The Enigma Chronicle

The Volunteer Firefighters Association (VFFA), the body representing the Voice of Volunteer Rural Firefighters in NSW, refutes the claim by green alarmists that climate change is the cause of the recent bushfires in New South Wales.

The VFFA is angered by comments from the green lobby groups that tackling climate change was more important than prescribed burning of forest fuels to reduce bushfire risk. The real blame rests with the greens and their ideology as they continue to oppose and undermine efforts to conduct hazard reduction in the cooler months and to prevent private landowners from clearing their lands to reduce bushfire risk.

The bushfires in Australia are hardly unprecedented. There have been far worse bushfires stretching back to the earliest days of European settlement in Australia, including the Black Saturday Victoria 2009, NSW Bushfires 1994, Ash Wednesday Victoria 1983, Blue Mountains NSW 1968, Black Tuesday Hobart 1967 and Black Friday Victoria 1939, according to Peter Cannon, President of the VFFA.

Read the VFFA press release here.

Listen to scientist David Packham explain that the wildfires have nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with fuel-loads.

Read about Australia’s firebug problem.

… “A 2015 satellite analysis of 113,000 fires from 1997-2009 confirmed what we had known for some time – 40 per cent of fires are deliberately lit, another 47 per cent accidental. This generally matches previous data published a decade earlier that about half of all fires were suspected or deliberate arson, and 37 per cent accidental. Combined, they reach the same conclusion: 87 per cent are man-made… ” — The Sydney Morning Herald, Nov 19, 2019

There are, on average, 62,000 fires in Australia every year. Populated areas and satellite studies tell us that lightning is responsible for only 13 per cent. The rest, 54,000 are man-made. I wonder what is the CO2 load from those man-made fires. Climate alarmists should be all over that! “How dare you!”

Here is an amusing twitter debate on the Australian bushfires. Hothead alarmists on the thread seem more motivated by opinions without any facts to back it up, just spouting off alarmist dogma. There is quite a bit of good data presented, pretty much debunking climate hysteria relating to the Australian bushfires.

This photo in the thread says a lot. Read the protest placards. Protesters in East Gipps­land in the state of Victoria stopped a hazard-reduction burn that they said was “killing baby birds alive.” “I’m more worried about climate change,” one protesting grandmother told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. As a result, the hazard reduction was reduced to 3 percent of the area planned. Two months later, East Gippsland was burned out. I think this is a pretty good example of irony.

ABC Gippsland which originally ran the story about the protesters, deleted the article from its website after it gained notoriety on social media.

There is now tremendous blow-back in Australia as people begin to fully understand that climate change is not the cause of the bushfires. At least two decades of “green” environmental policy severely cutting backburns designed to remove fuel (i.e. wood and brush) is the true culprit. That and arson.

update 090120: Australian climate scientist Jennifer Marohasy discusses how the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has deleted actual recorded temperatures, massaging with fake temperature data, and consistently fudging the data (i.e. “cooled the past”) to validate the global warming narrative. Its ClimateGate all over again (see reference below).

I have to admit I haven’t spent enough time fully take in this rather lengthy blog post by Judith Curry — Legacy of Climategate – 10 Years Later. (from November 2019) Mainly because it has A LOT of information about the genesis and history of climate alarmism. I have covered some of this information in my last few blog posts, but Curry’s post peels the whole onion.

Climategate is in reference to the uncovering that climate scientists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in the UK had deleted, then fudged climate data and then lied about it, presenting climate papers to the IPCC based on this knowingly falsified data. Once outed, there was sufficient evidence and concern that five inquiries or investigations were conducted by, respectively, The UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, The Oxburgh panel, the Independent Climate Change Emails Review under Sir Muir Russell, Penn State University and the InterAcademy Council. The first three were established in the UK and focused on scientists at the CRU. The fourth was focused on our friend, Mr Climate Hockey Stick, Michael Mann of Penn State University. The fifth was commissioned by the IPCC itself as a review of its policies and procedures.

Curry references a paper by Ross McKitrick, Professor of Environmental Economics at Guelph University, Understanding the Climategate Inquiries. (The link is to a Word document).

The net finding of these inquiries is that there was a conspiracy and collusion to fraudulently fake and then misrepresent climate data, which coincidentally provided research-based “evidence” of global warming. Fancy that. Didn’t see that coming.

Its mind-boggling how vast this climate hysteria conspiracy is. Its not like what has been going on has been a secret. Rather it is A Big Lie. But progressives in the climate science community, aided and abetted by MSM, have succeeding in shouting down and censoring critics. Ahh, yes, the Cancel Culture, the progressive’s grim reaper, will come for anyone that challenges THE NARRATIVE. The word for that is fascism.

p.s. I did learn something very interesting in this. For his “seminal” hockey stick analysis in the mid-’90s, Michael Mann used an algorithm which mined data for hockey-stick shaped series (i.e. it specifically looked for correlations in the data which formed a hockey stick when graphed). The algorithm was so powerful that it could produce hockey-stick shaped “reconstructions” from auto-correlated red noise (i.e. randomly generated data). Mann failed to disclose the use of the algorithm for his climate work, even into 2004. Small wonder he failed to reveal the algorithm in his defamation suit in British Columbia, which he lost for failure to produce court ordered data and methodology. As a result of the loss in his defamation suit, Mann is a wholly discredited climate charlatan.

update 240120: Speaking of Mann, watch Hide The Decline: A Climategate Backgrounder. Dr. John Robson looks back on the 10th anniversary of the exposure of the scandalous “Climategate” decision to delete awkward data that contradicted the idea that settled science said we face a man-made global warming crisis. IPCC cannot be trusted. It was clearly complicit in developing and promoting Climate Alarmism to suit their agenda, not the science. Conceal data that counter their narrative, slice and dice the data to suit the narrative. Their narrative? Climate is warming and the change is man-made = climate crisis … NOT! Fake data, fraudulent science. Wake up! Video from December 6, 2019

Greenland just set a new all-time record-low temperature — -86.8F / -66C. At that temperature, maybe Hell did freeze over.

Summit Camp, also known as Summit Station, is a year-round research station on the apex of the Greenland Ice Sheet. It is located some 10,500 ft (3,200 m) above sea level. It’s data is often cited by climate alarmists as evidence of global warming. So maybe warming has taken on a bit of a chill.

To make matters worse, a pulse of Arctic air is expected to engulf practically all of Canada by Jan 09, and should sweep the Central & Western U.S. by Jan 17. This is projected to be accompanied by heavy snowfalls.

The deep cold is a result of a weakening jet stream, diverting brutal polar cold to the lower-latitudes This is also coincident with historically low solar activity. Without sounding pithy, despite the shrill prognostications of global warming, there is mounting evidence that there is, in fact, a cooling going on. In which case, the climate alarmists will probably begin bleating about the need to increase CO2 emissions.

V.A. Shiva explains the financing side of carbon credits. Spoiler alert: it is a financial vehicle which will vastly enrich the IPCC and connected individuals. It has nothing to do with cleaning up the environment and everything to do with a transfer of wealth. It is a forced tax on carbon emissions. Trump saw through the scheme and exited the Paris Accord. Definitely, watch the video to understand how the scheme works and why the Paris Accord is a scam.

To summarize Shiva’s presentation: “Polluters” offset carbon emissions through buying “carbon credits” which are a financial tool created and administered by the IPCC. The Paris Accord was the IPCC’s “PR Organization” to force compliance with the use of carbon credits. But first, they had to get all the countries of the world to sign onto the accord.

Under the Paris Accord, the US would have to create a green fund with $100B. This fund would be used to pay off (ie bride) offending countries to get them to sign on to the accord. However, they would not be required to restrict carbon emissions until 2030, after which time offending companies would be required to purchase carbon credit offsets. This forced tax would be a multi-trillion dollar payoff for the IPCC and those connect with the scheme. Al Gore is sitting on a vast number of these carbon credits. And certainly there will be others, as well as the financial market mechanism for trading carbon credits.

To make the plan work, the IPCC had to establish that global warming was going on, and implicating humans as a primary factor. Shiva talks about how (a) climate scientist(s) cooked the actual measured and accepted average temperature of the earth to make it seem like there was warming going on. He references this article, “Fourteen is the New Fifteen” by Arvind Kumar.

In 1988, the “Observed Surface Temperature” of Earth was accepted by the IPCC to be an average of 15 degrees Celsius for the period from 1950-1980. In 1996, the Earth’s average temperature was estimated to be 14.64C. So, global cooling. Pretty inconvenient when the narrative you want to support argues for global warming.

In literature published after the 1997 Vital Signs report by Worldwatch Institute, the leaders of the global warming movement started using 14 degrees Celsius for the global average temperature for the period from 1950-1980. The 1998 edition of the annual publication of Worldwatch Institute uses 14 degrees Celsius as the global average temperature, providing details of how it was informed of the change from 15 degrees Celsius in a footnote.

In the footnote, in earlier versions of Vital Signs, Worldwatch used the average estimated temperature of 15 degrees Celsius, as reported by the Goddard Institute. But the institute informed Worldwatch that a better base number would be 14 degrees Celsius. Dr. James Hansen, one of the scientists that established the original 15 degree baseline temperature, established the new 14 degree baseline temperature arbitrarily in an email to the author of the Worldwatch report, dated 18 January 1998.

Thus we have the genesis of the global warming hoax. The “Big Lie*.” An email from Dr James Hansen to the author of Vital Signs. It is a scheme hatched and coordinated through the IPCC to sell carbon tax credits worth trillions of dollars over the decades, commencing largely in 2030.

At some point, we may find out who the financial geniuses are that actually cooked up taxing carbon emissions. To make the scheme work would have required a conspiracy to drive the idea through the public that carbon emissions, CO2, is a primary culprit in global warming. As documented throughout this blog, this is just not true, and yet most people believe it to be true. But, from a tax perspective, what could be better than taxing a substance as common as the air we breathe? Or rather, in actual fact, the air we exhale. Stunning.

If you are paying attention and have red-pilled, there should be no doubt that man-caused climate change is a transfer of wealth scheme from rich countries to the IPCC and any company, organization or individuals connected with carbon credits.

*The Big Lie: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” — generally attributed to Joseph Goebbels

Just what I thought.

Efforts to rein in global warming by eating less meat, driving electric cars, or subsidizing solar energy are completely ineffective, writes a professor at the Copenhagen Business School, and constitute nothing other than “pointless virtue signaling.”

Bjørn Lomborg is the director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. “… Going entirely vegetarian reduces a person’s total emissions by only 2%.”

On electric cars, though they are “branded as environmentally friendly,” generating the electricity they require almost always involves burning fossil fuels. Moreover, producing energy-intensive batteries for these cars generates significant CO2 emissions (as written elsewhere in this blog), so that electric cars have a huge carbon deficit when they hit the road, and will start saving emissions only after being driven 60,000 kilometers.

According to IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol, we already spend $129 billion per year subsidizing solar and wind energy, yet these sources meet just 1.1% of global energy needs. The IEA estimates that “by 2040 — after we have spent a whopping $3.5 trillion on additional subsidies — solar and wind will still meet less than 5% of our needs.”

“If you think you can save the climate with electric cars, you’re completely wrong,” Birol observes. The fact is “cheap and reliable energy underpins human prosperity,” and this will be provided by fossil fuels until alternative sources of cheap and reliable energy can be found. Wind and solar ain’t it.

Yeah, yeah, I know. If we continue on the climate track we are on, the world as we know it is going to become unlivable in 12 minus whatever years. Billions of people are in peril as I write this. Yada Yada Yada.

But, there is that pesky data that refuses to conform to the climate alarmist narrative. The U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance and Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters International Disaster Database (OFDA/CRED EM-DAT), based in Brussels, has collected data on disasters since 1900.

Patrick J. Michaels of the Cato Institute sums it up for us in an article published in November 2014 titled “The One Statistic Climate Catastrophists Don’t Want You to Know.” Mr Michaels writes with a voice of authority, being a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. He has more than 3 decades experience in environmental studies. In summary, an expert on climate.

Per Michaels, we can all agree that climate change is a constant of nature. Everyone agrees that burning fossil fuels will have some impact on our naturally variable and, at times, volatile climate. The question is how much of an impact. And the pressing question is whether it will have a catastrophic impact— one so bad it justifies severely curtailing the use of fossil fuels in first- and second-world countries, while restricting the 3 billion people in third-world countries from using fossil fuels at all for energy.

Analysing data from OFDA/CRED EM-DAT, in comparing CO₂ emissions, the alleged climate change perp, to the number of climate-related deaths, which reflects actual climate danger to humans, as CO₂ emissions rise, climate-related deaths plunge. Wait .. what??!! That’s right, as CO₂ emissions have increased, climate related deaths have decreased. Well, that kinda deflates the alarmist balloon.

In the decade from 2004 to 2013, worldwide climate-related deaths (including droughts, floods, extreme temperatures, wildfires, and storms) plummeted to a level 88.6 percent below that of the peak decade, 1930 to 1939. The year 2013, with 29,404 reported deaths, had 99.4 percent fewer climate-related deaths than the historic record year of 1932, which had 5,073,283 reported deaths for the same category.

According to Michaels, climate catastrophists treat the global climate system as a stable and safe place, which we make volatile and dangerous. When, in fact, the global climate system is naturally volatile and dangerous. We make it livable through development and technology. And to do so, we need abundant, cheap, reliable, scalable power. Of viable sources, fossil fuels are the most readily available (coal, oil, natural gas), but emit CO₂ when they are consumed (the vastly overrated role of CO₂ in climate change is written about elsewhere in this blog). Nuclear and hydro are clearly in the mix, though nuclear does have pesky waste that needs to be safely stored away for centuries. Renewables — solar and wind — are just not capable of scaling up to generate the energy the world needs.

Why don’t the alarmists acknowledge the inverse relationship between CO₂ and climate deaths? Michaels sums it up in his research: “Because the dogma that man is ruining the planet rather than improving it is a religion, a source of prestige, and a career for too many people. But for the rest of us, the statistic climate catastrophists don’t want us to know is very, very good news.”

Electricity storage is the boogie man stalking EVs and our portable device (ie convenience) culture. For the time being, cobalt is an essential element in making the current generation of high-efficiency batteries. But this comes at a high price. In fact, it looks like a deal with the devil. Most of the cobalt we use comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and much of it is mined using child labor. Many of whom pay with their lives.

This week, International Rights Advocates filed a lawsuit against Tesla, Apple, Dell, Microsoft, and Alphabet for knowingly benefiting financially from child labor in the DRC.  A deal with the devil, indeed. Selling children’s lives as cheap labor to keep the cost of electric car batteries and mobile computing devices low-ish.

Read more here. And the next time you or someone you know wants to virtue signal how much they are helping the environment by buying an EV, think about whose life it probably cost.

And to further deflate any virtue signalling about the use of EVs, it is pretty conclusive there is a high hidden environmental cost to actually making the batteries. A two year old study out of IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute, which was commissioned by the Swedish Transport Administration and the Swedish Energy Agency to investigate the climate impact of litium-ion batteries from a life-cycle perspective, found that Tesla car battery production releases as much CO2 as 8 years of gasoline driving. Hmm. Math doesn’t look so good from that perspective, either.

So, what are we saying here. Given that science supports that CO2 does not impact the climate (read elsewhere on this blog), when we net climate change cost out of the equation, since it equals zero, on the cost side, EVs are expensive to buy, inconvenient to drive over distances and recharge, and they exploit child labor. Tesla batteries are warranted for 8 years, but outside of warranty, replacement costs are estimated to be as high as $20,000, though the range is likely $7-10k. As of this writing, there is not a precise answer on this, probably because EV builders don’t want to scare off potential buyers. Tesla is deliberately vague, but Elon Musk insists it will be on the lower range. Notwithstanding, at some point, older EVs will need a battery replacement, and it is reasonable to put this cost at about $10k. Ouch. This expected expense, plus rapidly outdated technology will crater used EV prices.

On the benefit side, they are easier to maintain and the cost to recharge them is less than the equivalent cost of gas, by some estimates less than half. But where does that electricity come from? Coal? Natural Gas? Nuclear? Hydro? Its unlikely that it is renewable, wind or solar.

So, pick your poison. Internal combustion engines or EVs. Both have costs. CO2 emissions is a red herring and irrelevant in the cost-benefit assessment. EV exploits child labor, so negates any virtuous signalling. You can guess what I will keep driving.

update: “Why Calling Electric Cars ‘Zero Emission’ Is Blatantly False Advertising” — from 2017. While plug-in electric cars don’t emit pollutants from their tailpipes, when electricity comes from burning fossil fuels, the CO2 emissions are shifted from the vehicle to the power plants.

A study from the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute calculated the CO2 emissions from plug-in electrics, depending on the energy sources used to generate electricity in various countries, and then translated that into miles per gallon. The report, authored by Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle, notes that an electric car recharged by a coal-fired plant produces as much CO2 as a gasoline-powered car that gets 29 miles per gallon. (For context, the average mpg of all the cars, SUVs, vans and light trucks sold in the U.S. over the past year (2016) is 25.2 mpg.) A plug-in recharged by a natural gas-powered plant is like driving a car that gets 58 miles per gallon.

The report — authored by Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle —  notes that an electric car recharged by a coal-fired plant produces as much CO2 as a gasoline-powered car that gets 29 miles per gallon. (For context, the average mpg of all the cars, SUVs, vans and light trucks sold in the U.S. over the past year is 25.2 mpg.) A plug-in recharged by a natural gas-powered plant is like driving a car that gets 58 miles per gallon.

So, all this virtue signalling about the non-polluting of electric cars is hokum unless the electricity generated is from clean sources. Not gonna happen soon.

A great article and video from JustFactsDaily.com: Climate Change Fears of Teen Activist are Empirically Baseless. I’m not going to waste any time or space commenting on anything Greta. Cancelled. Not worth the effort. However, read the article and/or view the video. There’s lots of solid, factual information puncturing the climate hysteria CO2 dirigible.

For example, 30 years ago, Stephen Schneider, a well-credentialed climate scientist of the day, told Discover magazine that:

“In order to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change, we need to get some broad-based support to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” which we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”

Let me parse that out: Our models predict disastrous scenarios. But noone is going to believe us or care what we have to say, let alone take any action. So, in order to get the coverage we need for our cause, we need to make up outrageous stuff and try to scare the hell out of people to get them to see that we are reasonable and that they need to listen to us and take the action that we advocate. So, let’s all panic together ... Or something like that.

So, the environmental and climate scare mongering we have had to endure for the last 4 or 5 decades is just story time. Grimm’s Fairy Tales in the modern era, only with climate-monsters rather than wolves and witches. Designed to scare us into submission. Straight from the source. Got that?

Whether you look at plant life, forest coverage, agriculture, rainfall, temperatures, or extreme weather, the hysteria around the dire predictions have all failed to come true. For decades. “Our models predict the sky is falling.” CO2!!

One of the best anecdotes, and most telling failures, is in extinctions. In 1989, Sandra Henderson, a biogeographer at EPA’s Environmental Research Laboratory, wrote that “scientists are warning of a possible loss of 20 percent of the earth’s species before the end of the century, [i.e. 2000]” and “a major factor in this modern species extinction may be our alteration of the earth’s climate: global warming due to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases.”

Okay, sure. Hmm. Let’s take a look at that. Let’s consider some basic math and the observed and verified science of extinctions. Roughly 1.2 million species have been cataloged. A loss of 20% would be 240,000 species. Yet, during 1984–2004, the International Union for Conservation of Nature recorded 27 confirmed species extinctions. This is not an exact figure, as the report notes that other extinctions may have occurred, such as “eight species of birds” whose status is uncertain. So, 27-35, give or take. Regardless of the precise number, it is low. The actual loss was orders of magnitude (35 vs 240,000) below Henderson’s projected extinctions. Basically a rounding error, and consistent with the average historical extinction rate observed before climate hysteria. Darwinism in action.

All this to say, be a skeptic. This is more ammunition in your quiver when a climate alarmist tries to browbeat you into submission, pointing an accusing finger … “How dare you!”

Ahh, so that’s how it works. This is a bit off the beaten path I have been on recently, but it answers so many things. Peter Boghassian is an Assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University. He sees things with a particular clarity which I appreciate.

His opinion piece in the WSJ is worth a read if you want to get some insight into how scholarly sausage is made — ‘Idea Laundering’ in Academia: How nonsensical jargon like ‘intersectionality’ and ‘cisgender’ is imbued with an air of false authority.

Well worth the read if, like me, you wonder what the heck are “gender studies” and how did they become academic fields of study.

Full disclosure is I think this and similar “academic’ fields are a farce. Taken to be as serious as Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks. Comedy gold when Michael Palin requests a government grant to develop a new silly walk. Kind of strikes at the heart of the matter. At least Monty Python was funny. Though several of the troupe have come out against the PC culture, commenting that Monty Python would never make it past the censors. This seems to be borne out, as the head of BBC comedy programming opined that Monty Python is out of step with modern times, and would never make it on TV today. He further attempted to slur Monty Python as six “Oxford White Blokes,” unforgivable in a cancel culture that demands diversity … or else. A comment refuted by John Cleese.

CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas (GHG). H2O is by far the most important, contributing about 95% of the climate effect. CO2 and temperature are not in synch at all through most of Earth’s history.

Patrick Moore’s peer-reviewed paper on the benefits of CO2 gives the time-line of CO2 decline and the cause of that decline, sequestration of CO2 into the shells of marine calcifying species. Shells that become limestone, CaCO3, removing carbon from the life cycle. Download the PDF here.

And after you do that, you can check out this video “CO2 is Greening the Earth”. Same theme, CO2 benefits life on earth.

The total wrongheadedness of blaming CO2 for the fake climate apocalypse seems to have peaked. Cooler, more informed heads are taking on this religion with actual science and facts. Couldn’t happen soon enough. However, next perhaps they’ll go after H2O, water vapor.