Tag: astrology

Claim: Climate change impacting ‘most’ species on Earth, ‘even down to their genomes’

By Jeremy Hance

Climate change is rapidly becoming a crisis that defies hyperbole.

For all the sound and fury of climate change denialists, self-deluding politicians and a very bewildered global public, the science behind climate change is rock solid while the impacts – observed on every ecosystem on the planet – are occurring faster in many parts of the world than even the most gloomy scientists predicted.

Given all this, it’s logical to assume life on Earth – the millions of species that cohabitate our little ball of rock in space – would be impacted. But it still feels unnerving to discover that this is no longer about just polar bears; it’s not only coral reefs and sea turtles or pikas and penguins; it about practically everything – including us.

Three recent studies have illustrated just how widespread climate change’s effect on life on our planet has already become.

“It is reasonable to suggest that most species on Earth have been impacted by climate change in some way or another,” said Bret Scheffers with the University of Florida. “Some species are negatively impacted and some species positively impacted.”

Scheffers is the lead author of a landmark Science study from last year that found that current warming (just one degree Celisus) has already left a discernible mark on 77 of 94 different ecological processes, including species’ genetics, seasonal responses, overall distribution, and even morphology – i.e. physical traits including body size and shape.…

Inconvenient NOAA report: ‘It is premature to conclude (AGW has) already had a detectable impact on’ hurricanes

Global Warming and Hurricanes

An Overview of Current Research Results

1. Has Global Warming Affected Hurricane or Tropical Cyclone Activity?

Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory/NOAA

Last Revised: Mar. 17, 2017

A. Summary Statement

Two frequently asked questions on global warming and hurricanes are the following:

• Have humans already caused a detectable increase in Atlantic hurricane activity or global tropical cyclone activity?
• What changes in hurricane activity are expected for the late 21st century, given the pronounced global warming scenarios from current IPCC models?

In this review, we address these questions in the context of published research findings. We will first present the main conclusions and then follow with some background discussion of the research that leads to these conclusions. The main conclusions are:

The Southern Hemisphere Sees Its ‘Quietest’ Hurricane Season On Record

So far, the Southern Hemisphere has seen 13 named storms, including four hurricane-strength storms. Only two of those storms became major hurricanes, Category 3 or higher, according to data compiled by Colorado State University

Most recently, Tropical Cyclone Debbie struck Australia’s northeastern coast in late March, forcing 25,000 people to be evacuated from low-lying areas. Debbie brought 161-mile-per-hour winds and cut power to thousands of residents. At least four deaths have been blamed on the storm.

The Southern Hemisphere’s quiet hurricane season comes after the most active season in the North Atlantic since 2010. The 2016 Atlantic season saw 16 named storms, including seven hurricanes.

Just three of those hurricanes were Category 3 or higher, and none made landfall this years. A major hurricane has not made landfall in the U.S. for more than a decade.

Hurricane Matthew was set to end the U.S.’s decade-long hurricane “drought,” but the storm did not make landfall as a Category 3 storm.

Matthew still caused billions of dollars worth of damage and forced thousands to flee their homes. The storm is estimated to have killed more than 1,000 people in Haiti.…

Flashback: Major Tornado Outbreak Of April 1974 Blamed on — Global Cooling!

Enviros Freak Over Trump’s EPA Climate Order, But The Earth Will Not Notice

Take a look at the Clean Power Plan — Obama’s most ambitious climate change effort. Despite the costs of this regulatory monstrosity, the Clean Power Plan would have no discernible impact in global carbon dioxide emissions over the next three decades.

That’s not the conclusion of climate change “deniers.” That’s what the Obama administration’s own Department of Energy said in a report issued in May 2016.

As part of its International Energy Outlook, the Energy Information Administration provided long-term forecasts of energy-related CO2 emissions, comparing global emissions with the Clean Power Plan, and without it.

What it shows is that with the Clean Power Plan, global carbon emissions would still climb 32% in 2012 and 2040, only slightly below what the increase will be without it. (See nearby chart.)

This growth in global emissions, by the way, comes despite continued improvements in decarbonizing economies in both the developed and developing world.

As we noted in this space recently, without any government mandates, energy-related CO2 emissions in the U.S. fell 12.4% from 2007 to 2015. Overall carbon intensity — a measure of how much CO2 it takes to produce a dollar of GDP — declined an average 1.5% a year since 2005.

These gains are due both to the fracking breakthrough, which unleashed massive supplies of lower-carbon natural gas, and the unending pressure the free market puts on businesses to be more efficient.

This same market-driven decarbonizing trend has been happening around the world.

Between 1990 and 2012, the carbon intensity of developed nations dropped by 33%, and by 25% in developing countries. By 2040, the carbon intensity of developed nations will be cut in half, the report projects, and will drop by almost 40% in developed countries, the Energy Department report shows.

Yet overall energy-related CO2 emissions will still climb by 51% in developing countries, and 8% among industrialized nations, from 2012 to 2040 — even with the Paris agreement.

Why? “Increases in output per capita coupled with population growth overwhelm improvements in energy intensity and carbon intensity,” the report explains.

In other words, barring some miracle scientific breakthrough, the only reliable way to cut global carbon emissions would be to depopulate the planet or kill economic growth.…

When climate change warriors can’t keep their stories straight

When climate change warriors can’t keep their stories straight

WSJ: ‘Trump is notching early victories is unleashing American energy, which has been held hostage to progressive climate obsessions’

The order directs the Environmental Protection Agency to review the Clean Power Plan, which the Supreme Court stayed last year in an extraordinary rebuke. The plan essentially forces states to retire coal plants early, and the tab could top $1 trillion in lost output and 125,000 jobs, according to the American Action Forum. Also expected are double-digit increases in the price of electricity—and a less reliable power grid. All for nothing: A year of U.S. reductions in 2025 would be offset by Chinese emissions in three weeks, says Rice University’s Charles McConnell.

The rule also fulfills a campaign promise to end Barack Obama’s war on coal. It’s true that market forces are reducing coal’s share of U.S. electric power—to some 30% from about 50% a decade ago—thanks mainly to fracking for natural gas. Yet Mr. Obama still deployed brute government force to bankrupt the coal industry. Mr. Trump is right to end that punishment and let the market, not federal dictates, sort out the right energy mix for the future.

The story is similar on a methane rule that the executive order will begin to roll back. Total U.S. methane emissions have dropped 15% since 1990, as Bernard Weinstein of Southern Methodist University told the House last fall, even though domestic oil-and-gas production has doubled over the past decade. One reason is that energy companies have a financial incentive to capture the stuff and sell it. Still, EPA promulgated expensive new emissions targets, equipment rules and more.

The order also dumps the “social cost of carbon,” which is a tool the Obama Administration employed to junk mandatory cost-benefit analyses for regulations. For example: An EPA power plant rule predicted net benefits from $26 billion to $46 billion, but as much as 65% of that derived from guesswork about the positives of reducing carbon, as Bracewell & Giuliani’sScott Segal explained to Congress at a 2015 hearing. The Obama Administration rolled out these new calculations with no public comment, and the models surely wouldn’t survive a rigorous peer review.…

Bjorn Lomborg: Trump gutting EPA climate regs show UN Paris treaty is ‘a paper tiger’

USA Today – By Bjorn Lomborg

According to the International Energy Agency, the U.S. promised to cut more energy-related CO2 emissions than any country in the world from 2013 to 2025, under the Paris climate treaty.

The problem is that this promise never had much ground in reality.

The primary measure America offered to achieve the promised cuts was the Clean Power Plan, which required the U.S. power sector to reduce CO2 emissions.

Yet this plan, even if fully enacted, would have achieved just a third of the U.S. promises under the Paris Agreement. If it had remained in effect for the entire century, my peer-reviewed research using United Nations climate change models found that it would have reduced temperature rises by an absolutely trivial 0.023 Fahrenheit at the end of this century.

Without the Clean Power Plan, U.S. emissions will likely increase slightly.

…

The treaty is nothing but a paper tiger: Its only legal underpinning is that all nations submitted promises — but those promises do not need to be kept.

In truth, Trump’s action just exposes what we have known for a while: The Paris Agreement is not the way to solve global warming.

Even if every nation fulfilled everything promised — including Obama’s undertakings — it would get us nowhere near achieving the treaty’s much-hyped, unrealistic promise to keep temperature rises under 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The U.N. itself has estimated that even if every country lived up to every single promised carbon cut between 2016 and 2030, emissions would be cut by just one-hundredth of what is needed to keep temperature rises below 2 C.

My analysis, similar to findings by scientists at MIT, shows that even if these promises were extended for 70 more years, then they’d only reduce temperature rises about 0.3 degrees F by 2100.

Moreover, many poor nations signed up to the treaty largely because of a promise of $100 billion a year of “climate aid” from rich nations, starting from 2020. Over the past five years, rich countries have managed to come up with only a 10th of one year’s promise.

It is only a matter of time before taxpayers from wealthy nations balk at the bill waiting for them. That will make many developing countries back out of the whole process.

This climate approach rehashes a failed policy that wasted decades: From …

Scientist tells Congress: Obama science czar ‘put a target’ on my back due to ‘my heretical view’ on climate

Hearing – Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method
US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology
March 29, 2017

Full Congressional Statement of Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. here:

In early 2014, not long after I appeared before Congress, President Obama’s science adviser John Holdren testified before the same Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. He was asked about his public statements that appeared to contradict the scientific consensus on extreme weather events that I had earlier presented. Mr. Holdren responded with the all-too-common approach of attacking the messenger, telling the senators incorrectly that my views were “not representative of the mainstream scientific opinion.” Mr. Holdren followed up by posting a strange essay, of nearly 3,000 words, on the White House website under the heading, “An Analysis of Statements by Roger Pielke Jr.,” where it remains today.

I suppose it is a distinction of a sort to be singled out in this manner by the president’s science adviser. Yet Mr. Holdren’s screed reads more like a dashed-off blog post from the nutty wings of the online climate debate, chock-full of errors and misstatements.
But when the White House puts a target on your back on its website, people notice. Almost a year later Mr. Holdren’s missive was the basis for an investigation of me by Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee. Rep. Grijalva explained in a letter to my university’s president that I was being investigated because Mr. Holdren had “highlighted what he believes were serious misstatements by Prof. Pielke of the scientific consensus on climate change.” He made the letter public. The “investigation” turned out to be a farce. In the letter, Rep. Grijalva suggested that I— and six other academics with apparently heretical views—might be on the payroll of Exxon Mobil (or perhaps the Illuminati, I forget). He asked for records detailing my research funding, emails and so on. After some well-deserved criticism from the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union, Rep. Grijalva deleted the
letter from his website. The University of Colorado complied with Rep. Grijalva’s request and responded that I have never received funding from fossil-fuel companies. My heretical views can be traced to research support from the U.S. government.

But the damage to my reputation had been done, and perhaps that was the point. Studying and engaging on climate change had become decidedly …

Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. Tells Congress: ‘I experienced an organized effort of delegitimization’ for climate dissent

Hearing – Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method
US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology
March 29, 2017

Full Congressional Statement of Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. here:

My Recent Experiences Where Science Meets Politics
Despite publishing many peer reviewed papers on a wide range of climate-related topics with colleagues around the world and having my research included in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC),1
I experienced an organized effort of delegitimization by members of Congress and the White House, supported by their political
allies in the media and in well-funded advocacy groups. These efforts were successful in that they resulted in me re-orienting my academic career away from climate-related research.

Here are some specifics of my experiences over the past few years:

 Several months after I testified before this committee in December, 2013, the White House posted on its website a 6-page essay by the President’s Science Advisor,

John Holdren, which claimed falsely that my testimony before this committee was “not representative of mainstream views on this topic in the climate-science community” and was “seriously misleading.”2

 Science advisor Holdren’s false claims were put forward even though my testimony was drawn from and consistent with the most recent reports of the IPCC. I have for decades supported the scientific assessment process of the IPCC and did so explicitly in my 2013 Congressional testimony.
 One year later, Congressman Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) opened a formal investigation of me and six other professors (three of us are testifying here today). In his letter to my university’s president, Mr. Grijalva justified the investigation of me by relying on the science advisor’s false claims: “John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, has highlighted what he believes were serious misstatements by Prof. Pielke of the scientific consensus on climate change,” and cited Dr. Holdren’s essay on the White House website.3
 In his letter, Mr. Grijalva introduced another false implication — that I, and the other academics, had “potential conflicts of interest and failure to disclose corporate funding sources.”4 Mr. Grijalva’s letter cited Exxon Mobil and the Koch Foundation as possible sources of undisclosed funding that I may have received.
 The communications director for the House Natural Resources Committee explained how we seven academics were chosen to be investigated by Mr. Grijalva: “The way we chose the list …