People for the West -Tucson
Newsletter, April, 2019
PO Box 86868, Tucson, AZ 85754-6868
pfw-tucson@cox.net
Real environmentalism can go hand in hand with natural resource production, private property rights, and access to public lands
A Review of Failed Environmental and Climate Predictions
by Jonathan DuHamel
Earth Day is recognized in April each year. In view of recent predictions that the world will end in 12 years unless we get rid of fossil fuels and completely revise our economic system, it is well to review the track record of past predictions.
First Let’s go back to the first Earth Day in 1970 and see some of the predictions made around that time:
“We have about five more years at the outside to do something,” ecologist Kenneth Watt declared to a Swarthmore College audience on April 19, 1970.
Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.
Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich: “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make.” “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.
In that same issue, Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, wrote, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
(Source for examples above: Reason.com)
More predictions:
September, 1969, from Sen. Daniel Moynihan to John Ehrlichman: “It is now pretty clearly agreed that the CO2 content [in the atmosphere] will rise 25% by 2000. This could increase the average temperature near the earth’s surface by 7 degrees Fahrenheit. This in turn could raise the level of the sea by 10 feet. Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington, for that matter.” (Source: Nixon Library) The reality: Rather than increasing by 81 parts per million as the “pretty clearly agreed” experts feared, CO2 rose by only 45 parts per million and temperature increased by 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit. Sea level rose by 3.9 inches rather than 10 feet. (Source)
July 9, 1971, Washington Post: “The world could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading [NASA] atmospheric scientist predicts.”
June 24, 1974, Time Magazine predicts another ice age is imminent. “As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval.” “Telltale signs are everywhere — from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest.”
April 28, 1975, Newsweek predicts global cooling: “There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth.”
April 22, 2002, the Australian Broadcasting Company predicted “Across the world, coral reefs are turning into marine deserts. It’s estimated that more than a quarter have been lost and that 40 per cent could be gone by 2010.” The reality: At the time of the broadcast, world coral reefs where estimated to be about 255,000 sq. km. So, by 2010, that should have dropped to 153,000 sq. km. But according to World Resources Institute , as of Feb. 2011, coral reef area is estimated to be 249,713 sq. km.
On the credibility of climate models from the Journal of Hydrological Sciences (2008): “Geographically distributed predictions of future climate, obtained through climate models, are widely used in hydrology and many other disciplines, typically without assessing their reliability. Here we compare the output of various models to temperature and precipitation observations from eight stations with long (over 100 years) records from around the globe. The results show that models perform poorly, even at a climatic (30-year) scale. Thus local model projections cannot be credible, whereas a common argument that models can perform better at larger spatial scales is unsupported.”
April 9, 2015, Global warming alarmists and climate scientists have predicted that the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free by 1979, or 2000, or 2008, or 2012, or 2013, or 2015, or 2020, or 2030, or 2050 or… (ADI article)
March 20, 2019, “Heat records set twice as often as cold ones in US” Arizona Daily Star. The article ignores heat waves of the 1920s and 1930s. See a complete debunking here.
As Bjorn Lomberg wrote and documented in the “Skeptical Environmentalist,” most claims by environmental groups are not supported by the facts and the environment is in much better shape than we are led to believe.
About that 2°C tipping point when all hell will break loose:
Planet-Sized Experiments – we’ve already done the 2°C test
by Willis Eschenbach
People often say that we’re heading into the unknown with regards to CO2 and the planet. They say we can’t know, for example, what a 2°C warming will do because we can’t do the experiment. This is seen as important because for unknown reasons, people have battened on to “2°C” as being the scary temperature rise that we’re told we have to avoid at all costs.
But actually, as it turns out, we have already done the experiment. Below I show the Berkeley Earth average surface temperature record for Europe. Europe is a good location to analyze, because some of the longest continuous temperature records are from Europe. In addition, there are a lot of stations in Europe that have been taking records for a long time. This gives us lots of good data.
Temperatures were fairly steady until about the year 1890, and from 1890 or so to 2013, temperatures in Europe rose by about 2°C. Which of course brings up the very important question …We’ve done the 2°C experiment … so where are the climate catastrophes?
Seriously, folks, we’re supposed to be seeing all kinds of bad stuff. But none of it has happened. No cities gone underwater. No increase in heat waves or cold waves. No islands sinking into the ocean. No increase in hurricanes. No millions of climate refugees. The tragedies being pushed by the failed serial doomcasters for the last 30 years simply haven’t come to pass. Read more
During the past 15,000 years, natural variation of temperature has been more than 2°C in many cycles.
Related articles:
A Review of the state of Climate Science
The fake two degree political limit on global warming ☼
STATE OF THE UNION
Brainwashing children
Using Children to Shill for Bad Science in the U.S. and in the UK. See linked stories. ☼
Shall We Defend Our Common History?
From Hillsdale College Imprimis
Welcome to the new Orwellian world where censorship is free speech and we respect the past by attempting to elide it. Over the past several years, we have seen a rising tide of assaults on statues and other works of art representing our nation’s history by those who are eager to squeeze that complex story into a box defined by the evolving rules of political correctness. Read full article ☼
Summary Audit: Executive Branch Websites Promoting Global Warming Alarmism and Propaganda
Audit conducted by the Heartland Institute
Federal agency websites should only contain scientific facts about climate change, not left-wing propaganda. This means numerous existing websites must be corrected to reflect climate realism or taken down altogether.
In multiple federal agencies, political operatives posing as civil servants continue to propagate numerous global warming myths and alarmist claims, even though President Donald Trump has repeatedly said he and his administration are committed to promoting climate realism. For example, many federal agency websites that address climate topics aggressively push the assertion global warming is a human-caused crisis resulting from fossil-fuel use.
Federal agency websites should only contain scientific facts about climate change, not left-wing propaganda. Read the audit. ☼
ENERGY
Fossil Fuels Are Good for U.S. National Security, New Study Reports
By Linnea Lueken
A new study, “Global Warming Energy Restrictions Threaten U.S. National Security,” shows climate change is not a danger to U.S. national security. A review of all risk factors reveals that imposing carbon dioxide restrictions on the U.S. economy would diminish, rather than enhance, American military preparedness.
The use of fossil fuels benefits the United States and its national security, states the report, published by The Heartland Institute, which also publishes Environment & Climate News. On the other hand, laws and regulations proposed to fight climate change, such as federal and state restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions, carbon dioxide taxes, and subsidies for select renewable energy technologies, endanger national security, the report states. Read full report ☼
Why Renewables Can’t Save the Planet
by Michael Shellenberger
After the author organized groups of labor unions and environmentalists to promote renewable energy, the real truth hit.
The main point:
In fact, wind turbines are the most serious new threat to important bird species to emerge in decades. The rapidly spinning turbines act like an apex predator which big birds never evolved to deal with.
Solar farms have similarly large ecological impacts. Building a solar farm is a lot like building any other kind of farm. You have to clear the whole area of wildlife.
In order to build one of the biggest solar farms in California the developers hired biologists to pull threatened desert tortoises from their burrows, put them on the back of pickup trucks, transport them, and cage them in pens where many ended up dying.
As we were learning of these impacts, it gradually dawned on me that there was no amount of technological innovation that could solve the fundamental problem with renewables.
You can make solar panels cheaper and wind turbines bigger, but you can’t make the sun shine more regularly or the wind blow more reliably. I came to understand the environmental implications of the physics of energy. In order to produce significant amounts of electricity from weak energy flows, you just have spread them over enormous areas. In other words, the trouble with renewables isn’t fundamentally technical—it’s natural.
He concludes:
I think it’s natural that those of us who became active on climate change gravitated toward renewables. They seemed like a way to harmonize human society with the natural world. Collectively, we have been suffering from an appeal-to-nature fallacy no different from the one that leads us to buy products at the supermarket labeled “all natural.” But it’s high time that those of us who appointed ourselves Earth’s guardians should take a second look at the science, and start questioning the impacts of our actions. ☼
In a victory for energy reality, EU dumps 2050 climate alarmist targets and commitments
by Larry Hamlin
In a spectacular climate alarmist policy failure the European Union dumped its “carbon neutrality by 2050” commitment and targets driven by the sacred but highly arbitrary and unsubstantiated 1.5 degree C global temperature “limit” and ended its Brussels summit with no climate commitments or targets for year 2050.
The EU heavy weight Germany along with other Eastern European countries including Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic refused to agree to any climate commitments or targets for year 2050 which had been expected to occur at this highly touted EU summit meeting.
Germany is facing huge economic along with energy supply and reliability problems as a consequence of trying to implement its incredibly costly “Energiewende” transition plan to “green energy” as highlighted in a WUWT article which noted:
“The cost of Germany’s “Energiewende” (energy transition) is enormous: some 200 billion euros by 2015 – and yet with minimal reduction in CO2 emission. In fact, coal consumption and CO2 emissions have been stable or risen slightly the last seven to ten years. In the absence of a miracle, Germany will not be able to fulfill its self-imposed climate commitments, not by 2020, nor by 2030.
What applies to Germany also applies to other countries that now produce their electricity primarily with fossil or nuclear power plants. To reach development comparable to Germany’s, such countries will be able to replace only about one quarter of their fossil and nuclear power, because these power plants must remain in operation to ensure frequency regulation, balance and back-up power.”
The same article also described the nightmare scenario of Germany trying to meet its 2050 renewable energy objectives as follows:
“To fulfill the German target of getting 60% of their total energy consumption from renewables by 2050, they must multiply the current power production from solar and wind by a factor of 15. They must also expand their output from conventional power plants by an equal amount, to balance and backup the intermittent renewable energy. Germany might import some of this balancing power, but even then the scale of this endeavor is enormous.
Perhaps more important, the amount of land, concrete, steel, copper, rare earth metals, lithium, cadmium, hydrocarbon-based composites and other raw materials required to do this is astronomical. None of those materials is renewable, and none can be extracted, processed and manufactured into wind, solar or fossil power plants without fossil fuels. This is simply not sustainable or ecological. Read more ☼
More on the “Green New Deal”
Green New Deal Would Barely Change Earth’s Temperature. Here Are the Facts.
By Nicolas Loris, Daily Signal
Even if Americans were on board with this radical change in behavior and lifestyle, it wouldn’t change our climate.
In fact, the U.S. could cut its carbon dioxide emissions 100 percent and it would not make a difference in abating global warming.
Using the same climate sensitivity (the warming effect of a doubling of carbon dioxide emissions) as the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assumes in its modeling, the world would be only 0.137 degree Celsius cooler by 2100. Even if we assumed every other industrialized country would be equally on board, this would merely avert warming by 0.278 degree Celsius by the turn of the century. Read more ☼
The “Green New Dealers” Have Lost All Perspective
by Alan Carlin
Perhaps the worst aspect of the “Green New Deal” (GND) recently proposed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Edward Markey is that the authors have lost (or possibly never had) all perspective on climate change. They are acting as if climate change were as bad a problem as the Great Depression, and that another “New Deal” is required for the US to survive. This shows that they they really have no understanding of climate change and that Congress should never appropriate any funds for the purposes proposed by the GNDers. If they have such a bad understanding of this problem, what would they do if there actually were a real problem? It makes one worry that the GNDers might be willing to start World War III on the basis of nothing.
The larger view is that prior to about 1860 the world was suffering from the Little Ice Age, the coldest period for several hundred years with many adverse effects on humans and their crops. What the world needed was higher temperatures, not colder temperatures. During the 1930s the world began to get what it so badly needed, warmer temperatures. So then there was some warming again from the 1970s until recently. And now the climate extremists want lower temperatures rather than realizing that the present relative warmth is just what we needed. There are now increasing indications that temperatures may fall again over the next decade or two because of a weakening sun. The temperature changes to date are entirely consistent with past variations in climate temperatures. Clearly the best thing to do is nothing. But the GND supporters are desperate to claim an emergency and spend almost one hundred trillion dollars of taxpayer and ratepayer money claiming that the problem they see must be solved in 12 years if the world is to survive. We do not even understand how the climate system works, let alone how to solve the alleged problem. As explained on this blog and my Book, everything points to bad “science,” not an emergency.
How crazy can you get! We should be thankful for the minor temperature increases during the Twentieth Century and maybe even hope for a little more, not sacrifice everything to solve a non-problem that we should be thankful for. The climate alarmists should not be given even $1 of taxpayer or ratepayer funds until and unless the “consensus” science may be shown to be fully valid by independent scientists using the scientific method. It is the responsibility of the GNDers to show the validity of their “science,” not climate skeptics.
The best available scientific research using structural econometrics shows that there has been no significant warming due to increases in CO2 during the years for which data is available. But the GNDers want expenditures estimated at $93 trillion of your tax and ratepayer money that assume this is not the case. They base their case on climate models that assume that temperature increases during the 20th Century will continue or even accelerate as CO2 levels continue to increase. But there is no valid evidence for this, just computer models based on unproven “science” promoted by the United Nations in recent decades and more recently by left-wing socialists in the US. (Source) ☼
Consequences of Cuomo’s Climate Agenda Hit Close to Home. His Home.
By Michael Bastasch
The unintended consequences of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s global warming crusade are hitting close to home—literally.
The Cuomo administration has blocked major natural gas pipeline projects. At the same time, however, natural gas was becoming an increasingly important part of New York’s electricity and heating mix.
The utility Consolidated Edison put a moratorium on new natural gas hookups across parts of Westchester County, including Mount Kisco, site of the Democratic governor’s residence, according to The New York Times.
Local officials and businesses worry that Con Edison’s decision will derail major development projects that rely on natural gas for heating. It also means homes looking to get off relatively expensive heating oil will have to wait. Pipelines are needed to get natural gas to customers, energy companies say, and there aren’t enough to reliably meet demand, especially during harsh winters. Read more
SEA LEVEL
30 years of NOAA tide gauge data debunk 1988 Senate hearing climate alarmist claims
by Larry Hamlin
NOAA has updated its coastal tide gauge measurement data through year 2018 with this update now providing 30 years of actual data since the infamous 1988 Senate hearings that launched the U.S. climate alarmist political propaganda campaign.
In all more than 200 coastal locations are included in these measurements with more than 100 of these coastal locations with recorded data periods in excess of 50 years in duration. None of these updated NOAA tide gauge measurement data records show coastal location sea level rise acceleration occurring anywhere on the U.S. coasts or Pacific or Atlantic island groups. Read more
See NOAA data here: https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_us.html ☼
PARTING THOUGHTS:
“Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early twenty-first century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.” – Richard Lindzen
“The Founders were not democrats and socialists…, but conservatives who had a healthy distrust of political passions and who devised a complex system designed to frustrate the schemes of social redeemers and others convinced of their own invincible virtue.” -David Horowitz
“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” – Richard Feynman
“Next time someone labels your opposition to mass immigration ‘racist’ or ‘xenophobic,’ tell them you are equally opposed to New Yorkers immigrating to Florida and Californians immigrating to Arizona. And for the same reason: They bring with them the very values that caused them to flee. The only difference is Latin Americans are largely unaware of what they are doing; New Yorkers, Californians and other leftists who move to conservative states know exactly what they’re doing: voting for the government policies from which they fled.” —Dennis Prager
“To allow any governmental authority to determine how much money individuals shall be permitted to receive from other individuals produces not only a distortion of the economic processes by undermining incentive for efficiency, it is more fundamentally a monumental concentration of political power which reduces everyone to the level of a client of politicians. Even aside from what this means for freedom and human dignity, it makes virtually inevitable a constant and bitter struggle among all segments of the society for the favor of those who wield this massive power to determine each person’s economic well-being. It is a formula for economic, political, and social disaster. Such power has, in a number of countries, led to a nomenklatura whose personal privileges have been a mockery of the very ideals of equality that led to such a concentration of power in pursuit of a mirage.” -Thomas Sowell
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Our Mission
1) Support private property rights.
2) Support multiple use management of federal lands for agriculture, livestock grazing, mining, oil and gas production, recreation, timber harvesting and water development activities.
3) Support a balance of environmental responsibility and economic benefit for all Americans by urging that environmental policy be based on good science and sound economic principles.
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
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