People for the West -Tucson
PO Box 86868, Tucson, AZ 85754-6868 pfw-tucson@cox.net
Newsletter, May, 2017
The “Marches for Science” – hypocritical pleas for money
by Jonathan DuHamel
The several “Marches for Science” (held April 22) around the country are not really about science, but about fear that President Trump’s proposed cuts to the EPA and other agencies for climate research will make federal grants disappear. It’s about the money, not the climate.
An Arizona Daily Star story ( 4-14-17) noted that Tucson’s “March for Science” (Link) had called off the march itself, because they could not afford the price “to barricade North Stone Avenue, hire off-duty police and medics, and take out insurance.” Instead, they settled for a rally on Saturday. An observer at that rally reported that all the signs fell into two groups: 1) Support Global Warming funding because…; and 2) Anti-Trump.”
The article featured University of Arizona professor Scott Saleska who is concerned that cuts to the EPA budget will jeopardize his research funding. The article quotes part of a letter which Saleska and other professors sent to EPA head Scott Pruitt.
Here is the pertinent quote: “In fact, we know with an exceptionally high degree of confidence that most of the climate warming over at least the last six decades has been caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities.”
I emailed Dr. Saleska (on April 14) asking this question: “What specific physical evidence supports the contention that CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels is the principal cause of recent warming? Note: computer simulations are not physical evidence. Consensus is not physical evidence.”
Dr. Saleska replied on Thursday, April 20. Rather than citing specific evidence, he deflected the question: “My apologies for the slow reply. Busy week. But you raise an interesting question. What kind of evidence are you looking for? That is, what evidence would, in your mind, support the contention if it were observed?”
Over the last several years, I have posed that same question to four other UofA “climate science” professors during public meetings. None could cite any supporting physical evidence. They usually devolved to citing computer simulations.
But, most computer models assume that CO2 is the main driver of climate. Natural variation of climate is often ignored. Hence we have the result that output from the computer climate models diverge widely from observations by satellites and radiosondes:
On the national “March for Science” website (link) is this statement: “We unite as a diverse, nonpartisan group to call for science that upholds the common good and for political leaders and policy makers to enact evidence based policies in the public interest.”[emphasis added] Where is the evidence for the policy on global warming?
Andrew Follett, reports in the Daily Caller:
A Harvard physician thought the recent “March For Science” looked more like a religious event than one to promote the value of the scientific method.
“Being ‘pro-science’ has become a bizarre cultural phenomenon in which liberals (and other members of the cultural elite) engage in public displays of self-reckoned intelligence as a kind of performance art, while demonstrating zero evidence to justify it,” Dr. Jeremy Faust, a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School, wrote in Slate.
“There was an uncomfortable drone-like fealty to the concept — an oxymoronic faith that information presented and packaged to us as Science need not be further scrutinized before being smugly celebrated en masse,” Faust wrote. “That is not intellectually rigorous thought — instead, it’s another kind of religion, and it is perhaps as terrifying as the thing it is trying to fight.”
Faust said marchers are wrong about what’s really imperiling science — it’s not attacks from the public and political class, but attacks from within.
Faust points out that academics are under serious financial pressure to rapidly and continually publish research to sustain or further their careers, even if the research is essentially useless or misleading. Academics have an enormous financial incentive to engage in dubious laboratory research. Read more
Marc Morano reports on some of the extremes seen at the “march for science” which invoke God, Hitler, Gay Marriage, Racism, Sexism and how it is first and foremost a march for endless government funding, ideology, and in support of a “no dissent” policy. Read more
In my opinion, climate science has turned into political science and certain professors fear that “cleaning the swamp” will kill their cash cow. For some real physical evidence showing how the CO2 boogeyman and the greenhouse hypothesis fail, see my Wryheat story Evidence that CO2 emissions do not intensify the greenhouse effect .
An example of how political the climate madness is getting:
Democrats Ask Teachers To Destroy Books Written By ‘Climate Deniers’
by Andrew Follett, Daily Caller
Three senior House Democrats asked U.S. teachers to destroy a book written by climate scientists challenging the environmentalist view of global warming.
The Democrats were responding to a campaign by the conservative Heartland Institute that is sending copies of the 2015 book, “Why Climate Scientists Disagree About Global Warming” to about 200,000 science teachers. Democratic Reps. Bobby Scott of the Committee on Education, Raúl M. Grijalva of the Committee on Natural Resources, and Eddie Bernice Johnson of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology all issued a statement telling teachers to trash the book. Read more (You can download the book for free here.) ☼
Shots Fired into the Christy/Spencer Building at UAH
by Dr. Roy Spencer
(Note: Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. John Christy operate the satellite system which measures global temperature every day from the University of Alabama at Huntsville – UAH. They also give testimony to Congress.)
A total of seven shots were fired into our National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) building here at UAH over the weekend.
All bullets hit the 4th floor, which is where John Christy’s office is (my office is in another part of the building).
Given that this was Earth Day weekend, with a March for Science passing right past our building on Saturday afternoon, I think this is more than coincidence. When some people cannot argue facts, they resort to violence to get their way. It doesn’t matter that we don’t “deny global warming”; the fact we disagree with its seriousness and the level of human involvement in warming is enough to send some radicals into a tizzy. (Read more)
Read also: Update on Possible Ecoterror Attack at UAH by Dr. Roy Spencer
Excerpts:
I am not surprised this happened at all. For the last 25 years our science has been viewed as standing in the way of efforts to institute a carbon tax or otherwise reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The amount of money involved in such changes in energy policy easily run into the hundreds of billions of dollars… more likely trillions.
When I was at NASA, my boss was personally told by Al Gore that Gore blamed our satellite temperature dataset for the failure of carbon tax legislation to pass. So why am I not surprised that our building was shot up? Because people have been killed for much less reason than hundreds of billions of dollars.
This is why the FBI needs to get involved in this case, if they haven’t already. Ecoterrorism is a federal crime. There were federal employees in the building at the time the shots were fired into the building. ☼
Environmentalists have been predicting dire consequences since even before “Earth Day.” In the following article, Walter E. Williams recounts the failed predictions of doom and gloom.
Here’s How Wrong Past Environmental Predictions Have Been
by Walter E. Williams, April 26, 2017 (Read original article)
Each year, Earth Day is accompanied by predictions of doom.
Let’s take a look at past predictions to determine just how much confidence we can have in today’s environmentalists’ predictions.
In 1970, when Earth Day was conceived, the late George Wald, a Nobel laureate biology professor at Harvard University, predicted, “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
Also in 1970, Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist and best-selling author of “The Population Bomb,” declared that the world’s population would soon outstrip food supplies.
In an article for The Progressive, he predicted, “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next 10 years.”
He gave this warning in 1969 to Britain’s Institute of Biology: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
On the first Earth Day, Ehrlich warned, “In 10 years, all important animal life in the sea will be extinct.”
Despite such predictions, Ehrlich has won no fewer than 16 awards, including the 1990 Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ highest award.
In International Wildlife (July 1975), Nigel Calder warned, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.”
In Science News (1975), C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization is reported as saying, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.”
In 2000, climate researcher David Viner told The Independent, a British newspaper, that within “a few years,” snowfall would become “a very rare and exciting event” in Britain. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said. “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.”
In the following years, the U.K. saw some of its largest snowfalls and lowest temperatures since records started being kept in 1914.
In 1970, ecologist Kenneth Watt told a Swarthmore College audience:
The world has been chilling sharply for about 20 years. If present trends continue, the world will be about 4 degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990 but 11 degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.
Also in 1970, Sen. Gaylord Nelson, D-Wis., wrote in Look magazine: “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian (Institution), believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
Scientist Harrison Brown published a chart in Scientific American that year estimating that mankind would run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver were to disappear before 1990.
Erroneous predictions didn’t start with Earth Day.
In 1939, the U.S. Department of the Interior said American oil supplies would last for only another 13 years. In 1949, the secretary of the interior said the end of U.S. oil supplies was in sight.
Having learned nothing from its earlier erroneous claims, in 1974 the U.S. Geological Survey said the U.S. had only a 10-year supply of natural gas.
The fact of the matter, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, is that as of 2014, we had 2.47 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas, which should last about a century.
Hoodwinking Americans is part of the environmentalist agenda. Environmental activist Stephen Schneider told Discover magazine in 1989:
We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. … Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.
In 1988, then-Sen. Timothy Wirth, D-Colo., said: “We’ve got to … try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong … we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” Americans have paid a steep price for buying into environmental deception and lies. ☼
Ex-Chief Scientist: Our Advice To Gov’t On Preventing Global Warming Was Wrong
by Andrew Follett, Daily Caller
Former chief scientist Sir David King admitted he was wrong in advising the U.K. government to encourage diesel vehicles to fight global warming.
King said the government overestimated the effectiveness of its programs to encourage diesel vehicles. King was the U.K.’s chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007 and until recently a special representative for climate change.
King advised the U.K. government to push programs to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and concluded that switch to diesel cars would be better for the environment.
Though well-meaning, the continent’s environmental efforts haven’t decreased carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and have raised power prices. Many of Europe’s anti-global warming policies have actually made the situation worse. Read more ☼
MORE CLIMATE ALARMISM:
The WMO’s Dubious Omissions…Arctic Of The 1930s And 1940s Just As Warm As Today!
By Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt
Climate alarm at the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) was reported on 21 March 2017 at the German online derwesten.de:
Heat waves in the Arctic – climate scientists sound the alarm …. During the winter in the Arctic temperatures reached near the melting point. It wasn’t the only weather extreme that climate scientists reported on. Such a heat wave occurred in the Arctic at least three times at the start of 2017, so reported the World Weather OrganiZation (WMO) in Geneva.
BUT: In the 1930s and 1940s there were two heat decades in the Arctic which were almost as warm as today. This is just a small fact that went missing in the WMO press release and in the derwesten.de article. Read more (And see graphs) ☼
Falling Sea Level: The Critical Factor in 2016 Great Barrier Reef Bleaching!
by Jim Steele, Director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University
It is puzzling why the recent 2017 publication in Nature, Global Warming And Recurrent Mass Bleaching Of Corals by Hughes et al. ignored the most critical factor affecting the 2016 severe bleaching along the northern Great Barrier Reef – the regional fall in sea level amplified by El Niño. Instead Hughes 2017 suggested the extensive bleaching was due to increased water temperatures induced by CO2 warming.
In contrast in Coral Mortality Induced by the 2015–2016 El-Niño in Indonesia: The Effect Of Rapid Sea Level Fall by Ampou 2017, Indonesian biologists had reported that a drop in sea level had bleached the upper 15 cm of the reefs before temperatures had reached NOAA’ Coral Reef Watch’s bleaching thresholds. As discussed by Ampou 2017, the drop in sea level had likely been experienced throughout much of the Coral Triangle including the northern Great Barrier Reef (GBR), and then accelerated during the El Niño. They speculated sea level fall also contributed to the bleaching during the 1998 El Niño. Consistent with the effects of sea level fall, other researchers reported bleaching in the GBR was greatest near the surface then declined rapidly with depth. Indeed if falling sea level was the main driver in 2016’s reef mortalities, and this can be tested, then most catastrophic assertions made by Hughes 2017 would be invalid. Read more ☼
ENERGY ISSUES
New Study Finds Renewable Fuels Are Dirtier Than Fossil Fuels!
By P Gosselin on 21. April 2017
Today we look at two new papers that reveal renewable energies don’t deliver what their proponents like to have us believe they do, i.e. clean, affordable and reliable energy, and another telling us that the Paris Agreement is a joke.
Biofuel blends are more polluting.
The first paper by Emery et al., 2017, looks at biofuel and found:
Life-cycle non-GHG air pollutant emissions, particularly NOX [nitrous oxides] and PM [particulates], are higher for corn ethanol and other biofuel blends than conventional petroleum fuels.”
Other findings include:
1) emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and carbon monoxide (CO) increase by 9–50% per 100 km traveled for high-ethanol blends from corn grain and combined grain and stover feedstocks;
2) NOX, PM [particulates], and SOX [sulfur dioxides] increase by 71–124% from corn grain and 56–110% from combined grain and stover, relative to conventional gasoline;
3) The total social costs of ethanol blends are higher than that of gasoline, due in part to higher life-cycle emissions of non-GHG pollutants and higher health and mortality costs per unit. Read more ☼
Geologists Discover The US’s Largest Natural Gas Deposit
by Andrew Follett
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) discovered the largest continuous natural gas deposit in the country, stretching across the Gulf Coast states of Texas and Louisiana.
USGS estimates between 4 billion barrels of oil and 304.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas sit untapped in the Haynesville and Bossier shale formations. More natural gas was found in these two formations than any other continuous assessment the USGS has ever conducted. Read more
(USGS press release with maps) ☼
Distributed-energy Sources Raise Costs, Vulnerability to Outages, Study Finds
By Bonner R. Cohen
A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has concluded distributed renewable-energy resources, such as rooftop solar systems, raise costs and make electric systems more vulnerable to emergencies and terrorist-related outages. Read more
For the full study click here. ☼
ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES
Feds, Wildlife Groups Use Bogus Endangered Species Science to Block Border Fence
by Judicial Watch
Wildlife conservation groups are collaborating with a federal government agency to halt construction of the southern border wall by fudging science to claim that unimpeded trans-border corridors are essential to an “endangered species” with 99% of its population in Mexico. Under the plan, large areas of Arizona and New Mexico would be prohibited from erecting a border wall so that jaguars—which don’t even occupy the area—can roam back and forth between the two countries. More than ¾ million acres in Arizona and New Mexico would be designated as critical habitat for jaguars under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA), which specifically states that critical habitat can only be designated for the United States.
Judicial Watch obtained records from Arizona’s Game and Fish Department, local governments and one of the biologists fighting the effort to designate the area a “critical habitat” for jaguars. It’s been a years-long battle that started in 2012 when the Obama administration relaxed ESA requirements to make designation of critical habitat easer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). This includes lowering scientific standards and essentially caving in to leftist groups. The result, according to biologist and attorney Dennis Parker, is more restrictions on private property, grazing, mineral exploration and development not to mention national security. Furthermore, no scientifically verifiable record of jaguar breeding exists in the area and only lone, transient male jaguars are occasionally and peripherally occurrent, Parker said. In a document addressed to USFWS, Arizona’s Game and Fish Department states that “habitat essential to the conservation of the jaguar does not exist in either Arizona or New Mexico under any scientifically credible definition of that term.”
One of the world’s leading big cat experts, Dr. Alan Rabinowitz, confirms that less than one percent of the jaguar habitat in the world is in the United States and that there’s nothing about the lands in the southwest U.S. that make them critical to the continued survival of the jaguar as a species. Read more ☼
Rivers Declared to Be “Persons”
by Wesley J. Smith
We live in truly surreal times. In an age when all human beings still do not have access to human rights—and when some of the world’s foremost bioethicists declare that the unborn and cognitively disabled are not persons—radical environmentalists and others are agitating to grant “rights” to objects in nature.
In the latest phase of this descent into metaphysical madness, two rivers have been declared to be legal “persons” endowed with human-style rights. In New Zealand, the Whanganui River was granted the same legal rights as a human being. The reason? The Maori tribe considers the river sacred and an “ancestor.”
Religion was also why an Indian court declared the Ganges River, considered sacred in the Hindu faith, to be a “person.” Read more ☼
PROPERTY RIGHTS
Court Upholds Esa Land Grabs Made to Protect Species Not Living on Private Property
By Michael McGrady
In an endangered species case a U.S. Court of Appeals decided the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service could list private property that contains no members of a protected species as critical habitat.
Brian Seasholes, a former research fellow at the Reason Foundation and now an independent scholar, said the Fifth Circuit’s decision has troubling implications for property owners and endangered species alike.
“What’s remarkable about Markle is the habitat they’re claiming is necessary for the dusky gopher frog is not occupied by the actual species,” Seasholes said. “It’s unsuitable habitat, and the only way it can be rendered suitable is through human intervention. Read more ☼
The mouse that won’t stop roaring
By Ron Arnold, Washington Examiner
Why did the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service waste over 100 million taxpayer dollars to save the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse from extinction when the little critters are alive and well from Colorado to Alaska?
The Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative public interest law firm based in California, has asked FWS that question by filing a delisting petition to remove the mouse from the “threatened” list of the Endangered Species Act. New scientific findings confirmed that the mouse, far from being “threatened,” is not meaningfully different from other populations of jumping mice with healthy populations in a huge swath of Western North America. The Endangered Species Act does not regulate species but habitat, which is land-use control. The Fish and Wildlife Service uses its power to separate land from use. Read more ☼
Texas Wins Victory for Farmers Against BLM
by Bob Price, Breitbart
Texas leaders and farm owners secured a victory in the battle against the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) attempted land grab along the banks of the Red River. The federal agency announced it is suspending the surveys ordered during the Obama Administration to justify the attempted takeover of 90,000 acres of land.
The BLM admitted in a letter issued on March 29 that it used an “incorrect methodology” in its justification for the attempted taking of land that had been in the possession of many Texas landowners for generations. “Having reviewed this deposition testimony and other new information, the BLM believes the survey methodology was used in error and may have caused errors in identifying the location of the Gradient Boundary,” Acting Cadastral Survey Chief Stephen Beyerlein wrote in the letter. Read more ☼
POINTS TO PONDER
“Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.” —Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
“Without justice being freely, fully, and impartially administered, neither our persons, nor our rights, nor our property, can be protected. And if these, or either of them, are regulated by no certain laws, and are subject to no certain principles, and are held by no certain tenure, and are redressed, when violated, by no certain remedies, society fails of all its value; and men may as well return to a state of savage and barbarous independence.” —Joseph Story (1833)
“If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are
misinformed.” — Mark Twain
“A recent study has found that women who carry a little extra weight, live longer than the men who mention it.”- Anon
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Newsletters can be viewed online on Jonathan’s Wryheat Blog:
https://wryheat.wordpress.com/
See my essay on climate change:
https://wryheat.wordpress.com/climate-in-perspective/
The Constitution is the real contract with America.
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People for the West – Tucson, Inc.
PO Box 86868
Tucson, AZ 85754-6868
Jonathan DuHamel, President & Editor
Dr. John Forrester, Vice President
Lonni Lees, Associate Editor
People for the West – Tucson, Inc. is an Arizona tax-exempt, 501(c)(3) corporation. Newsletter subscriptions are free.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, any copyrighted material herein is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
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