In just the last week, the progression of ice extents in Barents Sea is impressive. The first image from MASIE is January 27, 2017. h/t Pethefin
Then a week later on February 3 we see that Svalbard is almost enclosed.
In that one week Arctic ice gained 240k km2 up to 14.3 M km2, including Barents Sea adding 145k km2. Thanks to MASIE we can see Arctic ice growing before our eyes.
One Week in Barents Sea shows Svalbard under siege.
Sitting in the Skagit County Courthouse in the middle of the so-called “valve turners,” Ken Ward had this to say just hours before a jury decided his fate.
“I’m feeling pretty relaxed,” Ward said.
He testified Tuesday about the day he and four others shut off tar sands oil pipelines across the country.
“It was a fabulous opportunity to explain to the jurors pretty succinctly why I did it. I put up a map of Skagit County, about a third of which will be under water in 2050. That’s why I did it,” Ward said.
“I thought they would just convict me, but they didn’t,” said Ward, who was facing up to 20 years on charges of burglary and sabotage.
“It’s not immediately obvious what a hung jury means,” he said. “But as we were sitting there we realized: Wait a minute. No, this is not just a moment of confusion. This means a jury presented with a video of exactly what I did wasn’t willing to convict. That’s huge.”
“Apparently they cared more about climate cataclysm than enforcing the law. It’s quite astounding.”
Four others involved in the Oct. 11 shutdown of tar-sands oil pipelines still face trial in Montana, North Dakota and Minnesota, Ward said.
Ward said he expects more citizen dissent, and widespread acts of civil disobedience to push back against Trump’s embrace for more mining, drilling and transport of fossil fuels.
On February 9, prosecutors will announce whether or not they will retry the case.
More details from Seattle Times (here)
Conclusion
It is a triumph of fear over facts. We know what a hung jury means. Out of twelve people, one had drunk the same koolaid as Ward and refused to convict him. Do we now have post-normal law (an oxymoron for sure), just as perverted as post-normal science?
Background in Previous Post: Climate Case: Judge Defends Rule of Law
Some time ago, climate activists noticed they were not winning over the American public, whose opinion was deeply divided on global warming/climate change. They turned to legal venues to promote their agenda, including shareholder proposals and legal complaints.
Any jurisdiction, like Massachusetts or the UK, who enacted reductions of fossil fuel emissions will be subject to legal suits for not achieving emission targets. In such court proceedings, global warming/climate change, temperature changes, extreme weather etc. are all of them beside the point. Once such a law is in place, the belief has served only as a cover to compel energy policies no longer needing any reference to climate science or its uncertainties.
Washington state is one of the most liberal in the US, and thus a hotbed of climate alarm and activism. In the November general election, the state was the first to vote on imposing a carbon tax. The measure was defeated, but only because social justice groups and many environmental activists argued it did not go far enough in promoting clean energy.
Washington State Voters Reject Nation’s First Carbon Tax
Last November, children were recruited to bring a case against the federal government for not stopping climate change, and the judge in that case agreed to hear their complaint. Washington Youth Sue Over Climate Change
In this context, we have a brave judge standing up for the rule of law in a case of civil disobedience. The defendant Ken Ward is an Oregon-based environmental activist who turned off an oil pipeline in Washington state last October 11. He does not dispute his criminal behavior, but claims his actions were necessary to defend the planet.
The 60-year-old Corbett, Ore. man faces three felony charges and one misdemeanor for shutting off a valve on the Trans Mountain Pipeline in Burlington, Wash, which transports Canadian Tar Sands crude oil into the state for refinement.
At a pre-trial hearing on January 24 in Skagit County, Washington, a judge denied Ward’s defense strategy, known as the necessity defense.
Judge Michael E Rickert said: “I don’t know what everybody’s beliefs are on [climate change], but I know that there’s tremendous controversy over the fact whether it even exists. And even if people believe that it does or it doesn’t, the extent of what we’re doing to ourselves and our climate and our planet, there’s great controversy over that.”
There have been some victories for the necessity defense in the UK and in Massachusetts where a prosecutor in 2014 dropped charges against Ward and another activist who blocked a coal shipment, stating that “climate change is one of the gravest crises our planet has ever faced”.
But Rickert, an elected judge in Skagit county, north of Seattle, sided with state prosecutors who argued against the necessity defense and have alleged that Ward, co-founder of Climate Disobedience Center, committed burglary, criminal trespass and sabotage.
While explaining the standards for permitting a necessity defense, Rickert said: “It does need to have some immediacy, some imminence, more so than this particular threat and harm, which is climatic change, global warming, whatever.”
He later added that with climate change, there’s “great controversy” with “over half of our political leaders”. (Critics have slammed the GOP as the “only major party in the advanced world” to deny climate change).
Interestingly, only the report in The Guardian (here) quoted Judge Rickert so that readers might hear what he said (the news). But the journalist’s bias came out in several adjectives and parenthetical asides intended to assert his own opinion (fake news) to undermine the judge’s authority.
Ward’s action was a planned act of protest done in conjunction with other “valve turners” in other states. At the same time in Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana, fellow environmentalists turned off oil pipelines. They broke the law because they believed that the federal government gave them no other choice: by its inaction on climate change issues, they chose to cut off the flow of oil into the country. Williamette Week (here)
Summary
Finally a judge stands up for the rule of law. No religious belief, be it Seventh Day Adventism, or Catastrophic Climatism can be imposed on others, nor be a justification for illegal actions against lawful enterprises. At least the Adventists respect social justice by seeking only to persuade others through discussion rather than by force or violence.
Postscript:
A year ago was another loss in the courts for climate activists on January 15, 2016 in Seattle.
Activists lose criminal case on climate change defense – but judge praises effort
The ‘Delta 5’ had attempted to illegally block trains carrying crude oil near Seattle, and had hoped that their trial would mark the first time that a US jury was allowed to consider the “necessity defense” in a case of climate activism.
But after allowing two days of expert testimony on topics ranging from the Paris climate talks to railway safety standards and the health impacts of particulate matter, Judge Anthony E Howard ruled that the defense had failed to present sufficient evidence to show that the defendants had “no reasonable legal alternative” to trespassing on a private rail yard and blocking trains.
The case is a blow to environmental campaigners but marks the furthest defendants have managed to go in an American courtroom using the so-called “necessity” defense that argues such actions are justified to combat catastrophic climate change.
The activists progressed unusually far because Howard allowed them to call expert witnesses to testify to the harms of climate change, even though he later felt compelled to instruct the jury to disregard their evidence. The judge appeared to do so reluctantly, expressing some sympathy for the activists in a court on Thursday.
“Frankly the court is convinced that the defendants are far from the problem and are part of the solution to the problem of climate change,” Howard said from the bench. But, he added: “I am bound by legal precedent, no matter what my personal beliefs might be.”
That’s two brave judges. It appears many more courageous judges will be needed.
Thanks to Dr. Ross McKitrick for telling the story: It’s official—Ontario’s coal phase-out was all for nothing which appeared in the Financial Post, January 17, 2017. Excerpts below.
The federal Liberal government plans to impose a national coal phase-out, based on the same faulty arguments used in Ontario, namely that such a move will yield significant environmental benefits and reduce health-care costs. One problem—those arguments never made sense, and now with the Ontario phase-out complete, we can verify not only that they were invalid but that the Ontario government knew it.
First, ample data at the time showed that coal use had little effect on Ontario air quality. Environment Canada’s emissions inventories showed that the Ontario power generation sector was responsible for only a tiny fraction (about one per cent) of provincial particulate emissions, a common measure of air pollution.
Taken together these reports provided a credible basis for predicting that a coal phase-out would only have a small effect on our air quality. They also showed, based on the results of retrofits then underway at the power plants, that the same air quality improvements could be obtained at a fraction of the cost by installing scrubbers on the smokestacks, rather than shutting the coal-fired plants down.
Second, the government’s claims about the health effects of phasing out coal were highly implausible. It stated (and continues to assert) that coal plant emissions cost the province more than $3 billion annually in health-care costs. But this was at a time when the total provincial health-care budget was only about $35 billion annually. In other words, they claimed that nearly one-tenth of all health-care spending was due to illnesses and mortality arising from power plants that, again, were responsible for only about one per cent of annual particulate emissions.
Dr. Aliakbari and I analysed data for the cities of Hamilton, Toronto and Ottawa over the 2002-2014 interval. Our statistical model allowed us to isolate the effects of declining Ontario coal use compared to changing emissions from other Canadian and U.S. sources and effects due to weather. In line with our expectations and the prior evidence, we found that phasing out coal was responsible for only very small changes in Ontario air pollution levels.
We did not look at greenhouse gases because they are not local air pollutants, only matter on a global level, and emissions could be offset by purchasing credits anywhere in the world. The climate issue was, and remains, a red herring in the discussion about the costs and benefits of eliminating coal.
Summary
Ontario is suffering a crisis of high and rising electricity costs that’s causing real, long-lasting damage to households and businesses. The province insists the pain is worth it because of the environmental improvements. The numbers show otherwise. Phasing out coal had almost no effect on Ontario’s air pollution levels—and the government at Queen’s Park knew this was likely to be the case. It has all been for nothing.
Ross McKitrick
Professor of Economics, University of Guelph
Two additional points
Firstly, in both the US and Canada, the real motivation is virtue-signalling, posing as fighters of climate change. The US EPA is also infamous for bogus estimates of public health and air quality benefits to justify costly and onerous energy regulations.
When Ontario government rejected the anti-pollution scrubbers mentioned in the article above, Energy Minister Dwight Duncan said: “We’re not going to spend $1.6 billion on technology that doesn’t help climate change. That’s just dumb.”
Secondly, the result was worse than nothing. Ontario’s electricity rates are the fastest rising and among the highest in North America. Ratepayers are being mugged by the once friendly Reddy Kilowatt.
Ontario’s Hall of Pain
Ontario Climate Policy Refugees
Ontario Jammed by Rent-seekers and Ratepayers
Electrical Madness in Green Ontario
Another powerful post by Clive Best on how earth’s surface temperatures change by means of changing meridional heat transfers. Meridional Warming.
The key point for me was seeing how the best geological knowledge proves beyond the shadow of a doubt how the earth’s climate profile shifts over time, as presented in the diagram above. It comes from esteemed paleoclimatologist Christopher Scotese. His compete evidence and analysis can be reviewed in his article Some thoughts on Global Climate Change: The Transition from Icehouse to Hothouse (here).
In that essay Scotese shows where we are presently in this cycle between icehouse and hothouse.
As of 2015 earth is showing a GMT of 14.4C, compared to pre-industrial GMT of 13.8C. According to the best geological evidence from millions of years of earth’s history, that puts us in the category “Severe Icehouse.” So, thankfully we are warming up, albeit very slowly.
Moreover, and this is Clive Best’s point, progress toward a warming world means flattening the profile at the higher latitudes, especially the Arctic. Equatorial locations remain at 23C throughout the millennia, while the gradient decreases in a warmer world.
The previous post explained what is wrong with averaging temperature anomalies. See Temperature Misunderstandings
Conclusion:
We have many, many centuries to go before the earth can warm up to the “Greenhouse” profile, let alone get to “Hothouse.” Regional and local climates at higher latitudes will see slightly warming temperatures and smaller differences from equatorial climates. These are facts based on solid geological evidence, not opinions or estimates from computer models.
It is still a very cold world, but we are moving in the right direction. Stay the course.
Meanwhile, keep firing away Clive.
Obama and other Western political leaders have been saying that Climate Change is the biggest threat to modern society. I am coming around to agree, but not in the way they are thinking. I mean there is fresh evidence that we can defeat radical Islam, but we are already losing to radical climatism. I refer to climate alarm and activism, which has come to dominate the environmental movement and impose an agenda for social re-engineering.
The Climatist Game Plan
Mission: Deindustrialize Civilization
Goal: Drive industrial corporations into Bankruptcy
Strategy: Cut off the Supply of Cheap, Reliable Energy
Tactics:
Progress:
Collateral Damage:
For more info on progress see: http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/terence-corcoran-clean-green-and-catastrophic
Summary:
Radical climatism is playing the endgame while others are sleeping, or discussing the holes in the science. Truly, the debate is over (not ever having happened) now that all nations have signed up to the Paris COP doctrine. Political leaders are willing, even enthusiastic dupes, while climatist tactics erode the foundations of industrial society. Deaths and unemployment are unavoidable, but then the planet already has too many people anyway.
ISIS is an immediate threat, but there is a deeper and present danger already doing damage to the underpinnings of Life As We Know It. It is the belief in Climate Change and the activists executing their game plan. Make no mistake: they are well-funded, well-organized and mean business. And the recent behavior of valve-turners, acting illegally to shut off supplies of fossil fuel energy, shows they are willing to go very far to impose their will upon the rest of us.
Note: On an earlier version of this post, I was chastised by a deep environmentalist, Michael Lewis, for tarring him and others dedicated to environmental concerns with the same brush as climate activists. I take his point, and acknowledge the dismay many environmentalists feel at the damage climatists have done both to science and to efforts to protect the planet from real pollution.
Conclusion
With Trump’s election, there is a new sheriff in town. We can hope for changes, firstly to stop the erosion and secondly to repair the damages to the underpinnings of modern society. The transition is underway, and it looks like this:
Science Matters 