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Willie Soon speaks at the University of Chicago

by Andy May, Nov 20, 2022 in WUWT

Dr. Willie Soon gave a great presentation at the Federalist Society Chapter at the University of Chicago Law School on November 18, 2022. The title of his talk is:

“The Corruption of Environmental Rulemakings at the US EPA: Climate Change, Mercury Emissions, and Air Quality”

Willie Soon, 2022

Dr. Soon’s slide deck is excellent reading and he has kindly sent it to me, you can download it here. If you prefer to watch his presentation, you can do so on YouTube here. Soon’s presentation starts about 22:46 minutes into the video.

Soon’s key points:

  • Given the daily, seasonal, and annual range of temperatures around the Earth, the warming of the past 125 years is trivial.
  • Except for ENSO variations, the global average surface temperature has hardly changed in over 20 years.
  • Willie humorously dismantles the article on him in Wikipedia and Gavin Schmidt’s criticisms, these slides are worth the download!
  • Willie plugs the article he wrote with 23 co-authors entitled: “How much has the Sun influenced Northern Hemisphere Temperature trends? An ongoing debate.” Seriously, this is probably the best climate change article written in the last thirty years in my humble opinion, I refer to it all the time. The bibliography alone is worth it. If you never read another climate article in your life, you should read this one. Download it here.
  • He destroys the Mercury pollution nonsense that is permeating the media. Possible spoiler, don’t drink Coca Cola!
  • Is it air pollution or weather?

Finally, President Dwight Eisenhower’s warning about “public policy [becoming] the captive of a scientific-technological elite” was correct:

“It is time to face a hard truth: the seventy-year experiment to federalize the sciences has been a failure. The task now is to prevent the Big Science cartel from further dehumanizing society and delegitimizing science. There is a second hard truth: the necessary reforms will not come from within. Rather, it will be the people and their representatives that will have to impose them. To restore science to its rightful and valuable place, break up the Big Science cartel.”

(J. Scott Turner, Professor of Biology (emeritus), SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, December 10, 2021)

I wish I had said that.

 

climate-debate

COP27 Is A Downpayment On Disaster

by P. Homewood, Nov 20, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

As usual the BBC paints the latest COP as a “historic deal”!

Dust settling on the detail

After hours and hours of intense negotiations we finally have some outcomes from this years COP27.

The dust is still settling, but here is what we know so far.

  • Delegates who’ve been working through the night at the UN climate summit in Egypt have approved a major deal on helping poorer countries
  • They have agreed to set up a fund to pay for some of the loss and damage being inflicted by global warming
  • Many of the most controversial decisions on the fund have been kicked into next year when a “transitional committee” is expected to make recommendations for countries to then adopt at the COP28 next
    November
  • Those recommendations would cover “identifying and expanding sources of funding” – referring to the problematic question of which countries should pay into the new fund
  • The overarching agreement from the summit – called the “cover text” – does not raise ambition on reducing greenhouse gas emissions from what was agreed at the COP26 summit in Glasgow last year

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Although a fund has been agreed in principle, there is no agreement about how much is put in, or who pays. Crucially there is no agreement that countries like China, India and Russia will pay a penny. The agreement to set up the fund is meaningless without answers to these questions.

And there is also no agreement to reduce emissions beyond COP26 pledges. In particular developing countries are under no obligation whatsoever to reduce emissions, as a condition for receiving this money.

As WWF put it, the loss and damage fund will be a downpayment on disaster!

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