NY Times: Steel Industry Is On The Rebound Under Trump
‘A perfect administration from the perspective of the steel industry’
Source: NY Times: Steel Industry Is On The Rebound Under Trump…
US drought levels fall to lowest point in years – Only 5% of U.S. experiencing drought
BY REID WILSON – 05/12/17 11:35 AM EDT
Just 5 percent of the United States is experiencing drought conditions, the lowest level of drought here since government scientific agencies began updating the U.S. Drought Monitor on a weekly basis in 2000.
Record rain and snowfall over the winter on the West Coast and heavy spring rains in the Midwest have alleviated some of the worst and longest-lasting drought conditions ever recorded.
That parching, years-long drought came after another rainy period, in 2010, when just 8 percent of the U.S. experienced drought conditions. The boom-and-bust cycle is likely caused by climate change that creates more extreme weather patterns, scientists say.
At its driest point, in September 2012, 20 percent of the nation experienced what climatologists deemed “extreme” drought.
Today, small parts of Southern Georgia and Central Florida are still experiencing extreme drought. The drought has amplified several large wildfires in Georgia and Florida, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration said.
Parts of southern Arizona are in the midst of a long-term severe drought, while scattered areas of Texas, Colorado, the Dakotas and the greater Washington, D.C., region are dealing with more moderate water shortages.
No state has experienced the highs and lows more than California. As recently as September, the entire state was experiencing at least some drought conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, and 43 percent of the state experienced extreme drought.
Today, after a rainy winter fueled by a so-called Pineapple Express weather system, more than three-quarters of the state is drought-free. Only the Los Angeles area and some inland counties near the U.S.-Mexico border are overly parched.
“California’s drought was alleviated by atmospheric rivers that brought heavy rains earlier this year,” Matthew Rodell, a NASA hydrologist, said in a statement. “Combine that with recent precipitation across much of the northwestern and central parts of the nation, and the result is a much wetter-than-normal map.”
Now, California faces the opposite problem. Heavy rain and snowfall have damaged systems meant to capture water, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
The federal government has already said it will send California $274 million to repair the Oroville Dam, where damage to a spillway forced the evacuation of almost 200,000 people in February. Water officials are worried that heavy rains could damage other dams in Northern California, too.…
Eyes on Paris climate pact as Tillerson hosts Arctic forum in shadow of Russia spat
AFP-JIJI
FAIRBANKS, ALASKA – Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was in Alaska to play host to the eight nations of the Arctic Council on Thursday, trailed by burning questions about Russia and climate change.
The policy forum for the countries of the great white north got underway in the former gold prospecting town of Fairbanks, far away from the political frenzy gripping Washington.
But two of the questions hanging over President Donald Trump’s White House were also on envoy’s minds in Alaska.
Can Washington mend ties with Russia, represented in Fairbanks by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and will Trump honor the U.S. pledges in the 2017 Paris climate change accord?
“We’ve got a lot to do tomorrow,” Tillerson warned guests at a dinner on the eve of the forum late Wednesday.
PLANET EARTH COVERED IN MUCH MORE FOREST THAN THOUGHT
Date: 11/05/17
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A new global analysis of the distribution of forests and woodlands has “found” 467 million hectares of previously unreported forest – an area equivalent to 60% of the size of Australia. The discovery increases the known amount of global forest cover by around 9%, and will significantly boost estimates of how much carbon is stored in plants worldwide.
The new forests were found by surveying “drylands” – so called because they receive much less water in precipitation than they lose through evaporation and plant transpiration. As we and our colleagues report today in the journal Science, these drylands contain 45% more forest than has been found in previous surveys.
We found new dryland forest on all inhabited continents, but mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, around the Mediterranean, central India, coastal Australia, western South America, northeastern Brazil, northern Colombia and Venezuela, and northern parts of the boreal forests in Canada and Russia. In Africa, our study has doubled the amount of known dryland forest.
The world’s drylands: forested areas shown in green; non-forested areas in yellow. Bastin et al., Science (2017)
With current satellite imagery and mapping techniques, it might seem amazing that these forests have stayed hidden in plain sight for so long. But this type of forest was previously difficult to measure globally, because of the relatively low density of trees.
What’s more, previous surveys were based on older, low-resolution satellite images that did not include ground validation. In contrast, our study used higher-resolution satellite imagery available through Google Earth Engine – including images of more than 210,000 dryland sites – and used a simple visual interpretation of tree number and density. A sample of these sites were compared with field information to assess accuracy.
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Barack Obama: Climate Denier
BY STEVEN HAYWARD
Further to my item here yesterday about how the term “climate denier” is extended to everyone who dissents even the slightest bit from narrow climatista orthodoxy, Barack Obama clearly didn’t get the memo, for yesterday in Italy he let fly with this:
“Ninety-nine percent* of scientists who study climate change carefully . . . will tell you that it is indisputable that the planet is getting warmer and the only real controversy is how much warmer will it get.”
Whoa there, Lightworker! You’re not supposed to say that last bit! There is no controversy, understand? Only “deniers” say there is any controversy about forecasting future warming.
The weakness of the forecasting models has been at the heart of climate skeptics’ critique for a long while, and you don’t need to read any renegade science to have large doubts about the probity of the climate models. You only need to read the chapter on the problems of the models in each of the successive Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) periodic reports. But I suspect that the number of journalists (and most climate activists, for that matter) who ever read the actual IPCC chapter on climate models asymptotically approaches zero. It suffices just to quote the “consensus science” document to get you branded as a denier, which is a great marker of scientific close-mindedness.…
Obama’s Contradictory Climate Talk
His Milan remarks offered nothing but vague hypotheticals at odds with one another.
Speaking in Milan on Tuesday at the Global Food Innovation Summit, Barack Obama — who was introduced as “the man that gave us hope, dreams and made us become better people” — told the crowd he forgot his tie. In a display of his post-presidency cool, he opted instead for a dress shirt unbuttoned to mid-chest. He appeared relaxed, sun-kissed, and, as always, supremely confident. You would too, if you were about to rake in a reported $3 million to give a speech and then have a chat with your former chef.
While the four-day event this week aims to “bring food and technology together,” Obama was there to talk about climate change. As the Trump administration seriously considers withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, the former president is ratcheting up the pressure for the U.S. to stay tethered to his signature international agreement.
In his opening remarks, Obama claimed that “for all the challenges we face, this is the one that will define the contours of this century more dramatically perhaps than any other.” He blamed climate change for everything from weather conditions in America (“where states are seeing floods on sunny days, where wildfire seasons are longer and more dangerous”) to the EU’s influx of migrants, which he claimed was caused not only by the conflict in Syria, but also by “food shortages that will get far worse as climate change continues.” (He later said the strain that climate refugees have put on the EU’s political system is “just the beginning.”)
That wouldn’t be the only humanitarian tragedy that Obama would attribute to man-made climate change during his appearance. He also blamed the phenomenon for making food production more difficult. “We’ve already seen shrinking yields and spiking food prices that in some cases are leading to political instability.” But for most of the world outside, say, Venezuela or North Korea, this is simply not the case. Yields continue to rise in every major crop. High food prices, scarcity, and hunger are almost always the result of failed government and economic systems, not the methane emissions of cows.
And yet Obama seemed unsure of his own message. For at the same time, he added, producing food is also a major cause of climate change:
Science Unsettled: Why Trump Should Dump The UN Paris Climate Deal
…Climate Change: We keep hearing the “science is settled,” yet once again data emerge showing that there has been no appreciable warming now for 19 years. Memo to global warming advocates: People are starting to notice.
Of course, it is pretty clear from the record that temperatures have risen in the past 150 years or so. But that should hardly be surprising, given that the period lasting into the early 19th century was known as the “Little Ice Age.”
But more recently, alarms were sounded over the rise in 2015 and 2016 of global temperatures, even though the rise was a result of a temporary phenomenon — the “El Nino” effect of warming seawaters in the Pacific that create higher temperatures and weather disruptions around the world.
As Christopher Booker of the Sunday Telegraph in Britain noted this week, after being repeatedly warned about 2016 being “the hottest year on record,” we now have arrived at this: “In recent months global temperatures have plummeted by more than 0.6 degrees: just as happened 17 years ago after a similarly strong El Nino.”
By the way, those temperature readings are courtesy of satellites, which provide the most comprehensive and accurate temperature readings of all. Many of the scariest headlines come from far more limited, and localized, temperature readings, which can be deceptive.
Scare headlines about disappearing arctic ice are similarly being shown as overblown if not outright false. The Danish Meteorological Institute reports that since December Arctic temperatures have pretty much been below -20 degrees Celsius. Arctic ice and the Greenland ice cap are both expanding, not shrinking.
‘Fraud, Fake…Worthless Words’: NASA’s James Hansen on UN Paris Pact – Trump should take note
By Robert Bradley Jr. — May 9, 2017
“Watch what happens in Paris carefully to see if all that the leaders do is sign off on the pap that UN bureaucrats are putting together, indulgences and promises to reduce future emissions, and then clap each other on the back and declare success.”
“Big Green consists of several ‘environmental’ organizations, including Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), each with $100+M budgets, each springing from high-minded useful beginnings, each with more high-priced lawyers than you can shake a stick at. EDF …was chief architect of the disastrous Kyoto lemon. NRDC proudly claims credit for Obama’s EPA strategy and foolishly allows it to migrate to Paris.”
– James Hansen, “Isolation of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: Part I,” November 27, 2015.
“[The Paris agreement] is a fraud really, a fake. It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.”
– James Hansen, quoted in Oliver Milman, “James Hansen, Father of Climate Change Awareness, Calls Paris ‘A Fraud’.” The Guardian, December 12, 2015.
James Hansen has weighted in the Paris agreement, which is now on the firing line with the U.S. threating to set into motion a pullout. Hansen’s disfavor of this global climate agreement, setting voluntary targets for greenhouse gas reductions globally, might rival that of President Trump, but for contrary reasons.
The good news is that the father of climate alarmism has repeatedly spoken truth to power when it comes to the politics of energy and climate.
More solar jobs is a curse, not a blessing – ‘Underscores how wasteful, inefficient & unproductive solar power is’
Citing U.S. Department of Energy data, the New York Times recently reported that the solar industry employs far more Americans than wind or coal: 374,000 in solar versus 100,000 in wind and 160,000 in coal mining and coal-fired power generation. Only the natural gas sector employs more people: 398,000 workers in gas production, electricity generation, home heating and petrochemicals.
This is supposed to be a good thing, according to the Times. It shows how important solar power has become in taking people out of unemployment lines and giving them productive jobs, the paper suggests.
Indeed, the article notes, California had the highest rate of solar power jobs per capita in 2016, thanks to its “robust renewable energy standards and installation incentives” (ie, mandates and subsidies).
In reality, it’s not a good thing at all, and certainly not a positive trend. In fact, as Climate Depot and the Washington Examiner point out – citing an American Enterprise Institute study – the job numbers actually underscore how wasteful, inefficient and unproductive solar power actually is.
That is glaringly obvious when you look at the amounts of energy produced per sector. (This tally does not include electricity generated by nuclear, hydroelectric and geothermal power plants.)
* 398,000 natural gas workers = 33.8% of all electricity generated in the United States in 2016
* 160,000 coal employees = 30.4 % of total electricity
* 100,000 wind employees = 5.6% of total electricity
* 374,000 solar workers = 0.9% of total electricity
It’s even more glaring when you look at the amount of electricity generated per worker. Coal generated an incredible 7,745 megawatt-hours of electricity per worker; natural gas 3,812 MWH per worker; wind a measly 836 MWH for every employee; and solar an abysmal 98 MWH per worker.
In other words, producing the same amount of electricity requires one coal worker, two natural gas workers – 12 wind industry employees or 79 solar workers.
Even worse, whereas coal and gas electricity is cheap, affordable, and available virtually 100% of the time – wind and solar are expensive, intermittent, unreliable, and available only 15-30% of the time, on an annual basis. Wind and solar electricity is there when it’s there, not necessarily when you need it.
In truth, about the only thing solar and wind companies do well is collect billions of dollars in subsidies from taxpayers and billions of dollars
‘Outside the Green Box’: New book unmasks ‘sustainable development’ fallacies
By Robert Bradley Jr. — May 8, 2017
“Energy consumption is not a villain. Nations that consume the most energy per person discharge the lowest level of air and water pollutants per person. Low-cost energy provides economic growth and generates capital for pollution control.”
Editor note: Steve Goreham has written another primer of note. The author of Climatism!: Science, Common Sense, and the 21st Century’s Hottest Topic (2010) and The Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change (2012), Goreham has just published a fun, readable book with great political timing.
The audience for Outside the Green Box: Rethinking Sustainable Development is not only any classroom studying energy choices and related public policies. Goreham is targeting the green consultant. The back cover explains:
Your firm spends millions to be environmentally sustainable. Carbon credits, renewable energy, ethanol fuel, and electric vehicles demonstate your company’s commitment. Fluorescent light bulbs, organic foods, and a hybrid car may be part of your personal commitement. But contrary to what your green consultant tells you, these and other sustainable measures provide little positive benefit to Earth’s environment.
But more so. When it comes to energy, the eco-benefits of renewables are illusory and have distinctive environmental costs.
MasterResource is pleased to publish an excerpt from the concluding chapter of Outside the Green Box, available from Amazon or at stevegoreham.com.
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Much of government policy, academic thought, and public opinion stands on fears created and promulgated by environmental sustainable development. The philosophy that humans are too many, too polluting, climate destroying, and profligate wasters of natural resources holds today’s society in a powerful psychological grip. Thousands of energy and environmental laws are justified on these misconceptions. Let’s briefly review why these ideas are incorrect.