Category: Econut O’ The Day
In a letter, the U.S. EPA administrator tells Newsom that his executive order mandating only new electric car sales in California by 2035 may be illegal and questions the feasibility of the increase demand in electricity "when you can't even keep the lights on today." pic.twitter.com/f3piV4UtZe
— Alexei Koseff (@akoseff) September 28, 2020
California governor signs executive order to ban gas-powered cars and trucks
SACRAMENTO, Calif. – California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday signed an executive order to ban gas-powered cars and trucks in California by 2035, a move he said would cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than a third.
Plus, Newsom said he is directing the California Air Resources Board to establish regulations that require all new cars and passenger trucks be zero-emission vehicles by 2045 “where feasible.” Continue reading “”
Bjorn Lomborg: California Fires Mainly Caused by Century of Suppressing Controlled Burns
Ongoing forest fires in California are mostly a function of poor forest management, particularly insufficient controlled burns to clear away accumulated fuelwood, explained Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center ………..
“It has fairly little to do with climate change, and it has almost everything to do with the fact that we haven’t managed our forest well,” said Lomborg of California wildfires. “We haven’t done prescribed burning. We haven’t ensured that these fires won’t burn out of control.”
Lomborg added, “We’ve just simply allowed fuelwood to build up to cause almost uncontrollable fires in California.”
Prescribed burnings are necessary to reduce the risk of uncontrollable forest fires, Lomborg stated. “If we did prescribed burning, we could, in a few years, reduce the fire risk dramatically and actually get people’s lives back to — pretty close — to normal.”
“Fires are mostly there because we’ve had fire suppression for more than a hundred years.” Continue reading “”
And it’s not just that. Joe’s own ‘climate plan’ does have the GND in it. So either he’s lying in an attempt to conceal his econuttery, or he’s passed the point he can’t even remember the policies he’s running on.
Biden Interrupts Republican Voter, Tries To Rebut Her Question Before She Finishes It
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden interrupted a Republican voter trying to ask a question during his CNN town hall Thursday.
Biden started to answer, trying to dispute one of the things she had said before she finished laying our her question……………
According to Biden’s campaign website, Ballay was correct about his climate plan embracing the Green New Deal.
“Biden believes the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face. It powerfully captures two basic truths, which are at the core of his plan: (1) the United States urgently needs to embrace greater ambition on an epic scale to meet the scope of this challenge, and (2) our environment and our economy are completely and totally connected,” his website states.
The “Escalator to Extinction” Myth
In Life on the Mississippi Mark Twain wrote, “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” Unfortunately, conjecture based on limited facts has produced “research” trumpeting catastrophic fears of extinction. The “escalator to extinction” theory argues organisms must migrate to higher elevations where a cooler altitude will offset global warming temperatures. But there is scant evidence that is happening.
For example, in 1985 researchers spent 33 days surveying the wondrous bird diversity along a narrow ascending 5-mile trail in southern Peru. They recorded an amazing 455 unique species. In 2017 they repeated the survey, but for only 22 days. Still they observed 422 species consisting of 52 additional species never observed in 1985, but they also failed to detect 71 species that had been documented in 1985. Clearly, more extensive surveys are needed to accurately detect all species and determine their abundance. Nonetheless, because 8 ridgetop species (i.e. Crested Quetzal) that were previously observed only at the highest elevations but were not detected in 2017, researchers conjectured the “escalator to extinction” eliminated those 8 species. Additionally, they asserted similar local extinctions must be happening along ridgetops all across the earth’s tropical mountains.
Modeled temperatures had risen by 0.8°F between the two surveys, so they concluded those missing 8 species were extirpated by global warming because birds already at the ridgetop could no longer flee upwards to cooler temperatures. For most people, the idea that a 0.8°F rise in ridgetop temperatures could be deadly greatly strains the imagination. Moreover researchers in nearby regions of Manu National Park, found the alleged “extirpated species” thriving at lower elevations where temperatures are 3-5 °F warmer than their ridgetop. Falsely asserting most Peruvian birds are “highly sedentary” and don’t migrate, the scientists argued it was unlikely they missed any birds during their 10 days on the ridgetop due to migration. Thus, the birds must be locally extinct. Not having the critical eye of a Mark Twain, mass media journalists – BBC, the Atlantic, and Yale Environment 360 – promoted those extinction fears. Regretfully only good investigative journalism has become extinct.
It is well documented that about 24% of Peru’s birds are “elevational migrants”. Elevational migrants are typically on the move between different elevations during August and September, the same months of the 1985 and 2017 surveys. The high chance of not observing randomly migrating species prudently explains why their short-term surveys each missed detecting 12% and 16% of the region’s species. And there’s good news to counter their extinction conclusions. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature determined those “extinct” 8 species are relatively abundant elsewhere and categorized as species of Least Concern.
A global warming explanation only obscures complex movements within ecosystems elsewhere. Researchers comparing early 20th century bird surveys in California’s mountains found as many species were moving downslope as species “fleeing” upslope. Furthermore, the same species moved differently in different regions. But fearmongering media journalists don’t find such facts newsworthy.
The theory that global warming relentlessly pushes species up mountain slopes to their eventual extinction, has been preached by climate scientists like James Hansen to add urgency to his catastrophic theories. Unfortunately, such theories have constrained the objectivity of several researchers to the point they manipulated observations to fit the theory.
For example, pika are rabbit-like creatures that live in rockslides of western America’s mountains. By comparing the elevations of territories documented in the early 1900s to their current elevation Dr. Beever argued global warming was causing a “five-fold increase in the rate of local extinctions.” However, of the 25 pika territories surveyed, 10 were now inhabiting lower and warmer elevations. To preserve a scary theory, Beever eliminated those observations from his calculations, guaranteeing a statistical upslope retreat. But recent US Forest Service surveys also found 19% of the currently known pika populations are at lower elevations than documented during the cooler 1900s, as well as a few thriving pika territories that Dr. Beever had deemed locally extinct.
Dr. Camille Parmesan’s 1994 Edith’s Checkerspot butterfly study made her an icon for climate change catastrophe. Featured on the Union of Concerned Scientists’ website Parmesan stated, “The latest research shows clearly that we face the threat of mass extinctions in coming years,” For promoting global warming catastrophe, she earned an invitation to speak at the Clinton White House and to join the IPCC. I tried to replicate her study, but she refused to supply the necessary data and she never published a methods section. However, it was privately admitted the Checkerspot butterfly had been increasing through the 2000s and many butterfly colonies she designated extinct, were now thriving. But such good news was never published. What is truly worrisome is all these misleading claims have duped the public into a hysteria regards climate “extinctions”.
We’re living in BLADERUNNER, but without space colonies and Darryl Hannah replicants.
10 a.m. Fran SanCisco, 09/09/2020, reality
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t even believe.
Gender reveals on fire off the shoulder of Nob Hill.
I watched stunguns glitter in the dark near the Golden Gate.
All those tech bros will be lost in time, like equity in a failed startup. Time to die.
UNSW: “Climate change and the tyranny of psychological distance”
The University of New South Wales, birthplace of the Ship of Fools expedition which got stuck in the Antarctic ice, is concerned that people rapidly switch to other priorities, when disasters which don’t affect them personally are no longer front page news.
Climate change and the tyranny of psychological distance
03 SEP 2020 CAROLINE TANG
With last summer’s bushfires largely out of the headlines, has the psychological distance people might feel towards climate change increased?
UNSW Sydney’s Professor Ben Newell has been researching climate change psychology for a decade and his work focuses on how to tackle the preconceived notions people have which cloud their decision-making in the face of an uncertain future.
Prof. Newell said the past summer’s fire season was “extremely bad” but he wondered what would happen to people’s attitudes towards climate change if the bushfires were less severe this summer.
“Last summer’s smoke haze was a big concern because some people were seeing it as the new norm. They shrugged and said, ‘Oh, it’s smoky today and we’ve had a couple of months of it, whatever,’ but it seems wrong to already be at the point of accepting that’s just the way things are now,” he said……..
Prof. Newell defined psychological distance as a “construct” in one of his studies: “Psychological distance refers to the extent to which an object is removed from oneself; for example, in likelihood of occurrence, in time, in geographical space or in social distance,” he said.
“So, if people perceive climate change as psychologically distant from themselves, they could construe it in more abstract terms, potentially impeding action if the threat is perceived as less real, tangible or relevant.
“For example, the melting of the Arctic and Antarctic has been a wake-up call for years now but because they are sparsely populated, it’s not front and centre of many people’s concerns…….
“There’s a lot of literature that shows people adapt and acquiesce to seeing lots of the same type of stimulus over and over again – so, people become more and more likely to say, ‘Oh yeah, it’s just the same thing’,” he said.
“Sometimes even I find myself thinking, ‘I can’t think about this stuff anymore because it’s just too hard’, but I’m reminded of the necessity to keep talking about it, to keep reiterating the message.
“Even if there is a danger of habituation or disengagement, the danger of not talking about it is much worse. So, the continuous reminder these things are happening now and will keep happening again has to be part and parcel of it.”……………
Read more: https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/climate-change-and-tyranny-psychological-distance
What I find fascinating about Professor Newell’s words is the suggestion that he has to make a continuous personal effort to overcome his own natural tendency to habituate, to dismiss climate change as a high priority issue.
If even believers have to keep kicking themselves to believe, the end of the climate movement may be closer than we think.
Just another econut prediction delivered to the trash heap of history
Glacier National Park is removing “glaciers will be gone by 2020” signs
KALISPELL — For more than a decade, signs at Glacier National Park warned visitors that the glaciers would be gone by the year 2020 – now those signs are being changed.
They were originally added to the park to reflect climate change predictions by the U.S. Geological Survey.
Glacier National Park spokeswoman Gina Kurzmen explained that the latest research shows shrinking of some glaciers, but in ways much more complex than what was predicted. Because of this, the park must update all signs around the park which state that all glaciers will be melted by 2020.
Not being the center of attention since the bug run began must have really been hard on the little ditzhead.
Greta Thunberg Issues Demands for Immediate Response to Climate ‘Crisis’
Teenage climate worrier Greta Thunberg issued a string of fresh demands Thursday for world leaders to take emergency action on climate change, lamenting some had “given up” on the possibility of preparing a decent future for coming generations.
Key to her list of executive actions was an immediate end to all investments in fossil fuel in parallel with a shutting down of fossil fuel subsidies as well as making “ecocide an international crime at the International Criminal Court.”
In an interview with Reuters, the 17-year-old said governments must accept the need to transform the global economic system as a basic step in avoiding “a climate catastrophe.”
Econuts get the cluebat upside the head….again.
Plastic Bag Bans Are the Latest Regulations to Get Tossed During Coronavirus Pandemic
As states rush to lift, waive, or delay regulations that might impede their ability to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, plastic bag bans are being tossed aside.
On Tuesday, Maine’s legislature voted to put off enforcement of their state’s plastic bag prohibition—which was set to go into effect April 22—until next year. The day before, New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation agreed to delay any enforcement of that state’s bag ban until May 15.
The New York ban was supposed to go into effect on March 1. But because a lawsuit challenging the bag ban has been delayed over coronavirus, the state was forced to pull back until that case can resume.
The reusable bags these bans are supposed to encourage—and which were considered an unmitigated social good just a few weeks ago—have come under fresh scrutiny from a newly germophobic nation that fears they might aid the spread of COVID-19.
Businesses have been leading the way on this front. Starbucks suspended its policy of filling up customers’ reusable mugs in early March, and Dunkin Donuts and Tim Hortons (a Canadian coffee chain) have done the same.
“Until this pandemic passes, state and local officials should discourage shoppers from bringing their potentially virus-laden reusable bags out in public. Restore single-use bags, including the plastic kind,” wrote the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board on Monday.
The mayor of a town in Maine has actually called for a ban on reusable bags.
How likely is it that reusable bags will give you Covid-19? That’s still something of an open question. John Tierney, writing in City Journal, notes that numerous studies have shown reusable bags’ potential to transmit bacteria and viruses. And recent research has shown that the virus can live on plastic surfaces for up to three days. So single-use bags might be better for avoiding the spread of the disease, as they will be tossed immediately and not left lying around the house where multiple people migh come into repeat contact with it.
That said, the Centers for Disease Control downplay the risk of surface transmission on their website, saying that while it is possible to catch COVID-19 from touching objects and then touching your face, “this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads.”
Two epidemiologists interviewed by Slate about grocery store best practices also said reusable bags did not pose much of added risk. “I doubt it’s going to be a problem,” said Stephen Morse, a professor of epidemiology at the Columbia University Medical Center. “If you’re really worried, you can always wipe down the bag with mild detergent or a disinfecting wipe, but that shouldn’t be necessary unless the bag gets some unexpected exposure to contaminated material.”
Climate Hypocrite: Bernie Leads 2020 Field in Private Jet Spending
The Bernie Sanders campaign spent just under $1.2 million on private jet travel last quarter, outpacing the entire 2020 Democratic presidential primary field.
The most recent filing from Sanders reveals $1,199,579 in spending during the final three months of 2019 to Apollo Jets, LLC, a “luxury private jet charter service.”
The campaign spent an additional $23,941 for transportation to Virginia-based Advanced Aviation Team.
The candidate who comes closest to matching Sanders in private jet spending was former vice president Joe Biden, whose campaign spent $1,040,698 to Advanced Aviation Team last quarter.
Swedish Child-Priestess Greta Thunberg Goes to Davos and Scolds Us All Some More.
It’s a new decade, so it’s time for a new round of panic about the weather killing us all. Swedish child-priestess and chronic truant Greta Thunberg is at the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week, because that’s where the spotlight is. And she’s scolding all the grown-ups for not doing what she wants when she wants it, because Veruca Salt wasn’t fictional.
I was scared of the Boogeyman when I was little too. I just didn’t have crowds of adults applauding my cries of fear……
This kid is in for a shock when she grows up. Because she’s going to grow up. The adults who stole her childhood will have died off, but the planet will still be here. How will she reconcile the resulting cognitive dissonance? Will she acknowledge the truth, or will she find more excuses to believe the lie? That’ll be up to her, once she’s no longer being exploited for political purposes.
PRESS RELEASE: HEARTLAND INSTITUTE REACTS TO NOAA’S CLAIM 2019 ‘SECOND-WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD’
Agency’s own data actually shows 2019 was cooler than 2005 in the United States; global temp claims riddled with problems
ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, IL (January 15, 2020) – The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) today
released a new report claiming 2019 was “the second warmest [year] since modern recordkeeping began in 1880. NOAA says this past year was 0.98 degrees Celsius warmer than the 1951 to 1980 mean, making the 2010s “clearly the warmest decade on record.”
Climate experts at The Heartland Institute dispute this claim, pointing to a cherry-picked period for the “mean” comparison and data that has been consistently adjusted to artificially make recent years appear significantly warmer than in decades past. In fact, NOAA’s state-of-the-art land-based temperature stations in the United States, placed by design to minimize the urban heat-island effect and other factors that corrupt the data, show that the U.S. was cooler in 2019 than in 2005. See the chart below from the U.S. Climate Reference Network via the NOAA website.
The following statements from climate and environment experts at The Heartland Institute—a free-market think tank—may be used for attribution. For more comments, refer to the contact information below. To book a Heartland guest on your program, please contact Media Specialist Billy Aouste at media@heartland.org.“The NOAA/NASA press release is inconsistently presented. For example, they can’t even agree on a common base period for comparisons. Some graphs use 1951-1980 while others compare to 1981-2010 averages to create anomaly plots. NOAA and NASA owe it to the public to present climate data with a consistent climate period for comparison, otherwise it’s just sloppy science. “NOAA’s U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) has the best quality climate data on the planet, yet it never gets mentioned in their press releases. While the U.S. isn’t the world, the lack of a warming signal in the contiguous United States since 2005 suggests that the data NOAA and NASA use from the antiquated Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) reflects warmer biases due to urbanization and adjustments to the data. The USCRN has no biases, and no need for adjustments, and in my opinion represents a ground truth for climate change.”
Anthony Watts
Senior Fellow
The Heartland Institute
awatts@heartland.org“Modest warming has, thankfully, been occurring since we slipped out of the Little Ice Age a little more than a century ago. That was the coldest period of the past 10,000 years and brought horrible human misery. The modest warming that is lately occurring should naturally lead to subsequent years being a little warmer than previous years, which is the case. This is a good thing and just brought tremendous human health and welfare benefits, along with substantial environmental benefits.”
James Taylor
Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy
The Heartland Institute
jtaylor@heartland.org“Once again, NASA and NOAA are throwing gasoline on a fire they largely created by ignoring the best data on temperature, and instead using compromised or adjusted temperature readings to reinforce their claim humans are causing a climate crisis. The U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN), the gold standard of surface temperature data, plus data from global satellites and weather balloons, all record minimal or almost no warming over the past 40 years, yet NASA and NOAA ignore these sources of unbiased data, because it undermines their dogmatic belief in human caused climate catastrophe.”
“NASA and NOAA are like toddlers trying to fit round toys into square holes, and just as likely as toddlers to throw fits when their efforts are stymied by reality.”
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D.
Senior Fellow, Environment & Energy Policy
The Heartland Institute
Managing Editor, Environment & Climate News
hburnett@heartland.org
Greta Snaps Over Demands: ‘We Want This Done Now – As In Right Now.’
Far-left climate extremist Greta Thunberg demanded in a new op-ed that world leaders cave to her anti-capitalist agenda “right now” as they prepare to meet in Davos for the 50th anniversary of the World Economic Forum.
“We demand that at this year’s forum, participants from all companies, banks, institutions and governments immediately halt all investments in fossil fuel exploration and extraction, immediately end all fossil fuel subsidies and immediately and completely divest from fossil fuels,” Thunberg wrote in an op-ed in The Guardian. “We don’t want these things done by 2050, 2030 or even 2021, we want this done now – as in right now.”
The Martyrdom of Saint Greta of Sweden
So Meat Loaf caused a little kerfuffle this weekend by saying he thought Greta Thunberg had been “brainwashed.”
I don’t know that should be a surprise, but it got me thinking about her again. I have a lot of sympathy for the kid.
For me, it started with seeing her picture. She’s small, slight, even scrawny; her head looks out of proportion to her body. She’s now 17 (as of 3 January) but she still looks childlike, prepubertal, younger than her 14-year-old sister. Frankly, she looks like she’s been in a concentration camp: malnourished over the long term
Sure enough, reading a little about her, we find that she’s an Asperger’s child (I guess this month that’s now called “high-functioning autism”), she has obsessive-compulsive disorder, she stopped eating for months and still refuses to eat anything but certain specific things, in particular, a dish of pancakes filled with rice — but her OCD keeps her from eating if there’s a sticker or label on the package. She suffers from “selective mutism”, which means basically that there are situations in which she’s unable to speak……..
Her public career started when she took Fridays off from school to hold up a sign outside the Swedish Parliament; this grew into a movement that spread throughout Europe.
Through it all, things keep striking me as odd. I don’t know what it’s like in Sweden, but cutting classes one day a week isn’t normally feted as heroic in the US. And she hasn’t been attending school for months as she traveled. In the US, that’s called “dropping out”.
So, this is what we’re being asked to believe: that an autistic kid with OCD who often can’t speak on her own has
- organized a worldwide movement
- given TED talks, spoken to the UN General Assembly, and been named Person of the Year by Time Magazine
- managed to get a ride on a multimillion-dollar racing yacht so she wouldn’t have to fly (and bragged on how she wasn’t releasing CO2 on the trip, although it required seven plane tickets for the crew for the boat).
There’s a bucolic barnyard term for that — actually, several, depending on your choice of equine, bovine, or galline.
This isn’t a neurologically atypical high school kid arranging this: there are adults, and probably a lot of adults, using her as a front.
Exposing How The Hoax Of Climate Change Drives Delirious Political Policies
Once again, it’s Throwback Tuesday and time to wrap up the series on the hoax of man-made climate change by covering how undermining legitimate science affected government policies based upon fraudulent science. Despite the scandal of Climategate in 2009 and Climategate 2.0 in 2011, the UN IPCC and associated scientists, whose wealth redistribution scheme was based upon the hoax of climate change, work doubly hard to discredit legitimate scientists, as we have found, through unsavory tactics and issue increasingly worsening fraudulent reports based on a political agenda instead of actual scientific data. Through this measure, it uses fearmongering tactics to brainwash the people and those in government into buying the snake oil that stifling wealthy nations’ economies to give third world nations other people’s money will end/disrupt/quell/limit/slow climate change through decreasing the non-greenhouse gas of Carbon Dioxide (CO2).
Numerous former UN IPCC scientists with impressive credentials and legitimate work, who became disillusioned with the panel and its politically manufactured “scientific” conclusions, are willing to testify to the dishonesty of the process. But, the UN IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri, in conjunction with Al Gore, calls “climate change” his religion. Pachauri is no longer with the UN IPCC because of a sexual harassment scandal. Pachauri’s resignation letter read, “For me the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion and my dharma”.
Donna Laframboise, a journalist who has written numerous books critical of the UN IPCC, indicates the IPCC reports lack scientific integrity and individuals relying on those reports are basing decisions on information lacking scientific integrity. According to Laframboise, “the IPCC goes back, after the fact, and changes the original scientific report so that it aligns with the politically negotiated summary”.
She also noted, “After the summaries are haggled over, the IPCC alters what the scientists wrote. That’s the reason the IPCC routinely releases its summaries before it releases the underlying scientific report. In this 2007 news clipping, the IPCC chairman explains: “we have to ensure that the underlying report conforms to the refinements.”
Greenpeace co-founder turned climate skeptic Dr. Patrick Moore commented on Laframboise’s report, noting this is the “perfect reason for the US to abandon the UN Paris climate ‘agreement.’”
#1 – Who is “We?”
#2 – 
Greta Thunberg told cheering protesters today ‘we will make sure we put world leaders against the wall’ if they fail to take urgent action on climate change.
The Swedish teen activist was addressing the crowd at a Fridays for Future protest in Turin, Italy.
She arrived there from Madrid where she had been attending the UN climate summit but said she feared the event would not lead to change.
COP25 Attendees Grab Grub at Burger King Despite UN’s Anti-Meat Alarmism
When all these econuts act like their prophesies of climate doom are real and actually begin behaving like there is a crisis, I might begin to believe them.
The anti-meat messaging at the U.N. Climate Change Conference apparently hasn’t deterred attendees from grabbing a bite at one of the world’s most popular burger joints.
Climate Depot’s Marc Morano caught on video long lines at the Madrid climate confab onsite Burger King, even though the outlet wasn’t serving the Impossible Burger, the chain’s recently unveiled vegan offering.
“Burger King only offered real cow meat at the summit location,” Mr. Morano said in his Thursday report. “No fake meat burger available is even more ironic, given that the U.N. just gave its ‘Planetary Health’ award to the company responsible for Burger King’s fake meat ‘Impossible Meat’ burgers on December 10.”