Econut O’ The Day – Page 11

Happy Groundhog Day!

Happy Groundhog Day Earth Day everybody! You can see how it is possible to confuse the two, since Earth Day is the same every year—we’re doomed unless you hand over complete power to the government to manage people and resources.

QED: On Earth Day 1970, CBS’s Walter Cronkite Panicked: ‘Act or Die!’

15 spectacularly stupid predictions from the first Earth Day

Keep these predictions in mind when you hear the same predictions made today. They’ve been making the same predictions for 51 years. And they’re going to continue making them until…well…forever, or until people finally get fed up enough with them and get out the tar and feathers, if not something more ‘permanent’.

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AOC Introduces a New and Improved Green New Deal.

With Representative Ocasio-Cortez reintroducing her Green New Deal bill and Joe Biden pledging to halve carbon emissions in the U.S. in less than 10 years, and after the “Climate Summit” goes virtual on April 22, America is going to be so green we’ll be mistaken for an artichoke.

There’s no time to lose. The earth is doomed unless we stop poisoning our atmosphere with the exhalation of so many politicians and world leaders. If they stopped and held their breath for a day or two, we’d be carbon neutral in a jiffy.

It’s too bad that’s not a real solution, but we’d at least be spared the ministrations of AOC and her climate police who are chomping at the bit to upend the lives of 300 million people.

“We’re going to transition to a 100 percent carbon free-economy, that is more unionized, more just, more dignified and guarantees more health care and housing than we ever have before,” Ocasio-Cortez said at a press conference overlooking the National Mall. “Do we intend on sending a message to the Biden administration that we need to go bigger and bolder? The answer is absolutely yes.”

If we’re more “dignified,” does that mean I have to wear a shirt around the house?

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This is an alternate tactic the gun grabbers have been trying for decades. Getting their econutz shills to sue to ban lead bullets and shot.

Judge Affirms Hunters Can Use Traditional Ammo in NRA Case

On April 1^st, a federal judge in Arizona sided with NRA-ILA and Safari Club International and held that hunters’ use of traditional ammo does not violate federal environmental law.

The case dates back to 2012, when a group sued the U.S. Forest Service. The group alleged that by allowing hunters to hunt with traditional lead ammo in the 1.6-million-acre Kaibab National Forest—which is authorized by Arizona state law—the Forest Service was violating the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. That Act was originally passed in 1976, to address the increasing amount of municipal and industrial waste that was being disposed of at the time. But over time, it has been used to attack gun owners and shooting ranges.

On April 1^st, the judge held that the Forest Service is not disposing any waste by allowing hunters to hunt in accordance with state laws. But the case had even bigger implications. The Plaintiff was asking the court to order the Forest Service regulate hunting. But the states own the wildlife, even while it is on federal lands. “Each national forest,” the judge said, “is required to cooperate with state wildlife agencies to allow hunting in ‘accordance with the requirements of State laws.”’ A ruling to the contrary would have given the federal government the authority to enter a field of regulation that belongs to the states on lands where hunting takes place. Those implications would be huge because 640-million acres (about twenty-eight percent of the country) is owned and managed by the federal government. Thankfully, the judge sided with NRA-ILA and Safari Club.

NRA-ILA will continue to protect the rights of hunters everywhere to use commonly owned and affordable ammunition to hunt and enjoy public lands.

The case is called Center for Biological Diversity v. United States Forest Service. The National Shooting Sports Foundation also intervened as a defendant in the case.

HOW MUCH HAS THE EARTH ACTUALLY WARMED?

Maybe the only good thing about covid hysteria is that it has, for a while, drowned out global warming hysteria. Still, many people have the impression that global temperatures have warmed alarmingly in recent decades. Unfortunately, there is no reliable record of surface temperatures for a number of reasons, including the fact that the activists who are in charge of the records keep changing them to promote the alarmist position.

But that is all right, since warming due to carbon dioxide doesn’t occur at the surface, it occurs in the atmosphere. The only reliable, unfudged record we have of global temperatures is the satellite record in the lower troposphere, which only goes back to 1979. This is the global temperature trend from then until now:

This means that “[t]he linear warming trend since January, 1979 remains at +0.14 C/decade (+0.12 C/decade over the global-averaged oceans, and +0.18 C/decade over global-averaged land).” In other words, at the warming rate that has prevailed since 1979–assuming it continues–the Earth’s average temperature would rise by one degree in 70 years.

How much of that is due to human activity, as opposed to natural variation (e.g., rebounding to normal temperatures after the Little Ice Age), no one knows.

Biden sued by 12 states over climate executive order: ‘Enormous expansion of federal regulatory power’
Lawsuit argues that Biden does not have the authority to set a ‘social cost’ for greenhouse gases

A coalition of 12 states is suing President Biden’s administration over a climate executive order that they claim has the potential to have a serious economic impact across the country through the expansion of federal regulatory power.

The suit, which is being led by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, was filed on Monday. State attorneys general from Arkansas, Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah also joined the action.

It alleges that Biden’s Executive Order 13990, titled “Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis,” does not have the authority to issue binding numbers for the “social cost” of greenhouse gases to be used in federal regulations.

The breakdown of the social costs shows $269 billion for carbon dioxide, $990 billion for methane, and $8.24 trillion for nitrous oxide – totaling approximately $9.5 trillion, according to the lawsuit, which cited interim values determined by an interagency working group that was created by Biden’s order.

Schmitt said that those potential regulations will stifle manufacturing and harm agriculture in Missouri, where state figures show that hundreds of thousands of people work in those industries.

“Under President Biden’s executive order, which he didn’t have the authority to enact, these hard-working Missourians who have lived and worked this land for generations, could be left in the dust,” Schmitt said in a written press release.

But the suit claims that the impact from the $9.5 trillion “social cost” of greenhouse gases will stretch farther than just Missouri.

“In practice, this enormous figure will be used to justify an equally enormous expansion of federal regulatory power that will intrude into every aspect of Americans’ lives— from their cars, to their refrigerators and homes, to their grocery and electric bills,” the suit states.

The lawsuit argues that Biden’s order does not have the authority to set values for the social costs of carbon, methane, and nitrous oxide that will be used by regulatory agencies.

“It will be used to inflict untold billions or trillions of dollars of damage to the U.S. economy for decades to come,” the suit states.

In claiming that Biden’s order cannot set these values, the suit claims that the action violates the separation of powers, “the most fundamental bulwark of liberty.”

BLUF:
The constant push for fascism from our corrupt, lickspittle media, such as the Los Angeles Times cited above, only exacerbates the situation. Without the media-driven madness surrounding the Wuhan flu, few ever would have noticed it. Without the airy-fairy theory of “global warming,” most sane people would have gone about their lives completely unaffected by the madness of others.

And, really, who would buy an electric car, except as a virtue-signalling status symbol? Only at gunpoint, I suspect.

On the Left, an Era of Fascist Magical Thinking.

The genius of the Left’s success in achieving their favored policy positions is found in their favorite tactic: first, posit a counter-factual [fancy speak for a bald faced lie ed.] and, second, act on it as if it were true — with maximum governmental force.

Examples abound: that men can transform themselves into biological women by simply wishing it to happen, and then can be protected — nay, favored — by a raft of new laws designed for their “protection.” That the real women are offtimes physically damaged by this malignant fantasy matters not one bit. After all, “rights” are more important that reality.

The mass hysteria over the nearly non-existent threat of Covid-19 to the great mass of humanity is another. Yes, Covid has been hell on morbidly obese people over the age of 85 (just about any illness is), but to shut down the world’s economies and, worse, political freedoms in order to protect “the most vulnerable among us” (in one of the Left’s favorite simpering phrases), was not only insane, it was evil.

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At What Point Do We Realize Bill Gates is Dangerously Insane?

“What this comes down to, though, is that Bill Gates has been so rich for so long that he’s spent the bulk of his adult life without anyone telling him he’s wrong”

This isn’t an overreaction to Gates’ latest foray into the news cycle. It’s an observation based on a long pattern of statements and behavior by the founder of Microsoft and one of the richest men who has ever lived which, were any of us normal people guilty of them, would result in our being institutionalized.

Bill Gates is crazy. And he’s dangerous, because he’s willing to put untold sums of money toward making the insane things he believes a reality – and all of those insane things hurt people.

The most recent idiocy? Impossible Burgers for all the white people.

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Favoring renewable energy over natural gas investment has led to the mess.

I’m writing from Texas, so I’ll try to finish this column before the electricity goes out.

As you may have heard, we’ve had an unusually powerful winter storm down here and, in spite of the fact that every third household has a four-wheel-drive super-duty pickup truck, Texas has come to a standstill. When a little bit of ice settled on the freeway, a half a dozen people lost their lives in the ensuing 135-car pileup.

Meanwhile, after years of mocking Californians for their self-imposed energy troubles, Texans are experiencing rolling blackouts — and a whole lot of blackouts that refuse to roll on but instead sit obstinately in place — because our power grid cannot keep up with the spike in demand.

As in California, Texas’s energy scarcity is largely artificial: The state produces an extraordinary amount of natural gas, but there has been a woeful underinvestment in infrastructure ranging from pipelines to winterizing equipment at utilities. You may as well not have the fuel at all if you can’t get it to where it’s needed or use it once it’s there.

What Texas has invested in is renewables, especially wind. These have performed especially poorly: The state’s electric-grid regulator reports that though wind and solar still make up a relatively small share of the state’s overall energy mix, they accounted for 40 percent of the capacity shut down by the storm: Out of the 45 gigawatts that went dark, 18 gigawatts were from wind and solar.

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Did Wind Power Fall Hard During the Great Texas Storm? Yep. Twice.

Texas is that rare state that has everything: oil, natural gas, coal, space for wind and solar, rare-earth minerals, great food, good-looking people, and abundant humility.

Maybe not that last one. And we haven’t had a Super Bowl champion in much too long a time.

Anyway, Friday morning I pulled electric power generation data by source from the United States Energy Information Administration. EIA is reputable and authoritative, to the extent that any government agency is. Insert shrug emoji if you wish. I mostly trust their data. It’s EIA’s data everyone cites when they, accurately, say the United States reduced carbon emissions faster than other developed nations and ahead of the Paris Accords targets over the past few years. EIA’s data attributes that to the rise of natural gas as a cheap, reliable, and clean power source. So you’ve probably trusted their data too, whether you were aware of it or not.

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They Made A Movie About This

BLUF:
As a species, we are not anywhere close to fully understanding the Earth’s incredibly complex climate system — or the extent of the role we humans play in it. And we certainly are not at a place where we need to scrap the efficient fossil-fuel energies that we know work in favor of “green energy” technologies that are not currently up to the task.

Unfortunately, Texas is currently finding that out the hard way

Severe Winter Weather Across Southern United States Blamed on Global Warming

In their frenzy to blame every bit of unusual weather on climate change (which used to be called global warming), climate alarmists have more than once claimed that the warming Earth can also cause hideous cold weather. Now, the horrendous wintry weather that’s been downing power lines and freezing windmills in Texas is being blamed on — you guessed it — global warming.

Today’s example of counterintuitive weather phenomenon comes from MIT climatologist Judah Cohen, who has been quick to attach the wintry weather in the southern United States to global warming. “The current conditions in Texas are historical, certainly generational,” said Cohen, who is also the director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research. “But this can’t be hand-waved away as if it’s entirely natural. This is happening not in spite of climate change, it’s in part due to climate change.”

Cohen was one of a slew of authors of a 2019 article linking a phenomenon known as Polar Amplification to extreme winter weather events. Polar Amplification — known in the northern hemisphere as Arctic Amplification — suggests that the polar areas of Earth are warming far quicker than mid-latitude and equatorial regions due to several reasons, a key one being the reported loss of sea ice, as open water reflects sunlight less than sea ice.

In a nutshell, the “out-of-control” warming of the polar regions supposedly causes big swings in the jet stream and also may weaken the so-called polar vortex, which allows extremely cold weather to escape further southward than usual. “The energy escaping from the jet stream bangs into the polar vortex so it starts to wobble and move all over the place,” Cohen said. “Where the polar vortex goes, so goes the cold air.”

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BLUF:
Green energy has its place. But it is NOT and should not be the only energy source we utilize. In fact it should be a minor energy source, nuclear anyone? If anything, this bout of Old Man Winter should be a lesson to us all. Wind and Solar will always lose against snow and ice.

Wind And Solar TKO’d By Ice And Snow

Wind and Solar suffered a crushing defeat this week at the hands of snow and ice. From the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf Coast and Eastern shores, the United States has been in the icy grip of Old Man Winter.

“Nearly half of Texas’ installed wind power generation capacity has been offline because of frozen wind turbines in West Texas, according to Texas grid operators.

Wind farms across the state generate up to a combined 25,100 megawatts of energy. But unusually moist winter conditions in West Texas brought on by the weekend’s freezing rain and historically low temperatures have iced many of those wind turbines to a halt.

As of Sunday morning, those iced turbines comprise 12,000 megawatts of Texas’ installed wind generation capacity, although those West Texas turbines don’t typically spin to their full generation capacity this time of year.”

Stop and think about that for a minute. The Biden Administration along with good ole Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Greta Thunberg are demanding that we move to wind, solar, and electric. They’d like us there as early as 2025.

Cue that thing we call WINTER. Here in the Rocky Mountain region we’ve had freezing temperatures for days. From here on east, it isn’t much better. Minnesota saw temps at -20 below, St. Louis is getting hammered at the moment and when you add snow with high humidity, you get icy unsafe driving conditions. Kansas City has been notified they’ll have to deal with rolling brownouts for at least two days, and people from Colorado, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and more are being told to conserve electricity.

“Platte River Power Authority’s call for customers to conserve energy on Sunday resulted from a perfect storm of energy supply issues, as extreme cold created a regional shortage of natural gas, ice and frigid temperatures restricted power from wind turbines and blankets of snow covered solar panels.”

But that doesn’t matter, right? Everyone should be fine. Right? I mean, we’ve got solar panels and wind turbines as our go-to…right?

Due to the extreme cold, ELECTRIC energy needs to be conserved. Isn’t one of the key Biden Administration platforms a move to all electric? Hmmmm. Now, let’s look elsewhere. HEY TEXAS!!

“About 2 million homes statewide were without power Monday as the Texas electric grid grappled with a diminished supply of energy in the face of the lowest temperatures the state has seen in three decades.”

Let’s talk about those wonderful wind turbines for a minute shall we? They look pretty interesting don’t they? How many times do you see 100% of a group of wind turbines turning? The answer is, you never will. Secondly, wind turbines shelf life is less than twenty years. In fact, a turbine is doing great if it makes it to fifteen. Thus, what do you do with obsolete turbines? Crush them using heavy diesel-powered equipment and fill land-fills with non-recyclable parts. That’s right. Wind turbines aren’t recyclable.

Think solar is much better? Can a panel be recycled? Yes, according to this article. No, and watch out for toxic chemicals according to this article.

Sure seems like green energy isn’t so green. Furthermore, green energy is no match for ice and snow as multiple states are dealing with blackouts and rolling brown-outs.

President Trump was right when he said, if wind quits, there goes your power grid.

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Bill Gates wants to take your steak: Billionaire says the US and other wealthy countries ‘should move to 100% synthetic beef’ to prevent climate change – after buying up a record amount of farmland in 18 states

Bill Gates said on Monday that he thinks the US should abandon eating beef
Called on the country to switch to ‘100% synthetic beef’ due to climate change
Beef cattle production employs 726,000 people across the country
Gates admitted in another interview that he sometimes eats real hamburgers
Last month Gates was revealed as the biggest private owner of farmland in US
The tech billionaire, 65, owns 242,000 acres of agricultural land in 18 states

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BLUF:
It is sad and ironic that in a state known for its huge petroleum and natural gas resources, the lack of reliability of wind power has brought the state to its knees in a time of crisis, not unlike that which California experienced in 2020 during record heat where wind and solar power could not keep up with demand and was near collapse.

The folly of chasing renewable energy as a means of mitigating “climate change” is making itself abundantly clear today in Texas. When will politicians wake up and realize that renewable energy almost always equates to unreliable energy?

Texas frozen wind power – outages ensue, electricity now at unheard of $9000 per megawatt-hour.

There’s a saying in the lone star state “Don’t Mess with Texas” which actually started out as an anti-littering campaign but has become sort of a slogan for the rugged, no-nonsense way of life that people have there. Now with dead wind turbines littering the state, the focus on deploying unreliable renewable energy in the name of “saving the planet” has literally “messed with Texas” in a huge way.

Ice storms knocked out nearly half the wind-power generating capacity of Texas on Sunday as a massive deep freeze across the state locked up wind turbine generators, creating an electricity generation crisis.

Wind generation ranks as the second-largest source of energy in Texas, accounting for 23% of state power supplies last year, behind natural gas, which represented 45%, according to Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) figures.

ERCOT reports today the spot price for electricity in Texas is currently a stunning $9000 per MegaWatt-hour. Even in the high demand summer months, $100 per MW-hr would be high.

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Bill Gates: How the world can avoid a climate disaster.
—CBS News, February 15th.

Bill Gates Joins Private-Equity Firms in $4.7 Billion Deal for Private-Jet Company. —The Wall Street Journal, February 5th.

I’ll start considering that ‘climate change’ might possibly be a real problem when the people who tell me it’s a problem start living their own lives like it’s a real problem.

My question is: Why didn’t the Goobernor fire him the day after this wanna-be tyrant opened his yap?

EMBATTLED MASSACHUSETTS CLIMATE OFFICIAL DAVID ISMAY RESIGNS ‘IMMEDIATELY:’

David Ismay, the Baker administration $130,000-a-year climate change undersecretary, has resigned “immediately” citing his incendiary comments.

In a resignation letter he shared with the Herald today, Ismay writes: “It is with great regret that I submit my resignation, effectively immediately, from the position of Undersecretary for Climate Change in the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs.”

The resignation letter is addressed to his boss, Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs Kathleen Theoharides, and is dated Wednesday, Feb. 10.

Ismay heads out the door after a series of questionable comments about forcing homeowners, motorists and fishermen to prepare for hard times as the state pushes for so-called Net Zero emissions in the years to come.

Even Gov. Charlie Baker bristled at Ismay’s rhetoric, saying the undersecretary does not speak for him.

Ismay laded on the hot seat after MassFiscal posted a video of the undersecretary saying the state needs to “break their will” and “turn the screws on” ordinary people to force changes in their consumption of heating fuels and gasoline. Ismay described the ordinary people as the “person across the street” and the “senior on fixed income.”

That didn’t sit well with the governor.

“First of all, no one who works in our administration should ever say or think anything like that — ever,” Baker said late last week. “Secondly, Secretary Theoharides is going to have a conversation with him about that.”

I’m so old I can remember when they said snow would be a thing of the past.
I’m so old I can remember when they said we were entering a new Ice Age.
Strangely the solution for both was More Socialism!™ (cue the meme)

Eiffel Tower needs blowtorch for ice as snow blankets Europe.

PARIS — Workers at the Eiffel Tower used a blowtorch to melt the ice collecting on its surfaces and snow was blocking roads and halting trains and school buses Wednesday across northern France.

Amid a European cold snap, areas in Normandy and Brittany unused to such icy conditions were closing highways for lack of snow-clearing equipment. In parts of the Paris region, local authorities halted school buses and urged parents to keep their children at home.

Snow blanketed the French capital and froze the Eiffel Tower.

“When negative temperatures return, my floors get partially covered with ice! To get rid of it, we need to use a blowtorch because ice-control salt is too corrosive for the metal,” tweeted the monument, which has been closed to the public for months because of coronavirus restrictions.

Environmentalism Is the New War on the Working Class.

“There should be a real liberal party in this country, and I don’t mean a crackpot professional one.” – Harry Truman.

John Kerry, President Joe Biden’s new climate czar, took a private jet to accept an environmental award in Iceland in 2019. “It’s the only choice for somebody like me, who is traveling the world to win this battle,” he unironically told a reporter when asked about it.

If this sounds like a clueless joke, it’s not. President Biden’s chief environmental officer took the least carbon-efficient means of travel known to man because it was “the only choice” he could think of for a member in good standing of the indulged upper classes.

But this is no anomaly when it comes to liberal climate activism; it is a perfect encapsulation of what it has become: a vanity project of the jet set that directly harms working-class interests. And it’s this green agenda that directly threatens the working class that Biden has prioritized as he has taken command of the federal government.

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BLUF:
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.

Massachusetts Climate Czar Says the Quiet Part out Loud in Private Meeting: We Must ‘Break Your Will.’

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% of our emissions come from – as I have it started to say you and me, except you guys are in Vermont – 60% of our emissions come from residential heating and passenger vehicles. Let me say that again …60% 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 no 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.

I can’t even say that publicly.

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Are you ready for the climate lockdowns?

Last week President Biden signed an executive order to rejoin the Paris Climate Accords. This was a mostly symbolic gesture, as the same alarmism being pushed prior to the agreement in 2016 is still being pushed now while nation-states like China are still ignoring it. Now Biden administration climate envoy John Kerry, under fire for boarding a private jet to Iceland to accept a climate award, is telling the United States and the world that the conditions of the Paris agreement are ‘inadequate’.

As the global climate elite push eating bugs and staying home to save the Earth on the masses, it’s worth posing the question: what will be adequate? With the Global Economic Forum in Davos approaching in April, we’re going to start hearing terms such ‘Climate Equity’ and ‘Climate Reset’ (a play on the WEF’s Great Reset) more frequently. We’ll probably also start to hear calls for climate lockdowns. I know, right now that sounds completely preposterous, but don’t these kooky ideas always find a way to bleed into the mainstream? Fifteen Days to Slow the Sun!

The possibility of climate lockdowns is already being floated by some of our greatest thinkers. They see a confluence of global crises as an opportunity. The perfect storm caused by COVID-19 and the resulting global economic meltdown offers a chance to take what they see as bold and dramatic action to save the planet. The Biden administration will certainly use the consequences of COVID to push through some green legislation, but just as before, it will not be enough in the eyes of progressives. There must always be more.

Mariana Mazzucato, an author and a professor in innovative economics at the University of London, raised the prospect of climate lockdowns in MarketWatch last September:

‘Under a “climate lockdown”, governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban consumption of red meat, and impose extreme energy-saving measures, while fossil-fuel companies would have to stop drilling. To avoid such a scenario, we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently.’

The idea of ‘doing capitalism differently’ is the driving rhetorical motivation behind the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset (another term for the implementation of global Marxism).

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CU Professor says much of climate research ‘untethered from the real world’; cites misuse of scenarios

DENVER–President Biden recently signed a sweeping executive order (EO) aimed at what the White House calls a “profound climate crisis.” As Biden’s unilateral exercise of authority notes, “There is little time left to avoid setting the world on a dangerous, potentially catastrophic, climate trajectory.”

U.S. Senator Michael Bennet agrees, chiming in that “Climate change is a major threat to our national security, our economy, our health, and our way of life,” while Colorado Congressman Ed Perlmutter notes that, “If we are going to build a better future and combat the climate crisis, we must listen to the experts.”

These actions and rhetoric are predicated on the perception that climate change is an imminent threat to humanity, a perception that may be based on what one expert, Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. of the University of Colorado Department of Environmental Studies, calls the “the unstoppable momentum of outdated science.”

In an article published November 30, 2020 in the Honest Broker Newsletter Pielke writes, “Much of climate research is focused on implausible scenarios of the future, but implementing a course correction will be difficult.”

“Ultimately, the issues associated with the misuse of scenarios in climate research and assessment are a matter of scientific integrity,” he concludes.

Pielke cannot be called a climate change denier. Indeed, he has long been an advocate for action, but he is also a vigorous advocate for accurate, dispassionate and politically neutral science as an essential predicate to discussions of climate change policy.

“Responding to climate change is critically important,” writes Pielke. “So too is upholding the integrity of the science which helps to inform those responses.”

As an example of outdated science keeping its momentum, Pielke writes of a 2015 literature review of some 900 peer-reviewed studies on breast cancer using a cell line “derived from a breast cancer patient in Texas in 1976.” But in 2007, he says, it was confirmed that it was a skin cancer line, not one related to breast cancer, and that even now it is being improperly used in breast cancer research.

Pielke writes, “In 2020, climate research finds itself in a similar situation to that of breast cancer research in 2007. Evidence indicates the scenarios of the future to 2100 that are at the focus of much of climate research have already diverged from the real world and thus offer a poor basis for projecting policy-relevant variables like economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions.”

Pielke published a graph showing how carbon dioxide emissions scenarios for the future, including the one “most commonly cited” by climate researchers, Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5), diverge significantly from actual emissions to date (dark purple curve).

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