MORE PROPAGANDA, THIS TIME IN UK JUNIOR SCHOOLS

Here are the details. Sadly so many of our teachers use this material because, first it is simple to use and readily available and secondly most teachers believe it completely.

MASS INDOCTRINATION GOING ON IN USA CAMPUSES

This article explains what is happening in colleges in the USA where a serious effort is being made to indoctrinate students into becoming climate change evangelists. Here is a short extract:

Michael Willig, executive director of University of Connecticut’s Institute of the Environment, and Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, has announced that a national webinar, scheduled for April 7, ”will explicitly consider environmental justice challenges posed by the climate crisis.” And the aim is to extend this radical agenda not only to students in environmental studies, but those in history, science, business, culture, economics, psychology, religion, government, media, journalism and the arts.

You may ask what they mean by "environmental justice", but it sounds good. 

IT'S PLASTIC THAT IS PROTECTING US FROM CORONAVIRUS

This is not something that is being pointed out by the media, but the truth is that our medical workers require massive amounts (more than a billion items) of protective clothing, the vast bulk of this is from single use plastic. As I have always maintained there is nothing wrong with using plastic as long as it is disposed of safely by incineration. 

There is an excellent article by Dominic Lawson in the Sunday Times of 26 April on this subject, see this link (£)

THE NATION IS GETTING CLOGGED UP BY MADNESS

IPSO, The Independent Press Standards Organisation, has concluded that no action will be taken against a newspaper that called a lady “barking” for being ‘married’ to a chandelier.

Amanda Liberty, 35, lost her complaint against The Sun newspaper. She said the coverage was inaccurate, as she was not yet married to the chandelier, only engaged.

A columnist for the newspaper gave her their “Dagenham Award (Two stops past Barking)” and was accused of making pejorative comments about her sexual orientation. IPSO ruled that attraction to light fixtures is not an accepted sexual orientation.

Liberty wants to ‘marry’ the 92-year-old German chandelier. “She makes me feel really special, she makes me feel whole, she makes me feel complete.”

In an interview with StoryTrender, Liberty admitted that there was a “lack of conversation” in their relationship, however she doesn’t “need that from her” because she has conversations with friends and family.

She confesses to having a previous relationship with the US Statue of Liberty. She travelled to see it six times, and even changed her surname to “Liberty” by deed poll. Such was her infatuation.

Amanda Liberty argues that she was born “objectum sexual”, having a romantic desire for objects.

UK GOVERNMENT IN FANTASY OVER CLIMATE POLICY

This article explains how the government apparently believes the world should recover from the coronavirus outbreak by bringing forward new climate policies. They don't mention where the money is coming from, but seem to think that they will make money from it. Unbelievable!

PLANET OF THE HUMANS, A MICHAEL MOORE DOCUMENTARY

Here is a link to the film (1hour and 40minutes) referred to in yesterday's post. What makes this film so special is that it was made by someone who is passionate about 'saving the planet'. As he says in the film, he was a cheerleader for the people who he now denounces. He supported renewable energy and believed it was the solution. I admire someone who has the courage to change his mind and do so publicly. 

Having said that, I do not agree with his belief that extra CO2 in the atmosphere is definitely a serious concern, but what he is saying is that the very costly 'solutions' are not solutions at all, and in that I believe he is correct. What effect will this film have? I don't expect any TV channel to air it, as they don't touch anything controversial on climate these days and without that it is not likely to reach the mass audience. 

Do our political leaders really care enough to admit they are wrong? I very much doubt it. They have bought into these false solutions and most of the public have been brainwashed by all the propaganda pumped out on TV.

NEW MICHAEL MOORE FILM TRASHES RENEWABLES

This article Reviews the film and also has a link to it. 

A new documentary, “Planet of the Humans,” being released free to the public on YouTube today, the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, reveals that industrial wind farms, solar farms, biomass, and biofuels are wrecking natural environments. 

“Planet of the Humans was produced by Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore. “I assumed solar panels would last forever,” Moore told Reuters. “I didn’t know what went into the making of them.” 

The film shows both abandoned industrial wind and solar farms and new ones being built — but after cutting down forests. “It suddenly dawned on me what we were looking at was a solar dead zone,” says filmmaker Jeff Gibbs, staring at a former solar farm in California. “I learned that the solar panels don’t last.” 

UN WANTS US ALL TO GO FULL TILT TO SPEND WHAT'S LEFT ON CLIMATE CHANGE

UN Climate Change Fund Calls Coronavirus An 'Opportunity' To Re-Shape The World
Sky News, 20 April 2020
 
The UN-funded financial arm of the Paris Agreement has labelled the killer coronavirus an “opportunity” to raise funds for climate change action and “relaunch economies on low-emission, climate-resilient trajectories”.


 

What a ridiculous statement, and what a pity we cannot see someone try to defend it on a TV news bulletin. But alas, no - all we get on the news are endless stories about the coronavirus outbreak, as if nothing else is going on. In any case all our news broadcasters would agree with them! How might the interview go?

So, our economies are in free-fall unemployment is at its highest and the government does not have enough revenue to cover its spending commitments, and you are suggesting the meagre resources we have left should be spent on climate action instead of trying to rebuild our national infrastructure or our manufacturing base. Brilliant. 

The extraordinary statements have been published in a document by the Green Climate Fund – an international organisation with a $10.3 billion budget (US).

 
Australia gifted it $200 million (AUD) in 2015 but Prime Minister Scott Morrison axed further contributions after questions were raised about funds being sent to China, the single largest CO2 emitter in the world.
 
“While COVID-19 is causing untold suffering, the international response to this unprecedented health crisis in modern times offers an opportunity to direct finances towards bolstering climate action. GCF will continue to make critical investments in climate-resilient water resource management, health care facilities, agriculture and livelihoods – all of which are essential to subduing and overcoming the pandemic,” the organisation wrote in an official public update.
 
“Similarly, we will step up our efforts to catalyse green investment to relaunch economies on low-emission, climate-resilient trajectories.
 
“The Green Climate Fund is confident that only a united approach – bringing together determined efforts and innovation – will provide lasting solutions to both the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change.”
 
The Green Climate Fund went on to suggest that climate change was a threat comparable to COVID-19 which has killed 165,000 people, infected millions more and ravaged global economies.
 
“The COVID-19 pandemic and the global response required to stem it shows the importance of acting together to solve unparalleled threats to people and our planet,” the GCF said.
 
“The far-reaching impacts of COVID-19 are a stark reminder of the catastrophic implications the world faces if we don’t.”
 
A Sky News special investigation last year revealed the GCF squandered $3.7 million flying staff around the world for climate change conferences.
 
The bureaucrats which run the GFC were paid $65 million in wages – a figure that has been steadily ballooning each year. It can also now be revealed that the fund sent $157.5 million (AUD) to China in December despite the country planning on increasing emissions by several thousand mega tonnes of CO2 by 2030. China escaped having to pay a cent towards the climate change fund by hanging on to its “developing nation” status even though it is a global superpower with the world’s second largest economy.
 
China’s failure to contribute to the fund led to US President Donald Trump withdrawing from the deal, clawing back billions.
 
However, funds Australians contributed still in part went towards financing a major antistructure project in Shandong – one of the biggest polluting cities in the world which has a $1.1 trillion GDP (US). The Green Climate Fund will finance “low carbon transport with supporting investments in new energy vehicles and bus rapid transit green corridors” in the major metropolis.  

WHO RUNS THE UK - IS IT THE COURTS OR THE GOVERNMENT?

Economic Recovery At Risk As Climate Campaigners Launch Legal Bid To Stop UK Govt’s £29 Billion Road Building Plans
Forbes, 21 April 2020

The U.K. government’s £28.8 billion plan to expand Britain’s road network is set to be challenged by the same legal team which, in February, halted the Department for Transport’s plan to expand Heathrow.



The Court of Appeal ruled Heathrow expansion plans were illegal because the Department for Transport had ignored the Paris climate agreement.

Lawyers acting for Transport Action Network (TAN) have asked the Department for Transport (DfT) and Highways England to scrap their five-year road building plan.

At its launch alongside the budget in March, the Road Investment Strategy 2 (RIS2) was described by Chancellor Rishi Sunak as England’s “largest ever” roads programme.
 
A commitment to ramp up spending on mainly strategic roads was a key manifesto pledge in the Conservative party’s general election campaign last year. RIS2 revealed that £25.3 billion would be spent on freeways and A-roads, and £3.5 billion was pledged for major local routes.

TAN claims the plan breaches climate and air quality laws, and they have charged solicitors Leigh Day to act on their behalf. The firm has retained the services of David Wolfe QC of Matrix chambers and Pete Lockley of 11 KBW, the same legal team that was victorious in the Heathrow case.

TAN director Chris Todd said: “How can the DfT claim to take climate change seriously when it is set to burn billions on the ‘largest ever roads programme’ to make things worse?”
 
Full post
 
 

FRENCH CITIZEN'S CLIMATE CONVENTION COMES UP WITH DISASTROUS POLICIES

France’s Climate Convention Has Come Back To Bite Macron
The Spectator, 18 April 2020
 
President Macron now has to find a way to evade the consequences of his idiot exercise.



Those of us who are sceptical about the worth of citizens’ assemblies have been noting with interest the upshot of the French citizens’ convention for the climate which delivered its recommendations this week.
 
The thing about these assemblies of randomly selected citizens mulling over thorny issues is that they’re a brilliant way for elected politicians to shift the responsibility for really unpopular policies onto someone else. Except they can go horribly wrong.
 
President Macron used this device to deal with the threat from the gilets jaune, back in those distant days when citizens could actually assemble in France. He had to deal with a movement that was driven by the concerns of predominantly rural voters who felt ignored by the elite while placating the urban young exercised about climate change. What better than to go through the motions of direct democracy to appease the first group while giving the random citizens a brief that would ensure that their conclusions appeased the environmentalists? The convention was asked how to ensure that French carbon emissions would be reduced by 40 per cent in 2030 from 1990 levels.

The upshot was precisely as you’d expect: the convention has come up with proposals that no sane politician would actually want to take to the electorate, especially not in rural France. They recommend closing hypermarkets, shelving the 5G network because it uses more electricity, prohibiting the sale of cars whose emissions exceed that of most current models, and banning hoardings that might encourage people to drive further to buy things.
 
Advertisements, whether print broadcast or online, for items generating excessive CO2 would be banned; those that were authorised would be forced to carry the words: ‘Do you really need this?’. Some of the proposals are decent, such as encouraging the use of local shops over chain stores, but the overall effect is bossy, authoritarian and appallingly expensive for poorer people.
 
The president now has to decide how to deal with this embarrassment. You see, he made the mistake at the outset of declaring that the convention’s proposals would be taken seriously; they would be implemented immediately, put before parliament for legislation, or submitted to a referendum. That was then, when no one anticipated a situation where the French economy would be shrinking by six per cent in a year.
 
The problem with citizens’ assemblies is that its members don’t, unlike elected politicians, actually have to deal with the consequences of their breezy and idealistic proposals. In the first place, they are rarely representative of the entire population: in France, 25,000 people were approached to see if they wanted to take part; most refused, and 150 were chosen. Most of those are people with an agenda, who are prepared to give up entire weekends in return for a stipend of £74 (€86) a day plus expenses. In other words, political activists and people with time on their hands.
 
It was the same with the Irish citizens’ assembly on abortion. As in that case, the conclusions people come to depend on the agenda they are presented with. If the experts who brief them have a particular bias, pro-choice or hardcore green, then the recommendations will reflect that. The Irish body wasn’t presented with pro-foetus experts except as a minority view (you can see the programme online); I’d wager that the French convention was similarly skewed towards environmentalists rather than economists.

The thing about normal democracy is that it’s a way for us to choose people to make difficult decisions about policy and then implement them in law. In exceptional cases, the true direct democracy of a referendum can be used. Delegating these choices to a collection of unelected individuals is passing the buck. Mr Macron now has to find a way to evade the consequences of his idiot exercise. The old rule applies: never ask people their opinion unless you know the answer you want them to come up with, and then fix the process to make sure that’s what happens.

AT LAST A SENSE OF REALITY ABOUT OUR CARBON FOOTPRINT BEGINS TO DAWN

This article spells out how woeful our CO2 emission reductions have really been when account of imported goods is made. The government must know perfectly well that there is no way we can get to a true net zero emissions by 2050, so they fiddle the figures to make it look like we are heading in the right direction. Fairly soon the public will see the reality and realise what a con this whole thing is.

CORONAVIRUS TELLS US A LOT ABOUT COMPUTER MODELS

This article takes a look at how computer models have been used to predict how coronavirus will spread and lead to deaths in the population. They are all we have got, but this pandemic has exposed their limitations ruthlessly. Remember climate change also relies on computer models.

CLIMATE SCIENCE SCEPTIC ARGUMENT WINNING FACTS

This article explains where these fact sheets can be found. Climate change has almost disappeared from the news media at present for obvious reasons, but when it returns these arguments will be very important for sceptics to use when writing to the newspapers and taking part in phone-ins, so please keep a note of them.

You can go straight to the facts website here. 

MELTING GLACIER REVEALS VIKING HIGHWAY

This article explains the recent discoveries. What it also reveals is that the climate from about 400 AD to 1000 AD must have been warmer than today, something that is never mentioned in our news bulletins. 

COULD OIL HAVE A NEGATIVE PRICE?

Glutted Oil Markets’ Next Worry: Subzero Oil Prices
The Wall Street Journal, 15 April 2020

Traders of physical barrels of crude brace for the possibility of negative pricing



The coronavirus pandemic is turning oil markets upside down.
 
While U.S. crude futures have shed half of their value this year, prices for actual barrels of oil in some places have fallen even further. Storage around the globe is rapidly filling and, in areas where crude is hard to transport, producers could soon be forced to pay consumers to take it off their hands—effectively pushing prices below zero.

The collapse is upending the energy industry and even the math used in trading energy derivatives. CME Group, the world’s largest exchange by market capitalization for trading futures and options, now says it is reprogramming its software in order to process negative prices for energy-related financial instruments.
 
Part of the problem, traders say, is the industry’s limited capacity to store excess oil. Efforts to curb the spread of the virus have driven demand to record lows.
 
Factories have shut. Cars and airplanes are sitting immobile. So refineries are slashing activity while stores of crude rapidly accumulate.
 
U.S. crude inventories surged by a record 15.2 million barrels during the week ended April 3, according to data from the Energy Information Administration. Gasoline stockpiles also jumped, climbing by 10.5 million barrels, while refining activity hit its lowest level since September 2008.

The buildup of crude is overwhelming storage space and clogging pipelines. And in areas where tanker-ship storage isn’t readily available, producers could need to go to extremes to get rid of the excess, said Jeffrey Currie, head of commodities research at Goldman Sachs. Those might include paying for it to be taken away.
 
“It’s like traffic on a freeway,” he said. “It gets congested when there are a lot of cars.”

Crude comes in many varieties, used for a range of purposes, and different grades are priced based on several factors, including their density, sulfur content and ease of transportation to trading hubs and refineries. Heavier, higher-sulfur crudes generally trade at a discount to lighter, sweet crudes such as West Texas Intermediate because they tend to require more processing. Crudes that depend on pipeline transportation are trading at a discount right now because there is nowhere to put them and the pipelines that would normally take them away are getting jammed up, analysts and traders say.
 
The price of some regional crudes recently dipped into single digits. The spot price of Western Canadian Select at Hardisty—a heavy grade of Canadian crude typically transported by pipeline or rail to the U.S. Gulf and Midwest for refining—fell to just over $8 a barrel on April 1, according to an assessment from S&P Global Platts. The spot price of West Texas Intermediate at Midland fell to just above $10 a barrel on March 30, while West Texas Sour at Midland—its harder-to-refine counterpart—fell to around $7 a barrel. And one commodities trading house recently bid less than zero dollars for Wyoming Asphalt Sour crude.
 
It isn’t just the traders of so-called physical oil who are bracing themselves for the possibility of negative pricing. Traders of energy derivatives are preparing, too. Mark Benigno, co-director of energy trading at INTL FCStone, said he has never seen oil derivatives trade below zero but began several weeks ago to assess what might happen if they do.
 
Full story

BATTLE RAGES OVER 97% CONSENSUS CLAIM

NASA Fights Campaign To Remove 97% Climate Science 'Consensus' Claim
The Washington Times, 14 April 2020

Valerie Richardson

Nothing sends climate skeptics into orbit faster than seeing NASA repeat the 97% climate-consensus claim, but the effort to have the Obama-era declaration removed from the government website is suffering from a failure to launch.


 
NASA officials rejected the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s July 9 request for correction under the Information Quality Act, concluding that “changes to the Web site are not needed at this time,” prompting the free-market group to file an appeal Tuesday.
 
On its Global Climate Change page, NASA states: “Multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.”

CEI attorney Devin Watkins, who called the statement “inaccurate, unreliable, and biased,” said that NASA has refused to budge even though President Trump has expressed reservations about the consensus argument on anthropogenic global warming.
 
In 2017, for example, Mr. Trump told The Associated that “you have scientists on both sides of the picture.”
 
“It’s really weird when the President of the United States seems to say the 97% figure is incorrect, but an agency he is responsible for overseeing continues to say on their website that the President is wrong,” Mr. Watkins said in an email.
 
In her reply to the CEI, NASA chief information officer Renee P. Wynn said that the Global Climate Change website “presents the state of scientific knowledge about climate change and honors the role that NASA has played and plays in researching and communicating climate science.”

“NASA also still finds this information to be accurate and clear as it does not rely on results of a single peer-reviewed publication for facts, which is why a number of peer-reviewed papers are listed on the Web site to capture the robust nature of the scientific debate,” Ms. Wynn said in the March 11 letter.

Mr. Watkins countered that the “single sentence response says next to nothing,” and that instead of giving a point-by-point response as required by Office of Management and Budget rules, “her denial does not even respond to even a single point of our request.”

“Ms. Wynn totally ignores the requirements of reliability and lack of bias,” said the CEI appeal.

The CEI’s original request for correction ran 11 pages, and included specific methodological challenges to the studies cited by NASA, but the NASA response was barely two pages.

The Washington Times has reached out to NASA for comment.
 
The research papers cited by NASA to bolster the 97% claim “don’t actually make the claims that NASA’s claiming they make,” in some cases excluding — or including — scientists “who don’t have an opinion or say they’re uncertain or don’t know,” Mr. Watkins said.
 
He said the statement was posted by NASA at some point during the Obama administration.
 
“I just think there was political pressure to get it added, and no one questioned NASA directly on it at the time,” he said. “As the political winds shifted and the Trump administration came in, I suspect NASA didn’t really even look at it.”
Consensus gap or myth?

Debate over the scientific consensus on climate change has raged since at least 2004, when Science magazine published an essay by now-Harvard history of science professor Naomi Oreskes, “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change.”
 
She reviewed 928 study abstracts with the words “climate change” published in journals from 1993-2003, concluding that 75% implicitly or explicitly endorsed the consensus view and 25% took no position, but “none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.”
 
The 97% figure took off following a 2013 study led by John Cook, now an assistant research professor at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, who reviewed peer-reviewed paper abstracts with the words “global warming” or “global climate change” from 1991-2011.
 
“The first thing we noticed was that a lot of papers don’t even bother to mention whether humans are causing global warming or not. It’s like, you look at astronomy papers: Not many of them would bother mentioning that the earth revolves around the sun. It’s established consensus,” Mr. Cook told Yale Climate Connections in a 2017 interview.
 
“But amongst the papers that did mention it — there were about 4,000 papers amongst the 12,000 papers we looked at — 97.1% of them endorsed human-caused global warming in their abstract,” Mr. Cook said.
 
The pushback was immediate.
 
PopularTechnology.com interviewed a half-dozen prominent scientists who said the study mischaracterized their work, while other academics, including Richard Tol of the University of Sussex and the University of Delaware’s David Legates, published challenges to the study’s methodology.

For example, “Legates’s peer-reviewed independent study reevaluating the 64 articles that Cook said explicitly endorsed AGW (that more than half of the warming was caused by humans) found that actually only 41 made such claims,” said the CEI.

The debate has left little room for middle ground. In 2017, Yale Climate Communications rated the 97% figure as “true,” while Mr. Tol said in 2014 that it was “essentially pulled from thin air.”

NASA also cited statements from 18 scientific organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which said in 2014, “Based on well-established evidence, about 97% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening.”

On the other hand, CEI noted that NASA failed to take into account documents signed by researchers rejecting the climate-catastrophe scenario, such as the Oregon Petition, which has more than 31,000 signatures of self-identified scientists, including more than 9,000 with doctoral degrees.
 
The SkepticalScience blog, founded by Mr. Cook, slammed the CEI challenge, calling the “no consensus” argument “one of the most popular climate myths” perpetrated by “fossil fuel-funded think tanks.”
 
“That so-called ‘consensus gap’ between public perception and the reality of expert agreement is largely due to a sustained misinformation campaign,” said the Aug. 15 post.
 
At the other end of the spectrum, Climate Depot’s Marc Morano, author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change,” took a jab at the consensus “myth,” saying it was “about time NASA is forced to confront its part in repeating the 97% claim.”
 
“NASA is likely to fight tooth and nail over this false 97% claim because NASA has a vested interest in keeping up the ‘consensus’ myth,” Mr. Morano said in an email. “Sadly, NASA has long been overrun with many scientists who are willing to bend the truth for the climate cause.”
 
Full story

see also GWPF papers on the so-called Climate Consensus