, putting Bush on the hook for economically damaging policies that he would never escape. His climate-change strategy paved the way for Barack Obama’s. In domestic energy policy too, the final two years of the Bush presidency turned out to be a prelude to President Obama’s eight. They saw the nonsensical call to break America’s addiction to oil. There was the goal of reducing gasoline usage by 20 percent and the alternative-fuel mandates and the aggressive fuel-economy standards embodied in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, a monument to the folly of bipartisan energy policy. The Bush-Obama climate strategy collapsed at the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, when China and India successfully opposed any multilateral treaty that would threaten to cap their emissions. After Copenhagen, President Obama’s climate envoy, Todd …
