Environmental Impacts of Renewable Energy Technologies

When it comes to generating electricity, it’s already given that renewable energy sources produce lesser amounts of global warming emissions than fossil fuel. By this reason, it has made renewable energy sources as a favored alternative. But, have you ever wondered about the harmful effects of renewable energy production and how a lot of us tend to overlook it?

In any case, the use of renewable energy sources has enormous environmental consequences. Tons of carbon dioxide or CO2 are produced from electricity generation. The mass exploitation of renewable sources of energy will surely create disastrous outcomes to the environment.

The impact of these alternatives may vary depending on its location, climate, and other factors. We should also consider the environmental effects of technologies we adopt. For you to know about the adverse impacts of substituting notoriously on renewable energy options, keep on reading.

Wind Power

Wind power is one of the cleanest ways to produce electricity.  For instance, when wind power is in use, it does not produce pollution and global warming emissions. Wind is also considered as an affordable, abundant, and inexhaustible energy source which makes it a viable alternative to fossil fuels.

However, the use of wind power has a variety of environmental impacts that need to be mitigated and recognized. Efficient wind power generation requires the construction of tall towers, which is greatly opposed by some people because it creates an unsightly appearance.

Also, the source of wind energy has caused thousands of birds and bats death from bumping into wind turbines due to the changes in air pressure generated by the spinning turbines. Keeping the wind turbines unmoving during the time of low wind speeds could reduce the number of deaths of birds and bats.

Additionally, when the wind stops blowing, electricity continues to be provided by other forms of generation, such as hydro or gas. These power serve as a backup generator for producing electricity. However, these powers also cause harmful effects on the environment.

Geothermal Energy

Geothermal energy is energy sourced from the earth’s heat. Some plants are located near geothermally active spots. The impacts of these plants will vary depending on the conversion of cooling technology (water-cooled and air-cooled) and the conversion of resource to electricity (flash, direct, or binary).

Others require deep drilling to get to the heated resources. The drilling needs more extensive land use and introduces risks of shifting earth. Water-cooled plants may dump heated water back into the streams and rivers which will massively kill the wildlife.

Biomass for Electricity

Sources of biomass resources for manufacturing electricity are diverse. Including energy crops like switchgrass, forest products, agricultural waste, and urban waste. The kind of feedstock and how it is developed dramatically affect land use.

Biomass power plants share some similarities with fossil fuel power plants. People considered burning biomass as the best alternative to burning fossil fuels. The burning of animal and plant material to produce electricity can put pollutants into the air, like any fossil fuel plant.

Moreover, the fuel or the feedstock that goes into a plant can be controlled and monitored. If they are not appropriately managed, too much feedstock can be removed, which will result in harming the environment.

Solar Power

In comparison to conventional energy sources, solar power gives a more significant amount of environmental benefits, thus contributing to the sustainable development of human activities. However, the vast scale deployment of solar panels also has to face negative ecological implications.

Solar panels are typically placed on existing structures, but the new large-scale projects are planned to be built in open areas. These structures require land use, which dramatically impacts wildlife and habitat loss. Indeed, when we talk about the most plentiful source of energy in the world, the sun quickly crosses our minds.

Going solar is a great way to offset energy costs, but we must also consider the effects it can give to our environment. To know more about energy consumption and how to efficiently manage your energy needs, Astral Energy LLC and other energy providers can help you with it.

Even though solar panels are not actively generating much at night, they still work because the solar system is connected to the utility grid. Solar produces kilowatt hours of energy. An alternative backup plan for this is getting a battery which will serve as a storage of power that the sun creates and then use it at different hours of the day.

Hydroelectric Power

Hydroelectric generation is often described as the ideal source of energy. Simple, non-pollutant, low operating cost and maintenance, and it runs as long as the rivers shall flow from the mountains to the sea.

There is always a definite adverse effect that arises from the creation of the reservoir and alteration of natural water flow. Hydroelectric stations generate electricity from exploiting the natural forces of gravity. Some issues are raised about altering the natural environment and loss of habitat for certain species.

Nuclear Power

Nuclear power has been considered as an answer to the need for a clean energy source and domestic energy. However, the use of this form of electricity does not come without a set of consequences. These consequences could range from gaseous emissions, social problems, and environmental impacts.

Nuclear plants use diesel generators as a means for backup electric power in times of emergencies. These diesel generators release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere which consist of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and others. These gases are considered as harmful to the environment.

Moreover, the setting up of a nuclear plant needs a wide and large area that is ideally situated near a natural water body. This kind of set-up usually ends up upsetting the ecological balance of the region and disturbing the natural habitat of some creatures. People living near the area where the nuclear plants are situated also feared the threat of being exposed to the unprecedented levels of radiation.

Takeaway

Renewable energy is considerably more environmentally friendly alternative than fossil fuel generation. However, renewable energy carries the risk of harming the natural environment. The impacts mentioned above are wide-ranging, extending from land and water use to animal habitat concerns.

We should learn to take good care of our environment as nature is continuously changing. By being efficient and clean in our ways, we allow future generations to experience the comfort we’re experiencing today.

The 97% Hoax: It’s time for us all to recognize the 97% con game

BY DR. JAY LEHR:

We are confident that all of our readers have read or heard for a number of years that 97% of all scientists believe that mankind has played a role in changing the earth’s climate. While it should have been recognized long ago as an urban myth, one of those stories that hang around regardless of a lack of any supporting facts. Rarely a day goes that a global warming alarmists do not use it to promote their cause of enlarging government and reducing personal freedom through the promotion of fear about our future.

Many articles have been written to refute this claim but they all dig into the statistical weeds. Common sense alone should set you straight. If the reader wishes he or she read could read the original paper by Naomi Oreskes that started it all in Science Magazine in December of 2004. Be aware you might die laughing.

The biased folks who concluded from a truly bizarre survey of science literature that 97% of all authors believe in man caused global warming would have actually been better served had they concluded that 70% of all scientists believe in their premise. That would actually have been possible. However a little common sense should tell us that no large group of people on our planet could ever reach 97% agreement on anything. Yes anything, including the Earth being round rather than flat or the sun rising in the East rather than West, or even the Earth’s gravitational pull.

Simple proof of this erroneous talking point is provided by the Global Warming Petition Project at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine in 2015. They obtained signatures on a Declaration from 31,478 American scientists, including 9,021 with Ph.D.s that stated they did not believe man kind had a significant impact on his climate. The declaration included the words: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human releases of carbon dioxide methane or other greenhouse gases are causing or will in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environment of the Earth.”

They made all the names available in a paper back book.It is rather doubtful that these people all comprise the 3% of non believers.

We do not doubt there are many scientists who do believe that man plays a major role in the determination of his climate. However, among the unsuspecting public who do not stop to consider what we are saying, the near universal comment of “the 97%” has done a lot of damage. It leads to poor anti fossil fuel legislation in states all across the nation. It leads to some states embracing the Paris Accord which would redistribute $3 trillion of American dollars to nations who use little fossil fuel. These American states could have none but zero impact on the planets thermometer but they can and will damage their state’s economy and their citizens standard of living.

The fraudulent 97% consensus is clearly a marketing ploy. What makes science different from religion is that only empirical evidence matters not opinion. Consensus does not matter at all in science.

It is not unique in science for incorrect views to hold forth for decades if not centuries before the crowds are turned back by incontrovertible evidence. Medical history is full of the minorities trying to make surgery safer by the simple effort of hand washing. Ulcers were long thought to be a result of type “A” personalities rather than requiring a specific bacteria to allow their development. Einstein himself fought an uphill battle with his theory of relativity. When 100 German scientists collaborated on a consensus to defeat him he said famously “If I were wrong one would have been enough”.

Give some thought to what we are saying next time you are confronted with this dangerous absurdity, which will likely be tomorrow.

RELATED ARTICLE: The Climate Cult

EDITORS NOTE: This CFACT column is republished with permission.

Hot Energy & Environmental News: Trump right on Wind Turbine Noise Causes Cancer, The Green New Deal & More…

Our latest edition of: Energy and Environmental Newsletter is now online.

President Trump caused quite a stir in a recent speech when he said that wind turbine noise could cause cancer. Of course the press immediately attacked him as being ignorant, dishonest, anti-wind, etc.  Since I wasn’t sure about the facts, I decided to look into it and to talk to some experts. The conclusion is that there is good scientific evidence that he is right! (Note: any competent, honest journalist could have found what I discovered online.)

Since there is such a diversity of interesting newsworthy articles, I’m subdividing them into several categories:

Energy —

The “New Energy Economy”: An Exercise in Magical Thinking

Global Warming (AGW) —

The Slow Walk to Silent Surrender

Misc (Education, Science, etc.) —

Why I Don’t “Believe” in “Science”

Note 1: We recommend reading the Newsletter on your computer, not your phone. Some documents (e.g. PDFs) are easier to read on a computer. We’ve tried to use common fonts, etc. to minimize issues.

Note 2: Our intention is to put some balance into what most people see from the mainstream media about energy and environmental issues… As always, please pass this on to open-minded citizens, and link to this on your social media sites. If there are others who you think would benefit from being on our energy & environmental email list, please let me know. If at any time you’d like to be taken off this list, simply send me an email saying that.

Note 3: This Newsletter is intended to supplement the material on our website, WiseEnergy.org. The most important page there is the Winning page.

Note 4: I am not an attorney, so no material appearing in any of the Newsletters (or our WiseEnergy.org website) should be construed as giving legal advice. My recommendation has always been: consult a competent licensed attorney when you are involved with legal issues.

The “Green” Whitehouse Agenda: The Enemies List

The “Green Whitehouse” Agenda (full series)
The Enemies List | Green Pays | Sheldon’s Endgame

Summary: Americans are accustomed to politicians saying one thing and doing another. But arguments about the funding behind think tanks and advocacy organizations are perhaps the most one-sided of the recurring debates on Capitol Hill. Few are as outspoken on the issue as Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. The wrinkle? Senator Whitehouse has a prolific portfolio of stocks that oddly aligns with industries he oversees.

Dealing with Our Political Enemies

U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) is a supporter of socialist New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal (GND). A radical environmental/economic fantasy that proposes to tear up and rebuild the U.S. economy over a ten-year period, the GND price tag, according to a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, will check in at between $51 trillion and $93 trillion. The high-side estimate roughly equals the combined annual economic output of . . . Earth.

Sen. Whitehouse disputes the characterization that this is a “radical” proposal, telling Salon in February that the true radicals are the “misbehaving” Republicans deluded by their “fossil fuel funding.”

This is one of many examples where there’s an ironic (less charitably, we might say “hypocritical”) twist in the character of one of the nation’s most influential left-wing politicians. Whether he’s trying to turn a climate policy disagreement into a federal racketeering lawsuit, or sheepishly dodging responsibility when his money and his mouth seem to be running in different directions, Whitehouse can be relied upon to replace accountability with accusations, and to wield his power and privilege in the service of gaining more of both.

Whitehouse has been berating the energy industry since 2007 and is arguably the Senate’s most accomplished practitioner of climate panic. In a 2008 news release, he denounced the oil industry for its “obscene” profits and doing “little to invest in the alternative energy technologies that will help end our dependence on fossil fuels.” In an October 2009 floor speech pitching a “clean energy” proposal he warned his colleagues not to “sit idle” and be “beguiled by the money and spin of polluting industries.”

But as he was talking, Whitehouse owned between $250,000 and $800,000 in ten different oil and gas industry stocks. This is according to his 2008 financial disclosure forms, as reported by the Center for Responsive Politics (the forms record a range of value for each investment, not a specific value). Giant oil and gas exploration and servicing firms, such as Devon Energy and Schlumberger Ltd, were two of his largest energy industry holdings.

For 2009, CRP reported his energy industry stock holdings at between $145,000 and $475,000.

So, while denouncing the energy company profits and preaching to the Senate about avoiding the beguiling money of the so-called “polluting industries,” his personal financial stake in “beguiling pollution” reportedly fell somewhere between “more than the value of most people’s homes” and “more than the total net worth of most Americans.”

This state of affairs seemed to hold until at least 2014, when he reported selling his stake in Schlumberger. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was the same year GoLocalProv, a news service in Providence, Rhode Island, began looking into whether Whitehouse’s investments squared with this ideology. In December 2014 they posted a report showing Whitehouse owned between $15,000 and $50,000 in Duke Energy (a large, coal-burning electric utility) as recently as the end of 2012.

Noting Whitehouse had (at that point) delivered “80 floor speeches about the adverse impact of global warming,” GoLocalProv speculated about the “conflict” between the politician’s “economic interests” and his “environmental pronouncements.”

Whitehouse usually escapes such media scrutiny. His complicated history with energy investments wasn’t mentioned in a March 2019 report in Roll Call, which gave critical examination to three Republican U.S. House members on a newly-formed “Select Committee on the Climate Crisis” because of their “personal investment in fossil fuel companies.” One of the three, Congressman Gary Palmer (R—Alabama), was questioned by the reporter due to his owning just $1,000 to $15,000 in each of three energy firms. This means Palmer’s total “personal investment” could be as small as the price of a cheap used car ($3,000) – hardly enough to motivate the congressman to become a cartoonish climate villain.

A Whitehouse staffer wouldn’t fess up to the specific details regarding what the boss owned and when, but tried to explain that it had been taken care of, saying “the Senator divested his investments from fossil fuels during the past couple of years” and “feels strongly about his work on environmental issues.”

Maybe critics should go easy on him: His heart’s in the right place, even if his wallet is still trying to catch up.

But where Whitehouse has been very generously willing to excuse his own complicity, while literally being an owner of the fossil fuel industry, he thinks the industry itself needs a knock on the door from the FBI.

Writing in the Washington Post in 2015, he proposed using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) against energy companies that disagree with his climate policy agenda. A year later, during a March 2016 hearing of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, he asked then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch what the Department of Justice thought of this.

The stunning reply from President Obama’s top cop: “This matter has been discussed. We have received information about it and have referred it to the FBI to consider whether or not it meets the criteria for which we could take action on.”

Richard Nixon analogies should be used sparingly but are sometimes too on-point to ignore. An infamous 1971 White House memo, titled “Dealing with our Political Enemies,” summarized what became known as Nixon’s “enemies list”—a plot to inflict IRS audits and other federal harassments on people whose only offense was disagreeing with a powerful politician.

“This memorandum addresses the matter of how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration,” wrote Nixon Administration lawyer John Dean. “Stated a bit more bluntly—how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”

Almost five decades later, Sheldon Whitehouse seems to be using the Nixon White House as a role model. And the next time he gets friendly climate cultists in the White House willing to listen to him, he won’t just be coming after the companies who keep the economy humming with low-cost energy, but anyone who speaks up to defend the good work they’re doing.

He’s tried it already.

In July 2016, just a few months after Lynch assured him the FBI was taking him seriously, Whitehouse and 18 other Democratic senators (including former and current minority leaders Harry Reid of Nevada and Chuck Schumer of New York) spent two days on the floor of the Senate denouncing dozens of free enterprise policy organizations that disagree with Whitehouse’s environmental extremism. Special times were reserved for verbal lashings directed at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and many others Whitehouse has elsewhere referred to as part of a “corrupt monster.”

Few relevant friends of the free market were excluded from this attack. In a joint letter responding to the assault, some of the think tanks denounced the creation of the “enemies list” by Whitehouse and the others, calling the Senators “tyrants” who were using their offices to “to bully and single out groups to blame rather than ideas to debate.”

In the next installment of The “Green” Whitehouse Agenda, learn how deep-pocketed environmentalist groups help support their man in the Senate.

COLUMN BY

Ken Braun

Ken Braun is CRC’s senior investigative researcher and authors profiles for InfluenceWatch.org and the Capital Research magazine. He previously worked for several free market policy organizations, spent six… + MORE BY KEN BRAUN.

EDITORS NOTE: This Capital Research Center column is republished with permission.

Indoctrinating Kids and Using Them as Props: Judge tosses kids’ lawsuit against Trump climate policies

Rejecting a claim by Philadelphia-based Clean Air Council and attorneys representing two Pennsylvania school boys that people have a constitutionally guaranteed due process right to a “life-sustaining climate,” a federal Judge has dismissed a bizarre legal case challenging the Trump administration’s climate policies.

In his Fen. 19 decision, U.S. District Court Judge Paul Diamond said the plaintiffs lacked standing. And in dismissing the case, Clean Air Council v. United States, Judge Diamond granted the request by President Trump, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, and other administration officials.

The case dates to November 2017 when the two boys, aged 7 and 11 at the time, attributed their respective ailments, severe allergies and asthma, to Trump administration policies rolling back Obama-era climate initiatives. Judge Diamond showed little patience with plaintiffs willing to clog up an already overburdened court system with an issue that was best dealt with outside the judicial sphere.

“A Policy Debate Best Left to the Political Process”

“Plaintiffs’ disagreement with the defendants is a policy debate best left to the political process,” Diamond wrote. “Because I have neither the authority nor the inclination to assume control of the Executive Branch, I will grant defendants’ motion.” Diamond scoffed at what he interpreted as a request by the plaintiffs that he “supervise any action that the President and his appointees take that might touch on ‘the environment.’”

Judge Diamond was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2004.

Joseph Otis Minott, the Clean Air Council’s executive director and chief counsel, was defiant in defeat, claiming in a statement that Trump administration policies “are increasing U.S. contribution to climate change … and violating our constitutional rights.

Diamond Rebukes Judge in Controversial Oregon Ruling

As reported by Environment & Climate News (March 25), Judge Diamond did more than just dismiss Minott’s claims in the Pennsylvania case. He took the extraordinary step of rebuking U.S. District Court of Oregon Judge Ann Aiken for her ruling in Juliana v. United States, which involved 21 children suing the federal government over climate change. When Aiken ordered the lawsuit to trial in 2016, she said “the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society.” As pointed out by Climate Liability News (Feb. 20), Aiken’s ruling that the young plaintiffs had a Constitutional right to a livable climate was the first such ruling by a U.S. judge.

Pointing out that Aiken’s ruling is at odds with previous court decisions, Diamond wrote that “the Julianna Court certainly contravened or ignored longstanding precedent.” He added that guaranteeing a stable climate would be “apparently without limit.”

Diamond also took issue with the notion that the judiciary has a role in climate policy and criticized Aiken’s public trust claims in Juliana, saying it was an incorrect expansion of that doctrine beyond the traditional concept governing navigable waters.

“Plaintiffs seek to create an entirely new doctrine – investing the Federal Government with an affirmative duty to protect all land and resources within the United States,” Diamond wrote. “The Julianna Court alone has recognized this new doctrine. Again, the Court’s reasoning is less than persuasive.”

“Noble Lie on Steroids”

Christopher Horner, an attorney and senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is pleased that Judge Diamond singled out Judge Aiken’s Oregon ruling.

“The federal court in Pennsylvania threw the suit out and in the process was fairly direct in criticizing the Oregon judge’s activism in supporting the demand for a climate plan ‘without apparent limit,’” which if you know anything about the issue is the most alarming aspect – not even the most extreme treaties purport a detectable impact on climate even if you accept their fairly well-debunked assumptions,” Horner told Environment & Climate News. “Such a ruling would offer the ruling class a bottomless well of authority usurpation of liberty and suffering in the name of something it actually would not affect. It is the Noble Lie on steroids, possibly the most Noble Lie ever perpetrated.”

“Even if you accept arguendo the alarmists’ model assumptions, the U.S. disappearing would make no difference, with our sacrifice swamped by increases in the developing world,” he added. “Take into account their alarmist scenarios are proved wrong, and this is just a political prescription, not anything to do with climate. Climate is an excuse to abandon our democratic process of separation of powers, and not a very good one.”

In both the Pennsylvania and Oregon cases, children were recruited as plaintiffs to serve the agenda of climate alarmists. Seeing this for the exploitation that it clearly is, Judge Diamond took the trouble to lambaste Judge Aiken’s judicial recklessness in allowing the political ploy to serve as the basis of a far-reaching court decision.

COLUMN BY

BONNER R. COHEN, PH.D.

Bonner R. Cohen, PH. D. is a senior policy analyst with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).

Sources.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climatechange-lawsuit/u-s-judge-dismisses-boys-lawsuit-against-trump-climate-rollbacks-idUSKCN1Q925A

https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2019/02/20/pennsylvania-kids-climate-case/

RELATED ARTICLE: Winning the future begins with children of the present

EDITORS NOTE: This CFACT column is republished with permission.

Plastic Bag Bans Won’t Help the Environment, But They’ll Cause More Foodborne Illnesses

Plastic bags are less than one percent of all litter.


New York lawmakers have followed California’s lead and decided to ban grocery stores from giving customers plastic bags. They hope shoppers will use their own cloth bags instead. This ban on plastic bags will harm shoppers in multiple ways.

As Daniel Frank sarcastically notes, “Reusable tote bags” can “cause food poisoning but at least they’re worse for the environment than plastic bags.” He cites Jon Passantino of BuzzFeed News, who observes, “Those cotton tote bags that are so trendy right now have to be used *131 times* before it has a smaller climate impact than a plastic bag used only once.” Yet, there are progressives who want to ban plastic grocery bags in favor of reusable cloth bags.

Plastic bags are less than one percent of all litter. Moreover, alternatives like cloth and paper bags are in many cases worse for the environment than plastic bags, and far worse for public health. That was illustrated by a 2011 legal settlement between plastic bag makers and an importer of reusable bags, ChicoBag. The plastic bag makers sued ChicoBag for its use of false claims about the recycling rate and environmental impacts of plastic grocery bags in its promotional materials. (Those false claims are also the basis for municipal bans and taxes on plastic bags.)

Under that settlement, ChicoBag was required to discontinue its use of its counterfeit EPA website and make corrections to its deceptive marketing claims, which had included sharing falsified government documents with schoolchildren. It was also required to disclose to consumers on its website that reusable bags, in fact, need to be washed.

Reusable bags “are a breeding ground for bacteria and pose public health risks — food poisoning, skin infections such as bacterial boils, allergic reactions, triggering of asthma attacks, and ear infections,” noted a 2009 report.  Harmful bacteria like E. coli, salmonella, and fecal coliform thrive in reusable bags unless they are washed after each use, according to an August 2011 peer-reviewed study, “Assessment of the Potential for Cross-contamination of Food Products by Reusable Shopping Bags.”

Among the inaccurate claims that ChicoBag could no longer make after the settlement is one that contrasted the environmental impact of plastic versus reusable bags. Contrary to ChicoBag’s previous claims, a study done for the U.K. Environmental Agency showed it would take 7.5 years of using the same cloth bag (393 uses, assuming one grocery trip per week) to make it a better option than a plastic bag reused three times. See “Life Cycle Assessment of Supermarket Carrier Bags,” Executive Summary, 2nd page.

As an earlier report on the subject noted (see p. 60):

[A]ny decision to ban traditional polyethylene plastic grocery bags in favor of bags made from alternative materials (compostable plastic or recycled paper) will be counterproductive and result in a significant increase in environmental impacts across a number of categories from global warming effects to the use of precious potable water resources. … [T]he standard polyethylene grocery bag has significantly lower environmental impacts than a 30% recycled content paper bag and a compostable plastic bag.

cotton bag has a greater [harmful environmental] impact than the conventional [plastic] bag in seven of the nine impact categories even when used 173 times. … The impact was considerably larger in categories such as acidification and aquatic & terrestrial ecotoxicity due to the energy used to produce cotton yarn and the fertilisers used during the growth of the cotton (see p. 60).

Similarly,

Starch-polyester blend bags have a higher global warming potential and abiotic depletion than conventional polymer bags, due both to the increased weight of material in a bag and higher material production impacts (see Executive Summary).

As Environmental Protection noted in 2010:

Reusable grocery bags can serve as a breeding ground for dangerous food-borne bacteria and pose a serious risk to public health, according to a joint food safety research report issued by researchers at the University of Arizona and Loma Linda University. The study — which randomly tested reusable grocery bags carried by shoppers in the Los Angeles area, San Francisco, and Tucson, Ariz. — also found consumers were almost completely unaware of the need to regularly wash their bags.

“Our findings suggest a serious threat to public health, especially from coliform bacteria including E. coli, which were detected in half the bags sampled,” said Charles Gerba, Ph.D., a University of Arizona environmental microbiology professor and co-author of the study. “Furthermore, consumers are alarmingly unaware of these risks and the critical need to sanitize their bags after every use.” The bacteria levels found in reusable bags were significant enough to cause a wide range of serious health problems and even lead to death — a particular danger for young children, who are especially vulnerable to food-borne illnesses, he said.

The study also found that awareness of potential risks was very low. A full 97 percent of those interviewed have never washed or bleached their reusable bags, said Gerba, who added that thorough washing kills nearly all bacteria that accumulate in reusable bags.

Plastic bags are “less than 0.5% of the litter stream,” according to the head of the National Black Chamber of Commerce. That low percentage is confirmed by EPA data. (See, e.g., EPA, Municipal Solid Waste in the United States: 2009 Facts and Figures, p. 53, showing that the entire category of plastic sacks, wraps, and bags—including trash bags as well as grocery bags—together account for only a little over one percent of all municipal solid waste, and only a small fraction of overall plastics.)

This article is republished with permission from Liberty Unyielding. 

COLUMN BY

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission.

This Veteran, Who Supplied Water to Firefighters, Went to Prison for Digging Ponds [Video]

An elderly veteran who ran a business supplying water to fight forest fires was prosecuted by the federal government and sent to prison for digging ponds on his own property, one of his lawyers says.

Joe Robertson, a Navy veteran from Montana, was 78 when he was convicted and sentenced to 18 months in federal prison and ordered to pay $130,000 in restitution through deductions from his Social Security checks.

His crime?

Robertson, whose business supplied water trucks to Montana firefighters, dug a series of small ponds close to his home in 2013 and 2014. The site was a wooded area near a channel, a foot wide and a foot deep, with two to three garden hoses’ worth of flow, according to court documents.

The U.S. government prosecuted Robertson for digging in proximity to “navigable waters” without a permit, a violation of the Clean Water Act administered by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers.

Tony Francois, a senior attorney with Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit, public interest law firm specializing in property rights, described the events leading up to Robertson’s prosecution during a panel discussion Monday at The Heritage Foundation.

Also on the panel was Kevin Pierce, vice president of Hawkes Co., a Minnesota-based family business that harvests peat for golf course greens. Daren Bakst, Heritage’s senior research fellow for agriculture policy, was moderator of the event, called “Horror Stories of EPA and Corps Overreach under the Clean Water Act.”

Pacific Legal Foundation filed a petition on behalf of Robertson, asking the Supreme Court to review his case, which turns on the definition of “navigable waters.”

The Navy veteran argued that he didn’t violate the Clean Water Act because
digging the ponds did not discharge any soil to navigable waters, since the trickle in the channel didn’t constitute navigable waters.

The largest navigable body of water anywhere near the Robertson home is more than 40 miles away, Francois said.

Because Robertson lived in a wooded area that is “increasingly fire prone,” he was “concerned about the safety and vulnerability of his property,” Francois said. He built the ponds “with a view toward being well-prepared should a fire strike.”

The Supreme Court is expected to decide in April whether it will hear Robertson’s appeal.

Robertson, sentenced in 2016, completed his 18 months behind bars in late 2017.

He was still on parole for the next 20 months when he died March 18 at age 80 of natural causes, according to his widow.

Pacific Legal Foundation filed papers this week to substitute Robertson’s widow, Carri Robertson, as the petitioner in the appeal to the Supreme Court.

Another case Francois cited concerns a proposed road in Marquette County, Michigan. The project, known as CR-595, would shorten the travel time between a nickel mine and a refinery 22 miles away.

The only route now available to the mine, called Eagle Mine, is three times as long, Francois said. The nickel mine, currently the only one in the U.S., is expected to bring about $4 billion in economic activity to the county, according to Pacific Legal Foundation.

The Marquette County Road Commission’s CR-595 proposal called for  a direct road from the mine to a refinery.

“The new route would bypass the city of Marquette altogether, eliminate nearly 30 miles of travel per trip, a million and a half miles annually, as well as save 500,000 gallons of fuel per year,” Francois said.

Since the proposed route goes through wetlands, however, the road commission sought a wetlands permit under the Clean Water Act. The state approved the permit, but the EPA rejected it.

“The final version [of the commission’s planned route] proposed to protect 63 acres of wetlands for every acre the road project would disturb,” Francois said. “But the EPA continued to object to CR 595 because in their view the commission still had not provided adequate plans to minimize impacts, and that its 63-1 mitigation ratio was not a comprehensive mitigation plan that would sufficiently compensate for unavoidable impacts.”

The EPA vetoed the commission’s plan and the Supreme Court declined a petition from Pacific Legal Foundation to review that decision.

Pacific Legal Foundation also represented Hawkes Co. in a 2016 case before the high court. In a 8-0 decision, the justices ruled that landowners have a right to challenge wetland determinations made by federal agencies.

Pierce, the Hawkes Co. official, described a difficult and arduous process to prevail over opposition from the Army Corps of Engineers to secure a permit allowing the company to expand on a 200-acre peat mining site. The company began the application process in 2006.

“I really don’t like how it worked. No. 1, there was a lot of fabrication from the Corps people, Pierce said at the Heritage event, adding:

They actually went to the landowner that we had the option to buy the land with. They sent two people up from St. Paul to his house for two and half hours for a meeting to try to convince him to sell the real estate to someone else, while we got $200,000 already invested in a permit application.

And they gave names and numbers of people who would buy it for preservation to sell it out from under us. Well knowing that we had options to buy and contracts with that landowner, which then forced us to have to buy the land seven years before we got our permit and had to follow through on it.

When I confronted them about it, they literally lied to me and said, ‘We didn’t know you had a permit or an option to buy.’ But then later in the conversation, they say, ‘Well, we thought it ran out.’

Congress initially passed the Clean Water Act in 1948, but lawmakers greatly altered and expanded it into the current form with amendments in 1972.

The law “establishes the basic structure for regulating discharges of pollutants into the waters of the United States and regulating quality standards for surface waters,” according to the EPA’s website.

Under the 1972 amendments, it is illegal to discharge any pollutant from a point source into navigable waters without a permit from the EPA. The Corps oversees the permitting process and shares enforcement authority with the EPA.

In 2015, the Obama administration implemented its Clean Water Rule, widely known as the Waters of the United States rule or WOTUS rule, which expanded the regulatory reach of the EPA and the Corps over bodies of water throughout the country.

The Trump administration has taken steps to withdraw the Obama administration’s rule and replace it with a new one that limits the regulatory reach of federal agencies.

Although Heritage’s Bakst said he approves of the Trump administration’s efforts, he has argued that it ultimately falls to Congress to clarify what waterways are subject to EPA regulations.

The Daily Signal sought comment for this report from both the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers.

“We cannot comment on ongoing litigation even as it pertains to actions of the previous administration,” EPA spokesman James Hewitt said in an email. “However, EPA is moving forward with a replacement WOTUS rule to ensure farmers and ranchers have more certainty when it comes to federal jurisdiction over waters.”

A Corps spokesman said in an email that it would not comment on the Robertson case since it is still active and has nothing to add to the Hawkes case beyond what is already “a matter of public record.”

COLUMN BY

Kevin Mooney

Kevin Mooney is an investigative reporter for The Daily Signal. Send an email to Kevin. Twitter: @KevinMooneyDC


Dear Readers:

Just two short years after the end of the Obama administration’s disastrous policies, America is once again thriving due to conservative solutions that have produced a historic surge in economic growth.

The Trump administration has embraced over 60 percent of The Heritage Foundation’s policy recommendations since his inauguration. But with the House now firmly within the grips of the progressive left, the victories may come to a screeching halt.

Why? Because they are determined more than ever to give the government more control over your lives. Restoring your liberty and embracing freedom is the best thing for you and the country.

President Donald Trump needs all of the allies he can find to push through the stone wall he now faces within this divided government. And the best way you can partner with him is by becoming a member of his greatest ally in Washington: The Heritage Foundation.

Will you activate your membership with a tax-deductible gift today?

ACTIVATE YOUR MEMBERSHIP TODAY


EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission.

VIDEO: The Democrat’s Green No-Deal. They Lied!

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell allowed a vote on H.Res. 109 Green New Deal co-sponsored by Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA). After the vote where no Senator voted for the bill, while all the Democrats voted “present” Senator McConnell posted this video.

The Democrats can’t bring themselves to even vote for it.

The Green New Deal is a hoax.

RELATED ARTICLE: Pelosi Introduces New Climate Bill One Day After Green New Deal Collapsed

U.S. Senate Votes on Green New Deal: Not a Single Senator Voted For It!

VIDEO: Senate fails to break filibuster to begin debate on Green New Deal – Fox News:

Florida Senator Marco Rubio issued the following statement on the Green New Deal vote in the U.S. Senate:

After ceremoniously introducing the Green New Deal, and all but canonizing it as a historic policy proposal, not one single Senator supported the measure, and 43 Senate Democrats today voted “Present.” U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) issued the following statement regarding the vote:

“Today’s vote makes clear that even the Green New Deal’s proponents agree that it is not a serious policy effort. Instead, it is a publicity stunt designed to pander to a progressive base seeking to repackage socialism that will do nothing to address the actual problems Americans face every day. The Green New Deal makes for a great slogan, but it is a fundamentally unserious proposal. If actually implemented, it would bankrupt our nation and leave our communities more vulnerable. That cannot, and will not, be the future of America.”

RELATED ARTICLES:

The Green New Deal: Less About Climate, More About Control

AFL-CIO President Opposes Green New Deal

Democrats Refuse to Vote for Green New Deal They Endorsed

ICYMI: Marco Rubio: Green New Deal Litmus Test Makes it Harder to Deal with Climate Change

Recent Energy & Environmental Newsletter

Recently we put together a definitive list of reasonable books on climate change — and it has been well-received. As a parallel effort, we now have a brand new list of some good books related to industrial wind energy. As before, if you have any suggested additions or deletions, please send them on, and we will update. Enjoy!

We’re strong supporters of PragerU and other sources (e.g. Clear Energy Alliance) that try to digest complicated matters into more understandable short videos. Welcome a relative newcomer: TPPF. Here is a collection of their videos, and a great example of a spot-on short (2 minutes) energy video.

Since there is such a diversity of interesting news worthy articles, for awhile I’ll try to divide them further:

Energy —

Wind & Solar Are Always Ruinously Expensive

NY Turbine Leaseholders hit with Liens for Wind Developer’s Unpaid Bills

President Trump Seeking Major Cuts to Renewable Subsidies

How did  Rick Perry and DOE get into the Ditch???

The Green New Deal —

The American Way of Life will be on the 2020 Ballot

Carlson video: Dems Say The End of the World in 12 Years!

The Green New Deal Is Unserious and Juvenile

The PCCS —

Massive Coalition Backs Trump’s Climate Science Committee

It’s Time To Expose The Shoddy Climate Science Of The Obama Years

Dr. Happer will set them free

Global Warming —

Climate Science’s Myth-Buster

New way to turn carbon dioxide into coal could ‘rewind the emissions clock’

It’s Not about the Climate—It Never Was

Powerful video: Nicholas Lewis and Climate Sensitivity

Media touts ‘clear sign of human-caused climate change.’ Here are the facts

Revealing Worldwide Poll as to What Our Priorities Should Be

House Climate Hearing off to Bad Start

Misc (Education, Science, etc.) —

Feds Push Climate Alarmism on our Children

Marxism, the Frankfurt School, and the Leftist Takeover of the Colleges

Note 1: We recommend reading the Newsletter on your computer, not your phone. Some documents (e.g. PDFs) are easier to read on a computer. We’ve tried to use common fonts, etc. to minimize issues.

Note 2: Our intention is to put some balance into what most people see from the mainstream media about energy and environmental issues… As always, please pass this on to open-minded citizens, and link to this on your social media sites. If there are others who you think would benefit from being on our energy & environmental email list, please let me know. If at any time you’d like to be taken off this list, simply send me an email saying that.

Note 3: This Newsletter is intended to supplement the material on our website, WiseEnergy.org. The most important page there is the Winning page.

Note 4: I am not an attorney, so no material appearing in any of the Newsletters (or our WiseEnergy.org website) should be construed as giving legal advice. My recommendation has always been: consult a competent licensed attorney when you are involved with legal issues.

America Finally Admits Recycling Doesn’t Work [+Video]

It’s time to admit the recycling mania is a giant placebo.


A couple of years ago, after sending my five-year-old daughter off to school, she came home reciting the same cheerful environmental mantra I was taught in elementary school.

“Reduce, reuse, recycle,” she beamed, proud to show off a bit of rote learning.

The moral virtue of recycling is rarely questioned in the United States. It has been ingrained into the American psyche over several decades. On a recent trip to the Caribbean, my friend’s wife exhibited nervous guilt while collecting empty soda, water, and beer bottles destined for the trash since our resort offered no recycling bins.

“I feel terrible throwing these into garbage,” she said, wearing a pained look on her face.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that there was a good chance the bottles she was recycling back in the States were ending up just like the ones on the Caribbean island we were visiting.

As Discover magazine pointed out a decade ago, recycling is tricky business. A 2010 Columbia University study found that just 16.5 percent of the plastic collected by the New York Department of Sanitation was “recyclable.”

“This results in nearly half of the plastics collected being landfilled,” researchers concluded.

Since that time, things have only gotten worse. Over the weekend, The New York Times ran a story detailing how hundreds of cities across the country are abandoning recycling efforts.

Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents’ recycling material in an incinerator that converts waste to energy. In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill. And last month, officials in the central Florida city of Deltona faced the reality that, despite their best efforts to recycle, their curbside program was not working and suspended it. Those are just three of the hundreds of towns and cities across the country that have canceled recycling programs, limited the types of material they accepted or agreed to huge price increases.

One reason for this is that China, perhaps the largest buyer of US recyclables, stopped accepting them in 2018. Other countries, such as Thailand and India, have increased imports, but not in sufficient tonnage to alleviate the mounting costs cities are facing.

“We are in a crisis moment in the recycling movement right now,” Fiona Ma, the treasurer of California, told the Times.

Cost is the key word. Like any activity or service, recycling is an economic activity. The dirty little secret is that the benefits of recycling have been dubious for some time.

“Recycling has been dysfunctional for a long time,” Mitch Hedlund, executive director of Recycle Across America, told The Times.

How long? Perhaps from the very beginning. Nearly a quarter century ago, Lawrence Reed wrote about the growing fad of recycling, which state and local governments were pursuing—mostly through mandates, naturally—with a religious-like fervor. There were numerous problems with the approach, he observed.

The fact is that sometimes recycling makes sense and sometimes it doesn’t. In the legislative rush to pass recycling mandates, state and local governments should pause to consider the science and the economics of every proposition. Often, bad ideas are worse than none at all and can produce lasting damage if they are enshrined in law. Simply demanding that something be recycled can be disruptive of markets and it does not guarantee that recycling that makes either economic or environmental sense will even occur.

If only lawmakers had heeded Mr. Reed’s advice, or that of John Tierney, who offered similar guidance in The Times the following year.

Believing that there was no more room in landfills, Americans concluded that recycling was their only option. Their intentions were good and their conclusions seemed plausible. Recycling does sometimes make sense–for some materials in some places at some times. But the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environmentally safe landfill. And since there’s no shortage of landfill space (the crisis of 1987 was a false alarm), there’s no reason to make recycling a legal or moral imperative.

That’s economics, you say. What about the environment? Well, the environmental benefits of recycling are far from clear. For starters, as Popular Mechanics noted a few years ago, the idea that we don’t have sufficient space to safely store trash is untrue.

According to one calculation, all the garbage produced in the U.S. for the next 1000 years could fit into a landfill 100 yards deep and 35 miles across on each side–not that big (unless you happen to live in the neighborhood). Or put another way, it would take another 20 years to run through the landfills that the U.S. has already built. So the notion that we’re running out of landfill space–the original impetus for the recycling boom–turns out to have been a red herring.

And then there are the energy and resources that go into recycling. How much water do Americans spend annually rinsing items that end up in a landfill? How much fuel is spent deploying fleets of barges and trucks across highways and oceans, carrying tons of garbage to be processed at facilities that belch their own emissions?

The data on this front is thin, and results on the environmental effectiveness of recycling vary based on the material being recycled. Yet all of this presumes the recyclables are not being cleaned and shipped only to be buried in a landfill, like so much of it is today. This, Mises would say, is planned chaos, the inevitable result of central planners making decisions instead of consumers through free markets.

Most market economists, Reed points out, “by nature, philosophy, and experience” a bunch skeptical of centrally planned schemes that supplant choice, were wise to the dynamics of recycling from the beginning.

As engineer and author Richard Fulmer wrote in 2016,

Recycling resources costs resources. For instance, old newsprint must be collected, transported, and processed. This requires trucks, which must be manufactured and fueled, and recycling plants, which must be constructed and powered.

All this also produces pollution – from the factories that build the trucks and from the fuel burned to power them, and from the factories that produce the components to build and construct the recycling plant and from the fuel burned to power the plant. If companies can make a profit recycling paper, then we can be confident that more resources are saved than are used. However, if recycling is mandated by law, we have no such assurance.

Again, economics is the key.

It’s time to admit the recycling mania is a giant placebo. It makes people feel good, but the idea that it improves the condition of humans or the planet is highly dubious.

It’s taken three decades, but the actions of hundreds of US cities suggest Americans are finally willing to entertain the idea that recycling is not a moral or legal imperative.

COLUMN BY

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has appeared in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Washington Times. Reach him at jmiltimore@FEE.org.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column with video is republished with permission.

‘Welcome to Neo-Stalinism’: After Trump’s tweet Google erases Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Moore from enviro group’s history

President Donald Trump touted Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore’s statements earlier this week that “the whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science.” Moore made his comments while appearing on Fox & FriendsSee:Trump touts Greenpeace co-founder declaring ‘the whole climate crisis’ is ‘fake science’ – Video & Point-by-point rebuttal to Michael Mann’s Newsweek smear of Trump, Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Moore & Princeton’s Dr. Happer

But now, Google, with the help of Greenpeace, is revising Greenpeace’s history to erase Dr. Moore from his role in co-founding the environmental group. But Greenpeace’s own website has previously featured Moore as one of its “founders.”
See: BUSTED: GREENPEACE’S OWN WEBSITE LISTED PATRICK MOORE AS ONE OF ‘THE FOUNDERS OF GREENPEACE’ – MOORE CALLS OUT HIS FORMER GROUP FOR ‘HISTORICAL REVISIONISM’ 
Moore on March 16: “Oh my! Google has removed my photo and name from the ‘Founders of @Greenpeace’. It was still there 2 days ago but now I am erased. Tech Tyranny!!”

Patrick Moore@EcoSenseNow
Oh my! @Google has removed my photo and name from the “Founders of @Greenpeace“. It was still there 2 days ago but now I am erased. Tech Tyranny!!
1st image a few days ago screen shot.
2nd image this morning.
Both were Googled “Who are the founders of Greenpeace”
16.1K
10:27 AM – Mar 16, 2019

12.9K people are talking about this
Twitter Ads info and privacy
Moore continued: “1st Google image a few days ago screen shot.”

2nd Google image this morning.

Both were Googled “Who are the founders of Greenpeace”
View image on Twitter

Patrick Moore@EcoSenseNow
While I was with Greenspirit Strategies consulting on environmental issues I wrote a detailed article on “Who are the Founders of @Greenpeace“. If you are interested in a historically accurate account, with many references. here it is:http://greenspiritstrategies.com/who-are-the-founders-of-greenpeace/ …
I am under the “P”.
312
11:42 AM – Mar 16, 2019

But Greenpeace’s own history has featured Moore as one of its “founders.”  See: BUSTED: GREENPEACE’S OWN WEBSITE LISTED PATRICK MOORE AS ONE OF ‘THE FOUNDERS OF GREENPEACE’ – MOORE CALLS OUT HIS FORMER GROUP FOR ‘HISTORICAL REVISIONISM’ 

BUSTED: GREENPEACE’S OWN WEBSITE LISTED PATRICK MOORE AS ONE OF ‘THE FOUNDERS OF GREENPEACE’ – MOORE CALLS OUT HIS FORMER GROUP FOR ‘HISTORICAL REVISIONISM’ – Greenpeace’s website listed Moore among its “founders and first members” before quietly removing it around 2007. Moore is only listed as a member of the group’s 1971 maiden voyage to oppose nuclear testing.

BUSTED: Greenpeace own website used to show Patrick Moore as one of “the founders of Greenpeace” – Via Anthony Watts – Watts Up With That

Moore explains: “I was listed as a founder of Greenpeace on their own websites for 20 years after I left. They only disowned me when I came out in favor of nuclear energy.”

http://joannenova.com.au/2019/03/greenpeace-lies-to-save-the-planet-erasing-patrick-moore-again/

By Jo Nova

Donald Trump quoted Patrick Moore this week — the skeptic with an ecology PhD who was once a Founder of Greenpeace. So Greenpeace leapt to do some damage control on their brandname and created more damage instead. They promptly tweeted that he was never a founder and is a paid lobbyist. (And what is Greenpeace anyway if not paid lobbyists?)

If they’ll lie about their own history, what won’t they lie about?

Thanks to Anthony Watts for finding the tweet and reminding us of things we posted long ago.

Greenpeace tweet in 2019:

 

Patrick Moore was not a co-founder. Greenpeace Tweet.

Greenpeace history page in 2007:

Patrick was not only one of the first five, but he was their only scientist.

The Greenpeace site on February 25th, 2007.  (Click to Enlarge) @Greenpeaceusa

For 40 years of Greenpeace history Patrick Moore was called one of the five founders of Greenpeace. He traveled on the first Greenpeace boat trip. Thanks to the Wayback Machine we know that sometime in March 2007 he fell off the Founders list.

Just Greenpeace copying their Soviet idols.

Greenpeace disappears a founder, much like ‘The Commissar Vanishes’ in Soviet Russia – It’s just like the famous communist propaganda photo series The Commissar Vanishes

The old Soviet practice under Joseph Stalin saw photos of commissar’s who fell out of favor with the Party, later had their photos doctored and the now unpopular commissar was made to disappear.

Patrick Moore@EcoSenseNow
· Mar 16, 2019

Oh my! @Google has removed my photo and name from the “Founders of @Greenpeace“. It was still there 2 days ago but now I am erased. Tech Tyranny!!
1st image a few days ago screen shot.
2nd image this morning.
Both were Googled “Who are the founders of Greenpeace”

GWPF@thegwpfcom

welcome to Neo-Stalinismhttps://www.rbth.com/history/329317-stalin-propaganda-photos …

131
10:43 AM – Mar 16, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy

How Stalin’s propaganda machine made people vanish from pictures (PHOTOS)

Not only did many of Joseph Stalin’s political rivals lose their lives – all traces of their existence were wiped off the face of the planet, including any photos of them.

rbth.com

49 people are talking about this

For more on Stalin and ‘The Commissar Vanishes’ see here.

Dr. Patrick Moore is featured prominently in the new skeptical book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change.”

Global Warming — Science vs Political Science

Since you have an interest in the Global Warming issue, I’m sending along a current public exchange I’m having with a well-known climatologist. As he publicly disparaged my qualifications to even discuss the AGW matter (!), it should be no problem for a person of such elevated expertise, to win this debate. You decide…

[FYI, if you’re pressed for time, or only have a passing interest in the Global Warming issue, then just look at #7 and #8.]

Here’s a brief chronological history:

1) the Adirondack Park (in upstate NY) is the largest park on the continental US (6 million acres). It is an extraordinary place that has unparalleled natural beauty. I’ve been a lifetime resident of the Park, so I have plenty of first-hand experiences with most of it. As an environmentalist, I’m a Park protector.

2) The Park is overseen by a powerful NYS agency, called the Adirondack Park Agency (APA). They establish a wide assortment of zoning rules, etc. that cover the entire Park. In general these are beneficial. For example, to date, industrial wind energy and solar are both prohibited. Excellent!

3) Political activists are pushing the APA to change their renewable energy restrictions. Their ultimate goal is to get industrial wind energy into the Park. As a feeler, in November the APA proposed this Renewable Energy Policy.

4) I then immediately sent the APA a 12-point objection to their proposal. (I have yet to hear any response back from them.)

5) In addition, to make citizens aware of this profoundly anti-environmental plan, I wrote a layman overview of the situation, which was published in some Adirondack newspapers.

6) After that was seen, I was asked by the editor of the well-respected bi-monthly Adirondack Explorer magazine to submit commentary for a feature they have, where major issues are debated. I submitted the con-piece about the APA’s proposed renewable energy policy. It came out a few weeks ago.

7) A NYS paleoclimatologist, Dr. Curt Stager, took issue with my Adirondack Explorer commentary, and last week got a lengthy op-ed published (attacking my competence, etc.).

8) I just finished a response to Curt’s polemic— and submitted it for publication, today. I’m sharing a slightly longer version with you, as I thought you might like to see a rather impassioned exchange between scientists about some of the key Global Warming issues.

There are multiple things to learn from this exchange. Although this is a moderate amount of reading, it’s an interesting, informative discussion of the Global Warming matter — making some points rarely seen.

Global Warming is THE issue of our times. After reading this you’ll have a much better understanding of this whole matter, and what’s really going on.

Let me know any questions.

As usual, please forward this information to any other open-minded parties you think might profit from it.

RELATED ARTICLE: Media Touts ‘Clear Sign of Human-Caused Climate Change.’ Here Are the Facts.

‘Massively incorrect’: Point-by-point rebuttal to Michael Mann’s Newsweek smear of Trump, Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Moore & Princeton’s Dr. Happer

Climate Depot Special Report

Michael Mann, a professor at Penn State University, has done a smear piece on President Donald Trump, Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore and Princeton Physicist Dr. Will Happer in Newsweek. Mann and other climate activists are working overtime trying to suppress scientific debate and stop the  proposed Presidential Climate Commission. See:All Eyes On The Scientist Set To Upend The ‘Climate Change’ Narrative – Under ‘All-Out Attack’ by Media – ‘Dr. Will Happer is one of the most important scientists in the U.S.’ & Trump touts Greenpeace co-founder declaring ‘the whole climate crisis’ is ‘fake science’ – Video

Mann, known his exploits in the Climategate scandal and his discredited Hockey Stick temperature graph, took to Newsweek to try to quash the upcoming threat of a Presidential commission on climate which would challenge his “consensus” catastrophic man-made climate change views.  [Note: Two Chapters devoted to Mann’s Hockey Stick Claims & his role in the Climategate scandal in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change.]

A point-by-point rebuttal to Mann’s claims by Marc Morano of Climate Depot.
[Note: Morano and Mann had a debate on BBC radio previously. See: Mann v. Morano: Climategate’s Michael Mann debates Climate Depot’s Morano on Live BBC Radio: Mann: ‘Morano’s a hired assassin’ — Morano: ‘Mann plays the part of martyr very well’]

Michael Mann’s March 13, 2019 Newsweek article: “DONALD TRUMP’S CLIMATE DENIAL GETS MORE RIDICULOUS BY THE DAY”

Michael Mann claim: “Once upon a time, Donald Trump accepted the scientific reality that human activity, primarily burning fossil fuels, causes climate change. He signed on to an ad calling on President Obama to take action on climate change.That was 2009.”

Climate Depot Response: Nice try Professor Mann. In December 2009, Donald Trump’s name appeared in a long list of corporate America in a newspaper ad urging the U.S. to pass so-called climate regulations. Having Trump’s name appear along with a lengthy list of business does not even mean Trump himself was aware that his organization (perhaps his daughter Ivanka approved his name in the ad. Her name also appears on the list)  The letter stands out in Trump’s public statements at the time. Just two months later, despite his name appearing in a form letter in a newspaper, Trump was publicly declaring himself a climate skeptic.

See: Feb. 2010: Donald Trump says Al Gore should return his Nobel Prize: ‘The Nobel committee should take the Nobel Prize back from Al Gore’ – Donald Trump is not a big believer in global warming. “With the coldest winter ever recorded, with snow setting record levels up and down the coast, the Nobel committee should take the Nobel Prize back from Al Gore,” the tycoon told members of his Trump National Golf Club in Westchester in a recent speech. “Gore wants us to clean up our factories and plants in order to protect us from global warming, when China and other countries couldn’t care less. It would make us totally noncompetitive in the manufacturing world, and China, Japan and India are laughing at America’s stupidity.” The crowd of 500 stood up and cheered.”

As Marc Morano told Sky News in 2017: “Donald Trump has been consistent about — if you go back to the 1980s with his Oprah Winfrey interviews. He’s been America first and he has been concerned about sovereignty. So he is not going to look at this and think it is a good deal for America when the UN has actually said they will redistribute wealth by climate policy. This has nothing to do with climate policy. This is a no brainer for Trump to withdraw the U.S. from”

Trump also expresses very accurate climate science views: Trump Aces Climate Change Debate on ’60 Minutes’

Reality check to Michael Mann, President Trump has been remarkably consistent on his view on man-made climate change.

Michael Mann claim: “Patrick Moore, who falsely claims to be a co-founder of Greenpeace…”

Climate Depot response: WRONG Professor Mann! Greenpeace’s own history has featured Moore as one of its “founders”! Do some basic research Prof. Mann before you try to smear. See:

BUSTED: GREENPEACE’S OWN WEBSITE LISTED PATRICK MOORE AS ONE OF ‘THE FOUNDERS OF GREENPEACE’ – MOORE CALLS OUT HIS FORMER GROUP FOR ‘HISTORICAL REVISIONISM’ – Greenpeace’s website listed Moore among its “founders and first members” before quietly removing it around 2007. Moore is only listed as a member of the group’s 1971 maiden voyage to oppose nuclear testing.

BUSTED: Greenpeace own website used to show Patrick Moore as one of “the founders of Greenpeace”

Prof. Mann, will you issue a retraction and apology to Dr. Moore for your obviously incorrect and poorly researched claims?

Michael Mann claim: Moore “claimed that the ‘climate crisis’ is ‘Fake Science’ and that ‘carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.’”

Climate Depot response: Dr. Moore nailed it scientifically and has support from many of his fellow prominent scientific colleagues. Excerpt from The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change – Page 46: Einstein’s Successor Touts the Virtues of Carbon Dioxide: Renowned physicist Freeman Dyson of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, who has been called Einstein’s successor,16 says, “I like carbon dioxide, it’s very good for plants. It’s good for the vegetation, the farms, essentially carbon dioxide is vital for food production, vital for wildlife. “The effects of CO2 on climate are really very poorly understood. . . . The experts all seem to think they understand it, I don’t think they do . . . Climate is a very complicated story. And we may or may not understand it better (in the future). The main thing that is lacking at the moment is humility. The climate experts have set themselves up as being the guardians of the truth and they think they have the truth and that is a dangerous situation.

Nobel Prize wining scientist Dr. Ivar Giaever explained: “The Earth has existed for maybe 4.5 billion years, and now the alarmists will have us believe that because of the small rise in temperature for roughly 150 years (which, by the way, I believe you cannot really measure) we are doomed unless we stop using fossil fuels…You and I breathe out at least thirty tons of CO2 in a normal life span, but nevertheless the Environmental Protection Agency decided to classify rising carbon-dioxide emissions as a hazard to human health.”

Page 53:  Ivy League geologist Robert Giegengack, former chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, has spoken about the “natural interplay” between temperature. Giegengack noted that “for most of Earth’s history, the globe has been warmer than it has been for the last 200 years. It has rarely been cooler.” In my interview with him for my film Climate Hustle, he said, “I’m impressed by the fact that the present climate, from the perspective of a geologist, is very close to the coldest it’s ever been.” He also said, “The concentration CO2  in the atmosphere today is the close to the lowest it has ever been.” Giegengack has authored two hundred peer-reviewed studies and spent much of his academic career in the doing field research on the history of climate on almost every continent.

Michael Mann claim: “First off, the people who call Puerto Rico home, or Paradise, California, or any number of cities and towns across the country and indeed the planet who have felt the already devastating impacts of climate change would beg to differ.”

Climate Depot response: “Devastating impacts” from hurricanes are not evidence of man-made climate change. Puerto Rico suffered from a bad hurricane and was unprepared and is still suffering the consequences from their lack of readiness and from the inefficient federal government response. Try as you might, Prof. Mann, hurricanes activity is not supporting your “extreme weather” claims, not even Hurricane Maria which hit Puerto Rico in 2017. See: Hurricane Maria had the eighth-lowest landfall pressure (917 mb) on record in the Atlantic Basin. Meteorologist Anthony Watts noted, “With Irma ranked 7th, and Harvey ranked 18th, it’s going to be tough for climate alarmists to try connecting these two storms to being driven by CO2/global warming. But they’ll do it anyway.”

But on every metric, extreme weather is on no trend or declining trend on climate timescales. Even the UN IPCC admits this. See: UN IPCC Report Admits Extreme Weather Events Have Not Increased & See: The UN IPCC Fifth Assessment Report in 2013 found, “Current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century…. No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin.”

Michael Mann claim: “Climate change is already making the heat waves that cause heat strokes worse.”

Climate Depot response: Mann’s heat waves claims are not supported in the peer-review literature. See: Claims Of More Heat Waves Refuted By Multiple Recent Studies, Longterm Data

Michael Mann claim: “It’s already raised sea levels, making coastal flooding more common and problematic.”

Climate Depot response: Wrong again Prof. Mann. See: NOAA: Average global sea level rising at rate of only 1.7-1.8 mm/yr – ‘A measly 5.6 inches by 2100’ 

UN IPCC Scientist Blows Whistle on Lies About Climate, Sea Level

World Leading Ocean Expert Calls Sea Level Rise Claims ‘Anti-Scientific Nonsense’

Scientists, studies & data agree: ‘Global warming’ not fueling acceleration in sea level rise –

Climatologist’s sea-level rise study disputes climate-disaster predictions – In many cases, ‘half of the sea-level rise is really from land sinking’

Geologist Dr. Don Easterbrook: “If you look at the total global sea level from about 1850 until the present time it’s been rising at a fairly constant rate, rather slow—about 7 inches a century…. It’s about 1 to 2 mm a year so if you’re 50 years old you experienced a sea level rise about 3 ½ inches and you probably didn’t even notice it,”

Former NASA Climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer:  “Sea level rise, which was occurring long before humans could be blamed, has not accelerated and still amounts to only 1 inch every 10 years.”

Michael Mann claim: “It’s already doubled the area burned by wildfires in the past few decades.”

Climate Depot response: Short term trends do not make climate trends. See: ‘Less fire today than centuries ago’ – Scientists, studies counter claim that wildfires due to ‘climate change’ – Book Excerpt

The following is an excerpt from author Marc Morano’s new best-selling book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change.

“There is increasing evidence that there is overall less fire in the landscape today than there has been centuries ago, although the magnitude of this reduction still needs to be examined in more detail.”…

“The ‘wildfire problem’ is essentially more a social than a natural one.” Researchers from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid found that “climate change” is not to blame for increased forest fires in the Mediterranean basin.”…

“In the United States, wildfires are also due in part to a failure to thin forests or remove dead and diseased trees. In 2014, forestry professor David B. South of Auburn University testified to the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that “data suggest that extremely  large megafires were four-times more common before 1940,” adding that “we cannot reasonably say that anthropogenic global warming causes extremely large wildfires.” As he explained, “To attribute this human-caused increase in fire risk to carbon dioxide emissions is simply unscientific.”

Wildfires are not worse — despite media hype about ‘global warming’

Fires far worse last century: Claim global warming causing wildfires goes up in — flames

Michael Mann claim: “My own research, in fact, shows that state-of-the-art climate models, if anything, are underestimating the impact climate change is having on extreme weather events.”

Climate Depot response: The scientific fact is that your heralded “state-of-the-art climate models could “show” any outcome you wish to create. Mann admitted in 2017: “Predictions can never be ‘falsifiable’ in the present: we must ultimately wait to see whether they come true.”

Prominent scientists have exposed your climate model con. See: Page 113: In 2007, top UN IPCC scientist Jim Renwick admitted that climate models do not account for half the variability in nature and thus are not reliable. “Half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable, so we don’t expect to do terrifically well,” Renwick conceded.

Page 110: Predictions Are Suddenly “Evidence,” Models are Now “Data” – And yet, such is the climate establishment’s attachment to their computer
models that they have begun to refer to their predictions as “evidence” and “data.” Scientists affiliated with the federal Oak Ridge National Laboratory in
Tennessee claimed in 2011, “We find evidence from nine climate models that intensity and duration of cold extremes may occasionally, or in some
cases quite often, persist at end-of-20th-century levels late into the 21st century in many regions.” And Seth Wenger of the University of Georgia has said that “the most dire climate models show temperatures in Idaho rising an average of 9 degrees in 70 years. That would make Boise pretty unpleasant. None of us
want to believe that.” But Wenger added, “I have to set aside my feelings and use the best data.”

Models Do Not Equal Evidence: The assertion that models are now “evidence” raised the ire of former Colorado State Climatologist Roger Pielke Sr. “The use of the term ‘evidence’ with respect to climate models illustrates that this study is incorrectly assuming that models can be used to test how the real world behaves,” Pielke explained.

[ … ]

Page 114: IPCC reviewer and climate researcher Vincent Gray of New Zealand, the author of more than one hundred scientific publications and an expert reviewer on every single draft of the IPCC reports going back to 1990, declared in that IPCC claims were “dangerous unscientific nonsense”16 because, “All the [UN IPCC does] is make ‘projections’ and ‘estimates’. No climate model has ever been properly tested, which is what ‘validation’ means, and their ‘projections’ are nothing more than the opinions of ‘experts’ with a conflict of interest, because they are paid to produce the models. There is no actual scientific evidence for all these ‘projections’ and ‘estimates,’” Gray noted.

Atmospheric scientist Hendrik Tennekes, a scientific pioneer in the development of numerical weather prediction and former director of research at the Netherlands’ Royal National Meteorological Institute, compared scientists who promote computer models predicting future climate doom to unlicensed software engineers. “I am of the opinion that most scientists engaged in the design, development, and tuning of climate models are in fact software engineers. They are unlicensed, hence unqualified to sell their products to society,” Tennekes wrote in 2007.

The late atmospheric scientist Augie Auer ridiculed climate model predictions, comparing them to video games: “Most of these climate predictions or models, they are about a half a step ahead of PlayStation 3. They’re really not justified in what they are saying. Many of the assumptions going into [the models] are simply not right.” And atmospheric physicist James Peden compared the climate models to children’s toys, calling them “computerized tinker toys with which one can construct any outcome he chooses.”

New Santer Climate Study Claim: 97% Consensus is now 99.99997%! Climatologist debunks: ‘Climate models are programmed to only produce human-caused warming’

6 New Papers: Climate Models Are Literally Worth ZERO

Spate Of Recent Papers: Climate Models Still Unable To Reproduce Even Most Fundamental Cycles!

Climate Models Over-Estimated Warming

Recent Research Shows Climate Models Are Mostly “Black Box” Fudging, Not Real Science

Michael Mann claim: “Unlike Moore, I’m actually a climate scientist.”

Climate Depot response: We will all genuflect to you and never question you now that you have declared “I’m actually a climate scientist.” Dr. Moore is PhD ecologist and a first rate scientist. But what scientific discipline is required to study climate? The answer: It has been estimated 80% of the UN IPCC membership has no dealing with the climate as part of their academic studies. Also note, that climate requires a wide range of disciplines: ‘There are more than 100 expert sub disciplines involved in climate change studies’ & Science magazine confused about who is a ‘prominent climate scientist’ — ‘there is no specific climate discipline’

Climatologist Dr. John Christy (even Mann has to admit is a real ‘climate scientist’) refutes Mann’s claims.

Excerpt from: “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change,”:

Climatologist John Christy testified before Congress in 2012, “There is a lack of evidence to blame humans for an increase in extreme events. One cannot convict CO2 of causing any of these events, because they’ve happened in the past before CO2 levels rose.” As Christy pointed out, “There are innumerable types of events that can be defined as extreme events—so for the enterprising individual (unencumbered by the scientific method), weather statistics can supply an unlimited, target-rich environment in which to discover a ‘useful’ extreme event.”

Christy explained why the extreme weather claims are unscientific: “The non-falsifiable hypotheses can be stated this way, ‘whatever happens is consistent with my hypothesis.’ In other words, there is no event that would ‘falsify’ the hypothesis. As such, these assertions cannot be considered science or in any way informative since the hypothesis’ fundamental prediction is ‘anything may happen.’ In the example above if winters become milder or they become snowier, the non-falsifiable hypothesis stands. This is not science.”

Michael Mann claim: “But even if I weren’t, these findings are readily apparent in even a cursory reading of the National Climate Assessment. That’s the major climate report Trump’s own administration released last year, and it goes into detail about how climate change is already hurting American communities from coast to coast.”

Climate Depot response: Yes, even a cursory reading of The National Climate Assessment reveals it is a pre-determined report written by environmental activists and overseen by President Obama’s former UN Paris climate pact negotiator. Science! Climate Depot’s Morano: “The National Climate Assessement is a political report masquerading as science. The media is hyping a rehash of frightening climate change claims by Obama administration holdover activist government scientists. The new report is once again pre-determined science.  The National Climate Assessment report reads like a press release from environmental pressure groups — because it is! Two key authors are longtime Union of Concerned Scientist activists, Donald Wuebbles and Katharine Hayhoe.”

See: Fed climate con job : Obama’s UN Paris negotiator & green activists helped prepare dire federal climate report

A former Obama administration official with ties to a liberal advocacy group funded by Democratic megadonors George Soros and Tom Steyer helped prepare the Fourth National Climate Assessment, whose dire predictions have since been attacked as overblown. Andrew Light, who worked on the 2015 Paris accord negotiations as a senior adviser to the U.S. Special Envoy on Climate Change under Secretary of State John F. Kerry, served as a review editor for the assessment, overseeing the pivotal final chapter that concluded under a worst-case scenario that global warming could wipe out as much as 10 percent of the U.S. economy by 2100…Light also spent five years as senior fellow and director of international climate policy at the Center for American Progress, which was founded and now led by longtime Democratic insider John Podesta. The center is also financed by liberal billionaires such as Mr. Soros and Mr. Steyer. …

“The National Climate Assessment report reads like a press release from environmental pressure groups — because it is,” said Marc Morano, author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change.”

Morano described two of the authors — Texas Tech professor Katharine Hayhoe and Donald J. Wuebbles of the University of Illinois — as “longtime Union of Concerned Scientist activists.” “These are not ‘Trump’s own scientists’ as the media likes to claim,” Mr. Morano said.

“The key authors are in fact left-wing environmental activists with the Union of Concerned Scientists, Center for American Progress, and the Obama Administration. And they cited outlier studies funded by Steyer and [Michael] Bloomberg.”

Scientists rip new federal climate report as ‘tripe’ – ’embarrassing’ – ‘systematically flawed’ – Key claim based on study funded by Steyer & Bloomberg

Climate experts call out new federal report for hiding the decline in hurricanes – ‘Were they thinking, no one would notice?’

Climate expert Dr. Roger Pielke Jr.: The claim of economic damage from climate change is based on a 15 degree F temp increase that is double the “most extreme value reported elsewhere in the report.” The “sole editor” of this claim in the report was an alumni of the Center for American Progress, which is also funded by Tom Styer.”

Climate analyst Paul Homewood: ‘Cherry picks’ a few bad weather events…extrapolates using the most scary scenarios’

Climatologist Dr. Pat Michaels on the report: ‘Systematically flawed’ – Report ‘should be shelved’

Trump v. Trump?!: Dr. Ken Haapala: ‘The global warming chorus immediately seized on the new USGCRP report claiming the Trump administration is contradicting President Trump’s claims about global warming. Amusingly, some of the chorus interviewed people who worked on the USGCRP, who were political appointees under the Obama Administration.’

Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore: “The science must be addressed head-on. If POTUS has his reasons for letting this Obama-era committee continue to peddle tripe I wish he would tell us what they are.”
Dr. John Dunn: “Two years into the Trump administration it is sad to see this 400-page pile of crap.”

The new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide To Climate Change: MIT climate scientist Richard Lindzen wrote of the National Academy of Sciences: “Regardless of evidence the answer is predetermined. If the government wants carbon control, that is the answer that the Academies will provide.”

Michael Mann claim: “CO2 is classified as a deadly toxin at high concentrations. I’d challenge Moore to prove he believes what he’s saying by trying to survive on carbon dioxide.”

Climate Depot response:  Page 47 of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change: Professor Happer and NASA moonwalker and geologist Harrison H. Schmitt pointed out in the May 8, 2013, Wall Street Journal, “Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That’s simply not the case.”

Corrupting the Language “Warming and increased CO2 will be good for mankind . . . CO2 is not a pollutant and it is not a poison and we should not corrupt the English language by depriving ‘pollutant’ and ‘poison’ of their original meaning.” —Princeton professor William Happer to Congress

MIT climate scientist Richard Lindzen has mocked claims that carbon dioxide is dangerous. “CO2 , it should be noted, is hardly poisonous. On the contrary, it is essential for life on our planet and levels as high as 5000 ppm are considered safe on our submarines and on the space station (current atmospheric levels are around 400 ppm, while, due to our breathing, indoor levels can be much higher),” he said in 2017.

Michael Mann claim: “William Happer is also the man chosen by Trump to potentially lead a panel to conduct an ‘adversarial’ review of climate science. Happer is a former physics professor who was caught in a sting in 2015 agreeing to take money from unknown oil and gas interests in exchange for writing a report full of climate denial.”

Climate Depot response: Former New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin explained this so-called Greenpeace “sting.” “Happer’s been a frequent target of environmental groups and scientists focused on slowing climate change. Greenpeace staff, pretending in 2015 emails to represent a Beirut company focused in part on energy, tricked him into agreeing to write reports on the virtues of carbon dioxide. His replies directed hoaxers to pay fees to a non-profit group he had launched with others to convey the upside of the greenhouse effect. “My activities to push back against climate extremism are a labor of love,” Happer wrote.

It was an attempt by in — Revkin’s words — Greenpeace “hoaxers” to entrap Dr. Happer, who was clearly not seeking money to promote his well established scientific views on carbon dioxide.

As for racking up money in exchange for promoting climate fears, Mann has that angle covered.

Climategate’s Michael Mann Racks Up Millions in Climate Stimulus Funds: – ‘More than $2.4 million is stimulating the career of none other than Penn State’s Michael Mann…Mann came by his grants via National Science Foundation, which received $3 billion in stimulus money…He received another grant worth nearly $1.9 million to investigate the role of ‘env. temperature on transmission of vector-borne diseases.’…Both grants say they were ‘funded under American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009.’

Report: Michael Mann has received ‘almost $6 million for various predictions, models and reconstructions over the last 13 years’: ‘Note also the generally escalating grant amounts in recent years. A lot of that is from the government’s National Science Foundation and NOAA teats’

Michael Mann claim: “As to the quality of Happer’s climate science, well that’s hard to speak to because he doesn’t actually do any climate science, and never has.”

Climate Depot response: Mann is massively incorrect on this key point. Claiming Dr. Happer “doesn’t actually do any climate science, and never has” is an outrageous distortion of science and Mann should retract this claim.

Former Harvard Physicist Dr. Lubos Motl responds to such charges about Dr. Will Happer: “When it comes to the main physical effect that is supposed to drive “climate change”, he’s not only an expert. He’s one of the world’s leading experts.”

By their (the media & climate activists) definition, this scam is nearly universally accepted as “science” by these scammers. If you’re an expert in the climate hysteria who is approved by other experts in the climate hysteria, you usually accept that the climate hysteria is rational. Otherwise you wouldn’t be an expert over the climate hysteria. Instead, the real question is whether a rational society should nurture and pay “experts” in the climate hysteria – “experts” in a discipline where the big answer is decided from the beginning and it’s a scientifically ludicrous one.
We also learn:

CNN: “Happer, who is not a climate expert, specialized in atomic physics and the study of optics at Princeton.”

Motl: “Is Happer a climate expert? How should we interpret the negative sentence above? You know, as some “climate experts” don’t know, the global warming is supposed to be caused by the greenhouse effect which is physically the absorption of the infrared radiation by the air. Is Happer an expert in that? Well, search Google Scholar for “w happer” infrared.

Unsurprisingly, he has written numerous articles that are “mainly” about the infrared absorption bands and Google Scholar finds over 1,000 articles that contain his name as well as “infrared”. So when it comes to the main physical effect that is supposed to drive “climate change”, he’s not only an expert. He’s one of the world’s leading experts. CNN and doomsaying crackpots in general surely find this fact inconvenient but this inconvenience doesn’t make it less true.”  [Climate Depot Note:  Motl later added: “The whole alleged threat – the greenhouse effect – is a straightforward homework exercise in the exact same subfield of optics (absorption of radiation) in which Happer is a top ten expert in the world.” – Motl called the attacks on Happer’s climate expertise “ludicrous terminological sophistry.” Motl explained: “E.g. here is a peer-reviewed paper on turbulence in the atmosphere which is really atmospheric physics and by content, the very same field.]

Michael Mann claim: “What he has done, though, is say insane (and offensive) things, like comparing the treatment of carbon dioxide to the ‘demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.’ That’s the quality of advice Trump is seeking.”

Climate Depot response: Dr. Happer’s point on CO2 was well taken. Other prominent scientists agree:

Page 54 of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change:

Question to Giegengack: Is carbon dioxide the control knob?

University of Pennsylvania Geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack, who has authored two hundred peer-reviewed studies and spent much of his academic career in the doing field research on the history of climate on almost every continent, explained: “I don’t see anything in the long term geologic record to support that conclusion. CO2 is one of many, many, many variables that influence the Earth’s temperature. There may be variables we don’t know about, that we haven’t yet discovered.”

Question: Are you afraid of rising CO2 concentrations?

Giegengack: “No, no I’m not. CO2 is not the villain that it has been portrayed.”

Giegengack explained to me that “natural processes close to the earth’s surface move CO2 around in quantities that dwarf the amount that we are generating.” “The record that shows how much higher CO2 has been in the past under circumstances when life on earth as we know it continued to thrive,” he explained. “I haven’t been impressed by the kinds of climate change that I have observed in my lifetime,” he added.

Michael Mann claim: “It’s one thing for Fox’s primary audience, with their failing faculties and dulled critical thinking skills, to be suckered in by their constant barrage of alternative facts and persuasive fictions. It’s quite another for the supposed leader of the free world, who has a thousand scientists at his disposal, to embrace such obviously unscientific claims with such conviction.”

Climate Depot response: Prof. Mann is a great example of someone who promotes “dulled critical thinking skills.” Mann has tried to “sucker” the public for years on his “alternative facts and persuasive fictions.”

Here are a few examples of the “dulled” thoughts of Prof. Mann from The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change:

Page 167: Penn State Professor Michael Mann was even more explicit. “We can see climate change, the impacts of climate change, now, playing out in real
time, on our television screens, in the 24-hour news cycle,” Mann said at a Democrat platform draft hearing in 2016.

Page 197: The UN IPCC’s Michael Mann, a Penn State professor embroiled in the Climategate scandal, couldn’t restrain himself from engaging in climate porn after Harvey hit Texas. “We’re starting to talk about conditions that will literally force us to relocate the major coastal cities of the world, to relocate the better part of the billion people.”

Page 220: Penn State Professor Michael Mann weighed in with a 2036 deadline. “There is an urgency to acting unlike anything we’ve seen before,”
Mann explained.31 Media outlets reported Mann’s made a huge media splash with his prediction, noting “Global Warming Will Cross a Dangerous Threshold in 2036.”

Page 238: Even before the elections, climate activist and Penn State professor Michael Mann warned that Trump was a “threat to the planet,” whose
future “could quite literally lie in the balance.”

Page 148:  UN IPCC scientist Eduardo Zorita, for example, publicly declared that his colleagues Michael Mann and Phil Jones, who had both been implicated
in Climategate, “should be barred from the IPCC process…. They are not credible anymore.” Zorita also noted how petty and punitive the global warming science had become: “By writing these lines I will just probably achieve that a few of my future studies will, again, not see the light of publication.” Zorita was making reference to Climategate emails in which IPCC scientists had discussed how to suppress data and scientific studies that did not agree with the UN IPCC line. He noted how scientists who deviated from the UN IPCC’s position were “bullied and subtly blackmailed.” Zorita was a contributing author to the UN IPCC Fourth Assessment Report in 2007. He has published more than seventy peer-reviewed scientific studies.

Michael Mann reveals he is no rocket man scientist as his claims rebutted by data – Mann claims that ‘climate change was behind this summer’s extreme weather’

Oh No! Not again! Warmist Michael Mann on UN climate summit: ‘Paris is probably the last chance’

Michael Mann: ‘Paris is probably the last chance to bring the necessary emission reductions on the way – we had begun 15 years ago, the required transformation of the energy system would gently can proceed.’

Reality Check: Every UN Climate Summit Hailed as ‘Last Chance’ To Stop ‘Global Warming’ Before It’s Too Late – Previous ‘last chance’ deadlines turned out to be — well — not the ‘last chance’ after all.

Also see: Warmist Michael Mann pushing ‘global warming’ blizzard connection

Mann has also claimed: “Reducing global carbon emissions should be understood as an extremely well-advised planetary insurance policy. Indeed, Americans take out fire insurance on their homes for levels of risk that pale in comparison to those associated with dangerous and irreversible climate change.”

Climate Depot Response to Mann:“Would anyone purchase fire insurance on their home with a huge up-front premium but virtually no payout if their home burned down? Only those who answer YES to such an “insurance” policy would like the “climate” regulations “deal” offered by Congress, the EPA, and the UN. If we actually did face a man-made climate crisis and we had to rely on the U.S. Congress or the United Nations to save us, we would all be DOOMED. The UN’s Paris climate agreement and EPA regulations can’t control the climate University of Pennsylvania Geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack has noted, “None of the strategies that have been offered by the U.S. government or by the EPA or by anybody else has the remotest chance of altering climate, if in fact climate is controlled by carbon dioxide.”

Michael Mann claim: “Fortunately, some in his party appear to now recognize that outright denial of human-caused climate change has no place in honest political discourse and they seem to be embracing a pivot to the more worthy debate over what we do to address it. Let us encourage this shift and allow climate change deniers to become increasingly isolated as the fringe, irrelevant relic that they are.”

Climate Depot response: On the contrary, the global warming movement has morphed into a coalition of ‘climate cause deniers.’ They deny the hundreds of causes and variables of climate change and pretend CO2 is the ‘control knob’ overriding all the others and that every bad weather even it somehow “proof” of their claims.

Related Links: 

Mann v. Morano: Climategate’s Michael Mann debates Climate Depot’s Morano on Live BBC Radio: Mann: ‘Morano’s a hired assassin’ — Morano: ‘Mann plays the part of martyr very well’

Morano: ‘It was very refreshing when, after the Climategate emails, people could see the collusion behind the scenes, with Mann & the other upper echelons of UN crafting a narrative of how they were going to, basically, have a partisan campaign to present the science and exclude people they didn’t like’

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change, By Marc Morano

 

Page 150: I myself was actually mentioned in one of the Climategate scandal emails. On July 23, 2009, AP reporter Seth Borenstein had emailed one of the Climategate scientists, Penn State professor Michael Mann of hockey stick fame, about a “a paper in JGR [Journal of Geophysical Research] today that Marc Morano is hyping wildly.” Mann wrote back to Borenstein, “The aptly named Marc ‘Morano’ has fallen for it!”

Page 152: Clive Crook, writing for the Atlantic, also slammed the Penn State investigation: “The Penn State inquiry exonerating Michael Mann—the paleoclimatologist who came up with ‘the hockey stick’—would be difficult to parody. Three of four allegations are dismissed out of hand at the outset: the inquiry announces that, for ‘lack of credible evidence’, it will not even investigate them…. You think I exaggerate?…In short, the case for the prosecution is never heard. Mann is asked if the allegations (well, one of them) are true, and says no.” As Crook explained, “The [Penn State] report…says, in effect, that Mann is a distinguished scholar, a successful raiser of research funding, a man admired by his peers—so any allegation of academic impropriety must be false.”

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Trump touts Greenpeace co-founder declaring ‘the whole climate crisis’ is ‘fake science’ [Video]

President Donald Trump touted Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore’s statements that “the whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science.” Trump responded “Wow” at the end of his tweet.

Moore continued: “There is no climate crisis, there’s weather and climate all around the world, and in fact carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.” Patrick Moore is featured prominently in the new skeptical book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change.”

Moore made his comments while appearing on Fox & Friends today. He also explained why he called AOC A ‘Pompous Little Twit’


Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump

Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace: “The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science. There is no climate crisis, there’s weather and climate all around the world, and in fact carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.” @foxandfriends Wow!

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Dr. Patrick Moore replied to President Trump:


Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump
· 4h

Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace: “The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science. There is no climate crisis, there’s weather and climate all around the world, and in fact carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.” @foxandfriends Wow!


Patrick Moore@EcoSenseNow

Thanks President Trump. I am in DC for a meeting of the CO2 Coalition founded by William Happer, who I admire greatly. CO2 is entirely beneficial. The EPA finding that CO2 is pollution must be reversed.

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Moore referenced Princeton Physicist Dr. Will Happer who is not part of the Trump administration and set to head a presidential commission on climate change. See: All Eyes On The Scientist Set To Upend The ‘Climate Change’ Narrative – Under ‘All-Out Attack’ by Media – ‘Dr. Will Happer is one of the most important scientists in the U.S.’

Partial transcript of Patrick Moore Fox & Friends segment. Broadcast March 12, 2019

Watch Fox News video: Greenpeace co-founder tears into ‘pompous little twit’ Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal

STEVE DOOCY (CO-HOST): It sounds like you don’t think [the Green New Deal] plan is a good one. What’s your major problem with it? 

PATRICK MOORE (AUTHOR): Well, it’s a silly plan. That’s why I suggested [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] was a pompous little twit. “Twit,” meaning, “silly” in the British lexicon and, “pompous,” meaning, “arrogant.” She really rubbed me the wrong way when she said she’s “the boss,” because she can make up a proposal that’s completely ridiculous and no one else did. And that is what’s wrong about this. 

In fact, the whole climate crisis, as they call it, is not only fake news, it’s fake science. There is no climate crisis. There is weather and climate all around the world. And, in fact, carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life. That’s where the carbon comes from in carbon-based life, which is all life on land and in the sea. And, not only that, a little bit of warming would not be a bad thing for myself, being a Canadian, and the people in Russia wouldn’t mind a little couple of degrees warmer either. 

DOOCY: But, Patrick, you know, there are so many scientists who have come out and say — and have said that climate change is real. 

MOORE: Yes, of course climate change is real, it’s been happening since the beginning of time, but it’s not dangerous and it’s not made by people. Climate change is a perfectly natural phenomenon. 

Moore, an ecologist, has testified to the U.S. Senate: 

Greenpeace Co-Founder Tells U.S. Senate: Earth’s Geologic History ‘fundamentally contradicts’ CO2 Climate Fears: ‘We had both higher temps and an ice age at a time when CO2 emissions were 10 times higher than they are today’

Watch full senate hearing here. 

Selected Highlights of Dr. Patrick Moore’s Feb. 25, 2014 testimony before the U.S. Senate Environment & Public Works Committee:

‘There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years.’

‘Today, we live in an unusually cold period in the history of life on earth and there is no reason to believe that a warmer climate would be anything but beneficial for humans and the majority of other species…It is “extremely likely” that a warmer temperature than today’s would be far better than a cooler one.’

Earth’s Geologic History Fails CO2 Fears: ‘The fact that we had both higher temperatures and an ice age at a time when CO2 emissions were 10 times higher than they are today fundamentally contradicts the certainty that human-caused CO2 emissions are the main cause of global warming…When modern life evolved over 500 million years ago, CO2 was more than 10 times higher than today, yet life flourished at this time. Then an Ice Age occurred 450 million years ago when CO2 was 10 times higher than today.’

Skeptical ‘Politically Incorrect’ climate book surges to #1 Amazon Best Seller in ‘Climatology’ – Goes into its 4th printing as it surpasses Carl Sagan’s ‘Cosmos’ book

Greenpeace co-founder: ‘Global warming’ is ‘strictly a fear campaign’ – It has taken ‘over science with superstition…& combo of religion and political ideology’

Dr. Patrick Moore: “Fear has been used all through history to gain control of people’s minds and wallets and all else, and the climate catastrophe is strictly a fear campaign — well, fear and guilt — you’re afraid you’re killing your children because you’re driving them in your SUV and emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and you feel guilty for doing that. There’s no stronger motivation than those two.”

Watch: Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore rejects climate fear: ‘CO2 is not the enemy. It is actually the reason that we are alive’

Moore shows unequivocally that CO2 and temperature have NOT moved in unison. In fact, during the Jurassic, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere plummeted while temperatures rose. The same thing disparity occurred in the Eocene. “It is (therefore) not possible to demonstrate a cause and effect relationship between CO2 and temperature over the long-term history,” Dr. Moore concludes. “Carbon is not the enemy. It is actually the reason that we are alive.”

Meteorologist Anthony Watts reveals how Greenpeace tries to downplay Moore’s role as founding member

Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20021119050900/http://www.greenpeace.org.au/aboutus/founders.html

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