Utopia, you are standing in it!

When researching previous post, I came across the article in the Guardian on James Hansen stating that “Obama had only four years to halt devastating climate change”. When I finished that post, I wondered how many other similar claims (in the form of “number of years/months to save the planet/world”) were there in Guardian articles.

As expected there were more than the one I accidentally bumped into. This post will be about the first article I found, there will be a follow-up post on the others.

That first article that I found is titled “Ten years to save the planet from mankind“, written by Gaby Hinsliff and published on 29 Oct 2006. Its subject is the Stern report that was published a day later (it is striking how the Guardian succeeds to know what is in a report before it is published). It was initially not really clear…

The image above, supported by the table later on shows that in December ice has recovered in the central Arctic with open water found only on the margins, as is typical this time of year. The animation shows progression of ice extent from Dec. 1 to Dec. 22, 2019.

Most dramatic is Hudson Bay on the left filling in over these 3 weeks, from 445k km2 up to 1214k km2, 96% of maximum. At the top, Chukchi Sea also ices over, from 589k km2 to 933k km2, 97% of max. Above Chukchi is Bering Sea just starting with fast ice, and Okhotsk upper right growing ice as usual. The two places lagging behind in ice recovery are Bering Sea and Baffin Bay.

The graph below shows the ice extent growing during December compared to some other years and the 12 year average (2007 to 2018 inclusive).

Note that the  NH…

The Trump tax plan, which was signed into law right before Christmas in 2017, had two very good features.

• Restricting the deduction for state and local taxes.
• A reduction of the corporate tax rate to 21 percent.

The former was important because the federal tax code was subsidizing high tax burdens in states such as New Jersey, Illinois, and California.

The latter was important because the United States, with a 35 percent corporate rate, had the highest tax burden on businesses among developed nations.

The 21 percent rate we have today doesn’t make us a low-tax nation, but at least the U.S. corporate tax burden is now near the world average.

There were many other provisions in the Trump tax plan, most of which moved tax policy in the right direction.

Now that a couple of years have passed, what’s been the net effect?

In

A heart-felt outcry from an Australian volunteer firefighter who says: Enough is enough!

Rural firefighter’s heartbreaking plea

A rural firefighter has issued a heartbreaking plea on social media, taking on environmental policies and saying “enough is enough”.

news.com.au, November 12, 2019

As catastrophic fires burn across Queensland and New South Wales — with experts warning that the worst is yet to come on Tuesday — rural firefighter Tyson Smith has issued a heartbreaking plea on Facebook.

The post, which has been shared more than 2600 times and liked by over 1600 people, asks how much more it will take before the government acknowledges current fires are the result of a larger issue.

Three people have died in NSW, and 200 homes and sheds lost to bushfires in both states over the weekend.

“How many more homes?” wrote Smith. “How many more acres of destroyed forest and bushland? How many more…

by Judith Curry

Is 3 C warming over the 21st century now the ‘best estimate’?  A reframing of how we think about climate change over the 21st century, and my arguments for 1 C.

Well, it finally happened: writer J. K. Rowling, who’s been vocally progressive in her politics since she became famous, has now become demonized for being a “transphobe”. What that means is that she gave support, on Twitter, to another woman who was fired from her job (a charity) because she refused to recognize transsexual females (male —> female) as completely equivalent to biological females. The court case about the firing is summarized by Andrew Sullivan (who has views similar to Rowling) in his latest New York Magazine column, and he links to the judge’s decision declaring that the woman supported by Rowling, Maya Forstater, had every right to be fired. Another account of the case, insisting that Forstater was indeed a hateful transphobe, was given by Vox, which also displays many anti-Rowling tweets as if to buttress its stand. (Vox is quickly becoming like HuffPo.)

Here’s…

Four years ago, I wrote about how dishwashers don’t work very well because of foolish red tape from Washington.

The clever folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute put together a video on the topic.

I especially like the fake commercial at the start of the video.

But I don’t like the way my dishwasher performs.

And Jeffrey Tucker of the American Institute for Economic Research shares my disdain.

American dishwashers used to work. They were wonderful labor-saving devices. They kept our kitchens cleaner. They sanitized the dishes, helping to stop cross-contamination and generally improving health over the iffy process of handwashing. …Then one day they just stopped doing the work. What happened? …Dishwashers used to wash all the dishes in under one hour. Now they take two hours, three hours, and four hours, and still don’t get the dishes clean. …All of this is directly due to government regulations. …Now…

No country went harder and faster with its renewable obsession than Germany. The rocketing power prices that inevitably followed are crushing its once thriving industries, including motor manufacturers such as Mercedes-Benz.

The idea that a critical input cost to manufacturing can be tripled without affecting profitability and employment is, as any student of that dismal science, economics might tell you, a nonsense.

Francis Menton takes a look at what happens when renewable energy rent seekers and eco-loons take control of energy policy, and with it the economic policy that underlies the success of any modern, industrial economy. Germany’s included.

Contrast Of Climate And Energy Policies, And Economic Results, In The U.S. And Germany
Manhattan Contrarian
Francis Menton
6 December 2019

If you are reading your normal diet of “mainstream” press, you are getting hit with a constant barrage of climate alarm, together with a near total boycott on any good…

At Real Clear Energy is a good reflection on the collapsed climate legal crusade by three NYAGs Exxon and Evidence 101 by John S. Baker, Jr. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The problem for all these attorney generals is that states have no jurisdiction over climate change. Whatever one thinks about climate change, the climatic phenomena know no borders. If anything should be done about climate change, it is properly committed to the federal government.

Untroubled by these fundamental facts, current New York Attorney General Letitia James nevertheless charged ExxonMobil with fraud in misleading investors regarding the threat posed to the company by the costs allegedly associated with by climate change. New York State’s notoriously broad and vague Martin Act.

In the court of (elite) public opinion, ExxonMobil had already been found guilty. For three years prior to trial, the Attorney General’s office claimed that ExxonMobil was clearly…

Energy and Poverty are obviously tied together.

“Access to cleaner and affordable energy options is essential for improving the livelihoods of the poor in developing countries. The link between energy and poverty is demonstrated by the fact that the poor in developing countries constitute the bulk of an estimated 2.7 billion people relying on traditional biomass for cooking and the overwhelming majority of the 1.4 billion without access to grid electricity. Most of the people still reliant on traditional biomass live in Africa and South Asia.

The relationship is, in many respects, a vicious cycle in which people who lack access to cleaner and affordable energy are often trapped in a re-enforcing cycle of deprivation, lower incomes and the means to improve their living conditions while at the same time using significant amounts of their very limited income on expensive and unhealthy forms of energy that provide poor and/or…

An astonishing decision from an Employment Tribunal in the UK has ruled that it is acceptable to dismiss an employee because of their view that sex is biological and immutable (unable to be changed). In a preliminary ruling in Forstater v CGD Europe (18 Dec 2019; Case No 2200909/2019, Employment Judge Tayler) this view was found to be “incompatible with human dignity and [the] fundamental rights of others” (para [84]), and hence not a protected “belief” for the purposes of a claim of “belief”-based discrimination under the UK Equality Act 2010. While this case is not based on a religious belief, it brings into sharp focus a number of issues connected with religious beliefs and the workplace.

While Greta frets about global incineration and mass extinctions, the wind industry is doing a very fine job of extinguishing millions of birds and bats, every year. Indeed, entire species are under threat, including Europe’s Red Kite and Tasmania’s Wedge Tailed Eagle.

More generally, there’s a wave of avian carnage wherever the wind industry plies it subsidy-soaked trade; and offshore is no exception.

As Jason Endfield details below, the offshore wind industry is exacting a phenomenal toll on a whole range of seabirds in the waters surrounding Britain.

Isle Of Man Seabird Populations Plummet As Wind Farms Overwhelm The Irish Sea
Jason Endfield Blog
Jason Endfield
21 June 2019

Herring Gulls are down 82%, European Shag down 51%, Razorbills down 55%. The list goes on….

* The world’s biggest offshore wind farm is just a few miles away.
* Isn’t there a conspicuous connection?

The Isle Of Man wildlife…