Month: September 2021

Will Evergrande Sink China (and others)?

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Daniel Lacalle, PhD, economist and fund manager, writes at CD Media Evergrande Isn’t China’s “Lehman Moment.” It Could Be Worse Than That. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The bankruptcy of the Chinese real estate company Evergrande is much more than a “Chinese Lehman.” Lehman Brothers was much more diversified than Evergrande and better capitalized. In fact, the total assets of Evergrande that are on the brink of bankruptcy outnumber the entire subprime bubble of the United States.

The problem with Evergrande is that it is not an anecdote, but a symptom of a model based on leveraged growth and seeking to inflate GDP at any cost with ghost cities, unused infrastructure, and wild construction. The indebtedness chain model of Evergrande is not uncommon in China. Many Chinese companies follow the “running to stand still” strategy of piling on ever-increasing debt to compensate for poor cash flow generation and weak margins. Many promoters get into massive debt to build a promotion that either is not sold or is left with many unsold units, then efinance that debt by adding more credit for new projects using unsaleable or already leveraged assets as collateral.

The total liabilities of Evergrande account for more than double its official debt figure (more than 2 trillion yuan). Evergrande’s financial hole is equivalent to almost a third of Russia’s GDP. Its annual revenues do not reach $70 billion, and it is more than debatable whether those revenues are real, since a relevant part comes from payment commitments whose collection is doubtful. Even if they were real, these revenues are not enough to address the bond maturities, which exceed $250 billion in the short term.

Evergrande is much more dangerous than it seems.

All the “Keynesian” solutions that you are hearing these days have already been implemented. Massive liquidity injections, low interest rates, full implicit and explicit support from the Chinese government … Let’s not forget that Evergrande was the largest issuer of commercial paper in China, $32 billion issued in 2020, a 390 percent increase from 2015, according to Reuters.

Evergrande represents less than 4 percent of the overall Chinese market but its model has been used by many Chinese promoters. The ten biggest real estate developers account for 34 percent of the market and aggressive leverage practices are widespread.

The real estate sector is huge in China. Its direct and indirect weight, according to JP Morgan, is 25 percent of GDP, more than double the size of the real estate bubble in Japan or Spain. The sector has been growing with an indebted model at 15 percent per year in the last three years. The Chinese government has introduced regulations to reduce the excess, but because it benefits from the increase in GDP and job creation, it has maintained a complacent position regarding the corporate debt model.

Chinese real estate companies, according to JP Morgan, have “reduced” their indebtedness to 92 percent of total assets from a monster 140 percent in 2018, with a profit margin of 9–13 percent. But those figures still show a larger and more concerning problem than what headlines imply. Most Chinese real estate developers have total liabilities of 50 percent to total assets, according to JP Morgan.  The problem is that the value of those assets and the capacity to sell them is more than questionable.

The implications of an Evergrande collapse are far greater than what investment banks tell us.

The first risk is a domino effect in a very aggressively indebted sector. There is also a significant impact on all those banks exposed to China and emerging markets, where China has financed ruinous projects in recent years. And there is also impact on global growth and countries that export to China, because the slowdown was already more than evident. Additionally, we cannot ignore the impact on the solvency of the financial system despite billions of dollars injected by the People’s Bank of China.

A Solvency Problem Cannot Be Solved with Liquidity.

The hope that the government will fix everything contrasts with the magnitude of the financial hole. Be that as it may, we cannot overlook the negative effect on those sectors highly exposed to real estate growth, infrastructure, electricity, services, and in the hundreds of thousands of citizens who have paid an upfront fee for flats that are not going to be built.

The problem with China is that the entire economy is a huge indebted model that needs almost ten units of debt to generate one unit of GDP, three times more than a decade ago, and all this catastrophe was already more than evident months ago. With total debt of 300 percent debt to GDP according to the Institute of International Finance, China is not the strong economy swimming in with cash that it was a couple of decades ago.

The market assumed that because it is China, the government was going to hide these risks. Even worse, the Evergrande collapse only shows a dangerous reality in several Chinese sectors: excessive indebtedness without real income or assets to support it.

This episode comes at the worst possible time, after the government has launched a massive crackdown on large companies. International investors are already concerned about corporate governance and intervention in China and now the fears of credit contagion make the risk even worse.

Evergrande is not an anecdote, it is a symptom.

 

 

We Are CO2

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Raymond has published a new slide on the World of CO2, shown above.  Carbon is an essential part of every human body, as explained in the accompanying text:

The organic molecules of the human body consist of carbon chains that are used to build carbohydrates, fats, nucleic acids and proteins. The breakdown of carbon compounds is the source of energy we need to live. The air we breathe provides the oxygen needed to break the carbon bond, which then produces CO2, that we exhale.

The set of 14 infographics can be accessed at The World of CO2 – RIC Communications

Infographics can be helpful, in making things simple to understand. CO2 is a complex topic with a lot of information and statistics. These simple step by step charts should help to give you an idea of CO2’s importance. Without CO2, plants wouldn’t be able to live on this planet. Just remember, that if CO2 falls below 150 ppm, all plant life would cease to exist.

– N° 1 Earth’s atmospheric composition
– N° 2 Natural sources of CO2 emissions
– N° 3 Global anthropogenic CO2 emissions
– N° 4 CO2 – Carbon dioxide molecule
– N° 5 The global carbon cycle
– N° 6 Carbon and plant respiration
– N° 7 Plant categories and abundance (C3, C4 & CAM Plants)
– N° 8 Photosynthesis, the C3 vs C4 gap
– N° 9 Plant respiration and CO2
– N° 10 The logarithmic temperature rise of higher CO2 levels.
– N° 11 Earth’s atmospheric composition in relationship to CO2
– N° 12 Human respiration and CO2 concentrations.
– N° 13 600 million years of temperature change and atmospheric CO2

There is also a high quality introductory video:

Raymond has also produced a second series of Simple Science graphics on the theme The World of Climate Change.

Infographics can be helpful, in making things simple to understand. Climate change is a complex topic with a lot of information and statistics. These simple step by step charts are here to better understand what is occurring naturally and what could be caused by humans. What is cause for alarm and what isn’t cause for alarmism if at all. Only through learning is it possible to get the big picture so as to make the right decisions for the future.

– N° 1 600 million years of global temperature change
– N° 2 Earth‘s temperature record for the last 400,000 years
– N° 3 Holocene period and average northern hemispheric temperatures
– N° 4 140 years of global mean temperature
– N° 5 120 m of sea level rise over the past 20‘000 years
– N° 6 Eastern European alpine glacier history during the Holocene period.

For example:

Japan PM Ends COVID-19 Emergency Restrictions

Posted on by Ron Clutz

From Yahoo News:  Japan to lift all coronavirus emergency steps nationwide  Excerpts in italics with my bolds,

Japan’s government announced Tuesday that the coronavirus state of emergency will end this week to help rejuvenate the economy as infections slow.

Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said the emergency will end Thursday and virus restrictions will be eased gradually “in order to resume daily lives despite the presence of the virus.” He said the government will create more temporary COVID-19 treatment facilities and continue vaccinations to prepare for any future resurgence.

“Our fight against the coronavirus is now entering a new phase,” Suga said. “Finally, we can see social and economic activities starting to normalize.”

When the measures end on Thursday, it will be the first time since April 4 that none of the country’s 47 prefectures have been under a state of emergency or quasi-state of emergency. While the state of emergency measures are wrapping up, there will be some restrictions still in place for another month, with restaurants and bars expected to close by 8pm local time or those with stricter Covid-19 safety measures by 9pm.

Comment:  The article misses the significance of this ruling for physicians applying home treatment protocols for their patients. From the previous post below, a public statement came from another prominent Japanese physician, Dr. Kazuhiro Nagao, who appeared on Japanese television proposing that COVID-19 should be treated as a Class 5 illness as opposed to its current classification as a Class 2. In Japan, illnesses are categorized by a classification system; approaching COVID as a Class 5 illness would mean that it could be treated like a seasonal flu.

Normalization may provide a basis to reconsider how the infection is treated.  Japan Times explains COVID-19’s classification in Japan is limiting treatment. Now doctors want it changed. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

With a rise in COVID-19 cases this summer having led to the deaths of patients who were isolating at home without medical support due to a lack of hospital capacity, some doctors have begun to call more aggressively for a downgrading of the disease’s classification — to one on par with influenza — to enable the prompt treatment of suspected patients without them having to go through cumbersome procedures just to get a doctor’s attention.

The debate on whether to downgrade the disease, which is currently classified alongside some of the most serious infectious diseases, to a less-threatening Class V disease has been gaining momentum as the government mulls its pandemic exit strategy. Health minister Norihisa Tamura signaled in July that the government would actively look into the issue, taking into account progress in the vaccine rollout, new infection figures and the number of hospital beds.

The proposed change to a Class V disease would not mean that the coronavirus has become less threatening. Rather, the revision would allow suspected patients to get treatment at any hospital using health insurance at their own cost, rather than having all the medical fees paid at the public expense. Tens of thousands of people now isolating at home could receive treatment there from a doctor, instead of going without medical support from doctors and having to rely only on remote monitoring by health centers, as existing rules limit who can receive medical care and where.

In addition, current tough measures taken by the government and health centers would no longer be in place and restraints on social activities would be lifted.

Advocates of the change cite difficulties in accessing the health care system in a timely manner as one reason behind increased cases of serious disease or even death.

One of the most vocal proponents for the change is Dr. Kazuhiro Nagao, head of Nagao Clinic in Hyogo Prefecture. He has argued on his website that 90% of medical institutions are refusing to see patients with a fever, as they’re afraid of getting a two-week business suspension order from a public health center for causing a cluster of infections. The change would allow hospitals to promptly provide medical services to COVID-19 patients, reducing the number of severe cases and deaths, he says.

Background from previous post:  Japanese Medical Chairman Doubles Down on IVM

In February 2021, Dr. Ozaki Chairman of the Tokyo Medical Association declared that Japan’s physicians should get a greenlight to prescribe IVM (Ivermectin) at the first sign of SARS CV infections.

Now in August, Tokyo Medical Association chairman Haruo Ozaki reiterated that ivermectin should be widely used and said that his early recommendations have not been heeded in Japan.  See Lifesite article August 30, 2021 Japanese medical chairman doubles down on ivermectin support after early calls went ignored.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds

In an interview with the The Yomiuri Shimbun on August 5, Ozaki spoke in detail about his opinion that ivermectin should be used in Japan and said that his early calls for usage have seemingly not been heeded.

He stated that there is evidence from multiple countries that ivermectin has proven effective for patients diagnosed with COVID: “I am aware that there are many papers that ivermectin is effective in the prevention and treatment of [coronavirus], mainly in Central and South America and Asia.”

Chairman Ozaki stated that despite evidence suggesting the efficacy of ivermectin, it is difficult to obtain the medication. He added that while ivermectin’s established effectiveness is increasingly clear, the U.S. company that manufactures the drug, Merck & Co., Inc., have currently limited distribution because they claim that the drug is ineffective at treating COVID.

“With the view that it is not effective for the treatment and prevention of sickness, there is an intention that it should not be used for anything other than skin diseases such as psoriasis.”

This has led to a situation where, according to Ozaki, “Even if a doctor writes a prescription for ivermectin, there is no drug in the pharmacy.” He said that this has rendered the drug practically “unusable.”

He contends that the fact that supply has been stopped by Merck & Co. is evidence that it does in fact work at treating COVID: “But (Merck) says that ivermectin doesn’t work, so there shouldn’t be any need to limit supply. If it doesn’t work, there’s no demand. I believe it works, so block supply. It looks like you are.”

He said that he “also told the Japan Olympic Committee that ivermectin should be used effectively when holding the Tokyo Olympics. But the government didn’t do anything.”

He addressed the reluctance on behalf of the medical establishment in using ivermectin to treat COVID. He said “there are problems for researchers in academia and professors in universities. Many do not do anything by themselves, but they are of the opinion of international organizations such as the WHO and large health organizations in the United States and Europe that ‘it is not yet certain whether ivermectin will work for the [coronavirus].’”

“We don’t do it on our own initiative, but only on the opinions of others. Why don’t we try to see for ourselves why ivermectin works? It is deplorable that there are critics, researchers, and scholars who are constantly criticizing without doing anything. I hope that Japanese academics will contribute more actively.”

Evidence that ivermectin is effective in treating COVID has been well attested in developing nations where vaccines are not widely distributed. Another study in France also suggested that ivermectin ought to be used as a remedy for COVID.

On May 25, the Indian Bar Association served a legal notice to Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, a Chief Scientist for the World Health Organization (WHO), relating to the harm she allegedly caused the people of India by campaigning against the use of ivermectin.

In Mexico city, a home-treatment-kit, including ivermectin was created, for its 22 million-strong population on December 28, 2020, following a spike in cases of COVID-19. Also, doctors were encouraged to use Ivermectin and other therapeutic drugs in their practice when dealing with COVID-positive patients. The effort resulted in a 52–76 percent reduction in hospitalizations, according to research by the Mexican Digital Agency for Public Innovation (DAPI), Mexico’s Ministry of Health, and the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS).

Following that came a public statement by another prominent Japanese physician, Dr. Kazuhiro Nagao, who appeared on Japanese television proposing that COVID-19 should be treated as a Class 5 illness as opposed to its current classification as a Class 2. In Japan, illnesses are categorized by a classification system; approaching COVID as a Class 5 illness would mean that it could be treated like a seasonal flu.

Dr. Nagao said he has used Ivermectin as an early treatment for over 500 COVID patients with practically a 100% success rate, and that it should be used nationwide.

About the effectiveness of Ivermectin in treating COVID patients, he said: “It starts being effective the very next day… My patients can reach me by message 24/7 and they tell me they feel better the next day.”

Nagao was asked by the TV anchor when patients should take Ivermectin if diagnosed with COVID-19. He replied: “The same day, I mean if you are infected today, you take it today… It is a medication that should be given for mildly ill patients. If you give it to hospital patients, it’s too late. This is also the case for the majority of drugs… So you have to give Ivermectin. I am asking our Prime Minister Suga to distribute this drug ‘made in Japan’ on a large scale in the country.”

He added that four pills should be distributed to everyone in the country, so that people can take them “as soon as you are infected.”

Footnote: 

As Dr. Ozaki suggests Big Pharma wants to banish any treatments that are cheap and effective. Doing the math:

An Ivermectin course for COVID is less than twenty dollars.

A course of REMDESEVIR is currently right at $8800 dollars. (and often doesn’t work)

An outpatient treatment with monoclonal antibodies is right at $23,000 – 25,000 dollars with all the infusion costs added.

That’s not to mention obscene vaccine profits.

Covid Absurdies Madebyjimbob

Posted on by Ron Clutz

This post was triggered by an article by Mike Solana at American Thinker Aborting reason. Some excerpts in italics with my bolds before jimbob takes over.

This month, as fate would have it, a controversial Texas abortion ban, shouted down from coast to coast with cries of “my body, my choice,” coursed a horrified media landscape just days before Biden introduced the concept of a national vaccine mandate. This is a very polite way of saying “forced medical procedures for almost everyone.” Across the ideological spectrum roles and rhetoric were promptly reversed.

Demands that a person’s right to their own body be honored were ridiculed and rebuffed by many of the same people who had in some cases just hours prior made impassioned arguments on behalf of a person’s right to their own body. It was an almost perfect cognitive dissonance, and it should have been enough, once illustrated, to jar even the most ardent partisan hack from their bullshit.Long story short, approximately zero partisan hacks were jarred from their bullshit. My body, my choice? Depends on who’s asking, and for what reason. But setting aside the committed idiocy of our loudest talking heads, the question at the heart of Biden’s mandatory vaccination is as old as the concepts of society and liberty: when personal freedom and social good enter conflict, what the hell do we do?

A subversion of liberty so significant as forcing someone to undergo a medical procedure they don’t want can potentially—if regrettably, and rarely—be justified. . . In addition, Americans are reluctant to trust what our institutional leaders have to say about the vaccine because Americans no longer trust our institutions. We especially don’t trust our political leaders or media. After the last few years, why would we?

Provided the vaccine hesitant aren’t literally crazy (they mostly aren’t), and the rest of us are pretty much safe (we are), there is no ethical justification for forcing anyone to undergo a medical procedure they don’t want. And until there is?

My body, my choice.

Forced vaccination at the scale of our entire country is presently an unjustifiable grab for power, and the thing about power? Sure, once a man gets a taste of it there’s never enough, and we should all expect more authoritarianism from this administration.

 

 

 

Leftist Bias More Evidence

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Sally Satel reports at The Atlantic The Experts Somehow Overlooked Authoritarians on the Left. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

In February 2020, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology held a symposium called “Is Left-Wing Authoritarianism Real? Evidence on Both Sides of the Debate.”

An ambitious new study on the subject by the Emory University researcher Thomas H. Costello and five colleagues should settle the question. It proposes a rigorous new measure of antidemocratic attitudes on the left. And, by drawing on a survey of 7,258 adults, Costello’s team firmly establishes that such attitudes exist on both sides of the American electorate. (One co-author on the paper, I should note, was Costello’s adviser, the late Scott Lilienfeld—with whom I wrote a 2013 book and numerous articles.) Intriguingly, the researchers found some common traits between left-wing and right-wing authoritarians, including a “preference for social uniformity, prejudice towards different others, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, aggression and punitiveness towards perceived enemies, outsized concern for hierarchy, and moral absolutism.”

[Comment: They also noted;  “Still, relative to right-wing authoritarians (RWA), left-wing authoritarians (LWA) were lower in dogmatism and cognitive rigidity, higher in negative emotionality, and expressed stronger support for a political system with substantial centralized state control. Our results also indicate that LWA powerfully predicts behavioral aggression and is strongly correlated with participation in political violence. “]

Published last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Costello team’s paper is persuasive, to the point that you have to wonder: How could past researchers have overlooked left-wing authoritarianism for so long? “For 70 years, the lore in the social sciences has been that authoritarianism was to be found exclusively on the political right,” the Rutgers University social psychologist Lee Jussim, who wasn’t involved in the new study, told me in an email. In the 1950 book The Authoritarian Personality, an inquiry into the psychological makeup of people strongly drawn to autocratic rule and repressive politics, the German-born scholar Theodor W. Adorno and three other psychologists measured people along dimensions such as conformity to societal norms, rigid thinking, and sexual repression. And they concluded that “the authoritarian type of human”— the kind of person whose enthusiastic support allows someone like Hitler to exercise power—was found only among conservatives. In the mid-1990s, the influential Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer described left-wing authoritarianism as “the Loch Ness Monster of political psychology—an occasional shadow, but no monster. ” Subsequently, other psychologists reached the same conclusion.

The Trump era likely deepened psychology’s conventional wisdom that authoritarians are almost always conservatives; the insurrection at the Capitol earlier this year showed the urgency of understanding the phenomenon. And yet calls to de-platform controversial speakers and online campaigns to get people fired for heterodox views suggest that a commitment to open democratic norms is eroding, at least in some quarters, on the left. Much further along the authoritarian continuum, people purporting to be antiracist or antifascist protesters have set fires and committed other acts of violence since the summer of 2020. These acts stop short of, say, the 1970s bombing campaign by the far-left Weather Underground, but surely call the prevailing wisdom into doubt. (Supporters of revolutionary regimes overseas have demonstrated even more clearly that some people on the left try to get their way through intimidation and force.)

But one reason left-wing authoritarianism barely shows up in social-psychology research is that most academic experts in the field are based at institutions where prevailing attitudes are far to the left of society as a whole. Scholars who personally support the left’s social vision—such as redistributing income, countering racism, and more—may simply be slow to identify authoritarianism among people with similar goals.

One doesn’t need to believe that left-wing authoritarians are as numerous or as threatening as their right-wing counterparts to grasp that both phenomena are a problem. While liberals—both inside and outside of academia—may derive some comfort from believing that left-wing authoritarianism doesn’t exist, that fiction ignores a significant source of instability and polarization in our politics and society.

Ideological blind spots can indeed affect researchers with a strongly conservative or merely right-of-center outlook, but there just aren’t enough of them to matter. If academic psychology had more viewpoint diversity, the political biases that distort researchers’ work would all counterbalance one another. In American universities today, those biases generally point in the same direction. In psychology, the belief that only conservatives can be authoritarians, and that therefore only conservative authoritarians warrant serious study, has proved self-reinforcing over the course of decades.

As both left- and right-wing autocracies metastasize around the globe—a “pandemic of global authoritarianism” that has “persisted and deepened” over the past 15 years, in the words of the Stanford sociologist Larry Diamond—and as the speed of radicalization of recruits has hastened, the modest cadre of researchers interested in the subject will likely grow. By recasting left-wing authoritarianism in more specific terms—anti-hierarchical aggression, top-down censorship, and anti-conventionalism—Costello and his colleagues offer other researchers and the general public a new vocabulary for discussing antidemocratic attitudes on that side of the political spectrum.

See also Know-it-alls, Drama Queens & Control Freaks

 

What is a “Vote” Anyway?

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Ted Noel writes at Town Hall In the Arizona Audit, Words Matter.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

This is one of those times when we wish that people would have used more circumspect language. Both the Arizona auditors and John Solomon committed a cardinal error that has allowed the Left to celebrate victory and ignore the fine print. Both note that Biden got more “votes” than Trump. That conclusion is incorrect, because it ignores the rest of the story.

A vote is an indication of preference cast by an eligible, registered voter.

It must be cast in the time, place, and manner prescribed by law. Anything else is not a vote. In Arizona, it is cast on paper ballots and read by machines. All the “accurate count” showed was that the machines counted the pieces of paper accurately. That’s all machines do. They do not count “ballots.”

The canvass did not answer the primary question, “How many of the pieces of paper were lawful ballots and how many should have been excluded because they were not lawful votes?” All the “accurate count” proves is that there was no outside effort to tweak the numbers by changing them by some direct internet chicanery. But it does not prove that Biden won. Or not. And that is the problem.  I won’t repeat all the details the auditors droned on through, but there are several key findings.

Over 50,000 “ballots” were unlawfully cast.

There were dead people, new addresses without re-registration, double votes, envelopes with no signatures, ballots received that were never sent out, and so on. Every one of those “ballots” were unlawful. They should have been rejected to remove them from the canvass. Since the margin between Trump and Biden was around ten thousand, this is far more than enough to cast doubt on the outcome. And then comes the drama.Maricopa County did everything it could to block the audit. If it was confident that it had done its job correctly, then one would expect that it would cooperate fully. Indeed, with the hand count matching the canvas, it seems that all should be well. But then we find that hundreds of thousands of election files were deleted from Maricopa County’s computer servers the day before the audit began. That smacks of guilty knowledge.

We also know that the servers allowed election data to be seen from the internet. Security was extremely lax, and even though it appears no votes were changed, other issues arise. Legally required signature matching on absentee ballots basically evaporated as the original tally went on.

Was someone watching from outside, then advising local officials on how to let unlawful ballots through to obtain the desired result?

At a bare minimum, the Arizona Presidential election was irretrievably tainted. The taint was large enough to make determination of the actual winner impossible. That’s why I wrote before January 6 that VP Pence should send several slates of electors back to their respective state legislatures for a final determination.

Those states, by repeated violations of their own state laws, did not hold elections. The processes they followed did not allow a tally of lawful votes.

The Arizona legislature should vote to decertify the electors for the 2020 election. This may have no legal effect, but if it leads two or three other states to the same conclusion, we may have a Constitutional crisis, and there are no guideposts for this trail. The Constitution simply did not foresee the compounding of raw power applied to prevent the proper administration of a Presidential election. The Supreme Court may deny cert based on the passage of time beyond the designated Electoral College date. Or it could decide to hear the case and ultimately find that Biden’s election is a nullity ab initio. Or something in between. Who knows?

What we do know is that we simply cannot declare who won the Arizona election with any degree of certainty. Even if that changes nothing else, it should give us a resolve to fix our elections so that they cannot be manipulated outside the law.

Pieces of paper with marks on them are not ballots until it is determined that those marks were made by a lawful voter in the time and manner prescribed by the legislature. Only after that bar is crossed for every ballot is it possible to have an election. Biden did not win the Arizona election because there was no Arizona election. It is impossible to truthfully say that he got more “votes” than Donald Trump. Nobody actually knows.

 

 

Updated Sept. 28 Europe Energy Stress Test Under Way

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Update Sept. 28  Additional commentary in Footnote at end

Europeans are going to get a strong dose of energy cuts Greta has long called for since starting her Fridays for the Future.  Shortages of fossil fuels are in the outlook and already reflected in skyrocketing prices. Tyler Durden explains at zerohedge All Hell Is Breaking Loose In Energy Markets.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

By now readers are well aware that Europe is suffering from a historic gas crisis, one which according to Rabobank is now even more extreme than the US oil price shock.

And unfortunately for Europe’s population, with every passing day – and to a lesser extent hedge funds such as Statar Capital which suffered a big loss in the past few days – it’s only getting worse. As Bloomberg’s Javier Blas notes today, both UK NBP and Dutch TTF natural gas benchmarks have closed the day at their highest ever settlement level, up ~11% on the day (to a closing price equal to more than $26 per mBtu).

Natural gas prices in Europe have surged past $25 per million British thermal unit, more than 400% higher than the 2010-2020 average, and significantly higher than in the U.S., where the commodity trades at around $5 per million Btu. In Asia, liquefied natural gas has recently changed hands at around $27 per million Btu, a seasonal record high, as China has also been hit by a widespread energy crisis (see “Millions Of Chinese Residents Lose Power After Widespread, “Unexpected” Blackouts; Power Company Warns This Is “New Normal””). Also, for those who haven’t read it yet, please check out Rabobank’s extensive recap of Europe’s energy crisis which we posted over the weekend.

Europe’s energy crisis is not contained to nat gas, and as we discussed over the weekend in another flashback to the 1970s US, UK gas station pumps are running dry in British cities on Monday with vendors rationing sales as a shortage of truckers strained supply chains to breaking point. Pumps across British cities were either closed or had signs saying fuel was unavailable on Monday, Reuters reporters said, with some limiting the amount of fuel each customer could buy.

The Petrol Retailers Association (PRA), which represents independent fuel retailers accounting for 65% of all the 8,380 UK forecourts, said members had reported that 50% to 90% of pumps were dry in some areas.

A post-Brexit shortage of truck drivers as the COVID-19 pandemic eases has sown chaos through British supply chains in everything from food to fuel, raising the specter of disruptions and price rises in the run-up to Christmas. Drivers lined up for hours to fill their cars at petrol stations that were still selling fuel, albeit often rationed. There were also calls for National Health Service (NHS) staff and other emergency workers to be given priority.

Hauliers, gas stations and retailers said there were no quick fixes as the shortfall of truck drivers – estimated to be around 100,000 – was so acute, and because transporting fuel demands additional training and licensing. “We need some calm,” Gordon Balmer, executive director of the PRA, told Reuters. “Please don’t panic buy: if people drain the network then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Shifting from gasoline and nat gas to oil, the near-term outlook is looking even more grim. According to Trafigura, one of the world’s largest commodity trading houses, the world faces higher oil and gas prices this winter and beyond as supply struggles to catch up with fast-rising demand.

“We’re going to see higher oil prices,” Ben Luckock, Trafigura’s co-head of oil trading said in an interview with Bloomberg.

Luckock said the market was mispricing forward oil contracts for the next couple of years because traders hadn’t yet woken up to the fact the supply-demand balance will remain tight for some time. Translation: even higher prices are coming with no easing in sight.

“I struggle to see anything but higher prices going forward in the next two years,” he said, one day after Goldman hiked its price target, now predicting that Brent would hit $90 some time in December. On Monday, Brent crude for immediate delivery surged toward $80 a barrel, setting its highest price in nearly three years.

On natural gas, he said prices could shoot up even more this winter if cold weather forces demand higher in Europe and Asia.

The bullish outlook comes as oil demand fast recovers toward its pre-pandemic level, with most traders expecting that consumption will reach the 2019 by early-to-mid 2022. As demand rebounds, supply has struggled to keep up: U.S. shale companies have kept a lid on spending, preferring to pay dividends to shareholders. With U.S. shale reacting slowly to higher prices, the OPEC+ oil cartel has been able to keep control of the market.

“The U.S. shale industry is showing very strong discipline. Oil prices are roughly double what they were a year ago and despite that we’re not seeing a huge increase in drilling,” Luckock said.

Luckock said that it was difficult to see lower natural gas prices this winter in Europe, despite the commodity trading at a record high already: “If it’s a cold winter in Europe or Asia, we have a big problem,” he said. “If it’s cold, and on top, it isn’t windy, then we have a much bigger problem. We will face shortages.”

Notably, Luckock said he was skeptical that Russia, the biggest gas supplier to Europe, was intentionally tightening the market for political gain, suggesting that Moscow was already pumping as much gas as it could right now.

“It’s easy to say that’s politically motivated, but I think it’s simpler than that: Russia is facing maintenance in many gas fields, very low domestic inventories, substantially increased flows to Turkey, and Gazprom is struggling to increase production,” he said.

Footnote: Commentary from Bloomberg Green and National Review

Ewa Krukowska at Bloomberg Green Energy Crisis Puts World’s Most Ambitious Climate Plan to Test.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

  • Soaring power and gas prices shoot up EU political agenda
  • Governments across EU fear backlash over costs of green shift

Natural gas and power prices are surging to all-time highs in the 27-nation region, as the bloc’s economies rebound from the Covid-19 pandemic. The surge in demand comes amid limited gas imports from Norway and Russia, with some countries accusing Moscow of manipulating supplies. At the same time, the EU strategy to accelerate emissions cuts in every sector from transport to manufacturing and agriculture boosted demand for carbon permits, with prices more than doubling over the past two years to new records.

The green package unveiled in July aims to align the economy with a 2030 stricter binding goal of reducing emissions by at least 55% from 1990 levels. The laws need to be approved by the European Parliament and member states in the Council of the EU, with each institution entitled to amending the plan, in a process likely to take around two years.

But for Europe’s lower-income countries — as well for the continent’s energy-intensive industries — the pain of any transition will be significant, and the EU will be under pressure to help cushion the blow from the current price jump.

But European governments are limited in what they can do to tackle the power crunch — without making their climate goals even harder to reach.

“It feels unlikely that politicians will reverse track and go back to coal generation or make changes to the approach to carbon,” said John Musk, an analyst at RBC Europe Ltd. “It is hard to see what measures can be adopted to alleviate near term supply-demand constraints on gas and power. There are likely be a couple of difficult years to navigate in terms of consumer prices and there may have to be some measures to help consumers here and there.”

Andres Stuttaford adds an essay at National Review The Gathering Storm (But with Not Enough Wind): Europe’s Energy Mess Gets Worse — a Lesson the U.S. Looks Set to Ignore.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Instead of looking at these alternative approaches, the EU, the U.K., and, soon enough, the U.S., seem set on what is looking more and more like a headlong rush into disaster.

To understand why this might be, it is important to understand that for many climate warriors a “bloody hard” transition is a feature, not a bug.

I wrote about this a week or so back:

Concentrating on resilience and adaptation do not follow the millenarian narrative that is an unmistakable subtext of the message now being sent out by many climate warriors, whether inside government, linked to government, or outside it. Underpinned by the expectation of apocalypse, this narrative, which has repeatedly demonstrated its dangerously persuasive power over the centuries, is based on the thought that a wicked humanity faces punishment and must, with the assistance of a morally superior, enlightened vanguard, be made to change its dreadful (often self-indulgent) behavior. Adaptation and resilience, by contrast, offer the prospect that our species will muddle on through, living pretty much as it has been doing, except even better, and without donning the hairshirt integral to so many climate warriors’ faith. Theirs has the characteristics of a religion, and there is little that is original about it. Pointless asceticism comes with the territory.

Questioning whether those setting the climate agenda are going about things the right way is not a matter of climate “denial,” but simple common sense. It is not, however, a conversation that the climate establishment wants to have. Fundamentalists are like that.

They may not want to have that conversation, but, as winter approaches, the growing crisis in Europe suggests that it is a conversation that may be difficult to avoid.

 

 

 

Europe Energy Stress Test Under Way

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Update Sept. 28  Additional commentary in Footnote at end

Europeans are going to get a strong dose of energy cuts Greta has long called for since starting her Fridays for the Future.  Shortages of fossil fuels are in the outlook and already reflected in skyrocketing prices. Tyler Durden explains at zerohedge All Hell Is Breaking Loose In Energy Markets.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

By now readers are well aware that Europe is suffering from a historic gas crisis, one which according to Rabobank is now even more extreme than the US oil price shock.

And unfortunately for Europe’s population, with every passing day – and to a lesser extent hedge funds such as Statar Capital which suffered a big loss in the past few days – it’s only getting worse. As Bloomberg’s Javier Blas notes today, both UK NBP and Dutch TTF natural gas benchmarks have closed the day at their highest ever settlement level, up ~11% on the day (to a closing price equal to more than $26 per mBtu).

Natural gas prices in Europe have surged past $25 per million British thermal unit, more than 400% higher than the 2010-2020 average, and significantly higher than in the U.S., where the commodity trades at around $5 per million Btu. In Asia, liquefied natural gas has recently changed hands at around $27 per million Btu, a seasonal record high, as China has also been hit by a widespread energy crisis (see “Millions Of Chinese Residents Lose Power After Widespread, “Unexpected” Blackouts; Power Company Warns This Is “New Normal””). Also, for those who haven’t read it yet, please check out Rabobank’s extensive recap of Europe’s energy crisis which we posted over the weekend.

Europe’s energy crisis is not contained to nat gas, and as we discussed over the weekend in another flashback to the 1970s US, UK gas station pumps are running dry in British cities on Monday with vendors rationing sales as a shortage of truckers strained supply chains to breaking point. Pumps across British cities were either closed or had signs saying fuel was unavailable on Monday, Reuters reporters said, with some limiting the amount of fuel each customer could buy.

The Petrol Retailers Association (PRA), which represents independent fuel retailers accounting for 65% of all the 8,380 UK forecourts, said members had reported that 50% to 90% of pumps were dry in some areas.

A post-Brexit shortage of truck drivers as the COVID-19 pandemic eases has sown chaos through British supply chains in everything from food to fuel, raising the specter of disruptions and price rises in the run-up to Christmas. Drivers lined up for hours to fill their cars at petrol stations that were still selling fuel, albeit often rationed. There were also calls for National Health Service (NHS) staff and other emergency workers to be given priority.

Hauliers, gas stations and retailers said there were no quick fixes as the shortfall of truck drivers – estimated to be around 100,000 – was so acute, and because transporting fuel demands additional training and licensing. “We need some calm,” Gordon Balmer, executive director of the PRA, told Reuters. “Please don’t panic buy: if people drain the network then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Shifting from gasoline and nat gas to oil, the near-term outlook is looking even more grim. According to Trafigura, one of the world’s largest commodity trading houses, the world faces higher oil and gas prices this winter and beyond as supply struggles to catch up with fast-rising demand.

“We’re going to see higher oil prices,” Ben Luckock, Trafigura’s co-head of oil trading said in an interview with Bloomberg.

Luckock said the market was mispricing forward oil contracts for the next couple of years because traders hadn’t yet woken up to the fact the supply-demand balance will remain tight for some time. Translation: even higher prices are coming with no easing in sight.

“I struggle to see anything but higher prices going forward in the next two years,” he said, one day after Goldman hiked its price target, now predicting that Brent would hit $90 some time in December. On Monday, Brent crude for immediate delivery surged toward $80 a barrel, setting its highest price in nearly three years.

On natural gas, he said prices could shoot up even more this winter if cold weather forces demand higher in Europe and Asia.

The bullish outlook comes as oil demand fast recovers toward its pre-pandemic level, with most traders expecting that consumption will reach the 2019 by early-to-mid 2022. As demand rebounds, supply has struggled to keep up: U.S. shale companies have kept a lid on spending, preferring to pay dividends to shareholders. With U.S. shale reacting slowly to higher prices, the OPEC+ oil cartel has been able to keep control of the market.

“The U.S. shale industry is showing very strong discipline. Oil prices are roughly double what they were a year ago and despite that we’re not seeing a huge increase in drilling,” Luckock said.

Luckock said that it was difficult to see lower natural gas prices this winter in Europe, despite the commodity trading at a record high already: “If it’s a cold winter in Europe or Asia, we have a big problem,” he said. “If it’s cold, and on top, it isn’t windy, then we have a much bigger problem. We will face shortages.”

Notably, Luckock said he was skeptical that Russia, the biggest gas supplier to Europe, was intentionally tightening the market for political gain, suggesting that Moscow was already pumping as much gas as it could right now.

“It’s easy to say that’s politically motivated, but I think it’s simpler than that: Russia is facing maintenance in many gas fields, very low domestic inventories, substantially increased flows to Turkey, and Gazprom is struggling to increase production,” he said.

Footnote: Commentary from Bloomberg Green and National Review

Ewa Krukowska at Bloomberg Green Energy Crisis Puts World’s Most Ambitious Climate Plan to Test.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

  • Soaring power and gas prices shoot up EU political agenda
  • Governments across EU fear backlash over costs of green shift

Natural gas and power prices are surging to all-time highs in the 27-nation region, as the bloc’s economies rebound from the Covid-19 pandemic. The surge in demand comes amid limited gas imports from Norway and Russia, with some countries accusing Moscow of manipulating supplies. At the same time, the EU strategy to accelerate emissions cuts in every sector from transport to manufacturing and agriculture boosted demand for carbon permits, with prices more than doubling over the past two years to new records.

The green package unveiled in July aims to align the economy with a 2030 stricter binding goal of reducing emissions by at least 55% from 1990 levels. The laws need to be approved by the European Parliament and member states in the Council of the EU, with each institution entitled to amending the plan, in a process likely to take around two years.

But for Europe’s lower-income countries — as well for the continent’s energy-intensive industries — the pain of any transition will be significant, and the EU will be under pressure to help cushion the blow from the current price jump.

But European governments are limited in what they can do to tackle the power crunch — without making their climate goals even harder to reach.

“It feels unlikely that politicians will reverse track and go back to coal generation or make changes to the approach to carbon,” said John Musk, an analyst at RBC Europe Ltd. “It is hard to see what measures can be adopted to alleviate near term supply-demand constraints on gas and power. There are likely be a couple of difficult years to navigate in terms of consumer prices and there may have to be some measures to help consumers here and there.”

Andres Stuttaford adds an essay at National Review The Gathering Storm (But with Not Enough Wind): Europe’s Energy Mess Gets Worse — a Lesson the U.S. Looks Set to Ignore.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Instead of looking at these alternative approaches, the EU, the U.K., and, soon enough, the U.S., seem set on what is looking more and more like a headlong rush into disaster.

To understand why this might be, it is important to understand that for many climate warriors a “bloody hard” transition is a feature, not a bug.

I wrote about this a week or so back:

Concentrating on resilience and adaptation do not follow the millenarian narrative that is an unmistakable subtext of the message now being sent out by many climate warriors, whether inside government, linked to government, or outside it. Underpinned by the expectation of apocalypse, this narrative, which has repeatedly demonstrated its dangerously persuasive power over the centuries, is based on the thought that a wicked humanity faces punishment and must, with the assistance of a morally superior, enlightened vanguard, be made to change its dreadful (often self-indulgent) behavior. Adaptation and resilience, by contrast, offer the prospect that our species will muddle on through, living pretty much as it has been doing, except even better, and without donning the hairshirt integral to so many climate warriors’ faith. Theirs has the characteristics of a religion, and there is little that is original about it. Pointless asceticism comes with the territory.

Questioning whether those setting the climate agenda are going about things the right way is not a matter of climate “denial,” but simple common sense. It is not, however, a conversation that the climate establishment wants to have. Fundamentalists are like that.

They may not want to have that conversation, but, as winter approaches, the growing crisis in Europe suggests that it is a conversation that may be difficult to avoid.

 

 

 

Dr. Richard Urso: End the Pandemic with Early Covid Treatment

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Drug Inventor Urso: Are We Underutilizing Early Treatment?

We cannot use a one-size fits all approach to fighting Covid

Dr. Richard Urso is a scientist, sole inventor of an FDA-approved wound healing drug, and the Former Director of Orbital Oncology at MD Anderson Cancer Center. He believes we cannot use a one-size-fits-all approach to fighting Covid.

“We are not going to vaccinate our way out of this,” he said. “There’s no reason to not use anti-inflammatories against inflammatory disease. I used steroids in March and people were saying, ‘Why are you using steroids for inflammatory for this viral disease?’ And I said, ‘Because it’s not a viral disease.’”

Urso says mass lockdowns and waiting for a vaccine never made a lot of sense to him. He calls for a multi-pronged strategy includes targeted vaccination programs, but also early treatment and prevention measures.

“Early treatment should have been part of the equation. I’m not against all those other things. Contagion control is important. Washing our hands. Things like that. They’re all important. Do we need vaccination programs? Absolutely. Do we need early treatment programs? Absolutely. So we have basically put the cart before the horse. The tail is wagging the dog. Early treatment should be a mainstay for everything.”

Background previous post 3000+ Doctors Declaration for Medical Rights and Freedoms

Update October 7:  Presently 10,000+ Medical Practitioners have signed this declaration, as well as providing additional resources at Global Covid Summit

By Debra Heine writes at American Greatness Over 3,000 Doctors and Scientists Sign Declaration Accusing COVID Policy-Makers of ‘Crimes Against Humanity’. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

A group of physicians and scientists met in Rome, Italy earlier this month for a three day Global Covid Summit to speak “truth to power about Covid pandemic research and treatment.”

The summit, which was held from September 12 to September 14, gave the medical professionals an opportunity to compare studies, and assess the efficacy of the various treatments that have been developed in hospitals, doctors offices and research labs throughout the world.

The Physicians’ Declaration was first read at the Rome Covid Summit, catalyzing an explosion of active support from medical scientists and physicians around the globe. These professionals were not expecting career threats, character assassination, papers and research censored, social accounts blocked, search results manipulated, clinical trials and patient observations banned, and their professional history and accomplishments altered or omitted in academic and mainstream media.

The document, reprinted below in its entirety, sprang from that conference.

Thousands have died from Covid as a result of being denied life-saving early treatment. The Declaration is a battle cry from physicians who are daily fighting for the right to treat their patients, and the right of patients to receive those treatments – without fear of interference, retribution or censorship by government, pharmacies, pharmaceutical corporations, and big tech. We demand that these groups step aside and honor the sanctity and integrity of the patient-physician relationship, the fundamental maxim “First Do No Harm”, and the freedom of patients and physicians to make informed medical decisions. Lives depend on it.

We the physicians of the world, united and loyal to the Hippocratic Oath, recognizing the profession of medicine as we know it is at a crossroad, are compelled to declare the following;

WHEREAS, it is our utmost responsibility and duty to uphold and restore the dignity, integrity, art and science of medicine;

WHEREAS, there is an unprecedented assault on our ability to care for our patients;

WHEREAS, public policy makers have chosen to force a “one size fits all” treatment strategy, resulting in needless illness and death, rather than upholding fundamental concepts of the individualized, personalized approach to patient care which is proven to be safe and more effective;

WHEREAS, physicians and other health care providers working on the front lines, utilizing their knowledge of epidemiology, pathophysiology and pharmacology, are often first to identify new, potentially life saving treatments;

WHEREAS, physicians are increasingly being discouraged from engaging in open professional discourse and the exchange of ideas about new and emerging diseases, not only endangering the essence of the medical profession, but more importantly, more tragically, the lives of our patients;

WHEREAS, thousands of physicians are being prevented from providing treatment to their patients, as a result of barriers put up by pharmacies, hospitals, and public health agencies, rendering the vast majority of healthcare providers helpless to protect their patients in the face of disease. Physicians are now advising their patients to simply go home (allowing the virus to replicate) and return when their disease worsens, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary patient deaths, due to failure-to-treat;

WHEREAS, this is not medicine. This is not care. These policies may actually constitute crimes against humanity.

NOW THEREFORE, IT IS:

RESOLVED, that the physician-patient relationship must be restored. The very heart of medicine is this relationship, which allows physicians to best understand their patients and their illnesses, to formulate treatments that give the best chance for success, while the patient is an active participant in their care.

RESOLVED, that the political intrusion into the practice of medicine and the physician/patient relationship must end. Physicians, and all health care providers, must be free to practice the art and science of medicine without fear of retribution, censorship, slander, or disciplinary action, including possible loss of licensure and hospital privileges, loss of insurance contracts and interference from government entities and organizations – which further prevent us from caring for patients in need. More than ever, the right and ability to exchange objective scientific findings, which further our understanding of disease, must be protected.

RESOLVED, that physicians must defend their right to prescribe treatment, observing the tenet FIRST, DO NO HARM. Physicians shall not be restricted from prescribing safe and effective treatments. These restrictions continue to cause unnecessary sickness and death. The rights of patients, after being fully informed about the risks and benefits of each option, must be restored to receive those treatments.

RESOLVED, that we invite physicians of the world and all health care providers to join us in this noble cause as we endeavor to restore trust, integrity and professionalism to the practice of medicine.

RESOLVED, that we invite the scientists of the world, who are skilled in biomedical research and uphold the highest ethical and moral standards, to insist on their ability to conduct and publish objective, empirical research without fear of reprisal upon their careers, reputations and livelihoods.

RESOLVED, that we invite patients, who believe in the importance of the physician-patient relationship and the ability to be active participants in their care, to demand access to science-based medical care.

 

So Called “Climate Science”

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Norman Rogers writes at American Thinker The ‘Science’ of Climate Change.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The science surrounding COVID has been hijacked for political purposes. People who recovered from the disease are pushed to get vaccinated, even though they have a natural immunity that is stronger than vaccine immunity. People are required to wear masks even though masks are essentially useless for preventing infection. People that die are reported as dying of COVID even though they died of something else. The government demands that children be vaccinated even though they are naturally resistant to the disease and suffer disturbing side effects from the vaccine. Schools are closed for no good reason.

The “science” of climate change is also BS. That should be easier to accept after seeing what the government did to COVID science. Why do politicians want to hype a nonexistent climate crisis? In a word: power. By claiming that there is an urgent climate crisis the politicians can spend billions to fight the imaginary foe. Those billions create political allies and reward friends. H.L. Mencken put it nicely in 1918:

The parade of imaginary environmental catastrophes during the last 70 years is very long. Here are some books predicting this or that environmental disaster: Our Plundered Planet (1948), Road to Survival (1948), Silent Spring (1962), Famine 1975! (1967), The Population Bomb (1968), The Limits to Growth (1972), An Inconvenient Truth (2006), This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. Climate (2014), The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019).

Richard Lindzen, one of the most accomplished climate scientists in the world by virtue of his discoveries, does not have to kowtow to the global warming mob. In an essay, he pointed out that scientific data that challenge the global warming hypothesis are simply changed. He cites examples of how environmental extremists have infiltrated scientific organizations. [See Climate Science Was Broken]

Tony Heller, an engineer and geologist, operates a long-running website, Real Climate Science. He specializes in exposing the changed data mentioned by Richard Lindzen. The promoters of climate change cherry-pick data when they are not changing it. Heller exposes the lie in the National Climate Assessment that heatwaves are becoming more common. He exposes “adjustments” to the U.S. temperature record to bring it into line with climate change predictions.[See Man Made Warming from Adjusting Data]

In her book The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert, Donna Laframboise exposes the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN organization that pretends to produce very careful and serious reports on the Earth’s climate. Most climate hysteria traces back to the IPCC’s reports. The IPCC does not follow its own procedures and is populated by environmental activists with limited scientific credentials. Its reports are masterful examples of wordy expositions that circle around scientific problems rather than presenting solid ideas backed by facts. The IPCC is a political organization, not a scientific one.

Amusingly, the longtime head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian railroad engineer, is also the author of a porn novel: Return to Almora. The 75-year-old bureaucrat was forced out of an Indian environmental organization for making persistent and improper advances to young women that worked for him. But, of course, that is irrelevant to his accomplishments as head of the IPCC.

The predictions of climate doom are based on complex computer models of the Earth’s atmosphere. Kevin E. Trenberth, an accomplished climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research said this about these models:

“None of the models used by IPCC are initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate. In particular, the state of the oceans, sea ice, and soil moisture has no relationship to the observed state at any recent time in any of the IPCC models.”

The method of the IPCC is to average together the results from dozens of computer models to make their predictions. They don’t actually say “predictions,” they say “projections,” but the rest of the world sees predictions. The model developers try to make their models fit climate history on the assumption that if they fit the past, the models might have predictive value for the future. There are a few problems. The models are so complex and have so many adjustable parameters, that fitting the past becomes an exercise in curve fitting. Further, the modelers are each permitted to have their own climate history. Parts of climate history that are poorly known, such as aerosols, can be fiddled to make a particular model fit better. [See Climate Models: Good, Bad and Ugly]

Figure 8: Warming in the tropical troposphere according to the CMIP6 models. Trends 1979–2014 (except the rightmost model, which is to 2007), for 20°N–20°S, 300–200 hPa. John Christy et al. (2019)

This method, applied to the stock market, would be to make a model and adjust it so that it explains past gyrations of the market. Then wahoo… the modeler can make billions. It doesn’t work, as the scarcity of mathematicians that are billionaires testifies.

I spent 10 years going to the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union. I spoke with many climate scientists including many who freely admitted in private that global warming is a very dubious enterprise.

I remember a Danish guy who visited beaches in northern Greenland by dog sled. He discovered 6,000-year-old driftwood on a beach always blocked by ice, year-round. That was clear evidence that the Arctic Ocean was summer ice-free during a time called the Holocene Optimum. Present-day global warmers claim that our coming climate disaster will again make the Arctic Ocean summer ice-free, something that happened 6,000 years ago with no help from SUVs or belching cows. Of course, the guy was afraid to make too much of his discovery because it challenges the climate doom theory.

There is no such thing as an early career climate scientist that is skeptical concerning global warming. I actually tried to find one and did a poster at a scientific meeting on the subject. The reason is simple. It is not because the science is so clear that only an idiot would question it. It is because our early-career climate scientist would soon be looking for a new job. Interfering with the flow of money from Washington is grounds for dismissal.

I still believe in science and I feel sorry for all the closeted climate scientists. Like the Soviet geneticists forced to cheer for Lysenkoism, these academics must cheer the global warming racket. They have wives, children, and mortgages.