Month: April 2019

Activists Demand Shell Commit Harikari

Posted on by Ron Clutz

CNN proudly proclaims: Climate groups threaten lawsuit to force Shell to ditch oil  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The groups have accused Shell of “deliberately obstructing” efforts to keep global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius, the key goal of the Paris agreement. Pressure on companies has been building since the UN warned last year that the world has only 12 years to avert a climate disaster.

“The company has no concrete plans to align its business strategy with the commitments contained in the agreement,” Joris Thijssen, the director of Greenpeace Netherlands, said in a statement.

“Shell spends billions on oil and gas exploration each year, with current plans to invest just 5 percent of its budget in sustainable energy and 95 percent in exploiting fossil fuels,” the groups said.

Climate Liability News has the story Shell Sued in the Netherlands for Insufficient Action On Climate Change.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Seven environmental and human rights organizations in the Netherlands have filed suit against Royal Dutch Shell for failing to align its business model with the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement.

The suit, which is the first to directly challenge an oil company’s business model, was filed Friday in The Hague by Friends of the Earth Netherlands/ Milieudefensie, Greenpeace Netherlands, five other organizations and more than 17,000 Dutch citizens.

The plaintiffs are not seeking financial compensation, but are asking Shell to adjust its business model in order to keep global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius, as recommended by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They allege that by following a business model that it knows will not reach these goals, Shell is violating a Dutch law prohibiting “unlawful endangerment” and is violating human rights by taking insufficient action against climate change.

“If successful, the uniqueness of the case would be that Shell – as one of the largest multinational corporations in the world – would be legally obligated to change its business operations,” said Milieudefensie attorney Roger Cox, who also represented plaintiffs in the landmark Urgenda suit.

Urgenda was the first case in which a court ordered a government to reduce its emissions and the first time a court ruled that not taking sufficient action on climate change is a human rights violation.

Plaintiffs allege Shell’s current business model threatens human rights because the oil giant is knowingly undermining the world’s chances to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. They maintain that rather than guarantee emission reductions, Shell’s current plan would contribute to a much larger global temperature increase.

Shell did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but in a Dec. 2018 press release said it “aims to reduce the net carbon footprint of its energy products by around half by 2050, and by around 20% by 2035, in step with society’s drive to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.”

Plaintiffs maintain that a reduction of the company’s carbon footprint is not the same as a reduction in total greenhouse gas emissions because the carbon footprint involves a relative reduction in carbon emissions per unit of energy produced for the market, not an absolute reduction. Shell could reach its goals by producing as many units of renewable energy as it does oil and gas and could therefore reduce its carbon intensity by half without ever having to reduce its production or trade of fossil fuels.

By using this formula, plaintiffs contend that Shell – which has announced plans to link executive pay to the targets – could reach its stated goals without reducing its carbon emissions.

They say even if Shell’s goals were specific to emission reductions, the company’s target of a 50 percent reduction by 2050 still falls short of the IPCC recommendation that carbon emissions reach net zero by mid-century.

If successful, the lawsuit will be the first in which a company is ordered to reduce emissions.

The suit should come as no surprise to Shell. As required by the Dutch legal system, the defendant organizations sent the company a liability letter last year, demanding it cut back on its oil and gas production and align its business strategy with the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. Shell rejected those demands, saying it “strongly supports” the goals of the Paris Agreement and pointing to the company’s Sky scenario, as “a technically possible but challenging pathway” toward achieving those goals. The groups, which encouraged Dutch citizens to sign on to the suit, announced in February they intended to sue the oil giant.

According to the Carbon Majors report, which was compiled and released in 2017 by the Climate Accountability Institute, Shell ranked sixth in the world in cumulative greenhouse gas emissions between 1854 and 2010.

Plaintiffs maintain it is still possible to limit global warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius, but doing so will require immediate large-scale changes, including a transition to renewable energy and drastic emission reductions by Shell and other carbon polluters.

“We also expect that this [case] would have an effect on other fossil fuel companies, raising the pressure on them to change,” Cox also said that unlike previous cases which sought financial compensation for the effects of climate change, this one involves asking the judge to order Shell to ensure its activities have zero percent carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.

Methinks these folks should beware their wishes coming true:

See Also  Going Dutch: How Not to Cut Emissions

 

Good News: Stanford Not a Social Justice Academy

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Above I posted Modern Educayshun on the dangers of PC-enforced monotonic diversity (“It’s OK if you don’t look like us, as long as you think like us.”). I must now reference a much more encouraging report of the state of these affairs at my alma mater, Stanford, one of the earliest schools to stop teaching Western Civ, and the cradle of global warming/climate change alarmism.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Journalist Richard Bernstein’s 1994 book, Dictatorship of Virtue, was among the first on the rise of political correctness. Twenty-five years later, he returns to Stanford University to take stock of the forces unleashed — and those kept in check. His recent article is Culture War and Peace at Stanford: The PC Uprising 25 Years On

In the decades since, there’s been plenty of righteous indignation expressed: the campus thought police demanding (and often getting) protection from anything they deem to be offensive; informal limits on free speech; reckless accusations of racism, sexism, and homophobia; violent demonstrations against conservative speakers. It goes on.

Such episodes and events often get wide attention. And I was expecting to find a deeply fraught atmosphere at Stanford. Instead, what I found there, 25 years after my book’s publication, was not the brute triumph of a narrow, politically correct orthodoxy but a far more subtle and peaceful outcome to those battles. To be sure, the liberal-left, identity-politics forces for change have scored great gains. They are now established in the departments whose creation they demanded, while things like the Western-civ requirement remain discarded.

But I also found that things have calmed down. The day-to-day mood is less explosively acrimonious than it was a quarter-century ago, in part because those who want to concentrate on identity politics now have their places. But they are contained there. They haven’t shut the rest of the place down, and the rest of the place – perhaps a not silent but discreet and quiet majority – goes about its business delivering a pretty good education to students.

The composition of its student body, moreover, is very different from decades past. About 36% of undergraduates are listed as “white.” Half of the 7,000 or so undergraduates are women; 11% are foreigners; nearly 18% are “first gens,” the first in their families to attend college. The arithmetic of this suggests that only a little more than 21% of the undergraduate student body is made up of the type of student that dominated in the era of mandatory core courses in the Western canon – white males whose parents were college educated.

But in addition to their single Thinking Matters class, which is just a fragment of an undergraduate’s time at Stanford, students have to take 11 quarter-length classes in what’s called Ways of Thinking/Ways of Doing, aka WAYS, and here is where the fashionable trends in identity politics, race, gender, sexuality, class, and their “intersectionality,” as the current term has it, become thick and heavy.

There are dozens and dozens of courses in WAYS, and the diversity theme is omnipresent — “Race and Gender in Silicon Valley,” “Ethnicity, Race, and Identity in Performance Cultures,” “Introduction to Comparative Queer Literary Studies,” “Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary American Film,” and “Introduction to Intersectionality” (readings drawn “chiefly from black feminist scholars”).

And it would seem from course enrollment figures and the choice of majors that while courses in “Engaging Diversity” may be required, they’re not where students are putting their main effort.

According to the Office of the Provost, in the graduating class of 2017 (the last for which these statistics are available) 274 students got computer science degrees, 382 in one or another engineering program, 40 in English, nine in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and two in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Berman, the Thinking Matters director, noted the irony that while fierce ideological conflicts get most of the ink, the real problem now may be the lack of intellectual passion among students. Over lunch at the student union, sitting at an outdoor terrace looking over Stanford’s hacienda-like sandstone campus, he told me, “There’s a growing belief among students and their parents alike that a college education is direct preparation for a job, rather than an opportunity to deepen one’s personality or to create engaged, thinking citizens.” The challenge is to entice students largely interested in other things back into the humanities.

“The right question isn’t ‘Why aren’t our students reading the Federalist Papers?’ It’s ‘Why are our students primarily doing problem sets without reading much of anything at all?’ ” he said.

Footnote: No, my parents were not rich Hollywood stars who bought me a place at Stanford.  In fact I was a diversity admission, being a kid with good grades from an ordinary middle-class family, and needed to fill the quota for entrants from the state of Arizona.

N. Atlantic Starts Cold in 2019

Posted on by Ron Clutz

RAPID Array measuring North Atlantic SSTs.

Update April 10, 2019  March AMO Results now available and included in Decadal graph below.

For the last few years, observers have been speculating about when the North Atlantic will start the next phase shift from warm to cold. Given the way 2018 went, this may be the onset.  First some background.

Source: Energy and Education Canada

An example is this report in May 2015 The Atlantic is entering a cool phase that will change the world’s weather by Gerald McCarthy and Evan Haigh of the RAPID Atlantic monitoring project. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

This is known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), and the transition between its positive and negative phases can be very rapid. For example, Atlantic temperatures declined by 0.1ºC per decade from the 1940s to the 1970s. By comparison, global surface warming is estimated at 0.5ºC per century – a rate twice as slow.

In many parts of the world, the AMO has been linked with decade-long temperature and rainfall trends. Certainly – and perhaps obviously – the mean temperature of islands downwind of the Atlantic such as Britain and Ireland show almost exactly the same temperature fluctuations as the AMO.

Atlantic oscillations are associated with the frequency of hurricanes and droughts. When the AMO is in the warm phase, there are more hurricanes in the Atlantic and droughts in the US Midwest tend to be more frequent and prolonged. In the Pacific Northwest, a positive AMO leads to more rainfall.

A negative AMO (cooler ocean) is associated with reduced rainfall in the vulnerable Sahel region of Africa. The prolonged negative AMO was associated with the infamous Ethiopian famine in the mid-1980s. In the UK it tends to mean reduced summer rainfall – the mythical “barbeque summer”.Our results show that ocean circulation responds to the first mode of Atlantic atmospheric forcing, the North Atlantic Oscillation, through circulation changes between the subtropical and subpolar gyres – the intergyre region. This a major influence on the wind patterns and the heat transferred between the atmosphere and ocean.

The observations that we do have of the Atlantic overturning circulation over the past ten years show that it is declining. As a result, we expect the AMO is moving to a negative (colder surface waters) phase. This is consistent with observations of temperature in the North Atlantic.

Cold “blobs” in North Atlantic have been reported, but they are usually winter phenomena. For example in April 2016, the sst anomalies looked like this

But by September, the picture changed to this

And we know from Kaplan AMO dataset, that 2016 summer SSTs were right up there with 1998 and 2010 as the highest recorded.

As the graph above suggests, this body of water is also important for tropical cyclones, since warmer water provides more energy.  But those are annual averages, and I am interested in the summer pulses of warm water into the Arctic. As I have noted in my monthly HadSST3 reports, most summers since 2003 there have been warm pulses in the north atlantic.
amo december 2018
The AMO Index is from from Kaplan SST v2, the unaltered and not detrended dataset. By definition, the data are monthly average SSTs interpolated to a 5×5 grid over the North Atlantic basically 0 to 70N.  The graph shows the warmest month August beginning to rise after 1993 up to 1998, with a series of matching years since.  December 2016 set a record at 20.6C, but note the plunge down to 20.2C for  December 2018, matching 2011 as the coldest years  since 2000.  Because McCarthy refers to hints of cooling to come in the N. Atlantic, let’s take a closer look at some AMO years in the last 2 decades.

This graph shows monthly AMO temps for some important years. The Peak years were 1998, 2010 and 2016, with the latter emphasized as the most recent. The other years show lesser warming, with 2007 emphasized as the coolest in the last 20 years. Note the red 2018 line is at the bottom of all these tracks.  The short black line shows that 2019 began slightly cooler than January 2018  The February average AMO matched the low SST of the previous year, 0.14C lower than the peak year February 2017. March 2019 is also slightly lower than 2018  and 0.06C lower than peak year March 2016.

With all the talk of AMOC slowing down and a phase shift in the North Atlantic, it seems the annual average for 2018 confirms that cooling has set in.  Through December the momentum is certainly heading downward, despite the band of warming ocean  that gave rise to European heat waves last summer.

amo annual122018

natlssta

cdas-sflux_sst_atl_1

 

Modern Educayshun

Posted on by Ron Clutz

OK, this video is thoroughly depressing, but I post it because it was sent to me by my grandson who is a first year university student.  He says it is telling the truth in an exaggerated way.  I mean that the attitudes are accurately portrayed, but are less obvious and not as explicitly expressed in real classrooms.

The video is a punch in the gut.  Below is a more intellectual discussion of the same thing: The takeover of civil relations by so called “social justice.”  Peter meyers writes at The American Mind The Mask of Social Justice Slips.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Beneath bogus egalitarianism courses the will to power.

In the old understanding, racism was a malady of opinion and sentiment and therefore, deeply rooted as it was, remediable. In the lately emergent view, racism (at least in majority-white societies) is universal, omnipresent, and insuperable. It is present institutionally no less than personally, in our subconscious no less than our conscious minds, in all we have and all we are. In the words of President Obama, it is “part of our DNA.”

Let us underscore the radicalism in this revision. Its claims of “the permanence of racism” notwithstanding, the racially “woke” Left seems to regard itself as the vanguard of a democratic revolution, rising in righteous wrath against a distinctively odious, white-supremacist oligarchy. The democracy so envisioned is not, however, one grounded in equal natural rights. Animated by an ethic of effectively permanent redistribution via permanent race classifications, it divides its population into the creditor and debtor races Justice Scalia decried in his Adarand opinion—a division fundamentally at odds with the principle of natural human equality.

The radicalism of the ascendant dispensation on racism runs deeper still. In Black Power, a seminal text for that new dispensation, authors Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton reject altogether the appeal to principles of justice, instead invoking Lewis Carroll to indicate the new ground of blacks’ claims to moral recognition and respect. They quote a passage wherein Humpty Dumpty boasts that he can make words mean whatever he chooses. Alice then protests, “The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things,” but Humpty gets the last word: “The question is which is to be master—that’s all.”

The irony of the new dispensation on racism is that in the pursuit of “social justice” it annihilates any intelligible idea of justice. It signifies not a replacement of one partisan idea of justice by a superior, more inclusive idea, but instead the replacement, at the level of foundations, of any commitment to justice with a commitment to power, pure and simple. .  .  On the premises claimed by the vanguard of today’s anti-racism Left, moral truth reduces to “effectual truth,” politics is no more and no less than the art of war, and claims of justice are but expressions of will to power.

On its face, the recent metastasizing of this malignant social justice ideal through what many persist in calling liberalism is dispiriting. What Bill unmasks as a bait-and-switch operation on racism, however, yields a promising implication. On race as in any other issue area, the success of the social justice Left depends on the durability of an inherently fragile coalition, in which a core of extremists appears compelled to alienate the relative moderates whose support and cover they need. In the very nihilism ascendant on the Left, there is cause for hope.

Among the moderates the Left needs are many whites, sincerely anti-racist by the old definition of racism and sympathetic to reasonable efforts to assist the disadvantaged. Many of those white moderates, however, must naturally object to serving as targets in an asymmetrical war in which others are permitted to hurl insults at them and they are forbidden to respond—or even compelled to assent. They must likewise resent being told that their own struggles, however great, are insignificant in comparison with their color-privilege, let alone being told that their relative success traces to a prowess in extraction rather than production. They must resent being  told that they “didn’t build that”—with the implication that they don’t own it either but “society” does, whose representatives in the administrative state are free to redistribute its proceeds as they see fit. Also among the moderates the Left needs are increasing numbers of blacks and Latinos, desiring only to be treated justly and awakening to the alternative bigotry and cynicism whereby the Left conceives of them as crippled, effectively objectifies them, and seeks to succor them with the advice that an identity of powerlessness is their only available capital.

At what could have seemed the bleakest moment in the anti-slavery crusade, Frederick Douglass declared in response to the Dred Scottruling, “my hopes were never brighter than now.” His hopes were bright because he knew, as King and other 20th-century civil rights leaders also knew, that their cause of liberty was blessed by the character of its enemies, whose despotic will to power impelled them inevitably to overreach. Against such enemies, Douglass maintained, the triumph of liberty was “a natural and logical event.” Like yesterday’s segregationists and slaveholders, today’s identitarians may scorn the claims of nature. Yet one can hope, with the ancient poet Horace: “naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret”—You may drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she always returns.”

Peter C. Myers is Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. He is also a Visiting Scholar at the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics at the Heritage Foundation.

Investor/Activists Repelled

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Climate Activists storm the bastion of Exxon Mobil, here seen without their shareholder disguises.

But their latest weapon of mass corporate destruction was defused by the SEC.  European energy companies were not so fortunate.  The story comes from CNN, who disapprove of the result. SEC sides with Exxon by blocking major climate vote.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

New York (CNN Business)ExxonMobil has dodged a climate change shareholder vote — with some help from the SEC.

The agency granted Exxon’s request to block a shareholder resolution that would have urged the oil behemoth to adopt and disclose greenhouse gas emissions targets on its business and products in line with the Paris climate accord.

The SEC ruled that the nonbinding proposal, which was backed by investors with $9.5 trillion in assets, would “micromanage” Exxon (XOM) by seeking to impose “specific methods for implementing complex policies” in place of managerial judgment.

The decision deals a blow to momentum in the investment community to coax force fossil fuel companies to come to terms with the realities conform to alarmists’ views of climate change. Exxon’s European rivals have already agreed caved in to adopt similar emissions targets.

But backers of the proposal, including the New York State pension, vowed to keep fighting for change at Exxon and other oil companies.

“We’re not going away,” New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, who runs the state’s pension fund, told CNN Business. “Don’t take a minor setback as defeat. It’s part of a longer process.”

The New York State Common Retirement Fund, which owned 10.5 million shares of Exxon as of the end of last year, led the Exxon shareholder proposal along with the Church of England’s endowment fund. DiNapoli suggested the SEC’s position was “influenced” by the Trump administration’s climate change skepticism.  “We’ve had a national administration spend a lot of time denying that climate change is a reality,” DiNapoli said.

Exxon declined to comment on the SEC ruling.

Exxon fought ‘vague’ resolution

The Exxon battle comes after DiNapoli’s office and the Church of England won a landmark victory against the world’s largest publicly traded oil company two years ago.

More than 60% of Exxon shareholders in May 2017 backed a separate proposal urging the company to do more to disclose the risk it faces from efforts to regulate carbon emissions. Six months after the rare rebuke, Exxon stopped resisting and agreed to reveal these climate risks.

Shareholder activism is on the rise, but companies are fighting back

But Exxon fought hard against this latest resolution. In letters to the agency, Exxon strongly urged SEC staff members to confirm they would not recommend punishing the company for leaving the proposal out of its annual proxy vote.

Exxon argued that the proposal is “vague and indefinite,” seeks to “micromanage the company” and has already been “substantially implemented.”

Exxon pointed to the company’s 2018 Energy and Carbon Summary as evidence that it is already doing its part to address the risks of climate change. Exxon pointed to other climate-related steps, including promises to cut emissions, research into fuel cells and biofuels and purchases of wind and solar energy.
And Exxon warned that “unilateral action” disconnected to government policy changes and consumer demand “could harm ExxonMobil’s business” and prevent the company from meeting the world’s energy needs,

European oil majors take different approach

The Exxon victory comes as major corporations are fighting to impose constraints on proxy advisory firms and what they view as “political” resolutions from activist shareholders.

In sharp contrast to US oil giants, European oil companies Royal Dutch Shell (RDSA), BP and Total (TOT) have either agreed to set emissions goals or are in the process of doing so. BP (BP) recently agreed to link the bonuses of 36,000 of its workers to climate change targets. Shell announced this week that it will quit a major US oil lobby because it disagrees with the group’s climate change policies.

The divergent approaches reflect the more urgent climate change concerns among European governments, shareholders and citizens.

Intro to Award Winning Book Population Bombed

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Far from being a catastrophe, population growth and carbon fuel-based development are the best means to lift people out of poverty, the authors write. NASA

Update April 3, 2019

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is delighted to announce that our book Population Bombed! by Canadian authors Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurmak has been shortlisted for the prestigious Donner Book Prize.  For those who would like an overview of the case made by the authors, below are some excerpts from their articles and interviews at the time of the book launching. At the end is posted a recent statement by a US politician taking a similar position, Yes, Babies Are a Better Solution to Climate Change Than the Green New Deal by Senator Mike Lee.

Control the Population, Control the Climate?  Not.

A recent book explains what’s mistaken about climate alarmists/activists thinking human numbers must be reduced in order to save the planet from us (H/T Master Resource). The Title is Population Bombed! by Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurmak who provide an introduction to their assessment in an article at Financial Post For 200 years pessimists have predicted we’d ruin the planet. They’re still wrong.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

In Avengers: Infinity War, the villain Thanos said: “If life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist.” Johns Hopkins University philosopher Travis N. Rieder apparently agrees, as he views each new child as an environmental externality putting “irreparable stress on the planet” in a way that “exacerbates … the threat of catastrophic climate change.” Similar ideas have been expressed by the likes of Al Gore, Hillary Clinton and Bill Gates. Feminist icon Gloria Steinem put it best: “What causes climate deprivation is population. If we had not been systematically forcing women to have children … for over the 500 years of patriarchy, we wouldn’t have the climate problems that we have.”

Population-growth catastrophism has been around for centuries. In the English-speaking world it is generally associated with economist Thomas Robert Malthus’ 1798 edition of his Essay on the Problem of Population and U.S. biologist Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb. Ehrlich and his co-author and wife Anne predicted imminent environmental collapse followed by mass starvation. What they didn’t see coming was that, to the contrary, hundreds of millions of people would soon be lifted out of grinding poverty while parts of the planet became greener and cleaner in the process.

In our new book Population Bombed! Exploding the Link between Overpopulation and Climate Change we mark the 50th anniversary of the Ehrlichs’ book by explaining that their predictions bombed because their basic assumptions are flawed.

First, the Ehrlichs assume that human numbers cannot exceed the limits set by a finite system. Bacteria in a test tube of food are used to model such a system: Since the levels of food and waste limit bacterial growth, human population growth, by analogy, ultimately cannot exceed the carrying capacity of test tube Earth.

Second, they assume that wealth and development unavoidably come with larger environmental damage. This assumption is still at the core of pessimistic frameworks, which maintain that physical resource throughputs, not outcomes, matter. So, countries such as Haiti where deforestation and wildlife extermination are rampant are inherently more “sustainable” than richer and cleaner countries like Sweden and Switzerland.

Third, Ehrlich does not acknowledge that, unique among this planet’s species, modern humans: transmit information and knowledge between individuals and through time; innovate by combining existing things in new ways; become efficient through specialization; and engage in long-distance trade, thus achieving, to a degree, a decoupling from local limits called the “release from proximity.” And the more brains there are, the more solutions. This is why, over time, people in market economies produce more things while using fewer resources per unit of output. Corn growers now produce five or six times more output on the same plot of land as a century ago while using less fertilizer and pesticide than a few decades ago.

Fourth, the Ehrlichs and other pessimists also fail to understand the uniquely beneficial roles played by prices, profits, and losses in the spontaneous and systematic generation of more sustainable — or less problematic — outcomes. When the supply of key resources fails to meet actual demand, their prices increase. This encourages people to use such resources more efficiently, look for more of them, and develop substitutes. Meanwhile, far from rewarding pollution of the environment, the profit motive encourages people to create useful by-products out of waste (our modern synthetic world is largely made out of former petroleum-refining waste products). True, in some cases dealing with pollution came at a cost — building sewage-treatment plants, for example — but these are the types of solutions only a developed society can afford.

Fifth, pessimists are also oblivious to the benefits of unlocking wealth from underground materials such as coal, petroleum, natural gas and mineral resources. Using these spares vast quantities of land. It should go without saying that even a small population will have a much greater impact on its environment if it must rely on agriculture for food, energy and fibres, raise animals for food and locomotion, and harvest wild animals for everything from meat to whale oil. By replacing resources previously extracted from the biosphere with resources extracted from below the ground, people have reduced their overall environmental impact while increasing their standard of living.

Why is it then that after two centuries of evidence to the contrary, the pessimistic narrative still dominates academic and popular debates? Why are so many authors and academics still focusing on the Malthusian collapse scenario — now bound to come from carbon dioxide emissions and the teeming populations that produce them?

The prevalence of apocalyptic rhetoric may be, arguably, due to factors ranging from financial incentives among academics and activists to behavioural heuristics that dictate why worrying is a motivator, and why even well-meaning people rarely change their mind given new evidence. Short-termism may also take some of the blame: Population control and climate activists take for granted the non-scalable benefits of a carbon-fuel economy in which large numbers of people collaborate and innovate. The cognitive biases at the root of our thinking may shape, and in the end distort, the impulse to question “consensus,” particularly in an intellectual climate lacking the motivation to achieve what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt called “institutional disconfirmation.”

Far from being the catastrophe that Thanos, the Ehrlichs and other pessimists would have us believe, population growth and carbon fuel-based development in the context of human creativity and free enterprise are the best means to lift people out of poverty, to build resilience against any climate damage that increased anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions might have, and to make possible a sustained reduction of humanity’s impact on the biosphere.

Pierre Desrochers, a geography professor at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and Joanna Szurmak, a doctoral candidate at York University, are the authors of Population Bombed! Exploding the Link Between Overpopulation and Climate Change. The book was launched at an event on Oct. 15th in Toronto.

More at their website: Population Bombed!

Update October 17,2018

Master Resource just posted an interview with Desrochers (here)

What we need in order to fight environmental degradation is to make sure that people in less advanced parts of the world can also be the beneficiaries of these processes. There is no doubt in my mind that these beneficial substitutions will happen more quickly the cheaper carbon fuels are. Of course, the argument is even more powerful when you think of the social consequences of less affordable energy.

Now, as with everything else, bad political institutions in some parts of the world will result in greater pollution as more carbon fuels are burned. The solution, however, is not to ban or tax everything from coal to plastic bags, but rather to improve standards of living and public governance. In my opinion, our guiding principle as far as carbon fuels are concerned should be the creation of lesser problems than those that existed before.

Yes, Babies Are a Better Solution to Climate Change Than the Green New Deal by Senator Mike Lee. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

But what was surprising about the reaction to my speech on the Green New Deal is which chart garnered the most vehement anger. It wasn’t Reagan riding a dinosaur or Utah Gov. Gary Herbert battling tornado-propelled sharks or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asserting that the resolution’s own supporters don’t know what’s in it.

No, the most controversial poster of the 14-minute speech turned out to be a simple image of six smiling babies.

Why such an aggrieved reaction to such a heart-warming image?

I’ll let Emily, a 28-year-old woman who talked to FiveThirtyEight from Spokane, Washington, explain.

We have physical proof that we cause a lot of harm to the planet, and I think the statistics show an imperative to reduce the footprint of our population, which has grown so fast. I think that having children can be immoral for a lot of reasons.

Emily is not alone in suggesting that having children is immoral. An author of the Green New Deal [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.] recently said on Instagram, “Our planet is going to hit disaster if we don’t turn this ship around, and so it’s basically like, there’s a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult. And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question, you know, ‘Is it OK to still have children?’”

Emily and the authors of the Green New Deal are not the first people to believe that bringing children into this world is a morally questionable act. Quite the opposite. The belief that the human population must be limited and controlled by government is a founding principle of the environmental movement.

As far back as 1798, when scholar Thomas Malthus published “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” utopian-seeking elites have made the case that human population growth must be controlled in order to ensure a sustainable society. These well-intentioned beliefs led to policy changes like the Corn Laws, which raised taxes on grain imports to the United Kingdom.

Opposed by classical economists like David Ricardo, who warned that such laws would make food more expensive, the Corn Laws were eventually repealed after they worsened the Great Famine in Ireland, when over 1 million people died of hunger.

Fast forward to 1968 when American biologist Paul Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb,” a book arguing that the government must take urgent action to limit population growth or humanity would face imminent ecological disaster. Ehrlich’s gloom-and-doom prophecies were quite popular with a segment of the American public as the book went on to be a best-seller.

But many economists pushed back—including University of Maryland professor Julian Simon who believed that humanity, if left free to innovate, could find new ways to make limited resources provide for an ever-expanding world population.

Simon and Ehrlich even made a bet testing their beliefs in 1980, picking five commodities to track over a 10-year period. In 1990, Ehrlich was forced to admit he lost, mailing a check to Simon in the amount that the commodities had fallen in price over that 10-year span.

Since that time, the earth has added billions more people, all while global poverty continues to fall.

What Malthus, Ehrlich, Emily, and the authors of the Green New Deal keep failing to understand is that human consumption and production patterns are not static.

Since the beginning of our species, humans have constantly been innovating and changing the world around them. In fact, it is our ability to function as a collective learning brain that sets us apart from every other animal on earth.

And, as Harvard University Department of Human Evolutionary Biology Chairman Joseph Henrich explains in his book “The Secret of Our Success,” the size of our population does matter:

The most obvious way the size of a group can matter is that more minds can generate more lucky errors, novel recombinations, chance insights, and intentional improvements. … So, bigger groups have the potential for more rapid cumulative cultural evolution.

Now the size of a population is not the only thing that matters. A society must also have in place institutions, cultural norms, and a legal framework that encourages experimentation, innovation, and creativity.

And here is where the failure of the Green New Deal as a serious response to climate change is the clearest. Instead of fostering an open-ended approach to addressing climate change, it demands top-down policy programs that forbid certain avenues of exploration, like nuclear energy, while also tacking on irrelevant policy goals, like universal health care, that have nothing to do with the issue the authors of the plan claim is so urgent.

Climates change. It’s what they do. There is even evidence that humans have been affecting the climate since at least the Neolithic era. And these changes to the climate have always presented a challenge to humanity. Today is no different.

We have always survived, and even thrived, in new environments. Just look at California. Left in its natural state, the Los Angeles river basin can support maybe 100,000 people. Today, thanks to a creative web of dams, aqueducts, canals, and pipelines, there is enough water for over 10 million people to live there.

This is the creative, practical, life-affirming path that will help us solve the climate change challenge. Instead of looking to limit and even shrink humanity’s footprint on the world, we should be looking to improve and expand it.

And yes, this means more babies.

Arctic Ice Ides of March

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The monthly average for March represents the annual maximum for Arctic ice extent.  The graph shows the 12-year March average in MASIE is 15M km2, with SII about 200k km2 less.  In this period six years were higher and seven lower, including a virtual tie between 2019, 2015 and 2007, slightly higher than 2017 and 2018.  In either MASIE or SII this March is ~330k km2 or 2% below the 12-year average.

As we will see, March 2019 ended with a flash melt that reduced extents dramatically in the final week or so.  First the graph of March comparing the daily extents.

Note that 2019 was close to average as recently as day 79 before dropping well below average and recent years.  As reported previously, most of the decline was due to early melting in Bering Sea, which loses its ice every Spring anyway. Below compares NH ice extents with and without Bering ice.

The gap between the black and green lines shows Bering contributed on average ~600k km2 to overall NH ice extents at the beginning of February, increasing to 800k km2 by end of March.  In 2019, the gap between the cyan and purple lines shows ~500k km2 of Bering Ice starting in February, decreasing to 140k km2 by March, then increasing up to 450k km2, and now back down to 180k km2. When the Bering volatility is set aside, the purple and green lines show Arctic ice excluding Bering was above average most of the month, and only slightly lower at the end.

So what has been happening?  In two words: Polar Vortex.  When cold Arctic air descends into parts of North America and Euarasia, warm moist air intrudes into the Arctic to replace it, and ice extents are reduced. For example, see the recently reported balmy weather in UK, and soon to be switched to bitter cold weather. From the Express  UK weather forecast: SHOCK Map shows Britain ENGULFED by freezing Arctic weather front

The cold front is shown in the image, The link underneath goes to the video.

//players.brightcove.net/2540076170001/B1Hli6KCG_default/index.html?videoId=6020946025001#t=12s

The table below shows extents for day 90 comparing 2019 to the 12 year average, and also showing the 600k km2 loss of ice in just 8 days at month end.

Region 2019090 Day 090 
Average		 2019-Ave. 2019082 2019090-2019082
 (0) Northern_Hemisphere 13983435 14786570 -803135 14600645 -617210
 (1) Beaufort_Sea 1070498 1070149 348 1070291 207
 (2) Chukchi_Sea 945075 965775 -20700 966006 -20931
 (3) East_Siberian_Sea 1087137 1086034 1103 1087137 0
 (4) Laptev_Sea 897845 896685 1160 897845 0
 (5) Kara_Sea 892123 917893 -25770 926462 -34340
 (6) Barents_Sea 515799 658886 -143086 681050 -165251
 (7) Greenland_Sea 585051 659518 -74467 552178 32873
 (8) Baffin_Bay_Gulf_of_St._Lawrence 1343734 1456673 -112939 1431122 -87388
 (9) Canadian_Archipelago 853337 852817 520 853337 0
 (10) Hudson_Bay 1260903 1253798 7105 1260903 0
 (11) Central_Arctic 3238381 3233007 5374 3227734 10647
 (12) Bering_Sea 178917 803209 -624292 446151 -267235
 (13) Baltic_Sea 25134 68136 -43002 41886 -16752
 (14) Sea_of_Okhotsk 1086939 851929 235010 1150521 -63582

Note that BCE (Beaufort, Chukchi and East Siberian) is rock solid, along with Laptev.  Atlantic melting has begun, with the largest losses in Barents and Baffin Bay.  The major deficit in Bering is there, And while Okhotsk has started melting, it remains 235k km2 above average at this time.

At Last A Climate Policy with Teeth

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Once again the UK is at the forefront in fighting climate change. Euan Mearns has the story UK Government to Announce New Energy Policies Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Amidst Brexit chaos, the Prime Minister will today introduce a white paper to Parliament detailing the Government’s new energy strategy. Stunned by criticism that she has failed to listen, the new policies will take full cognisance of the concerns recently raised by striking school children. The new policy has 4 main strands. The Downing Street press release is below the fold.

[BEGINS] In view of the grave concerns raised by 5 to 17 year old children on the impact of CO2 on Earth’s climate, Her Majesty’s government will today introduce legislation that will address the most pressing issue of our times, namely CO2 emissions and the ensuing climate mayhem that they cause (Exhibit 1, Appendix 1). CO2 has risen to record levels from 0.0280% (pre-industrial) to 0.0405% today (see endnote 1). The new energy policy has four main strands:

1. Adult only flights

As of 1 January 2020 juveniles below the age of 18 will no longer be allowed to fly on commercial flights within the UK and between the UK and foreign destinations. A reciprocal arrangement will apply to incoming flights that will not be allowed to land on British soil if there are juveniles on board. The government appreciates this will have a major impact on family holidays and tourism. But that is the policy goal. We can no longer countenance families flying all over the place simply for the sake of seeking some sunshine. Tourism is one of the most useless and resource wasteful activities known to Mankind. What is the point in wrecking Earth’s climate to go and gaze at the Eiffel Tower or to go visit Euro Disney when an equally enjoyable time can be had at our home grown attractions of the Blackpool Tower and Center Parcs (Figures 1 and 2).

The government appreciates this is going to have a catastrophic impact on the airline and airport industries. That is the whole point of the policy. We can longer countenance giving shelter to evil polluting companies on these islands. The UK will press our allies throughout the OECD to follow suit. Given time this should also have a catastrophic impact on the airliner manufacturing sectors where we expect Rolls Royce (engines) and BAE systems (wings) to be hardest hit. We point to the troubled Jaguar Landrover, caused by government policy, as a shining example of government aptitude at wrecking British industry.

2. An end to North Sea Ferries

The government is often accused of lacking foresight and we wish to stress that we are smart enough to recognise that selfish polluting families may simply try to avoid the adult only flight policy by using car ferries instead. The government sees no way of tackling this problem other than to close down all ferry services between the UK and mainland Europe, the Island of Ireland and all other destinations. Car ferries travelling between Scottish Islands comes under the jurisdiction of the Scottish Parliament.

The activity of transporting a two tonne SUV on board a ship running on filthy dirty bunker fuel needs to be consigned to history. The idea of families boarding a ship to simply drive around Europe looking at stuff, while wrecking Earth’s climate, needs to be stopped.

The government is aware that these policies may seem to be anti-tourism. Nothing could be further from the truth. We remain committed to a robust, albeit crippled, tourist industry. British children will simply need to learn how to enjoy beach holidays at home (Figure 3). And to prove this point, children will still be allowed to travel to Europe on all electric Eurostar trains. And really rich families will even be allowed to take cars with them, so long as they are all-electric vehicles.

3. An end to driving to School

With immediate effect, the UK Government is to introduce a ban on children being driven to school by their parents in petrol or diesel cars. We will continue to allow children of very wealthy families to be driven to school in all-electric vehicles. Hybrid plugin electric vehicles will not face an immediate ban but will be phased out over three years.

To enforce this ban children will be encouraged to spy on their friends (or enemies) by taking pictures of children covertly being dropped off just around the corner and sharing these images on social media. This should create a deterrent to illegal child dropping.

4. Phasing out of gas or oil heating systems in schools

In keeping with the recently announced policy of the Dutch Government to phase out natural gas all together and the allied UK policy of ceasing to build homes with gas central heating, the government will bring forward a bill to phase out gas or oil heating systems in all our schools by 2022. Schools will instead by obliged to install all-electric heating that runs exclusively on in-situ, off-grid, renewable energy systems. Using the latest SMART technology it is anticipated that this should be simple and straightforward to achieve.

Here’s the clever part. Children of all ages (5 to 17) will be allowed to participate in designing these SMART heating systems. The Government does not have spare funds to support this initiative so schools will have to pay for it out of existing budgets. However, since renewable energy prices have tumbled, paying for this should not be a problem. If schools struggle to meet this bill, they will be encouraged to either lay-off staff or ask parents to pay for this vital flagship policy. [ENDS]

Thank you Euan.  There is no fool like a Climate Fool today or all year round.