Climate Change a Layman’s perspective

 

 

 

Climate Change, Global Warming, Climate Emergency or whatever name it has been given by all those in this cult-like movement, it seems since 2007 it’s all we seem to be bombarded with. We are continuously being told the science is settled and that this is one of the greatest challenges  mankind faces. To reinforce this apparently, the world will be ending in twelve short years after enduring worldwide disasters culminating in some Extinction Level Event in twelve years. WE ARE DOOMED!

On the news, in our papers and via our social media we are inundated with claim and counterclaim, you can either embrace it or ignore it and get on with life. Since 2007 and the election of the Rudd government it has become impossible to ignore as power prices have skyrocketed with much of it due to government policy and subsidies of renewable energy.

As a layman, it can be difficult to follow, but at the same time after appropriate reflection and research any layman can sense something is either fake or real. Forget the talk about the “science is settled” in or the discredited “97% of scientists agree that global warming is real and humans are responsible for it”. These talking points are repeated Ad nauseam in the media all the time. Fortunately in today’s environment of the internet and social media it eminently possible to follow these issues, research the arguments and data, follow previous predictions, look beyond the five-second grabs used by mainstream media and as a layman make up your own mind.

The worst thing you can do is listen to the ridiculous propaganda put about many of our politicians as well as many in our media. Those in our media who don’t investigate and question many of these exaggerated claims should be held to account for their failure to their profession. Due to this failure, nations across the globe have spent hundreds of billions on initiatives from the fundamentally flawed Paris agreement. The authors of this document either had ulterior motives or are simply incompetent in providing a workable solution to the problem they were dealing with.

What genuine world problems could those billions have ultimately solved?

Bill Gates, one of the smartest people on the planet blew holes right through this thinking in an interview at Stanford University late last year. Declaring that nuclear power had an important role to play in any endeavours to reduce CO2 emissions and providing increased supply to growing energy demands. Gates also slammed Wall St thinking as unrealistic and most damningly refers to what I would call the climate alarmists groups in the following manner, –  “The ‘climate is easy to solve’ group is our biggest problem.” (watch the full interview here)

I couldn’t agree more!

Climate change was originally framed as Global warming but in the past few years, much of the globe has experienced record cooling which has continued early this winter season in the northern hemisphere. France, for example, experiencing its coldest May morning since 1979.

Earlier this year climate alarmists and zealots became excited when Britain went a week without coal contributing power to their grid. Conveniently those some zealots ignored the fact that key contributors that week were Nuclear power at 20.8% and Gas at 40.4% both sources that these groups are vehemently opposed to, especially here in Australia. Another factor was that demands on the power grid that week in Britain was low.

This year the polarisation of this issue was demonstrated when a split occurred amongst Europe’s twenty-eight nations with eight of them in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Portugal and Luxembourg all calling for the commitment of at least 25% of European spending to be committed to greater action to combat climate change. They also want to raise their emissions targets to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Powerhouse Germany, Poland, Italy and a number of eastern European nations have so far baulked at this due to concerns about impacts on their industries and energy provisions to their respective grids due to their reliance on coal energy.

 Meanwhile, in Australia, throughout our federal election saw our major parties, the greens and so-called independents all parroting from the same talking points with varying degrees of insanity. The Greens are the greens with policies that would destroy our economy if they ever were let loose upon it. The so-called independents fell in line right behind them. The LNP coalition government lacked the intestinal fortitude to cast themselves outside political correctness and instead of giving an alternative to the climate alarmists simply repeat the same talking points but just with less madness in their policy platform making them look the sane group in the insane asylum of climate extremism.

Bill Shorten and the ALP, however, decided to go down the rabbit warren of economic sabotage in a vain and naive attempt to reduce world emissions and save the planet and humanity from a perceived catastrophe despite knowing the countries of the world that really matter in this endeavour aren’t that interested. Through the Australian election campaign, Bill Shorten insulted anybody who disagreed with his climate plans as “cave-dwellers” and  “knuckle draggers” and then in the space of a week he accused opponents of his policies of being dumb, then dishonest before finishing by describing them as charlatans.

Maybe Mr Shorten should have been more careful in his choice of words. According to the Oxford dictionary, Charlatan’s meaning is “A person falsely claiming to have special knowledge or skill” or in other words a con man. With Shorten not able or willing to provide costing details on his climate policy and struggling with details surrounding his electric car proposal the charlatan adjective sat snuggly with his persona. The Australian voting public saw straight through him.

While the climate alarmists love using current events such as fires, floods, cyclones etc to push their agenda it’s always curious to me how they seem to ignore historical facts that are inconvenient to their argument. Alarmists continually argue about global temperatures rising but recently I came across a tweet comparing the temperature on the same day in New York 89 years apart. in 1920 on May 8th, New York was suffering a spring heatwave with the temperature rising to 87 degrees Farenheight resulting in the deaths of five people. This year on the same day it was at 59 degrees Farenhieght with no heatwave in sight. Anybody can cherry-pick historical figures to support an argument.

One thing that is indisputable is that whatever we do here in Australia makes next to no difference to world emissions and unless the world’s biggest emitters come on board in the very near future, everything we do is  nothing more than virtue signalling that hurts our economy, loses jobs overseas and makes our cost of living that much higher in a country whose population has and should enjoy some of the best standards of living at the best value for money in the world.

Alan Jones on SkyNews demonstrated brilliantly (below) how little an impact Australia can have on world emissions and how by taking overzealous action in this country, it would amount to nothing more than an act of self-sabotage on our nation and it’s people. This should be a must-watch for all Australians, especially our students who are shamefully being used as pawns by the climate cult in this campaign. The point Alan Jones makes in this video had already been conceded by Australia’s chief scientist Alan Finkel when being questioned by Ian Macdonald at a Senate Estimates hearing on 1 June 2017.

Considering the massive ramifications for the country any expensive climate change policy could have, you would hope that journalists in the mainstream media would give these Climate alarmists the interrogation required so we can ensure whatever investments, expense and sacrifices we make would ultimately benefit Australia and our future generations. Instead many of them seem to be cheerleaders for the cause and simply put forth the alarmists talking points for them. A great example of this was during the federal elections final leader’s debate at the National Press Club when Sabra Lan made the claim in one of her questions that Climate Change has made Cyclones more intense.

This goes totally against data on the Bureau of Meteorology website. The graph below from that website clearly demonstrates what Sabra Lane claimed in her question was demonstrably false.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another aspect of renewable energy that is a contradiction to environmentalists is the damage they cause. Wind Turbines across the globe are killing birds, bats, insects etc at an alarming rate while consuming vast areas of landmass.  In Germany, for example, their revolutionary Energiewende initiative is not only not meeting its objectives but it is threatening endangered species of birds and bats. Under the German climate protection plan one turbine every 2.7 km on average is t be erected all over Germany, each one 200 m tall, without regard for landscapes, lakes, mountains, forests or cities. Weren’t the Greens all about protecting our wildlife, forests and rivers? Have they given up on these principles pursuing this Climate alarmism?

The fact is that renewables cannot power modern society and will always need fossil fuels to ensure supply at peak demand. In a recent article in Forbes they covered the impacts of Germany’s renewables energy transition, the Energiewende which was supposed to be a model for the world to follow, but only last year Germany had to pause their phase-out of coal power stations and concede that they wouldn’t meet their 2020 Paris targets. The cost of this has been enormous with Germany spending $36 Billion annually over the past five years and if they are to meet intended goals by 2050 of 100% renewable power generation it is estimated that it will cost the country a staggering $3.8 trillion. Naturally, this is now encountering increasing resistance from the German public, especially in the countryside. Overrun by 30,000 wind turbines, rural Germans are on the brink of revolt, with over 1,000 groups determined to win back their heartland. To top things off Germans now enjoy the highest electricity prices in Europe.

This is a timely warning to Australians and citizens worldwide considering electing governments who lean to this sort of climate policy platform.

Another factor in the Climate Change debate is the continued use of “world ending” alarmism used by Climate Change proponents. Rather than engaging in a reasoned debate, they seemed more concerned with portraying opponents as prehistoric cave dwellers and engage in hyperbole when making catastrophic predictions about inaction on climate change/global warming and the worlds Co2 emissions.

This has been consistent behaviour from environmentalists for some time now. Australian Greens leader Richard Di Natale on a Q and A program before the election chimed in with the nonsense that the survival of the human species was under threat due to climate change. It went unchallenged by the show’s host. There is no scientific proof of the human race being under threat due to climate change. In fact, the climate has been changing since the beginning of time and humans and many other species have survived such changes.

Another example of this sort of hyperbole was a recent United Nations global assessment which claimed one million animal and plant species are at risk of extinction, many within decades. A recent twitter thread from Bjorn Lomborg brilliantly demonstrated the nonsense of this alarmism when he produced articles from as far back as the eighties declaring similar doomsday predictions that have never become reality. In Australia, Tim Flannery did the cause no good whatsoever when he made a series of dramatic predictions that proved to be totally baseless and for the Australian taxpayer, extremely expensive. An example of this was when at the height of drought conditions he preached that global warming would cause permanent drought in Australia, “so even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and river systems …” This lead to the construction of salination plants across Australia which have become monuments to stupidity as the country’s dams did indeed fill once droughts broke and rains and floods came.

(For more of Flannery’s false prophecies and background or rather lack of click here.)

In fact, there is evidence that far from being a destructive world-ending event, rising Co2 levels in our atmosphere are actually greening the planet leading to record crop growths. Carbon dioxide is a vital element for plant life through photosynthesis. This data comes from none other than NASA through satellite data and a team of 32 authors. NASA even released a YouTube video that almost exactly mirrors the message natural news has been advocating for years. The video is entitled, “Rising CO2 levels greening Earth”:

Another demonstration of fraud from our alarmist friends is the claim constantly put about that the science is settled due to 97% of climate scientists agreeing that most of the global warming is a result of human activity. This statement has proven to be fraudulent some time ago. There are plenty of scientists that don’t agree with this theory, many are listed in Wikipedia. To source articles detailing how this 97% consensus number is conflated click here. In America you can go to http://www.petitionproject.org/, where 31,497 American scientists (including 9029) have signed a petition stating – ‘The purpose of the Petition Project is to demonstrate that the claim of “settled science” and an overwhelming “consensus” in favour of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming and consequent climatological damage is wrong. No such consensus or settled science exists. As indicated by the petition text and signatory list, a very large number of American scientists reject this hypothesis.’

It now seems that this 97% consensus has become so discredited that the climate change/global warming movement have jettisoned scientists and resorted to indoctrinating and manipulating our youth. There have been many factually incorrect claims made by our youth through our media that have obviously been hammered into them by unethical adults. Even the mother of Greta Thunberg, the child leader of this youth movement, claims her daughter “can see carbon dioxide with the naked eye. She sees how it flows out of chimneys and changes the atmosphere in a landfill.” That’s one amazing girl! All credibility should have been lost right there, but no, they will keep pushing out this child until she is of no use any more, probably when she turns twenty and realises she has been used as a puppet for a corrupt cause.

While this alarmism has been around for decades in differing forms, it really gained momentum  since the release of the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” featuring failed USA presidential candidate Al Gore in 2006. Since then there has been a cult-like movement for the world to dump fossil fuels and embrace renewable energy. The only issue is that no modern society can be powered fully by renewable energy and it’s not even close. In fact, since the release of that film, it’s makers have had to face up to the inconvenient facts that most of their dire predictions simply haven’t eventuated. Not only are our polar gaps not disappearing, they are growing in size, polar bears are not facing extinction but are instead enjoying record numbers in their populations.

Satellite data are not showing the predicted warming nor the sea level rises predicted in the film, in fact, temperatures over the last twenty years have flattened out, with many now expecting a cooling period rather than a warming one.

 Greenpeace co-founder and scientist, Patrick Moore, you know one of the people our political leaders keep telling us we need to believe, is also an inconvenient voice. He is adamant this climate alarmism is nothing more than a hoax to line the pockets of many of the people and corporates pushing the cause. In just following his twitter feed you gain access to a plethora of stats, reports and arguments against the alarmists and their agenda.

Mr Moore through his tweets provides convincing arguments from both himself and others about our polar ice caps and how they are not disappearing despite Al Gore predicting that the North Pole would be ice-free by 2013. Patrick also tweeted a link to a NASA report sighting a drop in global temperatures over the past two years and he provided a link to a paper outlining the history of the world’s glacial periods which makes interesting reading. Patrick is simply a great resource for anybody wanting to research this issue rather than taking the word of potentially corrupt politicians, bureaucrats, journalists and vested interests.

Patrick isn’t the only one and the more you delve into this the more you can discover revealing information such as this tweet about sea level rises in the USA, or sea-level rises that aren’t happening.

 Another contentious point in the whole climate change debate is the demonisation of Co2 as a pollutant when its, in fact, a vital element for life on the planet. Many argue that instead of it being a problem it has actually enabled the greening of parts of the planet that hadn’t experienced it for some time. This greening leads to a greater ability to produce plants and plant food to enable a greater ability to feed an ever-growing world population. An enlightening article on this was published in Canada’s Ontarios Landowners website back in 2016. This article provides several facts about Co2 and their opinion on Climate Change alarmism.

The hypocrisy of those pushing the climate alarmist gospel was exposed in our (Australia’s) most recent federal election when Zali Steggal, the so-called independent candidate for Warringah used the Climate Change mantra to unseat former Prime Minister Tony Abbott. Alarmingly in a public debate amongst candidates for this seat, Steggall admitted that despite pushing the alarmist mantra on Global warming she did not have solar panels on her house’s roof and she still drove a gas-guzzling four-wheel drive on City streets. Just like Al Gore, it is this hypocrisy of elites lecturing ordinary citizens of the sacrifices they need to make while not making those sacrifices themselves. They wonder why they have no credibility.

Even worse is the alarmists use of children to guilt the wider population into taking action while bullying those who are sceptical into not speaking out about their scepticism.  During the Australian election campaign and again in Warringah an example of this indoctrination was there for all to see when young girls were hysterical on our television screens just thinking that the world is going to end due to the climate change.

One of these girls interviewed by the media, Estella Brasier, who descended into tears during the interview, was also photographed at a Zali Steggal’s campaign function wearing one of Zali’s campaign T-shirts. To take from our children their natural optimism and replace it with nightmare fears of an extinction-level event for agendas that are motivated by reasons of political and self-interest is nothing short of shameful. I would contend that in pushing this alarmism and in many instances hysterical narrative onto our youngest and most innocent borders on abuse.

Another double standard is that of the greens and their continued mantra of catastrophic global warming overtaking their concerns for wildlife and the environment. Renewable wind turbines not only require vast swathes of land to erect but also are taking a huge toll worldwide on birdlife and insects, in many instances some of our most precious and endangered.

 A new study published this year claims the 25,000 turbines in Germany on top of killing birds and bats are killing 1200 tons of insects per year. In the Altamont Pass in California, it is estimated that the wind farm located there kills between 880 and 1300 bird every year. This includes over 100 golden eagles, 300 hawks, 380 owls and a multitude of raptor species. There are plenty of more reports and data demonstrating the devastating impact on bird and insect wildlife that wind farms can have.

Recently in Australia, there were two incidents which demonstrated the total hypocrisy of the Climate Change proponents and their anti-coal mantra. The first incident was just before the Australian federal election when the anti-coal movement within the Queensland Labor government was using the future of the Black-Throated Finch to stall the go-ahead for the Adani coal mine project. In other words, birds don’t matter when wind farms are considered but they can be used as justification to stop a major coal mind project even when that particular bird isn’t endangered.

Even more recently a prominent Australian green politician and resident of Tasmania demonstrated a jaw-dropping double standard when he opposed a wind farm for his home state. This is the same man that led a convoy of climate change alarmists on a two-week drive up the east coast of Australia to try and stop the Adani mine project. This was a loud and clear statement from this hypocrite and his supporters “It’s a climate change emergency as long as it doesn’t affect my back yard.”

Can’t be much of an emergency. Just as hypocritically Brown and his ilk are opposed to one of the few industries that could ensure emission reduction in Nuclear power, despite Australia having all the natural attributes to develop an industry. Maybe Bob is just worried about becoming irrelevant.

Another fact that climate alarmists continue to ignore is that wind farms simply aren’t possible to construct without a viable mining industry. A two-megawatt windmill contains 260 tonnes of steel requiring 170 tonnes of coking coal and 300 tonnes of iron ore, all mined, transported and produced by hydrocarbons. According to an essay written by scientist David Hughes published in 2009, “a poorly located turbine could spin until it falls apart and never generate as much energy as was invested in building it.”

Again Alan Jones, love him or hate, breaks down the issues with turbines into a brilliantly simple critique.

Another cause of concern by alarmists is the impact of rising sea levels, especially on pacific island nations, where major industrial nations are put on the proverbial guilt trip to invest billions to save them. However, as this National Geographic article demonstrates many pacific islands and atolls are in fact growing not shrinking. The article covers a growing body of evidence amassed by New Zealand coastal geomorphologist Paul Kench, of the University of Auckland’s School of Environment, and colleagues in Australia and Fiji, who have been studying how reef islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans respond to rising sea levels.

Another highly credentialled New Zealand scientist, the recently deceased, Dr David Kear who has been publishing on sea levels since the 1950s stated in a 2013 report that “Our Earth’s climate is highly variable, and records show clearly that it always has been so. Animals and plants have had no option but to accept what comes and to adapt life in ways that suit best. Evolution gave some help by introducing “the Survival of the Fittest” 

In other words, the world’s climate is always changing as are the world’s ocean temperatures and sea levels. pacific island and atolls will evolve and adapt.

Dr Kear continues in this report with this statement

“Innocents in politics and the media were badly misled. They gladly supported projects to combat the non-existent threat of Global-Warming-Climate-Change. The projects were unnecessary because there was no threat; extremely costly in money time and effort; full of praise where ridicule was deserved misleading about benefits & options; and above all diversionary away from today’s real problems.”

I am not sure if he is being generous to call these people “innocents”, but I agree with his point that the proponents of climate change were deserving of ridicule to debunk this theory.

Another part of his report I am in total agreement with is how alarmists have convinced so many that a vital gas in co2 has been turned into a pollutant.

“Perhaps the saddest part has been that the essential and innocent gas, carbon dioxide, has been demonised and criminalised. It is essential in creating plant growth using chlorophyll and photosynthesis. It is thus essential for our very existence. Crops grow better in a CO2-enriched and warmer atmosphere when heated by an old-fashioned vertical kerosene heater. It gives off “carbon emissions” that are valuable to us all.”

In his report, Dr Kear challenges us all

“When will citizens revolt effectively against such callous disregard for their observations and wishes, by those who are essentially their elected employees? When will the perpetrators examine the basis of their ideology, and realise that it’s based on unfounded unscientific beliefs, not on confirmed, widely-available investigations by real scientists who abide by the moral standards of their profession?”

We are always told to listen to the scientist, well here is one making imminent sense that we all should listen to. Disappointingly this report was published back in 2013, one wonders what Dr Kear would think about the declarations of climate emergencies across the globe and the push to spend potentially trillions more on what he describes as the “non-existent threat of Global-Warming-Climate-Change.”

In Australia, we dodged a bullet when quiet Australians opted not to vote in a Bill Shorten Labour government that was promising to introduce a climate policy that would cost Australia $264 billion. However, we still have a Scott Morrison conservative government that remains committed to the Paris accord and spending our money, hand over fist, on claims that the science is settled when it is anything but. Citizens across the globe need to take up Dr Kear’s challenge and look past the simplistic media headlines and political talking points.

For me, a layman in scientific terms, the fact is that since the early eighties of the last century, claim after claim has not come to fruition from the numerous catastrophic prophecies of climate snake oil salesman like Al Gore and Tim Flannery. This alone has made me look into this climate change complex even more and from that research, there is enough to encourage in me more than a healthy dose of scepticism and encourage me to protest on behalf of our future generations before we bequeath them with a generational debt they may never recover from.

I encourage everybody to simply not just accept the talking points, the headlines, the five-second grabs, the school children protests designed to guilt us all into action that is not necessary. If the argument were more about making the environment better and the earth a cleaner healthier place then I would be all in on that, but we can achieve that without the fear, the expense or the sacrifice being demanded by many who have been indoctrinated into on way of thinking.

 

 

 

 

 

Be the first to comment on "Climate Change a Layman’s perspective"

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published.

*