Stuff to keep track of

Are AR-15 Rifles a Public Safety Threat? Here's What the Data Say

In any given year, for every person murdered with a rifle, there are 15 murdered with handguns, 1.7 with hands or fists, and 1.2 with blunt instruments. In fact, homicides with any sort of rifle represent a mere 3.2 percent of all homicides on average over the past decade.

Given that the FBI statistics pertain to all rifles, the homicide frequency of “assault-style” rifles like the AR-15 is necessarily lesser still, as such firearms compose a fraction of all the rifles used in crime.

With an average of 13,657 homicides per year during the 2007-2017 timeframe, about one-tenth of one percent of homicides were produced by mass shootings involving AR-15s.

According to a New York Times analysis, since 2007, at least “173 people have been killed in mass shootings in the United States involving AR-15s.”

That’s 173 over a span of a decade, with an average of 17 homicides per year. To put this in perspective, consider that at this rate it would take almost one-hundred years of mass shootings with AR-15s to produce the same number of homicide victims that knives and sharp objects produce in one year.

With an average of 13,657 homicides per year during the 2007-2017 timeframe, about one-tenth of one percent of homicides were produced by mass shootings involving AR-15s.

Speaking of guns, in Texas, 50,000 more babies were killed in the womb in 2017 than by firearms.

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NO POLITICS Initial Analysis of Murders in White Settlement TX Church



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Yeah, as Dr. Phil would say, "How did that work out for you?" From 2004: Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us

· Secret report warns of rioting and nuclear war
· Britain will be ‘Siberian’ in less than 20 years
· Threat to the world is greater than terrorism

And there were these climate swings and misses from 2010-2019, too. Like our fave alarmist, Al Gore.

Oops. Because actually, We're living in (almost) the best of times. For example:

“Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 percent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 percent when I was born,” Ridley writes, referring to the year 1958, a time that some of us can actually remember.

Freeman Dyson blows up global warming alarmism

Freeman Dyson is one of the most highly-regarded physicists in the world. Wikipedia introduces its entry on him thus:

Freeman John Dyson FRS (born December 15, 1923) is an English-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum mechanics, solid-state physics, and nuclear engineering. He is a lifelong opponent of nationalism and a proponent of nuclear disarmament and international cooperation. Dyson is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

He was one of the first scientific figures to recognize that environmentalism had become a religion in its own right:

There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. [From, "The Question of Global Warming."]

From "Environmentalist religion explained."

In 2011, The Independent published, "Letters to a heretic: An email conversation with climate change sceptic Professor Freeman Dyson."

World-renowned physicist Professor Freeman Dyson has been described as a 'force-of-nature intellect'. He's also one of the world's foremost climate change sceptics. In this email exchange, our science editor, Steve Connor, asks the Princeton scholar why he's one of the few true intellectuals to be so dismissive of the global-warming consensus.

In the interview, after concise explanation of why climate modeling is useful but not determinative:

My impression is that the experts are deluded because they have been studying the details of climate models for 30 years and they come to believe the models are real. After 30 years they lose the ability to think outside the models. 

Read the whole thing.

Why renewable energy cannot save the planet

Environmentalists have long promoted renewable energy sources like solar panels and wind farms to save the climate. But what about when those technologies destroy the environment? In this provocative talk, Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” and energy expert, Michael Shellenberger explains why solar and wind farms require so much land for mining and energy production, and an alternative path to saving both the climate and the natural environment.

Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine Hero of the Environment and President of Environmental Progress, a research and policy organization. A lifelong environmentalist, Michael changed his mind about nuclear energy and has helped save enough nuclear reactors to prevent an increase in carbon emissions equivalent to adding more than 10 million cars to the road.

When I pointed this out, I was told I was racist

Author and commentator Arthur Chrenkoff observes from Australia,

At the heart of the New Catstrophism lies an inconvenient truth: the United States – or Australia – could cut their emissions to zero today (or by 2030) and it would make a negligible difference to the global temperatures.

There are two reasons for that: firstly, the CO2 emissions in the United States, the European Union, Canada and Australia have actually been declining in the past 10-15 years. Secondly, the CO2 emissions throughout the developing world have been skyrocketing. And this is not just in relative terms, which disregard the massively different starting points, but in absolute terms.

Why? Because "China now produces more CO2 than the United States and the European Union put together, the Asia-Pacific region ... emits nearly twice as much CO2 as the United States and the European Union combined. And rising." So:

St Joan of Arc of the Children’s Crusade against Carbon, Greta Thunberg, should be going to Beijing or Bangalore and staging her protests there instead of, or at least in addition to, Sweden or New York. She should be hounding President Xi and Prime Minister Modi about their shameful emissions. She should be leading throngs of Asian kids out of schools for her Friday student strikes. She should be castigating the industries and the consumers of the developing world for destroying the planet and killing humanity in the process. She should be doing all this if she were serious about the global nature of the problem. But I won’t be holding my breath.

I pointed this out on Facebook to a very left-wing friend, whereupon I was almost instantly advised that it was racist of me even to suggest it. After all, I was told, there was no reason for the Chinese or Indians to listen to a white European girl. I am not making that up.

In fact, The U.S. Leads All Countries In Reducing Carbon Emissions.

Updates:

David Harsanyi:

Sixteen-year-old Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg lives in the healthiest, wealthiest, safest, and most peaceful era humans have ever known. She is one of the luckiest people ever to have lived.

In a just world, Thunberg would be at the United Nations thanking capitalist countries for bequeathing her this remarkable inheritance. Instead, she, like millions of other indoctrinated kids her age, act as if they live in a uniquely broken world on the precipice of disaster. This is a tragedy.

The problem with Greta Thunberg:

The problem with Greta Thunberg is not that she’s a 16-year-old girl with pigtails.

The problem with Greta Thunberg is not that she’s a school drop out.

The problem with Greta Thunberg is not she’s autistic.

There are hundreds of thousands of other kids around the world with some or all of these features – and none is being criticised for having them.

No, the problem with Greta Thunberg is that no matter how brave or inspirational or articulate or touchingly young and fresh-faced or triumphant-over-mental-adversity she may be, the “facts” she regurgitates on behalf of her controllers are lies, propaganda and fake news – and the cause she represents is downright evil.

Strip away all the fluffy invocations of nature and the plight of future generations and the alleged crisis facing mother earth and what you find underneath is pure totalitarianism.

Tony Heller:

Greta Thunberg lives a charmed life.  She doesn't have to go to school, travels the world, is likely getting very rich, and is being used in one of the most ridiculous attemots at a propaganda coup. In this video I discuss the difference between the reality of her life and the propaganda she has been chosen to spread.

Shouldn't global warming make it hotter?

The Deep South is infamous for blistering hot summers, aggravated by high humidity. I know, I grew up in the South and live there now.

Tomorrow, Sept. 24, is the second day of autumn, but in the South autumn's first few weeks are just summer continued. And yet we have this:

Autumn's beginning has been getting cooler for a century. So why exactly am I supposed to surrender my basic liberties and money to the socialist environmentalists? Well, whatever the reason is, "climate" isn't the answer. "Socialism" is.

"The press warns us every day that we are having a climate crisis. And they should know, because they have been warning us about an imminent climate crisis for almost a century."

Enlaces para pensar - 2 de septiembre

Socialist medicine will work great! Just look at the VA! When my liberal friends tell me that government-controlled medical care is unarguably the best America could ever get, I always reply, "So show me. Fix the VA and when it is running just like you want Medicare for All to work, tell me and I will take you more seriously." Then they get mad at me.

Well, here ya go: Officials are investigating 11 suspicious deaths at a VA hospital. Two have been ruled homicides.

But wait! There's more! Horror: VA Failed To Stop Pathologist Who Misdiagnosed Thousands — And Showed Up Drunk For Work

My point is not that stuff like this never happens in our current, private hospitals. It is that government bureaucrats always protect their own, and when the medical staff becomes, basically, another group of bureaucrats, then you get more of that code of omerta, and it is protected by the bureaucracy. Remember 2015's Gold King Mine Spill, caused exclusively by federal EPA employees? How many federal bureaucrats got fired or disciplined for it? Zero.

Stanford University makes segregation official policy. Stanford pushes separate physics course for minority students

• In an effort to achieve “diversity” within its physics department, Stanford University is offering a separate physics course in order to ensure retention of “underrepresented” physics majors.
• The initiative also includes two other physics courses focusing entirely on “diversity” and “inclusion” within the discipline.

The second bullet means that the "two other physics courses" are not actually physics courses. They are political courses. Stanford says as much:

Other courses offered to bridge the supposed diversity problem at Stanford include two one-unit physics courses that address not physics itself, but rather concepts of diversity within the discipline.

But they will count toward fulfilling a physics major, you betcha. In fact, they will soon be required for a B.S. in physics if they are not already.

Science courses used to be about, well, science. Now, like everything else the Left touches, they are increasing about political indoctrination. Not even the Soviet Union went that far.

How long will it be until you board an airliner designed by engineers whose major in aeronautical engineering had a principal focus on diversity and inclusion in engineering? Good luck with that!

"Religion is a check on moral relativism, so naturally the left hates it." Well, Left-wing politics is a religion and it does not tolerate competition. Like this: WBAP Morning News: Beto Supporters Boo Man Who Said America Needs to ‘Return to Jesus’

At a recent Town Hall event, Beto O’Rourke supporters booed a man who told the crowd that America needs to “return to Jesus” in order to heal. 

You will need counseling after clicking this link: Truly awful, idiotic, and just plain inexplicable but real kitchens in real houses. Don't say I didn't warn you. 

And then there are the living rooms. Living Room Design Fails So Bad, They'll Scare the Living Daylights Out of You

Love that it is for sale for more than one million dollars.

Shooting down drones is now easy. Well, for now. New military system could aloows soldiers to eliminate drones with one shot

With the system, the user selects and locks onto the target, and as soon as the trigger is squeezed, the system calculates the target’s movement and predicts its next location by means of advanced image processing and algorithms. SMASH 2000 prevents the bullet being fired until the target is precisely in its crosshairs.

It is also being tested by US armed forces.

"Senegal was not a hellhole." What I Learned in the Peace Corps in Africa: Trump Is Right

Very poor people can lead happy, meaningful lives in their own cultures' terms.  But they are not our terms.  The excrement is the least of it.  Our basic ideas of human relations, right and wrong, are incompatible.

Take something as basic as family.  Family was a few hundred people, extending out to second and third cousins.  All the men in one generation were called "father."  Senegalese are Muslim, with up to four wives.  Girls had their clitorises cut off at puberty.  (I witnessed this, at what I thought was going to be a nice coming-of-age ceremony, like a bat mitzvah or confirmation.)  Sex, I was told, did not include kissing.  Love and friendship in marriage were Western ideas.  Fidelity was not a thing.  Married women would have sex for a few cents to have cash for the market.

What I did witness every day was that women were worked half to death.  Wives raised the food and fed their own children, did the heavy labor of walking miles to gather wood for the fire, drew water from the well or public faucet, pounded grain with heavy hand-held pestles, lived in their own huts, and had conjugal visits from their husbands on a rotating basis with their co-wives.  Their husbands lazed in the shade of the trees.

Yet family was crucial to people there in a way Americans cannot comprehend.

The Ten Commandments were not disobeyed – they were unknown.  The value system was the exact opposite.  You were supposed to steal everything you can to give to your own relatives.  There are some Westernized Africans who try to rebel against the system.  They fail.

Read the whole thing.

Have a great Labor Day! Even though This Labor Day, Unions Are Gunning for Workers' Free Speech Rights

What you need to know today - 8/29

OK, you don't want Trump. But exactly what do you want? And the answer is that you do not know. 

To counter every signature Trump issue, there is almost no rational alternative advanced. That void helps explain the bizarre, three-year litany of dreaming of impeachment, the emoluments clause, the Logan Act, the 25th Amendment, the Mueller special-counsel investigation, Stormy Daniels and Michael Avenatti, Trump’s tax returns, White Supremacy!, Recession! — and Lord knows what next.

When the family is vanishing, you only have "identity." ‘The Great Scattering’: How Identity Panic Took Root in the Void Once Occupied by Family Life 

Let’s try a new theory: Our macro-politics have become a mania about identity because our micropolitics are no longer familial. This, above all, is what happened during the decades in which identity politics went from being a phrase in an obscure quasi-radical document to a way of being that has gone on to transform academia, law, media, culture and government.

Yes, racism, sexism and other forms of cruelty exist, and are always to be deplored and countered. At the same time, the timeline of identity politics suggest another source. Up until the middle of the twentieth century (and barring the frequent foreshortening of life by disease or nature) human expectations remained largely the same throughout the ages: that one would grow up to have children and a family; that parents and siblings and extended family would remain one’s primal community; and that, conversely, it was a tragedy not to be part of a family. The post-1960s order of sexual consumerism has upended every one of these expectations.

Who am I? is a universal human question. It becomes harder to answer if other basic questions are problematic or out of reach. 

There are fires in the Amazon. But "the Amazon" is not burning. The Great Amazon Fire Fraud

Hysterics (like President Macron) robotically describe the Amazon rain forest as the Earth’s “lungs.” And it is true that over the years, there has been some deforestation in Brazil and other countries in the Amazon region, as they continue to develop. But what liberals never mention is that overall, the Earth is getting greener. Forested areas, worldwide, are growing, not shrinking, in large part due to the increasing concentration of CO2–plant food–in the atmosphere. (CO2 is great for the environment.) You can see this easily in satellite photographs. Deserts are shrinking and vegetated areas are growing.

Segregation today. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever! Kentucky district to open STEM school to support girls of color

The district plans to open the academy for the 2020-21 school year. It will initially serve about 150 sixth graders with plans to expand to serve grades six through eight. The district expects the school to serve a total of 450 students from all over the county. The district opened a similar school last year aimed at supporting boys of color.

So racial segregation is official government policy in Kentucky. Well.

Today's "tell me another one" entry.  From presidential candidate Kamala Harris:

Let's fill in the rest of the story.

"The root of this is the strange obsession with racism that has become a religion of its own over the last two decades. The anointing of Obama as the completion of the Second Founding, the event that was supposed to wash the stains of slavery, segregation and racism from America, instead ushered in an era of race panic. The Left is in a near frenzy over racism, which they now see everywhere. It is an obsession to the point where even the so-called Right is infected by it." Read the rest at Civic Anti-Racism.

I got that from Gerard's link-fest so go there and read all his good stuff (after you are done here, of course!).

And finally:

Today's Link Sink

Opt out of everything on the internet: Your handy and very comprehensive page where you can opt out of almost any privacy-related matter on the web. Truly invaluable.  Click here.

But Bernie is wrong about everything else, so why not this? WSJ: Why Bernie Sanders Is Wrong About Sweden. My first reaction was, Why should Sweden be the exception? But in fact, Sweden is not socialist at all.

The ‘Nordic model’ of socialism, which he and other leftists tout, is more like ‘ruthless capitalism,’ says [Swedish historian] Johan Norberg.

He idealized the simple life of his ancestors in the 19th century. 

“I had this romanticized idea about them, and I looked at pictures of them: Look at that rural lifestyle, happy farmers.” Eventually he realized 19th-century life wasn’t all he cracked it up to be. “I thought it would come with penicillin, and sort of modern surgery, and instant access to all of the calories I needed to survive another day, and so. And I think history really saved me there, because then when I read up on my ancestors in northern Sweden, I realized that they didn’t live ‘ecologically.’ They died ecologically, at a very young age.” ...

A couple of days after our interview, Mr. Norberg emailed a warning for Americans: “The most dangerous place to be is top of the world, think you have it all made and can afford to experiment with socialism or protectionism, because you have plenty of room for mistakes before you hurt yourself,” he wrote. “That’s where Sweden was in 1970. It almost destroyed us, and it took some heroic efforts to get back on track.”

BTW, that's this Norberg:

Not the Police Squad character:

(Whose name was spelled Nordberg, anyway. But what the heck. Go with it.)

David Goldman: The Chinese will hand Trump his head on a platter. Goldman supports Trump and will vote for him next year, but says there are certain realities that Trump is not integrating. Read it and weep.

Speaking of the Chinese  - Africans to Chinese: Get out! Why? Because the Chinese build them nothing without strings (Strings? Heck, chains!) attached and the Chinese con has worn too thin to live with. Besides, I know very well a retired Marine officer who did years of State Dept. assignments in Africa after the Corps, He saw first hand many, many places where the Chinese had done infrastructure work - roads, pipelines, building projects. He told me that without exception they were of very poor quality and would not last. There was no doubt in his mind that the Chinese did not do the work to advance the African's interests, but their own, and saw the contracts as foothold for a permanent presence there.

Which helps explains why Trump wanted to buy Greenland. Because Greenland's government (it self governs although the island is still a Danish colony) asked the Chinese in 2017 whether they would build infrastructure that the Danish government declined to fund.

According to the South China Morning Post, Greenland had been seriously courted by China due to its strategic location and its mineral resources.

BTW, Harry Truman tried to buy Greenland, too, and even offered to swap part of Alaska for it.

Forbes: Trump Might Want to Buy Greenland But His Nemesis, China, Is There Before Him

CNBC: Here’s why Trump wants to buy Greenland

The Smithsonian Institution is not exactly run by the Vast Right-Wing, White-Supremacy Conspiracy, but it sure knocks the New York Times' "1619 project" into the can. The Misguided Focus on 1619 as the Beginning of Slavery in the U.S. Damages Our Understanding of American History

The year the first enslaved Africans were brought to Jamestown is drilled into students’ memories, but overemphasizing this date distorts history

But to the NYT, that's a feature, not a bug.

The "lungs of the earth" are still breathing. Reason: Don't Panic: Amazon Burning Is Mostly Farms, Not Forests. As Brazilians attained a higher per-capita standard of living over the years, they decreased clearing Amazon basin jungle. What made the difference? Capitalism, of course.

A 2012 study found, after parsing data from 52 developing countries between 1972 and 2003, that deforestation increases until average income levels reach about $3,100 per capita. As it happens, Brazilian per capita incomes reached $3,600 per capita in 2004,which is when deforestation rates began trending decisively downward.

Electric cars pollute more than diesel

So says the University of Cologne as reported by The Brussels Times, Belgium: "Electric vehicles emit more CO2 than diesel ones, German study shows."

Electrics' killer? Life-cycle pollution, compared to diesel cars - what it takes industrially to obtain the raw materials and turn them into finished, operating vehicles, operate them during their life span, and dispose of them when the reach the end. And the core of the problem is batteries.

When CO2 emissions linked to the production of batteries and the German energy mix – in which coal still plays an important role – are taken into consideration, electric vehicles emit 11% to 28% more than their diesel counterparts, according to the study, presented on Wednesday at the Ifo Institute in Munich.

Mining and processing the lithium, cobalt and manganese used for batteries consume a great deal of energy. A Tesla Model 3 battery, for example, represents between 11 and 15 tonnes of CO2. Given a lifetime of 10 years and an annual travel distance of 15,000 kilometres, this translates into 73 to 98 grams of CO2 per kilometre, scientists Christoph Buchal, Hans-Dieter Karl and Hans-Werner Sinn noted in their study.

The CO2 given off to produce the electricity that powers such vehicles also needs to be factored in, they say.

When all these factors are considered, each Tesla emits 156 to 180 grams of CO2 per kilometre, which is more than a comparable diesel vehicle produced by the German company Mercedes, for example.

The German researchers, therefore, take issue with the fact that European officials view electric vehicles as zero-emission ones. They note further that the EU target of 59 grams of CO2 per km by 2030 corresponds to a “technically unrealistic” consumption of 2.2 litres of diesel or 2.6 litres of gas per 100 kms.

These new limits pressure German and other European car manufacturers into switching massively to electric vehicles whereas, the researchers feel, it would have been preferable to opt for methane engines, “whose emissions are one-third less than those of diesel motors.”

ZeroHedge explains:

A battery pack for a Tesla Model 3 pollutes the climate with 11 to 15 tonnes of CO2. Each battery pack has a lifespan of approximately ten years and total mileage of 94,000, would mean 73 to 98 grams of CO2 per kilometer (116 to 156 grams of CO2 per mile), Buchal said. Add to this the CO2 emissions of the electricity from powerplants that power such vehicles, and the actual Tesla emissions could be between 156 to 180 grams of CO2 per kilometer (249 and 289 grams of CO2 per mile).

An electric car such as a Tesla is not powered by electricity. It is powered by coal; the electricity is just a means of transfer.

The same problem, btw, exists in the nearly-mythical hydrogen-powered car. The hydrogen has to come from somewhere. Atoms of H It do not exist in nature unbound to other elements. And you always use more energy to obtain free hydrogen than you get from oxidizing it. Guess where that energy comes from?

I covered hydrogen's problems years ago in, "Buy a Honda, kill a polar bear."

Here is a good video that explains hydrogen's potential advantages but very present difficulties very well.


And then there's this:   GAO: "Biofuels Don't Lower Gas Price or Emissions" But biofuels give so much political mileage that this report will disappear without a sound.

The wind power sell job

If wind power is so wonderful, why has sea commerce abandoned these ships?

Like almost all "alternative" energy schemes, wind-turbines are going to make some people very wealthy. But turbines will never make even a small dent in the power generation needed to meet even the world's increase in energy needs over the coming years. In fact, "Wind turbines are neither clean nor green and they provide zero global energy," says the UK Spectator.

Read the whole thing, but here is a bullet-point summary:

• world energy demand has been growing at about 2 per cent a year for nearly 40 years, today by about 2,000 terawatt-hours per year.        
  
• It would take nearly 350,000 new wind turbines per year to meet just the increase in demand.
  
• That’s one-and-a-half times as many as have been built in the world since governments started pouring consumer funds into this so-called industry in the early 2000s.
  
• That many turbines would require a land area greater than the British Isles, including Ireland, every year.
  
• If we kept this up for 50 years, it would take a land area the size of Russia covered with wind farms - just to meet the demand for new energy.
  
• Wind turbines are already close to power-generation efficiency limit. The main limit on efficiency is determined by the wind that is available, and that varies at its own sweet will from second to second, day to day, year to year.
  
• Wind is a fluctuating stream of low–density energy. We stopped using it for mission-critical transport and mechanical power long ago, for sound reasons. It’s just not very good.

There are other costs of wind power, too. One is straightforward financial in the form of government subsidies and the other hidden costs of grotesque environmental impacts.

Newsweek pointed out in 2015 that wind power could never survive in a fair market on its own. It relies on tens of billion of dollars in federal subsidies, which in 2016 the Obama administration declared should be made permanent.

Depending on which factors are included, estimates for the cost of wind power vary wildly. Lazard claims the cost of wind power ranges from $37 to $81 per megawatt-hour, while Michael Giberson at the Center for Energy Commerce at Texas Tech University suggests it’s closer to $149. Our analysis in an upcoming report explores this wide gap in cost estimates, finding that most studies underestimate the genuine cost of wind because they overlook key factors.

All estimates for wind power include the cost of purchasing capital and paying for operations and maintenance (O&M) of wind turbines. For the studies we examined, capital costs ranged from $48 to $88 per megawatt-hour, while O&M costs ranged from $9.8 to $21 per megawatt-hour.

Many estimates, however, don’t include costs related to the inherent unreliability of wind power and government subsidies and mandates. Since we can’t ensure the wind always blows, or how strongly, coal and natural gas plants must be kept on as backup to compensate when it’s calm. This is known as baseload cycling, and its cost ranges from $2 to $23 per megawatt-hour.

The subsidies are called the Production Tax Credit (PTC). It is yet another example of what I have long called a Sheriff of Nottingham plan: take money from the poor (or middle class) via taxation and give it to wealthy wind-power barons via subsidies. As The Hill points out:

If that isn't crony capitalism, I don't know what is.

The only reason wind energy has hobbled along is because of the government crutch that props it up. What does a permanent government subsidy say about the true viability of the wind industry? It proves that the wind industry is fully dependent on government handouts and can't ever be independent. So, why do we continue to allow our tax dollars to be thrown at an enterprise that cannot support itself in the foreseeable future? That's the question no politician wants to answer.

Not only does the PTC make the wind industry dependent on government funds, it takes money from the average American and gives it to the super-wealthy. The PTC is really a reverse Robin Hood, taking money from the poor to give to the rich. Money-savvy Warren Buffett fully realizes that the wind industry is not economically productive without the government there to push it along. Buffett said, "[O]n wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit." While the PTC exists, private investors like multibillionaire Warren Buffett are able to profit at the taxpayers' expense.

"Follow the money" indeed. Cui bono? Not you or me, buddy.

What about environmental costs? Don't wind turbines save the planet? Not even close. Back to my bullet points of the Spectator:

• The direct effects of wind turbines — killing birds and bats, sinking concrete foundations deep into wild lands — is bad enough.
  
• But there is also is the dirty pollution generated in Inner Mongolia by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets in the turbines. This generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale.
  
• Wind turbines are made mostly of steel and concrete. They need about 200 times as much material per unit of capacity as a modern combined cycle gas turbine.
  
• Steel is made with coal, providing the heat for smelting ore and carbon in the alloy. 
• Cement also uses coal.
  
• The machinery of ‘clean’ renewables is the output of the fossil fuel economy, and largely the coal economy.
  
• It take 150 tonnes of coal to make one turbine.
  
• To build 350,000 wind turbines a year just to keep up with increasing energy demand, will require 50 million tonnes of coal a year. That’s about half the EU’s hard coal–mining output.

In summary:

Wind power is not reliable, requires a backup-generation source, is overwhelmingly expensive, takes money from the poor to give to the rich, can never make a significant impact of total-power sourcing, requires near-unthinkable areas of land mass or sea beds for the turbines, increases reliance on fossil fuels, and requires very environmentally-adverse rare-earth mining operations that endemically heavily exploit children and poor adult labor.

So why are we still doing this? Oh, yeah ...

And I thought the science was settled

Geosystems scientists at Oxford University, that well-known den of climate-change deniers, have concluded that "Global warming may be occurring more slowly than previously thought."

Not warming very fast after all.

Computer modelling used a decade ago to predict how quickly global average temperatures would rise may have forecast too much warming, a study has found.

 

The Earth warmed more slowly than the models forecast, meaning the planet has a slightly better chance of meeting the goals set out in the Paris climate agreement, including limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

 

Scientists said previous models may have been “on the hot side”.

 

The study, published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, does not play down the threat which climate change has to the environment, and maintains that major reductions in emissions must be attained.

 

But the findings indicate the danger may not be as acute as was previously thought.

 

Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford and one of the study’s authors told The Times: “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations.”

Don't you hate it when nature won't cooperate in confirming your politics? By that I refer again to Ottmar Edenhofer, the lead author of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report and co-chair of the IPCC's Working Group III on Mitigation of Climate Change.

He told Germany's Neue Zurcher Zeitung in November, as reported by Investors.com:
"The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War."

Edenhofer let the environmental cat out of the bag when he said "climate policy is redistributing the world's wealth" and that "it's a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization." ...

Edenhofer claims "developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community" and so they must have their wealth expropriated and redistributed to the victims of their alleged crimes, the postage stamp countries of the world. He admits this "has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole."

What is climate science really about? Oh, you know:

Remember, climate science's only customers are governments because climate science has no product.

Hurricanes and global warming

The Myth That Climate Change Created Harvey, Irma

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in its most recent scientific assessment that “[n]o robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes … have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin,” and that there are “no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency.”

Further, “confidence in large-scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones [such as ‘Superstorm’ Sandy] since 1900 is low.”

Other media outlets tying Harvey to climate change took a more measured approach.

For instance, Vox wrote that man-made global warming did not actually cause Harvey, but simply exacerbated the natural disaster by creating heavier rainfalls.

But this claim is discredited by University of Washington climatologist Cliff Mass, who after examining precipitation levels in the Gulf found that “[t]here is no evidence that global warming is influencing Texas coastal precipitation in the long term and little evidence that warmer than normal temperatures had any real impact on the precipitation intensity from this storm.”

Mass went on to explicitly refute those who attribute Hurricane Harvey to climate change:

The bottom line in this analysis is that both observations of the past decades and models looking forward to the future do not suggest that one can explain the heavy rains of Harvey by global warming, and folks that are suggesting it are poorly informing the public and decision makers. 

Politicians seeking to exploit Harvey and Irma as reasons to act on climate change would only make a bad situation worse. Climate policies and regulations designed to prevent natural disasters and slow the earth’s warming simply will not do so.

Then there is the NOAA: 

It is premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity. That said, human activities may have already caused changes that are not yet detectable due to the small magnitude of the changes or observational limitations, or are not yet confidently modeled (e.g., aerosol effects on regional climate). ...

In summary, neither our model projections for the 21st century nor our analyses of trends in Atlantic hurricane and tropical storm counts over the past 120+ yr support the notion that greenhouse gas-induced warming leads to large increases in either tropical storm or overall hurricane numbers in the Atlantic.

Speaking of climate-change, remember all the alarm about how the world's glaciers were melting? Well, as it turns out, they are. And they've been melting for 400 years.

Remember, even former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer saw through the smokescreen:

"One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole," said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.

So what is the goal of environmental policy?

"We redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy," said Edenhofer.

That is what "climate change" is really about: its advocates just want our money.

Hmm:

Taken from this interesting lesson.

Update: Heh!

Update: This is informative, too: Hurricanes, Rainfall, and Climate Change

Used cars: The market will soon be flooded

Forbes: 11 Best Bargains in Three-Year-Old Used Cars

Get 'em while you can, because before long the used-car market will be flooded (heh!) with coded-out cars from Hurricane Harvey areas - and the sellers will not tell you (and may not even know themselves).

But the dadgum science is SETTLED!

I blame global warming! Or global cooling! Wait, it's because of climate change! Just remember, the science is settled!

As they say, climate is what you want, but weather is what you get.

The invention of global warming

A peer-reviewed Study Finds Temperature Adjustments Account For ‘Nearly All Of The Warming’ In Climate Data.

A new study found adjustments made to global surface temperature readings by scientists in recent years “are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data.”

“Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever – despite current claims of record setting warming,” according to a study published June 27 by two scientists and a veteran statistician.

The peer-reviewed study tried to validate current surface temperature datasets managed by NASA, NOAA and the UK’s Met Office, all of which make adjustments to raw thermometer readings. Skeptics of man-made global warming have criticized the adjustments.

Climate scientists often apply adjustments to surface temperature thermometers to account for “biases” in the data. The new study doesn’t question the adjustments themselves but notes nearly all of them increase the warming trend.

Basically, “cyclical pattern in the earlier reported data has very nearly been ‘adjusted’ out” of temperature readings taken from weather stations, buoys, ships and other sources.

The text of the full study may be read here. Its conclusion  is,

In this research report, the most important surface data adjustment issues are identified and past changes in the previously reported historical GAST data are quantified. While the notion that some “adjustments” to historical data might need to be made is not challenged, logically it would be expected that such historical temperature data adjustments would sometimes raise these temperatures, and sometimes lower them. This situation would mean that the impact of such adjustments on the temperature trend line slope is uncertain. However, each new version of GAST has nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history.

That was accomplished by systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern. This was true for all three entities providing GAST data measurement, NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU.

As a result, this research sought to validate the current estimates of GAST using the best available relevant data. This included the best documented and understood data sets from the U.S. and elsewhere as well as global data from satellites that provide far more extensive global coverage and are not contaminated by bad siting and urbanization impacts. Satellite data integrity also benefits from having cross checks between UAH and RSS as well as with Balloon data.

The conclusive findings of this research are that the three GAST data sets are not a valid representation of reality. In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data. Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years
have been the warmest ever –despite current claims of record setting warming.

Finally, since GAST data set validity is a necessary condition for EPA’s GHG/CO2 Endangerment Finding, it too is invalidated by these research findings.

Remember that an IPCC Former Chair Admits It's All About the Money.

"One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole," said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.

So what is the goal of environmental policy?

"We redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy," said Edenhofer.

But I wrote that years ago in, "Environmentalist religion explained:"

But there is more than mere religiousity at work in religious environmentalism. H.L. Mencken observed, "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it." And that is the true foundation of environmentalism today: the desire of its gurus to regulate the way others live. Monbiot again:

We can deal with climate change only with the help of governments, restraining the exertions of our natural liberties.

Freeman Dyson wrote, "Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion." I demur. Environmentalism has not replaced socialism at all. Instead, the old-line socialists, faced with decades of the failure of political socialism, have jumped on the environmentalist bandwagon to keep socialism alive. Environmentalism has become a much better vehicle to achieve a rigid regulation of people's lives than political socialism ever was. After all, the fate of the entire planet is at stake! Environmentalism has already led some British members of Parliament to propose that the government regulate almost every aspect of buying and selling by private individuals. If this is not socialism, it is a distinction without a difference.

So there you are. At bottom, modern environmentalism has discarded scientific rigor to embrace something not much different than Leninism, the desire to control the major components of the way individuals live. From there it is a short step from environmentalism to Leninism's successor: Stalinism, the desire to control every aspect of the way we live. That's our future, minus the gulags. We hope.

This seems an apt time to quote the old liberals' bumper sticker: "If you're not outraged, you are not paying attention."

IPCC Former Chair Admits It's All About the Money

Another Climate Alarmist Admits Real Motive Behind Warming Scare

"One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole," said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.

So what is the goal of environmental policy?

"We redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy," said Edenhofer.

Then there's this: "Diminishing solar activity may bring new Ice Age by 2030"

A lot more about that here: "What Happened to Spot? A Solar Update"

Solar image on May 31 of this year. Fewer sunspots mean a colder Earth.
This has been tracked going back hundreds of years.

The “Little Ice Age” was actually a significantly extended cool period lasting several centuries, and no less than FOUR extended minima occurred during its “tenure.” These include, in order, the Wolf, the Spörer, the Maunder, and the Dalton minima. These extended minima were not all of the same “depth,” in that the minimum numbers of sunspots were not the same across all of them — the Maunder was far deeper than the rest — but there are indications that we are hitting numbers in the range of the Dalton already.

Note that, during the Maunder Minimum, sunspots became so rare that a grand total of only ~50 were observed over 28 years — this corresponds roughly to two and a half solar cycles. In a “normal” cycle, we would expect to see around 50,000 sunspots in that same timeframe, some THREE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE MORE than were observed during the Maunder Minimum. Entire month spans went by with NO sunspots. Also understand that, when sunspots resumed, they did not pick up mid-cycle, despite the fractional-cycle timeframe; the extended minimum was, effectively, a reset.

I find it impossible to believe that the sophisticated computer global-warming models do not account at all for solar activity or for the increased cosmic-ray bombardments the Earth receives during solar minimums (because decreased solar strength means a weaker solar "wind" passing our planet). Not, surely it just can't be that global-warming "science" pays no attention at all to that fusion reactor 93 million miles away and what effect its output could have on the actual climate, not the modeled one.

But when all you want is Other People's Money, why bother with, you know, actual empirical data when GIGO works even better?

But moving on: "The Paris Climate Deal Was A 'Fraud' And A 'Sham' ... Until Trump Decided To Ditch It." It is amazing how many global-warming advocates fiercely opposed the Paris Accords - until Trump ditched it. Now we are all going to die!

Yet it was only a little more than a year ago that climate scientists and environmentalists were viciously attacking the Paris agreement itself. The goals were too low to make a difference. There was nothing binding any of the signatories to live up to their promises, and no enforcement mechanism if they didn't. It just kicked the can down the road.

James Hansen, the undisputed hero of the climate-change movement, called the Paris deal "a fraud really, a fake. … It's just worthless words. There is no action, just promises."

A joint letter signed by nearly a dozen top climate scientists said the agreement suffered "deadly flaws lying just beneath its veneer of success." These scientists complained that the agreement could actually be counterproductive, since it gave the impression that global warming was being dealt with when in fact it wasn't.

A study in the peer-reviewed journal Global Policy said that even if every country lived up to its CO2 emission reduction promises through 2030, the Paris deal would "likely reduce global temperature rise about 0.17°C in 2100."

And the WSJ: Trump Skips Climate Church -- Paris exists to provide an imprimatur to what politicians would do anyway. Funny about that "climate church" thing, since environmentalism long ago became a religion in its own right.

We are being played, people. But fortunately, not everyone is being rolled: MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen: Believing CO2 controls the climate ‘is pretty close to believing in magic’

Doubling CO2 involves a 2% perturbation to this budget. So do minor changes in clouds and other features, and such changes are common. In this complex multifactor system, what is the likelihood of the climate (which, itself, consists in many variables and not just globally averaged temperature anomaly) is controlled by this 2% perturbation in a single variable? Believing this is pretty close to believing in magic. Instead, you are told that it is believing in ‘science.’ Such a claim should be a tip-off that something is amiss. After all, science is a mode of inquiry rather than a belief structure.

The accumulation of false and/or misleading claims is often referred to as the ‘overwhelming evidence’ for forthcoming catastrophe. Without these claims, one might legitimately ask whether there is any evidence at all.

And just this year: 80 Graphs From 58 New (2017) Papers Invalidate Claims Of Unprecedented Global-Scale Modern Warming 

Last year there were at least 60 peer-reviewed papers published in scientific journals demonstrating that  Today’s Warming Isn’t Global, Unprecedented, Or Remarkable.

Just within the last 5 months,  58 more papers and 80 new graphs have been published that continue to undermine the popularized conception of a slowly cooling Earth temperature history followed by a dramatic hockey-stick-shaped uptick, or an especially unusual global-scale warming during modern times.

  

Yes, some regions of the Earth have been warming in recent decades or at some point in the last 100 years.  Some regions have been cooling for decades at a time.  And many regions have shown no significant net changes or trends in either direction relative to the last few hundred to thousands of years.

Like this chart of European summer temperatures over the last 2,000 years:

So what is the point of all this? As the IPCC's Edehofer said, We just want your money.

The whole climate-change enterprise is simply scientific prostitution.

Well, bummer: Antarctic ice sheet is growing

NASA Study: Mass Gains of Antarctic Ice Sheet Greater than Losses

A new NASA study says that Antarctica is overall accumulating ice. 

Still, areas of the continent, like the Antarctic Peninsula 

photographed above, have increased their mass loss in the last decades.

Credits: NASA's Operation IceBridge

A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers.

The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice.

According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed   to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.

“We’re essentially in agreement with other studies that show an increase in ice discharge in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island region of West Antarctica,” said Jay Zwally, a glaciologist with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study, which was published on Oct. 30 in the Journal of Glaciology. “Our main disagreement is for East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica – there, we see an ice gain that exceeds the losses in the other areas.”  Zwally added that his team “measured small height changes over large areas, as well as the large changes observed over smaller areas.”

Well, there's a narrative blown to shards.