No, the Climate Change Establishment has not changed their approach

Friend Burt emails me to say that the U.N. Climate Panel Quietly admits Its Doomsday Climate Scenarios were completely "Implausible".

They've been admitting this for years and years.  Here's a post from the archives from 2019:

Climate scientist Judy Curry testified before Congress, and this is really interesting:

Some people (including one of the Members) took issue with the following statement in my testimony:

“Based upon our current assessment of the science, the threat does not seem to be an existential one on the time scale of the 21st century, even in its most alarming incarnation.”

I referred to AR5 WGII:

“Every single catastrophic scenario considered by the IPCC AR5 (WGII, Table 12.4) has a rating of very unlikely or exceptionally unlikely and/or has low confidence. The only tipping point that the IPCC considers likely in the 21stcentury is disappearance of Arctic summer sea ice (which is fairly reversible, since sea ice freezes every winter).”

The IPCC is the same "U.N. Climate Panel" getting headlines today.  The IPCC Assessment Reports are the "State of the Science" reports they release every five years.  They are considered the Gold Standard for establishment science, and they've been very quietly burying exactly this point for a long, long time.

The only thing they've given up is keeping these scenarios for the screaming headlines.

The only thing interesting here is why they are doing this now?  I think it's the mad dash to AI, with AI datacenters springing up everywhere.  Each of these has a ravenous power appetite, and the (very wealthy) folks behind AI have told the IPCC to tone down the climate alarmism.

Money talks, so the mainstream climate science establishment walks. 

Earth Day

I would have something to say about this nonsense but The Silicon Graybeard has it pretty much covered.

Miguel, too. 

The Aral Sea is coming back to life

This is unexpected good news.  You have to click through to watch because embedding is disabled.  

The EPA makes everything worse, vol CXVI

In this case, marine diesel engines which used to be famously long lived.  The Detroit Diesel engines of old were famous for running 20,000 or 30,000 hours before a four day rebuild at the dock set them up for another 20,000 or 30,000 hours.  You couldn't kill these engines.  Rather, you would leave them to your kids in your will.

That's over now, and it's because of the EPA.  Over a span of 15 or 20 years, they ratcheted up the emission requirements for these engines to the point that Detroit Diesel would be fined millions and millions of dollars for selling their old (famously reliable) design.

And so now you have to rebuild after 10,000 hours, and you have to replace three times as many parts.  Plan on a month, rather than four days.

This is a very interesting video on the subject.  While I'm not an expert on diesel engines, it certainly seems solid from an engineering perspective. 

Here are the main points.

1. Pressures have gone from 10,000 psi to 30,000 PSI for a bunch of EPA-imposed constraints.  This shortens the lifespan of parts used in the engines.

2. The higher pressure means that engines are much more vulnerable to bad diesel fuel: water particles or tiny flakes of rust now essentially sandblast the pistons, valves, and cylinders.  This didn't used to take place at the old lower pressure.  This sandblasting effect shortens part life even more, which makes engine rebuild and cost even higher.

3. Because parts will fail much more often now, manufacturers put all sorts of sensors in place.  The sensors themselves can fail - the high seas is a notoriously unforgiving environment and salt water will get into the engine room.  This causes corrosion, which triggers sensor faults.  The engine's computer (itself a new thing, with software of questionable quality) will detect the fault and sometimes put the engine into "Limp Home Mode" - not allowing it to go above, say, 1000 RPM.  A ship in a storm may find its engine dangerously under powered, putting at risk the lives on board and the safety of the ship itself.  If a ship sinks in a storm under these circumstances, the fuel oil in the tanks will pollute the environment.

4. Not pointed out in the video, ocean-going vessels do not have to worry about emissions.  From a pure regulatory perspective, that is.  However, finding a new engine with all the design "upgrades" discussed here is the challenge.  I don't know what EU regulations are, so maybe a MAN engine doesn't have to deal with this.  But I'm nasty and suspicious and think that EU regulations could be even worse than EPA's.

Thanks a whole lot of nothing, EPA.  You're supposed to protect the environment. Oh, and not get Americans killed.

The only thing I think is unfair about the video is the title.  Engine manufactures design their engines to fail after 10 years because the EPA forces them to. 

You could roll back all the environmental regulations since 1990 and shutter the EPA and this Republic would be a whole lot better off. 

Why to Democrats hate the poor, elderly, and the environment?

Biden quietly bans gas-powered tankless water heaters.

These are the most efficient design, so Democrats obviously hate the environment.  People will use less efficient models and burn more fuel.

And these are the least expensive models.  Manufacturers expect the ban to add $450 to the price of new water heaters.  The poor and elderly hardest hit.

Holy cow, the Democratic party really sucks.

Save the planet by violating Indian treaties

I mean, why not?  There's a long American tradition of ignoring treaties with the tribes.  But this time it's playing out differently: Federal Judge sides with Osage Nation, Orders removal of 84 Wind Turbines:

The Osage Nation won a massive ruling in Tulsa federal court on Wednesday that requires Enel to dismantle a 150-megawatt wind project it built in Osage County despite the tribe’s repeated objections. The tribe’s fight against Rome-based Enel began in 2011 and is the longest-running legal battle over wind energy in American history.

...

The decision by U.S. Court of International Trade Judge Jennifer Choe-Graves is the culmination of 12 years of litigation that pitted the tribe and federal authorities against Enel. During the construction of the project, the company illegally mined rock owned by the tribe, and it continued to do so even after being ordered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to stop. Instead of halting work, the company sped up construction. Enel must now remove the 84 turbines that it built on 8,400 acres of the Tallgrass Prairie located between Pawhuska and Fairfax. Removing the turbines will cost Enel some $300 million.

As you might expect, the Oklahoma State courts were corrupt - with the Chief Justice of the OK Supremes benefiting from the project.  But the Federales were different, and ruled for the indians.  It looks like there's very little chance of an appeal, as the US Supremes ruled on a very similar case in the not so distant past.

And this bit is spot on:

By thrashing Enel in court, the Osage tribe not only stands to collect millions of dollars in damages and the removal of the loathsome turbines, it also has handed Big Wind the biggest public relations debacle in its history. It’s not just that the wind industry lost; it lost to a Native American tribe. That’s a particularly bad look when it comes to the branding of wind energy as “clean,” “green,” “sustainable,” and, of course, “renewable.”  

Chalk one up for the good guys.

The "French Haircut"

E.M. Smith has a typically thoughtful post about what is happening in Europe right now:

Do note that at present the EU & UK are having about a 10% to 20% reduction in their natural gas flows. This is about 5% to 10% reduction in their “Carbon”. Now both currencies have dropped about 1/3 of their value vs the $ US (that is also losing value fast to inflation….). They also have a political revolution in the starting phases, governments being turned out, and massive marches in the streets. It isn’t even winter yet… With that small a step toward the WEF “Decarbonization Goal”, this is what you get. What do you think will happen with a double of that “decarbonization”?

He then goes on to point out that the EU's "accomplishments" to date are only about 10% of the decarbonization goal and that to meet these goals each of the next ten years will have to do even more than what the last year has seen.  He points out:

Street Protests in the EU / Europe writ large are the prelude to riots that are the prelude to insurrections and revolts. I’ve often said these Elite need to remember “The French Haircut”. Yet they do not.

A lot of folks in Europe are going to die this winter.  We'll see what things look like in March, but I wonder how many of the EU governments will still be in power by then.

 

It's not easy being green

Wind energy company fined $35M for killing hundreds of bald eagles:

An American wind energy company has admitted to killing at least 150 bald and golden eagles, most of which were fatally struck by wind turbine blades, federal prosecutors said. 

ESI Energy pleaded guilty Tuesday to three counts of violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) after eagles died at three of its facilities in Wyoming and New Mexico, according to a statement from the Justice Department.

Nice going, Greens.  If the rest of us even pick up an Eagle feather from the ground we can go to prison, but your corporate buddies just cop a plea and, the cost to electricity rates, and go back to collecting their subsidies.

I'll believe that the Greens are serious when they insist on prison time for this sort of thing.

(via)

What causes de-forestation?

First the god news: de-forestation is down by two-thirds since 1980: 

In the past decade, the yearly reduction in forest area was 0.12 percent – down from 0.19 percent in the 1990s and 0.35 percent in the 1980s. In other words, out of 100 hectares of forested area in 2010, 98.85 hectares still green the world today. Emphatically, we are not running out of forests.

This is from the latest UN report on the subject, found via a link from Chris Lynch.

Now the bad news: ancient forest is being clear cut for wind farms:

Lately we’ve been reporting on what many people are calling one of the greatest environmental felonies in Europe: the deforestation of the 1000-year old Reinhardswald, known as the “fairy tale forest”, in order to make way for largescale industrial wind parks to produce “green” energy. Proponents claim the wind parks will save our environment and climate. Clearing the forests has already commenced.

I guess that "sustainable electricity" comes from cutting down thousand year old forest.  Good to know.

Unknown whether the report talks about how deforestation is up in Scandinavia because the forests are being cut down to make wood pellet fuel.  What a weird "environmentalism" that burns the forest in order to save it.

This blog belches carbon

Somewhere along the road, something disappeared from my side bar:

This is from way back in 2010, when Blogs were "the thing" and so the Green Nutcases were Very Concerned:

Oh, now this is rich. German greenies calculate that a blog which gets 15,000 hits or more a month (yay! we qualify!) pumps out 8 pounds of carbon dioxide a year.

 Hmmm ... rough math time: 15,000 "hits" corresponds to roughly 20,000 page views (in the old SiteMeter days).  I've been running about 4 times that for 12 years now so - let's see ... carry the one - this blog has belched 350 pounds of carbon into the atmosphere.

Sigh.  Those are rookie numbers.  Must up my game.

Or we can all just think it's a bunch of Eco-fascist nonsense by some very unsavory totalitarian would-be overlords who deserve all the mockery we can give them.  And so this will go proudly back into the side bar to make a permanent focus of mockery for the oh-so-mockable.

I still don't think that we have any business intervening in Ukraine

I wrote this a month ago and don't think any differently:

The ghosts of Stalingrad

Peter doesn't think we have any compelling national interest to get into a war with Russia over Ukraine.  I agree, and would amplify it like this:

Why on earth are we talking about getting into a war in Russia in the winter?

I mean, you could ask Napoleon how that turned out, or the German 6th Army.  Heck, you could ask the Afghani allies we just left behind how good an idea this is.  Since our military has such a good track record this century.

Peter's take is that the Powers That Be are getting desperate as the economy is mired in stagflation, the vaxx mandate is increasingly unpopular, and Biden's approval rating drops lower than any President in my lifetime.  A foreign adventure is often the prescription for what ails them - politics ends at the water's edge, right?

Except no - firstly, this is nothing but madness.  Bill Clinton at least had the good sense to bomb a Somali aspirin factory rather than Sevastapol.  Secondly, we've heard from Democrats for 20 years that politics does NOT end at the water's edge.

Quite frankly, it's time for Congress to step up as the Adult Supervision* and pass a resolution saying that we do not have a compelling national interest in NATO expansion into Ukraine, and we sure as heck don't have a compelling interest in Americans getting killed over that.  It sure would be something to see the Democrats filibuster that.

It's been a long time since I've tagged a post "Atomic War" ...

* This just goes to illustrate how weird things are.

UPDATE 22 January 2022 18:17:  J.Kb has a must read post about this.

I would expand on this, with several additional arguments: 

1. The Biden Administration has done terrible damage to our armed forces, which quite frankly may not have the capacity to respond meaningfully in a peer-to-peer shooting war.
2. There is quite a good chance that if we do engage with Russia that the Chinese will think that this is the best opportunity they will ever see to take Taiwan back.  The ability of our armed forces to simultaneously engage with two peer-to-peer conflicts is roughly between slim and none.  And Slim just left town. (UPDATE 24 FEBRUARY 2022 12:01: Aesop has some Pertinent thoughts on this topic, and is more pessimistic than I am.)
3. An actual shooting war involving the US and NATO will show that Donald Trump was right: NATO members have not been living up to their agreements on funding troop levels and readiness.  Quite frankly we all think that NATO is a paper tiger but a hot war will prove the point.
4. A corollary to #3 is that the EU will come under big pressure to do something - anything - about the conflict and any refugees.  The EU will be paralyzed (because it's always paralyzed) and will be exposed as not the "United States of Europe" but rather a paper tiger just like NATO.
5. Germans will begin to freeze in the dark.  They shut down a whole bunch of base load power (Energiewende) and now the Russians have them over a barrel.  Fuel Poverty is a real thing.

I'd like to digress in particular on #5.  We are seeing a fair amount of the usual jingoistic banging of the War Drum, with people not sufficiently enthusiastic about World War III being called "stooges" (or worse).  Quite frankly, I'd be more impressed with these attacks if they were also leveled at the greenie Watermelon crowd (Green on the outside, Red on the inside) who are hamstringing our fossil fuel industries (both here and in Europe).  Nothing gives Vladimir Putin more leverage over the West than this.  No war for European oil, and all that.

This post is tagged "idiots" because, well, you know.

UPDATE 24 FEBRUARY 2022 12:01:  Stephen Green at Instapundit muses about why Putin pulled the trigger and invaded.  I think it's quite simple: he thinks he will get away with it.  Quite frankly, I expect he's right.

Randoms

One thing about living in Southwest Florida is that people come here from all over.  At the dog park this morning I was talking to one of the other owners who works at a very high end resort on the beach.  She said two things that were very interesting:

1. Even though we're past High Season, they are packed.  There's a high proportion of folks from Michigan, and a bunch are down here house hunting.  The common thread is that they're all sick of the Governor there and are looking to get out.  These are all high income types - the ones who can pay $6,000+ for a week at the beach.
2. One of the guests she was talking to is a doctor at a big Pennsylvania hospital.  He said that there are 40 babies in the NICU, and the prognosis for all of them is poor.  The common thread was that their mothers all got vaccinated.  He says that the Press won't touch this story but he hears from doctor buddies elsewhere that they see this too.

So California is facing another drought this year.  What the stories you will read in the Press won't tell you is that the California State Water Board is draining the reservoirs.  Why?  To "restore the fish".  Here's a quote you won't run across on CNN:

“In the last 14 days, 90% of Delta inflow went to sea. It’s equal to a year’s supply of water for 1 million people.#ManMadeDrought,” Central Valley farmer Kristi Diener said.

Will the last taxpayer to leave California please turn out the lights?  We're trying to be Green ...

Lastly (and probably most importantly), if you stop by Glen Filthie's place you might want to pass on the brownies ...

There will be all sorts of compost once the Powers That Be go Green

Over at Miguel's place (I think it was J.Kb - hey guys, can you get a tag to show who posted what there?) we get a link to ravings at the UK Guardian about a Climate Change Final Solution:

The insane people at The Guardian published an article that sets up the historical precedent for that.

Why Genghis Khan was good for the planet
Laying waste to land scrubbed 700m tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

His empire lasted a century and a half and eventually covered nearly a quarter of the earth’s surface. His murderous Mongol armies were responsible for the massacre of as many as 40 million people. Even today, his name remains a byword for brutality and terror. But boy, was Genghis green.

Genghis Khan, in fact, may have been not just the greatest warrior but the greatest eco-warrior of all time, according to a study by the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Energy. It has concluded that the 13th-century Mongol leader’s bloody advance, laying waste to vast swaths of territory and wiping out entire civilisations en route, may have scrubbed 700m tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere – roughly the quantity of carbon dioxide generated in a year through global petrol consumption – by allowing previously populated and cultivated land to return to carbon-absorbing forest.

Killing 40 Million people for the planet.

This fiendishly clever plan of theres will indeed lead to a lower population because people like me will put .45 caliber holes in the foreheads of genocidal eco-fascists like the Guardian writers.  Think of all the compost!

Sheesh, it's like these people don't ever listen to what they say.  If they did, they might think something like "Hmm, am I sounding like a deranged, genocidal fascist?  Maybe we should focus on something incremental, like bike paths."  Instead, they'll talk themselves into my proposal, above.

And these morons probably think they're the smartest kids on the block.

And to show that this isn't a one-off, a "Black Swan", an oddball proposal - but rather a recurrent theme from the Genocidal Eco Left, here are some other genocidal Save The Planet sooper smaht plans that we've mocked here, dredged from the Borepatch archives:

Save The Planet - Starve The Children

Kill The Children For Mother Gaia

Friday Follies: KillThe Children For Mother Gaia Edition

Kill The Dog for Mother Gaia

Cut Health Care To Save Mother Gaia

Global Warming Causes Totalitarianism

Oh, and that last one is a hoot - the link there goes to an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.  This sort of genocidal eco fascism is entirely mainstream in western medical establishments.  It seems that there must be some sort of education plan in action, to make all this easy to get along with.  Maybe something like this ...

UPDATE 18 April 2021 11:19: Very good reply posted over at The Silicon Graybeard.

Everything you need to know about the Texas power blackouts

Lawrence does the research so that I (we) don't have to. 

Save the planet: clearcut the forest

"Green" energy causes forest to be cut down:

The ARD’s “Das Erste” reports how satellite images show deforestation has risen 49% since 2016 in Sweden, Finland and the Baltic countries. The reason: “Because of the CO2 targets. That sounds totally crazy but precisely because of the trend to renewable energies is in part responsible for deforestation in Estonia,” says the Das Erste moderator.

Having spent some time working for the EU, Liiana Steinberg explains in the report how she recently returned to her native Estonia and was shocked to see how much deforestation had taken place over the recent years (2:25). “I discovered how the forests no longer exists here left and right.”

You grind up the trees to make wood pellets which count as a "green" "carbon-neutral" energy source.  Except the forest is gone (hey, it will grow back in 30 or 40 years, although it will be fast growing pine and fir rather than old growth hardwood - but eggs, omlets, amirite?).

It seems that wildlife has declined by 25%.  Yay, environmentalists!

What's funny is that this keeps happening.  It seems that this has been going on for years.  Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence.  Third time is, well, you know.

Save the environment - clearcut the forest

Well, the Scottish forest:

excluding wind farms on privately owned woodlands, we end up with figures

6994 hectares were felled

13.9 million trees were felled.

I suggest another FOI request be made for windfarms on peat bogs, especially in the Flow Country.

Now this is just Scotland.

It would be interesting to get the figures for England  and Wlaes on how many trees have felled, hectares of farmland lost, and hectares of moorland and peatbog affected.

The greenies cut down 14 million trees to put up windmills.  All in the name of "saving the environment".  And this is just in Scotland.  We know it's going on other places because we've seen this before:

These towers are being installed in one of the FEW locations in the state where there is no evidence the area has EVER been logged. Now there will be 30 concrete platforms and a 30' wide gravel road across the top of these ridges. Why don't we install the towers, 1 on top of each of those skyscrapers in the cities? Those are already an eye sore, can't make them any worse. This project is turning 'God's Country' into disaster.

And before:

The Danish environment minister Troels Lund Poulsen decided, on behalf of the government, on 30th September 2009, that the clearing of 15 km2 of forest in the north west of Denmark will take place. A test centre for the development of offshore windmills is planned to take up 30 km2 of land in the Thy region, near Østerild. 

It's all chasing subsidies.  Oh well, at least it isn't using electric lights at night to power solar arrays.

Donald Trump reads Borepatch

Well, that's my explanation for this:

President Trump on Tuesday announced the United States will join the One Trillion Trees Initiative launched at the World Economic Forum as world leaders seek to combat climate change.

Trump made the announcement during an address to global business leaders gathered for the annual event in Davos, Switzerland.

So why do I say that he reads this blog?  Well, back in July I posted this:

A simple and cheap solution to burning fossil fuels?

Plant trees:

OK, the study simply argues that by adding 10 million squared kilometers of forests – the area equal to the territory of the U.S. (or Canada, if you wish), 2/3 of the man-made emissions of CO2 since 1800 could be removed from the atmosphere (they apparently pre-decided that the elimination of 2/3 of a problem is a good plan). Planting a tree costs $0.30, they claim, and because one needs about one extra trillion of new trees (the number of trees would be increased by 1/3 in this project – they did use the same estimate of the number of trees in the world as I mentioned above), the total cost would be $300 billion. This is the overall amount, not an annual one.

So for $300B over 30 years we could eliminate the excess carbon dioxide that we've put into the atmosphere.  Even if this figure is off by an order of magnitude, this is a huge win compared with the $122 Trillion that the UN wants to "fight Climate Change".

Alas, planting forests does not allow the industrial scale graft that the UN has come to expect.

$10B/year is a bargain compared to what everyone else is talking about, and will give us a bunch of pretty forrest to hike in.  I can't see how anyone can possibly oppose this, unless they're a bunch of statist pricks trying to boss everyone around.

A note to President Trump: it would be awesome if you started referring to her as "Snippi Longstockings", amirite?

UPDATE 25 January 2020 08:31: Courtesy of Aesop in the comments, LOL:

OK, this is just funny

pic.twitter.com/6aaE87l6iH

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) December 26, 2019

Is this a Global Crisis?

Then maybe we should consult with a child activist on what to do.

Or maybe not ...

Tab clearing

Lots going on and so I don't have time to flesh these out much, but still worth your time:

German farmers block roads in Germany protesting environmental laws.

Everywhere it seems that the public is rebelling against the Greens, who seemingly cannot regulate their demands to the "moderately sane" level and appear determined to ruin everyone's lives.  Protests in Chile and in the UK and The Netherlands are really an inversion of 1970s and 1980s radicalism - now it's the "revolutionaries" that have triggered mass, spontaneous protests.  File this under "Environmentalists are stupid and everyone hates them now."

Hilarious retro computer goofs.

A simple typing mistake led to an IBM S/370 mainframe getting wiped out, and IBM coding a check to prevent this from happening again.  That story reminded me of how Back In The Day we took our security scanner to a Big Government Agency to test it.  The scanner excelled at guessing usernames and passwords (this was back in the day before the operating system stopped you from trying eleventy million passwords).  There was a big row of Unix servers in the data center; some Einstein had wanted to be able to remotely shut them down without having to walk all the way to the room and so had set up accounts with a username of "SHUTDOWN" a password of "SHUTDOWN" and which executed the login shell /sbin/shutdown.  As the consoles all started flashing the message "THE SYSTEM IS GOING DOWN IMMEDIATELY", one after another, the wide-eyed Admin said something along the lines of "Make it stop! Make it stop!"  Good times, good times.

It's been ten years since ClimateGate and climate science is worse now than it was then:

Scientists on the ‘warm’ side of the spectrum think that IPCC is old hat and too conservative/cautious (see esp Naomi Oreskes’ new book); in short, insufficiently alarming.  The ‘alarmed’ scientists are focused on attributing extreme weather to AGW (heeding Steve Schneider’s ‘wisdom’), and also in generating implausible scenarios of huge amounts of sea level rise. As a result, consensus of the 97% is less frequently invoked.

Such alarmism by the climate scientists has spawned doomsterism, to the dismay of these same climate scientists – things are so bad that we are all doomed, so why should we bother.

This is kind of depressing and is really a eulogy for Science in today's society.

Today is the 154th anniversary of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.  I covered that here.  Propaganda isn't just a recent phenomenon.  It was par for the course with "Honest Abe", which is why he is undoubtably the worst President in this Republic's history.  Of course, the history of that war as it's taught today is retarded.

And after all this (mostly) bad news, here's a palate sweetener courtesy of Gorges: