Editor’s Note: Climate realists such as I and the other scholars at or associated with The Heartland Institute have long pointed out the policies promoted by climate crisis believers will hurt the average person the most. Carbon taxes and Green New Deal programs necessarily raise energy prices to restrict its use, which disproportionately affects the elderly, minorities, the poor, and those on fixed incomes the most, because they spend a higher portion of their incomes on energy and energy-intensive products such as food, than the relatively wealthy.
While elites like John Kerry and Leonardo DiCaprio fly around the world on private jets to accept awards for their climate piety, average people are told to stay home, not drive or fly, and most of all, not complain: their sacrifice, after all, is necessary to save the planet. I and others like me have been repeatedly slammed by mainstream media outlets and self-appointed climate czars who say we are lying about the effects of their policies on Joe Six Pack and Jane Soccer Mom, but they are the ones lying, and, as explored in this week’s lead essay by guest author Kira Davis, the truth is leaking out.
Guest author Kira Davis is a freelance writer and editor-at-large for RedState. She is also a regular guest host at KABC radio in Los Angeles, and Davis’ podcasts—”Just Listen to Yourself” and The Kira Davis Show—are heard by hundreds of thousands of listeners across the country and around the world. This article originally appeared on RedState and is reprinted with permission.
— H. Sterling Burnett
The progressive crowd has been saying the quiet part out loud quite a bit lately.
Time magazine released an article on Thursday extolling the praises of a shadowy cabal of industry higher-ups who conspired to manipulate the election and oust Donald Trump.
The article shocked a lot of people for its brazenness. Mere days earlier, conservative outlets—including our own—were subject to page removals, suspensions, and outright bans for even suggesting such a thing.
In yet another stunning “quiet part out loud” moment, a New England government official revealed the left’s endgame in fighting the climate, in an online meeting he assumed would remain private. Massachusetts Undersecretary for Climate Change David Ismay participated in a meeting with the Vermont Climate Council back in January, where he admitted that when it comes to the big climate “offenders” in their region, there are no bad guys left to break. Ismay went on to say that now the only ones left to “break” are the people:
I know one thing that we found in our analysis is that 60 percent of our emissions come from—as I have it, started to say you and me, except you guys are in Vermont—60 percent of our emissions come from residential heating and passenger vehicles. Let me say that again …60 percent of our emissions that need to be reduced come from you, the person on your street, the senior on fixed-income. Right now there is no bad guy left, at least in Massachusetts, to point the finger at and turn the screws on and [to] break their will so they stop emitting. That’s you. We have to break your will.
If you are shocked that a public official would not only admit out loud that they happily broke the back of a job-producing industry in their state, but that they now need to break the back of the average American, you’re not alone. Ismay himself seemed surprised at the words coming out of his mouth, and in a stunning admission told attendees that he knew that was not something he could say out loud in public, saying “I can’t even say that publicly.”
Herein lies the problem with climate policy specifically and progressivism in general. Everyone is on board as long as the “big guys” are getting screwed. What the public at large does not know is that progressive government has no intention of stopping at the big guy. They know that small business and the middle class make up the majority of American life, currently. They know that any significant change to American life must be done on the backs of those people. This is the terrifying truth that they dare not utter out loud, because even they know they are advocating for more poverty, more struggle, and less prosperity for the people who pay their salaries.
This is the rub of every left-wing policy versus right-wing criticism. The left claims it is for “the people” and for justice, to even the playing field. When the right points out that it will be “the people” who will have to suffer more poverty and more oppression, they are labeled as liars or idiots.
Well, here is a government official saying the quiet part out loud. Here is a paid servant of the people admitting that the Right has been right all along. The endgame is complete capitulation and the oppression of the notions and desires of the voters. Poor people don’t matter. Small business doesn’t matter. Even as all these people are surely using walls, and insulation, and heat, and electricity, they simultaneously are plotting to make sure no one else has those privileges.
The issue isn’t climate change. The issue is changing human nature, and under our Constitution, no man has the right to force changes upon our free will. If people vote for heat it’s because they like being warm in the winter. The will of the voter is intended to be the most powerful voice in the nation. As with the Time article, here we see unabashed, admitted proof that there is a concerted effort to circumvent the will of voters.
These people despise the existence of anyone outside their elitist bubbles. That’s all you need to know.
SOURCE: RedState
IN THIS ISSUE …
DATA ‘FALSIFIES’ CLIMATE EMERGENCY CLAIMS … POPULATION DENSITY CORRUPTING U.S. TEMPERATURE RECORDS … CHINA FAR OUTPACING OTHER COUNTRIES IN COAL POWER CONSTRUCTION … IN CHINA, WARMING CAME BEFORE CARBON DIOXIDE EMISSIONS INCREASED
DATA ‘FALSIFIES’ CLIMATE EMERGENCY CLAIMS
New research published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation after examining vast collections of observed, measured data concludes the evidence does not support claims climate change poses environmental doom or an existential threat to humanity.
“Almost everywhere you look, climate change is having only small, and often benign, impacts,” writes study author Indur Goklany, Ph.D. “The impact of extreme weather events—hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and droughts—are, if anything, declining. Economic damages have declined as a fraction of global GDP. Death rates from such events have declined by 99 percent since the 1920s. Climate-related disease has collapsed. And more people die from cold than warm temperatures.”
In an evidence-driven study, Goklany reports real-world data shows deaths from disease, floods, hurricanes, wildfires, and other natural disasters have declined substantially during the recent period of modest warming, while food production has increased, all of which is contrary to climate model projections.
Goklany also counters claims sea level rise is accelerating because of climate change, citing historic maps and satellite imagery that demonstrate coastlines and islands have, on average, gained more shoreline and land than has been lost to rising seas.
“A recent study showed that the Earth has actually gained more land in coastal areas in the last 30 years than it has lost through sea-level rise,” Goklany writes. “We now know for sure that coral atolls aren’t disappearing and even Bangladesh is gaining more land through siltation than it is losing through rising seas.’
SOURCES: Climate Change Dispatch; Global Warming Policy Foundation
POPULATION DENSITY CORRUPTING U.S. TEMPERATURE RECORDS
Examining a dataset maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Roy Spencer, Ph.D., principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (formerly the senior scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center), has confirmed the Urban Heat Island effect is compromising datasets of measured temperatures, skewing the results higher.
Adjusting for population density, Spencer found weather stations used to measure climate trends report lower long-term temperature trends. Spencer writes,
[T]he highest population density stations had ~0.25 C/decade warming trend, with a reduced warming trend as population density was reduced. … Significantly, extrapolating to zero population density would give essentially no warming in the United States during 1973-2011. … How can one explain this result other than, at least for the period 1973-2011, (1) spurious warming occurred at the higher population density stations, and (2) the evidence supports essentially no warming if there were no people (zero population density) to modify the microclimate around thermometer sites?
Spencer’s research confirms what many other scholars—such as Antony Watts and James Goodridge—have demonstrated and NOAA has quietly acknowledged. In the words of Watts, “greater population density affects long-term temperature trends. This Urban Heat Island effect (UHI) has been identified and proven time and again, yet official government temperature record-keepers don’t want to acknowledge or properly address the issue.”
SOURCES: Climate Realism; Dr. Roy Spencer; The Heartland Institute; Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society; Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology
CHINA FAR OUTPACING OTHER COUNTRIES IN COAL POWER CONSTRUCTION
China’s energy policy actions continue to belie its commitments to fight supposed human-caused climate change.
Despite China President Xi Jinping’s pledge to make the country “carbon neutral” by 2060, China built significant numbers of coal-fueled power plants in 2020 and every other year since the 2015 Paris climate agreement was inked. A report from the U.S. think tank Global Energy Monitor (GEM) and the Finland-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CRECA) found in 2020 alone China added 38.4 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-fueled electric power generation. By comparison, elsewhere in the world the use of coal to generate electricity declined by 17.2 GW. In 2020, China added 300 percent more coal-powered electricity generation than was constructed across the rest of the world combined.
In addition to the coal-fueled power plants China brought on line in 2020, China’s national and local governments also approved the construction of an additional 36.9 GW of coal-fueled power, triple the amount of coal capacity the government approved in 2019. In total, GEM and CRECA calculate there is 247 GW of coal power under construction in China alone, an amount sufficient to power Germany. This does not include the coal-fueled power plants China is building in Africa and Asia as part of its “Belt and Road” initiative.
Modern coal-fueled power plants have useful operating lives of 40 to 80 years or more. As a result, unless the Chinese Communist Party is willing to shutter hundreds of billions of dollars of efficient coal-powered electricity-generating assets prematurely, it is difficult to see how China will peak its carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 as it said it would do under the Paris climate agreement, much less become carbon-neutral by 2060.
SOURCE: Reuters
IN CHINA, WARMING CAME BEFORE CARBON DIOXIDE EMISSIONS INCREASED
New research published in the journal Quaternary Sciences indicates China began experiencing rising temperatures before humans emitted any significant amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In other words, the effect, warming, preceded the supposed cause, human greenhouse gas emissions.
The Paracel Island coral reefs are among largest living reefs in the Asia-Pacific region. The researchers sampled coral from areas in the Paracel Islands that have experienced minimal impact from human activities, providing a continuous climate record back to approximately 1520 A.D. The research team referenced two independent datasets developed using uranium dating technologies to track the corals’ responses to changes in temperature. One dataset they produced themselves. They sent a second sample to a laboratory in Australia for independent testing. The results were the same: the South China Sea was significantly cooler from 1500 through approximately 1825, when it began to warm. Since then, the region has warmed by approximately 2.3℃. The warming started just as the Industrial Revolution was getting underway, before human activities had added significant amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
This research confirms the findings of a 2016 study by an international team of scientists who examined climate records derived from coral skeletons, ice cores, tree rings, cave deposits, and ocean and lake sediments across the globe and found global warming started as early as the 1830s.
Instead of changing greenhouse gas concentrations correlating with rising temperatures, the Quaternary Sciences study shows fluctuations of temperature in the region since the 1500s have tracked with increases and decreases in solar activity. They also suggest a significant decrease in volcano activity recently recorded in the region may have contributed to the warming by reducing the amount of light-blocking particles in the atmosphere.
SOURCE: Yahoo News
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
