People for the West -Tucson
Newsletter, June, 2020
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
Some of you may have missed the May issue because I had trouble with the email client. You can read the May issue here: https://wryheat.wordpress.com/people-for-the-west/2020-archive/2020-5-may/
The main issue: Is the “cure” worse than the disease?
Did China Commit an Act of War?
By Jonathan DuHamel
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” —Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Biological warfare, while it may kill the enemy, is generally designed to cause many casualties and disruption. Those surviving victims of the biological agents will need the attention of many other people and resources. Biological warfare may also cause panic and disruption of a region’s economy. These are some of the things I learned during my two years as an officer in the Army Chemical Corps where I was specifically trained in CBR: chemical, biological, and radiological warfare.
As the story goes, the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, was conducting research on corona viruses when by accident (?) some of the virus escaped into the city and infected some of the citizens. China immediately quarantined the city and stopped travel within China. They could possibly have prevented spread of the virus if they had also stopped international travel and warned the world of what happened. But they didn’t. Perhaps the Chinese Communist authorities realized they had an opportunity destroy the economies of western countries. Because international travel was not immediately stopped, infected, asymptomatic people carried the virus around the world. China lied and people died. People and governments panicked.
It seems that the Chinese Communist authorities were paying attention to Sun Tzu.
Much of the panic was caused by computer models which predicted millions of deaths. These models were based on bad assumptions and insufficient data (very similar to climate models). For more on that subject, see: The Danger of Letting Lab Coats Run the World
and: Blinded by Doomsday Predictions Masquerading as Science
and:
See also: Coronavirus- The Truth (and Lies) Dr. David Williams ☼
THE PANDEMIC AND THE CLIMATE
Climate alarmists are upset that the pandemic is taking attention away from the “climate crisis.”
Climate change and a pandemic of lies
By Andrew Montford
The health establishment was looking away when the coronavirus struck; it had other priorities. If you look at the World Health Organization’s list of health threats, number one is climate change. Pandemics were down in third place, behind ‘non-communicable diseases’ such as diabetes and obesity. (Read more) ☼
Debunking Pro Publica’s Claims that Climate Change Spreads Viruses
By H. Sterling Burnett
Google News and the Climate Left are promoting a ridiculous article by Pro Publica arguing that climate change, rather than wind and solar power, causes deforestation that makes the spread of infectious diseases like coronavirus more likely. No study has ever directly linked any single species loss to anthropogenic climate change, despite many efforts to try and make such a connection. Climate change is not causing humanity’s conversion of land from forests to farms. As detailed in Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, modern agriculture, built upon and entirely dependent upon fossil fuels, is allowing farmers to produce more food than ever on less and less land. This allows former croplands to be reclaimed by forests. In addition, as detailed by CO2Science.org, the carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere over the past century is contributing to a general greening of the earth that, among other effects, is creating denser forests and turning desert into savanna, expanding wildlife habitat.
Contrary to the vast body of scientific literature detailed in Chapter Four of Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, Pro Publica’s article also falsely claims, “vector-borne diseases — those carried by insects like mosquitoes and ticks and transferred in the blood of infected people — are also on the rise as warming weather and erratic precipitation vastly expand the geographic regions vulnerable to contagion.” Note that Pro Publica presents no scientific evidence for this wild assertion. (Read more) ☼
Why the Current Economic Slowdown Won’t Show Up in the Atmospheric CO2 Record
by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
Summary: Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) continue to increase with no sign of the global economic slowdown in response to the spread of COVID-19. This is because the estimated reductions in CO2 emissions (around -11% globally during 2020) is too small a reduction to be noticed against a background of large natural variability. The reduction in economic activity would have to be 4 times larger than 11% to halt the rise in atmospheric CO2. (Read more) This means that attempts to prevent global warming by reducing human emissions will not work. See also: The Global CO2 lockdown problem This paper deals with measurement problems and data manipulation.
See also: There is no Climate Emergency ☼
Coronavirus And Climate Change: A Tale Of Two Hysterias
by Tilak Doshi, Forbes
In response to both threats, governments and their policy experts habitually chant the “follow the science” mantra. Unlike climate change models that predict outcomes over a period of decades, however, it takes only days and weeks for epidemiological model forecasts to be falsified by data. Thus, by March 25th, Ferguson’s predicted half a million fatalities in the UK was adjusted downward to “unlikely to exceed 20,000”, a reduction by a factor of 25. This drastic reduction was credited to the UK’s lockdown which, however, was imposed only 2 days previously, before any social distancing measures could possibly have had enough time to work.
For those engaged in the fraught debates over climate change over the past few decades, the use of alarmist models to guide policy has been a familiar point of contention. Much as Ferguson’s model drove governments to impose Covid-19 lockdowns affecting nearly 3 billion people on the planet, Professor Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” model was used by the IPCC, mass media and politicians to push the man-made global warming (now called climate change) hysteria over the past two decades.
As politicians abdicate policy formulation to opaque expertise in highly specialized fields such as epidemiology or climate science, a process of groupthink emerges as scientists generate ‘significant’ results which reinforce confirmation bias, affirm the “scientific consensus” and marginalize sceptics. Rather than allocating resources and efforts towards protecting the vulnerable old and infirm while allowing the rest of the population to carry on with their livelihoods with individuals taking responsibility for safe socializing, most governments have opted to experiment with top-down economy-crushing lockdowns. And rather than mitigating real environmental threats such as the use of traditional biomass for cooking indoors that is a major cause of mortality in the developing world or the trade in wild animals, the climate change establishment advocates decarbonisation (read de-industrialization) to save us from extreme scenarios of global warming. Taking the wheels off of entire economies on the basis of wildly exaggerated models is not the way to go. (Read full article) ☼
The Coronavirus Lockdown Has Not Made the Air Cleaner
by Todd Myers, National Review
Just about every day, someone claims that the air is cleaner. That, we are told, is a small benefit of the coronavirus-induced economic lockdowns. By reducing traffic on our roads, we are polluting the air less, providing a visible example of the supposed benefits of imposing more environmental regulation.
In my hometown of Seattle, one environmental activist told the local paper that people can “physically see that difference in the cleaner air.” The air-quality data tell a different story.
According to the EPA’s air-quality monitors, levels of particulate matter — known as PM 2.5 — are not lower now and have, in fact, been higher recently than the median level of the last five years. Consisting of particles smaller than 2.5 microns, PM 2.5 includes natural sources such as smoke or sea salt, as well as human-caused pollution from combustion.
This counterintuitive result could be due to a number of influences, including weather. The key factor, however, is that in most places, human-caused pollution is small relative to natural sources. Even a significant reduction in the human contribution makes only a small difference. (Source) ☼
Calls to add ‘climate change’ to death certificates as ‘pre-existing condition’
By Marc Morano
Professors in academia are touting a new study that is being used to call for “climate change” to be added as a cause of death on death certificates. “Climate change is a killer, but we don’t acknowledge it on death certificates,” co-author Dr. Arnagretta Hunter, from The Australian National University (ANU) Medical School, said. The study was published May 20, 2020 in The Lancet Planetary Health. Given the focus on COVID-19 infection rates and death tolls, it appears the climate activists in academia may want in on the scary and emotional death toll counts in order to draw attention back to their climate cause. (Read more) ☼
OTHER CLIMATE NEWS
Highly Touted Alarmist Hurricane ‘Study’ Sets New Low for Misleading Deception
By James Taylor
The media are breathlessly touting a cheap new “study” falsely asserting climate change is causing an increase in strong hurricanes. In reality, the study relies on deception, unethical data manipulation, and aggressive misrepresentation of quite normal short-term trends to support its false claim.
The study, published by government-employed and government-funded researchers whose jobs and income depend on perpetuation of the alarmist Climate Delusion, has been reported – without any critical examination – by the New York Times, Washington Post, The Weather Channel, and others. The Environmental Defense Fund is even using the new study to raise money for itself.
The headline for the Washington Post article tells us what the alarmists are peddling in this new study: “The strongest, most dangerous hurricanes are now far more likely because of climate change, study shows.” The truth, as shown by objective scientific facts, is quite different. (Read more) ☼
The Sun Has Entered ‘Very Deep’ Solar Minimum
The lack of any sunspots suggests the current solar minimum is one of the ‘deepest’ in 100 years. The sun has been reported to have a ‘very deep’ solar minimum with 100 days of 2020 not seeing any sunspots on its surface.
Astronomer Dr Tony Phillips says the current lack of sunspot counts suggests the current solar minimum is one of the ‘deepest’ of the past century.
A sunspot is an area of magnetic activity on the surface of the sun – also known as storms – and appear in areas of darkness. They play a huge part in the sun’s activity, including birthing solar flares and coronal mass ejections.
A solar minimum occurs when zero sunspots are spotted, but, before you start panicking and thinking this is a bad thing, solar minimums are all part of the sun’s cycle and occur every 11 years or so. Some scientists have linked previous solar minimums to dramatic drops in Earth’s temperature, including causing what was known as the ‘little ice age’ in the 1600s – some even fear it may happen again. (Read more)
See also: the next solar cycle and why it matters for climate (18pages) ☼
New Study: 11,500 Years Ago, Spain Warmed And Cooled ~3°C Within Decades…Warmth Was ‘Higher Than Current’
By Kenneth Richard
At the end of the last glacial, when CO2 concentrations hovered around 250 ppm, there were abrupt warming and cooling events in the Spanish mountains (Béjar range) with magnitudes of 3°C within decades. Peak temperatures were at times warmer than today.
Greenland, for example, warmed by 8 to 16°C “within decades or less” 20 or more times during the last 80,000 years.
In the northeastern United States, temperatures plummeted by 5.6°C within 200 years about 13,000 years ago (Hou et al., 2007). Then, around 11,600 years ago, temperatures abruptly rose ~5.4°C “in less than 200 years” (Read more) ☼
Shocking New Climate Study: Egyptian, Greek, Roman Empires Never Existed
By James Taylor
Seemingly all of the major news media are breathlessly reporting today on a study claiming up to 3 billion people will live in “nearly unlivable” hot conditions by the year 2070. A look at the sham study, however, shows that if the study’s claims were correct, none of the Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, or Roman empires could have existed. Instead, publicity-seeking pseudo-scientists realize that the easiest path to fame, glory, and media adulation is to make outrageous climate claims that bear no semblance to real-world climate or history.
USA Today summarizes the “study”, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS):
If global warming continues unchecked, the heat that’s coming later this century in some parts of the world will bring “nearly unlivable” conditions for up to 3 billion people, a study released Monday said.
Rome, Italy, currently has an average temperature of 59.4 degrees. According to the new study, it therefore must be “nearly unlivable” and “warmer than conditions suitable for human life to flourish.”
Athens, Greece, currently has an average temperature of 63.7 degrees. This is well above the upper limit of temperatures the new study says is livable and suitable for human life to flourish. (Read more) ☼
ENERGY
Mexico pulls the plug on “renewables”
By Ronald Stein
As Mexico is poised to plunge into its worst recession in recent-memory the leftist president is making cuts and pulling the plug on subsidy dependent intermittent power from wind and solar that has been driving up the cost of electricity for its financially challenged population.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador won the 2018 election by a landslide. His approach to government spending — even in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout — might best be compared to that of conservative icons Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
Recognizing that industrial wind and solar electricity bring little to no value to electrical grids, Mexico is moving to avoid the higher electrical prices. Of which have been experienced by Germany, Denmark, Great Britain, South Australia, California, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and other governments that have heavily subsidized their supply of intermittent electricity. (Read more) ☼
Dominion Energy proposes 40% rate hike in Virginia to pay for “net zero carbon”
By David Wojick
In a sane world no electric company would propose a 40% rate increase. That Dominion Energy has just done this for Virginia shows how crazy net zero carbon laws really are. The Legislature has in effect ordered Dominion to spend untold billions of dollars rebuilding their power generation system by adding a huge collection of expensive intermittent wind and solar. Dominion loves this because they will make a fortune at ratepayer’s expense. (Read more) ☼
Green Electricity Delusions
By Norman Rogers
With global warming the alleged science is so complicated that nobody, including the global warming scientists, can really understand what is going on. Green electricity, mostly solar and wind, is different. It’s relatively clear cut. No supercomputers spewing out terabytes of confusing data are needed.
Green electricity is quite useless. The latest trend in green electricity is wind or solar with battery backup. This green electricity costs about nine times more than the fossil fuel electricity it displaces. The true cost is hidden from the public by hidden subsidies and fake accounting. (My book, Dumb Energy, goes into great analytical detail.)
Green electricity is ineffective for preventing climate change. The climate change alarmists James Hansen and Michael Shellenberger make the case forcefully in this video. Hansen is the most important and most famous scientist warning against climate change. His followers consider him to be the greatest authority on the dangers of climate change. He calls wind and solar energy a “grotesque idea” and a “fantasy.” (Read more) ☼
Wind and solar weaknesses — Part I
By Dr. Jay Lehr, Terigi Ciccone
So-called “Green energy” threatens our culture, our freedoms and our pocketbooks, yet provides no net electricity to our electrical networks. Zero-Zip-Nada. They remain a Green delusion.
A bold statement, yes? Bolder still is the fact that wind and solar power plants are more efficient when they are not running and are the most efficient and eco-friendly when:
They are never bought, never installed, and never operated because they produce little or no net electrical power for a community’s electrical network, called the grid.
They make no significant reduction in CO2 emissions or pollution, and little reduction of fossil fuel burning.
For the “green-plants” already bought and installed—the best option for an electrical utility and the community is to tear them down, recycle the materials, restore the wastelands, and give your wallet and the Earth a big green smile. (Read more) ☼
New York Sits On A Natural-Gas Gold Mine They Refuse To Tap
By Kevin Mooney
Unlike neighboring Pennsylvania, New York has banned the use of hydraulic fracturing that can be used to extract oil and natural gas deposits available within an underground rock formation known as the Marcellus Shale. But New York policymakers have effectively cut off 12 million acres from the Marcellus Shale that could be used to supply growing energy needs. Without hydraulic fracturing, New York produces less than one percent of the natural gas that it consumes. For this reason, New York residents have lost out on an energy production boom that would have enabled the state to produce more than enough natural gas to cover its own heating, electrical, and industrial needs. (Read more) ☼
Bill Mckibben Caught Lying About Wind And Solar Costs
by H. Sterling Burnett
In a Los Angeles Times editorial, climate activist Bill McKibben claims, “In the last 10 years, engineers have driven the price of sun and wind power down below coal.” This is a falsehood that climate activists frequently tell, but here is the truth. What McKibben doesn’t disclose is that he’s only counting the price of wind and solar on days when they are operating at peak capacity, while ignoring their capital costs. Also, he is calculating the costs of operating traditional electric power plants when they are operating at less than peak efficiency, due to their need to regulate wind and solar’s ever-fluctuating power supply. (Read more) ☼
ENVIRONMENT
Peer-Reviewed Study: Repeat Coral Bleaching Just Happens, No Humans or CO2 Needed
A warm water coral reef provides the latest evidence that coral bleaching events occur with some regularity, and that there is always a reef recovery, no matter how severe the bleaching. A team of 15 researchers analyzed extracted coral reef cores from the equatorial Pacific’s Jarvis Island. The evidence they gathered indicates bleaching events were even taking place early in the 20th century, and that there appears to be a periodic 5-year repeat of the coral bleaching. (Read more) ☼
EPA
The Scientific Case for Vacating the EPA’s Carbon Dioxide Endangerment Finding
By Patrick J. Michaels and Kevin D. Darayatna
Executive Summary
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) 2009 “Endangerment Finding” from carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases grants the agency a legal mandate that can have profound and far-reaching effects. The Finding is based largely on a Technical Support Document that relies heavily upon other mandated reports, the so-called National Assessments of global climate change impacts on the United States.
The extant Assessments at the time of the Endangerment Finding suffered from serious flaws. We document that using the climate models for the first Assessment, from 2000, provided less quantitative guidance than tables of random numbers—and that the chief scientist for that work knew of this problem.
All prospective climate impacts in the Endangerment Finding are generated by computer models that, with one exception, made systematic and dramatic errors over the climatically critical tropics. Best scientific practice would be to emphasize the working model, which has less warming in it than all of the others.
Instead, the EPA relied upon a community of wrong models.
New research compares what has been observed to what is forecast, and finds that warming in this century will be modest—near the lowest extreme of the prospective range given by the United Nations.
The previous administration justified its policy choices by calculating the Social Cost of Carbon [dioxide]. We interfaced their model with climate forecasts consistent with the observed history and enhanced the “fertilization” effect of increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO2. We find that making the warming and the vegetation response more consistent with real-world observations yields a negative cost under almost all modeled circumstances.
This constellation of unreliable models, poor scientific practice, and exaggerated estimates of the Social Cost of Carbon argue consistently and cogently for the EPA to reopen and then vacate its endangerment finding from carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
The full document is available on the Competitive Enterprise Institute website at https://cei.org/content/scientific-case-vacating-epas-carbon-dioxide-endangerment-finding ☼
Parting thoughts:
“If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy.” —Thomas Jefferson (1802)
“The greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people.” —Thomas Jefferson (1801)
“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” – Voltaire
“Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people, in order to betray them.” —Joseph Story (1833)
“The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.” —Thomas Jefferson (1816)
“Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.” —Norman Mailer (1923-2007)
“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” —Thomas Jefferson
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest
person to fool.” – Physicist Richard Feynman, Nobel Laureate.
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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
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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