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climate-debate, energy and fields

Global Climate Summit Is Heading for a Geopolitical Hurricane

by M. Champion and S. El Wardany, Oct 23, 2022 in Bloomberg

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As Egypt prepares to stage COP27, the geopolitical context that shapes all international diplomacy has gone from tense to precarious. The war in Ukraine has divided nations over what some saw as a fight between Russian and Western interests, and supercharged an energy crisis that risks shredding COP26’s most concrete achievement: a global consensus to cut down on coal.

As COP26 approached, falling prices for renewable energy seemed to have forced a reckoning for the dirtiest of fossil fuels. The final text of the summit included calls for a “phasedown” of coal power from any plant that doesn’t capture its carbon and an end to “inefficient” subsidies for fossil fuel. A year later, rampant energy price inflation has combined with a protracted energy crunch to revive demand for coal and put subsidies for fuel of any kind back on political agendas.

“COP27 is to be convened while the international community is facing a financial and debt crisis, an energy-prices crisis, a food crisis, and on top of them the climate crises,” says Egyptian Foreign Affairs Minister Sameh Shoukry, who’s also the conference’s president. “In light of the current geopolitical situation, it seems that transition will take longer than anticipated.”

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climate-debate

‘Scam’: Former climate change alarmist says agenda has ‘no foundation’

by J. Summers, Oct 20, 2022 in LifeSite

(LifeSiteNews) — A former climate alarmist appeared on Laura Ingraham’s FOX Newsprogram las week, calling climate alarmism, the belief that the world will suffer catastrophically as a result of  man-made climate change or global warming, a “scam.” 

Tom Harris, Executive Director of the International Climate Science Coalition, an organization that seeks to promote a better understanding of climate science, toldIngraham that contrary to the mainstream position, there is not an impending climate crisis.  

“I was originally an aerospace engineer,” Harris began, “and I would give speeches, and I wrote articles. I wrote one in the Ottawa Citizen about comparative climatology, how studying the planets helps us understand the earth better. And I used the example of the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus. I said ‘This could happen on the earth, if we don’t reduce carbon dioxide!’”  

“A local professor at Carleton University, a professor of geology, he liked my article so much he used it in his course on climate change,” Harris continued. “But he said to the students, ‘But that part about Venus is wrong. What happened on Venus cannot physically happen on earth,’ and he explained why.” 

Harris claimed that the professor took him to his lab and showed him his findings, as well as those of other scientists, recounting “At times, [carbon dioxide] was 1300% of today, and we were stuck in very cold conditions. So it was all over the board. So I started wondering, ‘Well, maybe he’s right.’”

Harris also stated that the professor introduced him to people that showed him that thousands of scientists who disagree with the so-called “climate consensus,” shattering the proposition that most scientists believe in global warming.

Harris then brought out a book that dismantles the claims of thousands of articles about the climate crisis, showing that “there is no foundation” to the proposition. 

“Here’s a book actually that illustrates that, it’s called Climate Change Reconsidered, and this is on climatechangereconsidered.org,” Harris said. “There are thousands of references here which talk about the fact that there is no foundation to the climate scam. It’s all based on models that don’t work.” 

When asked by Ingraham if the science around climate and climate change was “settled science,” Harris answered in the negative.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

“It was an Ambush”: The Long Fight against Climate Deniers

by E. Worrall, Oct 22, 2022 in WUWT

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Read more: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/10/20/the-long-fight-against-climate-change-deniers

I’m not sure why Stott seems to think the Paris Agreement is such a success. The world is currently burning record amounts of coal, so I think we can safely add the Paris Agreement to the scrapheap of failed climate initiatives, regardless of political rhetoric.

As for Russia, Russians have likely been skeptical of Western climate science ever since Western scientists ignored Russian advice there was no evidence of unusual warming in the 20th century.

In 1998 scientist Rashit Hantemirov, of the Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology, Russian Academy of Sciences, tried to explain to Keith Briffa, who helped Michael Mann construct his iconic hockey stick, that the position of the polar timber line, the northern most point at which trees can grow, was the tree metric Russia uses for measuring historic changes in Arctic temperature. Hantemirov’s advice to Briffa was “… there are no evidences of moving polar timberline to the North during last century…“. That same polar timberline metric showed evidence of substantial movement during the medieval warm period, and other well documented historic warming and cooling events (Climategate email 0907975032.txt).

Western scientists seem to prefer tree rings – but even Mann’s colleagues admitted amongst themselves that tree rings are a questionable gauge of historic temperature. Climate scientist Tom Wigley wrote an email to Professor Michael Mann in 2003, in which he explained how his own son performed a high school science experiment which demonstrated Mann’s tree ring metric was likely measuring changes in precipitation rather than changes in temperature (Climategate 2 email 0682.txt).

We can only guess what Russian scientists thought of all this absurdity – but the evidence suggests they decided it was too funny watching Western climate scientists act like fools, to make a serious effort to interrupt the joke.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Phantom Forests: Why Ambitious Tree Planting Projects Are Failing

by Fred Pearce, Oct 6, 2022 in YaleEnvironment360

High-profile initiatives to plant millions of trees are being touted by governments around the world as major contributions to fighting climate change. But scientists say many of these projects are ill-conceived and poorly managed and often fail to grow any forests at all.

It was perhaps the most spectacular failed tree planting project ever. Certainly the fastest. On March 8, 2012, teams of village volunteers in Camarines Sur province on the Filipino island of Luzon sunk over a million mangrove seedlings into coastal mud in just an hour of frenzied activity. The governor declared it a resounding success for his continuing efforts to green the province. At a hasty ceremony on dry land, an official adjudicator from Guinness World Records declared that nobody had ever planted so many trees in such a short time and handed the governor a certificate proclaiming the world record. Plenty of headlines followed.

But look today at the coastline where most of the trees were planted. There is no sign of the mangroves that, after a decade of growth, should be close to maturity. An on-the-ground study published in 2020 by British mangrove restoration researcher Dominic Wodehouse, then of Bangor University in Wales, found that fewer than 2 percent of them had survived. The other 98 percent had died or were washed away.

“I walked, boated, and swam through this entire site. The survivors only managed to cling on because they were sheltered behind a sandbank at the mouth of a river. Everything else disappeared,” one mangrove rehabilitation expert wrote in a letter to the Guinness inspectors this year, which he shared with Yale Environment 360on the condition of anonymity. The outcome was “entirely predictable,” he wrote. The muddy planting sites were washed by storms and waves and were otherwise “ecologically unsuited to mangrove establishment, because they are too waterlogged and there is no oxygen for them to breathe.”

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