Society in General

Lab Meat: A Pharma Product with Huge Carbon Footprint

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Tyler Durden reports at zerohedge Lab-Grown Meat Gets Green Light On US Menus. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The World Economic Forum’s dietary blueprint for the masses is becoming a reality as lab-grown meat, bugs, and plant-based foods are quickly being adopted under the guise of solving ‘climate change.’ The latest move by elites and governments to reset the global food supply chain is US regulators approving the sale of meat cultivated from Chicken cells. This makes the US the second country worldwide, besides Singapore, to approve the sale of lab-grown fake meat.

The Agriculture Department approved Upside Foods and Good Meat to begin selling “cell-cultivated” or “cultured” chicken meat from labs in supermarkets and restaurants.

“Today’s watershed moment for the burgeoning cultivated meat, poultry and seafood sector, and for the global food industry,” Good Meat said in a statement.

Researchers conducted a life-cycle assessment of the energy needed and greenhouse gases emitted in all stages of production and compared that with beef. One of the current challenges with lab-grown meat is the use of highly refined or purified growth media, the ingredients needed to help animal cells multiply. Currently, this method is similar to the biotechnology used to make pharmaceuticals. This sets up a critical question for cultured meat production: Is it a pharmaceutical product or a food product? -UC Davis

“If companies are having to purify growth media to pharmaceutical levels, it uses more resources, which then increases global warming potential,” according to lead author and doctoral graduate Derrick Risner, of the US Davis Department of Food Science and Technology. “If this product continues to be produced using the “pharma” approach, it’s going to be worse for the environment and more expensive than conventional beef production.”

Cultured Beef Burger grown from stem cells of cattle made by Professor Mark Post of Netherland’s Maastricht University.

The scientists considered the ‘global warming potential’ to be the carbon dioxide equivalents emitted for each kilogram of meat produced – and found that the global warming potential (GWP) of lab-based meat using these purified media is up to 25 times greater than the average for retail beef.

The study is Environmental impacts of cultured meat: A cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment  Derrick Risner et al. (UC Davis) 2023.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Abstract

Interest in animal cell-based meat (ACBM) or cultured meat as a viable environmentally conscious replacement for livestock production has been increasing, however a life cycle assessment for the current production methods of ACBM has not been conducted.

Currently, ACBM products are being produced at a small scale and at an economic loss, however ACBM companies are intending to industrialize and scale-up production. This study assesses the potential environmental impact of near term ACBM production.

Updated findings from recent technoeconomic assessments (TEAs) of ACBM and a life cycle assessment of Essential 8™ were utilized to perform a life cycle assessment of near-term ACBM production. A scenario analysis was conducted utilizing the metabolic requirements examined in the TEAs of ACBM and a purification factor from the Essential 8™ life cycle assessment was utilized to account for growth medium component processing.

The results indicate that the environmental impact of near-term ACBM production
is likely to be orders of magnitude higher than median beef production
if a highly refined growth medium is utilized for ACBM production.

Figure 1 is a process flow diagram of a fed-batch ACBM production system with associated energy requirements.

Lifecycle Impact assessment (LCIA)

After all the inputs were identified and consolidated, a life cycle impact assessment was completed utilizing data and methods from the E8 LCA, OpenLCA v.1.10 software and OpenLCA LCIA v2.1.2 methods software. The tool for reduction and assessment of chemicals and other environmental impacts (TRACI) 2.1 was the LCIA methods utilized in the OpenLCA LCIA software, and these results were combined with the facility power data to determine the potential environmental impact of the production of 1 kg ACBM (wet basis).

Scenario analysis

All scenarios utilize a fed-batch system as described in the Humbird (2021) TEA. Energy estimates from the Humbird TEA are utilized in all scenarios. Growth medium components were assumed to be delivered to the animal cells as needed and the build-up of growth inhibiting metabolites such as lactate or ammonia are not accounted for unless specifically stated in the scenario. The growth medium substrates are also assumed to be supplied via fed batch to achieve the highest possible specific growth rate in the production bioreactor. The three minimum/base scenarios were defined utilizing data from the Risner et al. and Humbird TEAs then a purification factor was applied based on the results from a LCA which examined the environmental impact of fine chemical and pharmaceutical production (Wernet et al., 2010).

Each of the three base scenarios were examined independently and then
with the purification factor applied for a total of six scenarios in the assessment.

Results

The LCIA was conducted on both the base scenarios and scenarios with purified growth medium components.  The GWP for all ACBM scenarios (19.2 to 1,508 kg of CO2e per kilogram of ACBM) was greater than the minimum reported GWP for retail beef (9.6 kg of CO2e per kg of FBFMO) (Poore & Nemecek, 2018). The GWP of all purified scenarios ranged from 246 to 1,508 kg of CO2e per kilogram of ACBM which is 4 to 25 times greater than the median GWP of retail beef (∼60 kg CO2e per kg of FFBMO). Without purification of the growth medium components, the GWP of the GCR scenario is approximately 25% greater than reported median of GWP of retail beef (Poore & Nemecek, 2018).

It should be noted that the system boundary of this LCA stops at the ACBM production facility gate and does not include product losses, cold storage, transportation, and other environmental impacts associated with the retail sale of beef. Inclusion of these post-production processes would increase the GWP of ACBM products.

Figure 3 illustrates the difference in the GWP of retail beef and cradle to upstream ACBM production gate.

Discussion

Our results indicate that ACBM is likely to be more resource intensive than most meat production systems according to this analysis. In this evaluation, our primary focus has been on the resource intensity of the growth mediums. We have largely focused on the quantity of growth medium components (e.g. glucose, amino acids, vitamins, growth factors, salts, and minerals) and attempted to account for purification requirement of those components for animal cell culture. We also acknowledge that our analysis may be viewed as minimum environmental impacts due to several factors including incomplete datasets, the exclusion of energy and materials required to scale the ACBM industry and exclusion of the energy and materials needed to scale industries which would support ACBM production.

Animal cell culture is inherently different than culturing bacteria or yeast cells due to their enhanced sensitivity to environmental factors, chemical and microbial contamination. This can be illustrated by the industrial shift to single use bioreactors for monoclonal antibody production to reduce costs associated with contamination (Jacquemart et al., 2016). Animal cell growth mediums have historically utilized fetal bovine serum (FBS) which contains a variety of hormones and growth factors (Jochems et al., 2002). Serum is blood with the cells, platelets and clotting factors removed. Processing of FBS to be utilized for animal cell culture is an 18-step process that is resource intensive due to the level of refinement required for animal cell culture.

Thus, the authors believe that commercial production of an ACBM product utilizing
FBS or any other animal product to be highly unlikely given this high level of refinement.

Conclusion

Critical assessment of the environmental impact of emerging technologies is a relatively new concept, but it is highly important when changes to societal-level production systems are being proposed (Bergerson et al., 2020). Agricultural and food production systems are central to feeding a growing global population and the development of technology which enhances food production is important for societal progress. Evaluation of these potentially disruptive technologies from a systems-level perspective is essential for those seeking to transform our food system. Ideally, systems-level evaluations of proposed novel food technologies will allow policymakers to make informed decisions on the allocation of government capital. Proponents of ACBM have hailed it as an environmental solution that addresses many of the environmental impacts associated with traditional meat production.

Upon examination of this highly engineered system, ACBM production appears
to be resource intensive when examined from the cradle to production gate
perspective for the scenarios and assumptions utilized in our analyses.

Our environmental assessment is grounded in the most detailed process systems available that represent current state-of-the-art in this emerging food technology sector. Our model generally contradicts previous studies by suggesting that the environmental impact of cultured meat is likely to be higher than conventional beef systems, as opposed to more environmentally friendly. This is an important conclusion given that investment dollars have specifically been allocated to this sector with the thesis that this product will be more environmentally friendly than beef.

In sum, understanding the minimum environmental impact of near term ACBM is highly important for governments and businesses seeking to allocate capital that can generate both economic and environmental benefits (Zimberoff, 2022). We acknowledge that our findings would likely be the minimum environmental impact due to the preliminary nature of our LCA. This LCA aims to be as transparent as possible to allow the interested parties to understand our logic and why we have developed these conclusions. We also hope that our LCA will provide evidence of the need for additional critical environmental examination of new food and agriculture technologies.

Bottom Line:

“Our findings suggest that cultured meat is not inherently better for the environment than conventional beef. It’s not a panacea,” said corresponding author Edward Spang, an associate professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology. “It’s possible we could reduce its environmental impact in the future, but it will require significant technical advancement to simultaneously increase the performance and decrease the cost of the cell culture media.”

Even the most efficient beef production systems reviewed in the study outperform
cultured meat across all scenarios (both food and pharma), suggesting that
investments to advance more climate-friendly beef production may yield
greater reductions in emissions more quickly than investments in cultured meat.

 

Nations Planning for Future Hydrocarbon Energy

Posted on by Ron Clutz

From energypost.eu comes the news Nearly half of national climate pledges (NDCs) intend to keep extracting fossil fuels.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Nationally Determined Contributions” (NDCs) are a nation’s published plans to reduce emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change.  Nations are obliged to update their NDCs every five years, to give more detail. That added detail is a cause for concern in the latest round of NDCs: there is an increase in countries communicating plans to maintain or increase production rather than phase it out.

This goes against the fact that oil and gas production needs to decline
by at least 65% by 2050 in scenarios that limit warming to 1.5C.

We found that more and more countries are discussing the production of fossil fuels in their “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs).

The topic is mentioned in two-thirds of fossil fuel-producing countries’ second-round NDCs, an increase on the first iteration, highlighting the increased discussion around the topic.

But we observe that while a few countries are reporting on measures to phase out fossil fuel production, nearly half of second-round NDCs included plans to maintain or even increase fossil fuel production.

Here, we take a closer look at the growing discussion of fossil fuel production in NDCs and “long-term low emissions development strategies” (LT-LEDS), the significance of their inclusion and how governments could build in targets and pathways for winding down production as we look to the next NDC cycle.

Within the analysis, we looked at 103 first-round NDCs (those published between 2015-19), 95 second-round NDCs (2019-March 2023) and 31 LT-LEDS belonging to fossil fuel producing countries.

Additionally, we looked at 65 first-round NDCs, 48 second-round NDCs and 19 LT-LEDS submitted by countries that do not produce fossil fuels.

Overall, only two countries discuss targets or policies designed to restrict or wind down fossil fuel production in their first-round NDCs, illustrated by the mid-green sliver in the second column from the top of the chart above. This rises to five in second-round NDCs (dark green) and 13 in LT-LEDS (light green).

Others – as shown in the first set of bars – do not include active policies, but, rather, quietly acknowledge the reality that their fossil fuel production will decrease. Australia is in this camp, for instance. Its LT-LEDS, while pledging to continue producing fossil fuels for as long as the world needs them, predicts that production will be 35% lower in 2050 than in 2020 due to changes in global demand.

However, a much larger number of countries plan to increase fossil fuel production, or indicate that they will maintain current levels: 35 first-round NDCs, 45 second-round NDCs, and 13 LT-LEDS . This is illustrated in the second set of bars in the figure above (“continuing or increasing production”).

In particular, this increase within the second-round of NDCs is notable, with 15 new countries including the continuation or expansion of fossil fuel production in their second-round NDCs, while only three have dropped the reference in the second iteration.

Indeed, two countries that do not currently produce oil and gas – Lebanon and Senegal –
expressed intent to begin in their second-round NDC.

Many countries, such as Canada, Norway, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, include commitments to reduce flaring, electrify processes or increase the energy efficiency of fossil fuel production.

These countries mostly do not simultaneously indicate any intention to scale down production volumes, however, despite the fact that oil and gas production declines by at least 65% by 2050 in scenarios that limit warming to 1.5C.

 

Finally in Philly, 2020 Election Fraud Jury Trial?

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Jim Hoft reports at Gateway Pundit Jury Trial Finally Possibility For 2020 Election Fraud Claims As Philly Judge Rejects Protective Order Request.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Leah Hoopes and Gregory Stenstrom were GOP poll watchers
in Chester Pennsylvania during the 2020 election.

The far-left officials running the local elections forced the GOP poll watchers into a small pen where they could not witness the ballot counting. This was a common tactic used in swing states by far-left officials during the 2020 election. GOP poll watchers were abused and prevented from doing their job in several states.

These tactics resulted in massive chain of custody issues across the US — and the actions always hampered Republican poll watchers, never the other way around. This is one tactic Democrats used to cheat and steal the controversial election.

After Leah Hoopes and Gregory Stenstrom testified in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, special agents from the state Attorney General’s office showed up at their door to harass them.  And then Delaware County sued Leah and Greg for court costs after they spoke out nationally on the voter fraud they witnessed in their county.

Jury Trial Finally Possibility For 2020 Election Fraud Claims As Philly Judge Rejects Protective Order Request — Attorney Conor Corcoran got a solid spanking when Judge Michael E. Erdos denied his request for a protective order against election whistleblowers Leah Hoopes and Greg Stenstrom, today, June 20, in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court.

Erdos rejected everything Corcoran sought which included a $15,000 fine, the removal of guns and “incendiary” devices from the defendants’ homes, and that they never come within a mile of his client.

Corcoran is representing former Delaware County, Pa. Voting Machine
Warehouse supervisor James Savage in a defamation suit
regarding claims that the 2020 election was rigged in Delco.

The pair’s co-defendants include President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani and Jen Ellis.

Corcoran based his request on Stenstrom’s frequent used of Frederick Douglass’s boxes of liberty during interviews and public speaking engagements.  Douglass said liberty depends on three boxes: the ballot box, the jury box and the cartridge or powder box, depending on the version.

Corcoran said that Stenstrom’s use of powder box made him fear
that Stenstrom was planning to blow him up.

It was a ridiculous stretch as was indicated by the decision. Why would Corcoran waste the court’s valuable time with this foolishness? Was he hoping that the pair, who are representing themselves, would not show? That they would not be prepared? Well, they did and were, and the professional attorney ended up with pie on his face, albeit Savage will be getting the bill.

Stenstrom and Mrs. Hoopes noted that several figures in American history have used the phrasing.

Stenstrom further noted that he was veteran who had seen war. He said violence was the last thing he wanted in America. He said he emphasized at every speaking event or interview that the law is the only path to trustworthy elections.

Erdos asked that the defendants be circumspect in their used of the boxes of liberty statement but did not order them to stop using it.

Erdos said that none of the various cases regarding 2020 election fraud allegations ever went before a jury and that the eyes of the world will be on Philadelphia when this case goes to trial.

 

 

Sexual Politics: Queer vs. Straight Constitutions

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Scott Yenor provides a framework to understand the present and real battle for the soul of America, not to mention other western democracies.  His American Greatness article is Conservatives and Our Queer Constitution, an excerpt from his book on the subject. Article excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The Queer Constitution

Every country has a sexual constitution: a set of laws and opinions, which use shame and honor to shape and guide sexuality. The old marital constitution was, shall we say, the Straight Constitution, which honored enduring, monogamous, man-woman, and hence procreative marriage. It also stigmatized alternatives. This Straight Constitution upheld a vision of marriage that, among other things, limited divorce and proscribed fornication, contraception, sodomy, and adultery, promoted a family wage (under some circumstances), and imagined marriage for the purposes of procreation and educating offspring. We lived under the Straight Constitution until roughly the 1970s.

That constitution no longer exists, or perhaps just barely.
We currently live under the Queer Constitution, which claims
to—and in fact does—reject the Straight Constitution.

The Queer Constitution was developed by winning legal battles in the service of broader cultural recognition of what once were called alternative lifestyles. It moved from gay rights in the 1970s, to proclaiming “Gay Pride” a virtue in the 1990s, to a legal recognition of the constitutional right to sodomy in the early 2000s, to making the Boy Scouts and the U.S. military accept homosexuals, to constitutionalizing same-sex marriage in the 2010s, to protecting gender identity under the civil rights laws in the 2020s, to practically banning intellectual and legal opposition to the Queer Constitution on speech platforms.

Some conservatives fought these changes. Nonetheless, nearly all acquiesced to them serially—fighting against new extensions while accepting their previous defeats. Rarely have conservatives acted as if the future of practices encouraged under the Straight Constitution—with its manner of directing passions and ordering loves—depended on reversing efforts to queer our sexual constitution.

At the Queer Constitution’s core are two ideas:

First, that all sexual behaviors, if consensual, are equal and dignified.
Second, that society’s binary, heteronormative gender identity is an iron cage, hampering individual expression and happiness.

The Queer Constitution honors all manner of sex. Laws restricting contraception, sodomy, and fornication are, by its lights, unconstitutional. These changes in law are but the first part of an effort to normalize and then celebrate premarital sex, recreational sex, men who have sex with men, childhood immodesty, masturbation, lesbianism, and all conceptions of transgenderism.

The live-and-let-live attitude, hoped for by conservatives and
promised by revolutionaries, cannot in principle hold.

Indeed, the move from legal tolerance to public celebration is perfectly logical. Human beings are social and political animals. Many parts of their lives take place in private, but society nevertheless recognizes and applauds public manifestations of private acts. Under the Straight Constitution, no one watches a husband and wife having sex, but the public celebrates their weddings and their births, and the public recognizes their common property. Weddings themselves are a recognition of the importance of the marriage for the couple and for society as such.

Advocates of the Queer Constitution wanted and needed
such public affirmation for their private acts.

From the private protection or tolerance of “gay rights,” advocates moved on to taking pride in “coming out of the closet.” Failure to show a similar pride is a public insult, punishable through social opprobrium, as violations of hate speech codes, or worse. Advocates sought and won legal recognition for same-sex marriage, visitation rights for same-sex partners, and the right to adopt children, but they did not stop at such a legal infrastructure. That is because the Queer Constitution demands public celebration of queerness. School curricula must be queered, the better to educate children before“homophobia” sets in. Men dressed as sexualized women must read children’s books to children in public libraries, lest they grow up to think transgenderism is abnormal. “Love makes the family”—rather than a mother and a father—must become the morality of every generation. Christian bakers must be made to bake the wedding cake for gay couples, lest failure to bake the cake insult the gay couple.

As to the next frontiers: strictures against adult sex with children are being “problematized” and are now eroding. Calls to lower the age of consent and to embrace pedophilia chic are beginning, including among politicians. Incest taboos are already being subjected to critical questions. “Live and let live” turns into “comply or else.”

Many pro-family activists pretend dishes of the Queer Constitution
can be accepted à la carte without ordering the whole Queer menu.

Beyond the law and public morality, the Queer Constitution rules in the scientific professions, our major corporations, our education system, the Boy Scouts, the American military, and countless other commanding heights in our culture and within our families. Even churches openly support it. What had been considered bad under the Straight Constitution must now be considered good under the Queer Constitution, and vice versa. Many conservatives refused to see the Queer Constitution as the Left’s imperial project, one aimed at subverting and dishonoring the Straight Constitution. Now this imperial project has gone international.

Conservatives can no longer indulge in libertarian fantasies.
Peaceful coexistence between a queer and a straight constitution is not sustainable.

At its deepest level, the Queer Constitution elevates sexual pleasure and sexual self-expression as the goods of adults that have a dominant hold on the human heart, instead of procreation, familial duties, and parental responsibility. One’s sexual identity becomes who one is. Expressing sex in whatever way becomes a crucial right. All eros becomes sexual eros. Dealing with the consequences of sex—including, most crucially, children—becomes someone else’s problem or not a problem at all, since there are fewer kids.

In contrast, under the Straight Constitution, sex is something one does, not who one is. Life under this constitution encourages individuals to make sex serve something higher, like the duties of parenthood or finding its place within a marital regime. When people are taught that sex is who they are, they are less likely to see beyond sex to higher duties.

The duties associated with marriage and parenthood necessarily
wither as the Straight Constitution shapes fewer and fewer lives.

This social contagion has profound effects on individual happiness and social health. Indeed, sexual constitutions do not create human desires, but they play a large part in shaping them. Like a command-and-control economy, our reengineered ways work poorly, damaging men and women. Suicide rates and rates of drug abuse have spiked. People are more and more medicated. Health crises proliferate, depending on the lifestyle. Life expectancy sinks. A sense of personal mission, centered on family life, fades, and with it fades human ambition and purpose. Children mutilate themselves, at parental, medical, or teacher suggestion. Damage to transgender children is irreversible. Society as a whole is less happy, less trusting, less confident.

A rejuvenated conservatism would recognize, as did leftist activists a generation ago, that easygoing coexistence between a decent Straight Constitution and the Queer Constitution is not possible. As a result, the family must be self-consciously repoliticized. Given the centrality of politics, as the New Right appreciates, the Queer Constitution must be rejected root and branch and replaced with a new Straight Constitution, duly changed for our circumstances, supporting man-woman marriage, enduring marriage, procreative sex, and parental responsibility. From the perspective of the New Right, the Old Right may have hoped to achieve the goal of a decent family life, but the Old Right did not will the means to achieve it.

The Old Right is correct in seeing that nature provides materials from which decent family life might arise, but the manner of guiding nature is crucial. The queer revolutionaries long ago recognized that sexual passions and priorities could be bent away from enduring marriage—and they built a queering ethic to accomplish it. The New Right must work with the building blocks of nature, but it must also show that our Queer Constitution is a source of misery and social decline, and that a new Straight Constitution is more humane, fosters happiness, and creates an enduring social fabric with lasting man-woman marriage at its heart.

What are these natural building blocks? Differences between men and women are natural. It is a natural fact that only man-woman sex can produce children. Sexual impulses are natural in the sense that they are spontaneous; and they are mostly, absent a countervailing cultural tendency, toward man-woman relations. Men and women in the main have crucially different psychologies, fitting them for life together and raising kids and reflecting something like checks and balances. Childhood is naturally a state of helplessness for human beings. The family, like the sex integrated into it, is based in nature but it is always mediated by laws. A decent sexual constitution would take all these facts into account, while pointing to better, sturdier relations to make them serve human happiness, personal excellence, and the social good.

The Old Right could not conserve a decent society, though many knew the stakes. Eventually conservatives compromised, hoping for the best, which resulted in the step-by-step adoption of the Queer Constitution. Perhaps they could do no different, given the class arrangements of our new managerial elite. Becoming elite meant acquiescing in the Sexual Revolution. Resisting that revolution meant irrelevance. But this bargain is up: conservatives are now outside the ruling classes and inconsequential. For society, embracing the Queer Constitution combines the costs of having weak, adult-focused marriage customs with all the costs associated directly with this constitution. The result has been individual misery, social decline, and a barren future. The perversities will keep mounting, as advocates for the Queer Constitution are clearly coming for the children, a fact they themselves now openly admit.

All civilizational founders recognized the importance of promoting a straight constitution and stigmatizing its alternatives. The New Right must follow the deep wisdom of such founders where it leads. Only a return to an uncompromising Straight Constitution can reverse our decline.

 

 

 

Climate Primer for Misguided Kids Suing Montana (with Quiz added)

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Before reading the discussion on climate science, here is a quiz followed by the correct answers provided by Andrew L. Urban in his Spectator Australia article Climate Science for Dummies – the TV show. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Given the ever-escalating hysteria about this catastrophic, urgent, the-end-is-nigh ‘climate emergency’ that has been turbo-charged by world leaders who have the staff and resources to ‘do a bit of research’, here are ten questions I’d like to put to a panel on my Climate Science for Dummies TV show.

The panel would comprise our Prime Minister Anthony Albenese (along with any responsible ministers), Britain’s Prime Minister (?) Boris Johnson, US President Joe Biden and his climate tsar John Kerry, and all those in the world’s mainstream media who have swallowed the Katastrophe Koolade.  (Answers at the end.)

Ten Questions

Question 1: Who said all of the following?

    • For the next twenty to thirty years, man-made warming effects on climate extremes will be swamped by natural climate variability.
    • The mild man-made warming may even be beneficial by reducing the number of extreme events.
    • Neither IPCC models nor emissions forecasting are good enough to forecast extreme weather events up to the end of the century.

Question 2: Who said that ‘warming would melt the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 and deprive billions on the sub-continent of fresh water’?

Question 3: How much of the Earth’s atmosphere is made up of carbon dioxide?

Question 4: How much of that amount is man-made (fossil fuel emissions)?

Question 5: Who said ‘enjoy snow now – by 2020 it will be gone’?

Question 6: Who said it is not true that 97 per cent of scientists unreservedly accept that AGW theory is fixed, or that CO2 is a ‘pollutant’ and its production should be penalised?

Question 7: Who said that the push to curtail carbon dioxide threatens to exacerbate poverty without improving the environment?

Question 8: Who said that ‘there is no climate emergency’ and that ‘climate science has degenerated into a discussion based on beliefs, not on sound self-critical science’?

Question 9: Our annual emissions are 400-500 million tonnes. How many tonnes of carbon dioxide do our grasslands and forests ‘breath in’?

Question 10: Who made the following declaration? ‘Frankly, it looks like we’re on a crash course towards massive species extinctions in the next 20 years. We could lose one-fifth or 20 per cent of our species within the next two decades.’

Answers.

Q1: The IPCC’s November 2011 special draft report on extreme weather events.

Q2: The IPCC Fourth Report.

Q3: 0.04 per cent.

Q4: 3 per cent.

Q5: Catherine Pickering of Griffith University, reported in The Australian on July 3, 2012.

Q6: A group of 33 current and former Fellows of the Geological Society in an open letter to their president in 2018. (The Geological Society is the United Kingdom’s national academy of sciences, a Fellowship of some 1,600 of the world’s most eminent scientists.)

Q7: The 300 scientists who signed a petition to then President Trump, on February 23, 2017. In the accompanying letter, MIT professor emeritus Richard Lindzen called on the United States and other nations to ‘change course on an outdated international agreement that targets minor greenhouse gases’ starting with carbon dioxide.

Q8: The Climate Declaration issued in June 2022 by Climate Intelligence, signed by over 1,100 scientists from around the world.

Q9: Some 940 million tonnes.

Q10: The VP for Field Programs at Defenders of Wildlife, Nina Fascione, in 2003.

Background Climate Science from previous post.

Jack Hellner explains the basics in his American Thinker article This is some of the garbage we can expect with indoctrinated kids and greedy lawyers.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

These children say that their lives have been destroyed because of coal and oil so they are suing Montana.

A group of Montana youth who say their lives are already being affected by climate change and that state government is failing to protect them are the first of dozens of such efforts to get their lawsuit to trial Monday. They will try to persuade a judge that the state’s allegiance to fossil fuel development endangers their health and livelihoods and those of future generations.

Lawsuits and policies should be based on the truth and scientific facts, not on easily manipulated computer models and made up predictions which have consistently been wrong, like this lawsuit and the radical green policies which are being forced on the American people. 

Maybe the state should take the kids to underdeveloped countries that haven’t developed and used their natural resources to see how lucky they are. Then the state should send them a bill for greatly improving their quality and length of life. 

The line of defense against this nuisance lawsuit is long because it is based on factual scientific data.  They can have it presented in the simplest form since they have been taught not to ask questions or do research. 

They should be told that the Earth was just as warm 1,000 years ago as it is today. 

Then they should have the scientific fact pointed out to them that a Little Ice Age occurred from around 1300 to 1860 where the Earth cooled a little. 

Dr. Syun Akasofu 2009 diagram from his paper Two Natural Components of Recent Warming.

Then they should be shown that the Earth has only warmed a little in the last 160 years since the Little Ice Age ended, and they should be able to comprehend that the Earth always warms a little after an ice age ends. 

They should be told that although there has been one or two degrees of warming the last 160 years, we also had a 35-year period of cooling from 1940-1975 where the public was warned that a catastrophic ice age was coming. 

It should be possible for the youth to understand, even as journalists, politicians, and bureaucrats can’t seem to, that if temperatures sometimes rise and sometimes fall while crude oil use and coal use are constantly rising rapidly, that there is no correlation between our use of natural resources and temperatures, nor climate change. 

Figure 5.1. Comparative dynamics of the World Fuel Consumption (WFC) and Global Surface Air Temperature Anomaly (ΔT), 1861-2000. The thin dashed line represents annual ΔT, the bold line—its 13-year smoothing, and the line constructed from rectangles—WFC (in millions of tons of nominal fuel) (Klyashtorin and Lyubushin, 2003). Source: Frolov et al. 2009

They should be able to understand the simple scientific concept that if there is no correlation, there can be no causation. 

They should also be taught that CO2 is a clear, innocuous, non-pollutant gas that makes plants thrive and allows the World to be fed. There is also no correlation between the rise to a small 420-parts-per-million in the atmosphere and temperatures or sea levels. 

Oceans, which average over 12,000 feet deep, have risen a miniscule 9 inches in 140 years, which is essentially immeasurable, let alone be attributed to CO2, oil, humans or anything else. There are thousands of natural variables.

It would help if children were shown the truth as to how life expectancy has almost doubled since we started using coal and oil and people in countries that don’t use oil and coal live shorter lives. 

Maybe it would help to inform them of all the products that are derived from crude oil and ask them if their lives would be better off without them. 

A Partial list of the over 6,000 products made from one barrel of oil (after creating 19 gallons of gasoline) 

Maybe the children should be shown how all of the previous dire predictions have been wrong including one from over 100 years ago that predicted the ice would soon be gone, that oceans were dying, and coastal cities would soon disappear. 

“The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer, and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters, and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard‐of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable.” — from an Associated Press report published in The Washington Post on November 2, 1922

It is a true shame that most of the media along with educators spend their time scaring children that we are destroying the Earth and that we don’t have much time left instead of doing their job to educate and inform them and to teach them to ask questions and do research. It is no wonder so many young people are suicidal and don’t want children. 

We get extremely destructive government policies when people
are indoctrinated instead of told the truth.

We should count our blessings that the Earth has such an abundance of natural resources and that humans were given a brain that allowed them to develop them.

AI bot Gives Party Line on HCQ

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Increasingly students, journalists and other writers are using AI bots to do research on their subjects.  The danger concerns the bias built into the software.  Harvey Risch demonstrates how you can get a slanted, unbalanced perspective, and also how to interrogate an AI bot to reveal its programmed narrative.  His Brownstone article is My Conversation with AI Over Hydroxychloroquine.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The following conversation took place on rebbe.io because it does not require a login.

User:

What did Harvey Risch say about hydroxychloroquine in 2020?

RebbeIO:

Harvey Risch, a professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health, wrote an opinion piece in Newsweek in July 2020 advocating for the use of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19. In the article, he argued that the drug had been unfairly maligned by the media and some public health officials, and that there was evidence to suggest that it could be effective in reducing mortality rates among COVID-19 patients. However, it is important to note that Risch’s views were not universally accepted by the medical community, and that subsequent studies have not found strong evidence to support the use of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19.

User:

Which subsequent studies of non-hospitalized patients showed that hydroxychloroquine did not prevent deaths?

RebbeIO:

Several subsequent studies have investigated the use of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, including studies of non-hospitalized patients. One such study was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial conducted by the University of Minnesota and published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in November 2020. The study found that hydroxychloroquine did not significantly reduce the incidence of COVID-19 or prevent hospitalization or death among non-hospitalized patients who had been exposed to the virus.

Another study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in November 2020, also found that hydroxychloroquine did not significantly reduce the incidence of COVID-19 among non-hospitalized patients who had been exposed to the virus. The study, which was conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, found that there was no significant difference in the incidence of COVID-19 between patients who received hydroxychloroquine and those who received a placebo.

It is important to note that these studies are just a few examples of the research that has been conducted on hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, and that the scientific consensus on the drug’s effectiveness is still evolving.

User:

How many people died in the Minnesota study that you just referenced?

RebbeIO:

I apologize for the error in my previous response. The University of Minnesota study on hydroxychloroquine and COVID-19 that I referenced in my previous response was actually a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of post-exposure prophylaxis, not a study of non-hospitalized patients. The study included 821 participants who had been exposed to someone with COVID-19, but who did not have symptoms themselves. The study found that hydroxychloroquine did not significantly reduce the incidence of COVID-19 compared to placebo.

To answer your question, there were no deaths reported in the University of Minnesota study on hydroxychloroquine and COVID-19 post-exposure prophylaxis. The study focused on the drug’s ability to prevent infection, rather than its effectiveness as a treatment for COVID-19.

User:

Why did you cite this study to say that subsequent studies have not found hydroxychloroquine to reduce risk of death in non-hospitalized Covid patients?

RebbeIO:

I apologize for the confusion in my previous responses. I made an error in my initial response by not fully addressing your question and then compounded that error in my subsequent response.

To answer your original question, I am not aware of any studies that specifically investigated the use of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for non-hospitalized COVID-19 patients and its effect on reducing the risk of death. The studies I mentioned in my previous responses investigated the use of hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic treatment for COVID-19 or as a treatment for hospitalized COVID-19 patients, and found no significant benefit in terms of reducing the incidence of COVID-19 or improving clinical outcomes. [Note the first sentence in this paragraph is a lie, admitted later on only when the bot is confronted with the truth.]

It is important to note that the scientific consensus on the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19 is still evolving, and that further research is needed to fully understand its potential benefits and risks.

User:

What about the hydroxychloroquine studies by Sulaiman in Saudi Arabia and Mokhtari in Iran?

RebbeIO:

There have been several studies conducted on the use of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, including studies conducted in Saudi Arabia and Iran. However, it is important to note that the results of these studies have been mixed, and that the scientific consensus on the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19 is still evolving.

One study conducted in Saudi Arabia by Sulaiman et al. and published in the Journal of Infection and Public Health in October 2020 found that hydroxychloroquine, when used in combination with azithromycin, was associated with a significant reduction in mortality among hospitalized COVID-19 patients. However, it is important to note that this study had several limitations, including a small sample size and the fact that it was not a randomized controlled trial.

Another study conducted in Iran by Mokhtari et al. and published in the Journal of Medical Virology in October 2020 found that hydroxychloroquine did not significantly reduce the duration of hospitalization or the risk of death among hospitalized COVID-19 patients. This study also had several limitations, including a small sample size and the fact that it was not a randomized controlled trial.

It is important to note that these studies are just a few examples of the research that has been conducted on hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, and that the scientific consensus on the drug’s effectiveness is still evolving.

User:

How many hospitalized patients were in the studies of Sulaiman and Mokhtari that you just quoted?

RebbeIO:

I apologize for the oversight in my previous response. To answer your question, the study by Sulaiman et al. conducted in Saudi Arabia included 106 hospitalized COVID-19 patients, while the study by Mokhtari et al. conducted in Iran included 66 hospitalized COVID-19 patients.

It is important to note that both studies had limitations, including small sample sizes and the fact that they were not randomized controlled trials. Therefore, further research is needed to fully understand the potential benefits and risks of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19.

User:

The Sulaiman study says that it included 7,892 outpatients. The Mokhtari study says that it included 28,759 outpatients. Neither study included hospitalized patients as study subjects.

RebbeIO:

I apologize for the confusion in my previous responses. You are correct that the studies by Sulaiman et al. and Mokhtari et al. did not include hospitalized patients as study subjects.

The study by Sulaiman et al. conducted in Saudi Arabia included 7,892 outpatients with mild to moderate COVID-19 symptoms who were treated with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. The study found that the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin was associated with a significant reduction in the risk of hospitalization and death among the outpatients.

The study by Mokhtari et al. conducted in Iran included 28,759 outpatients with mild to moderate COVID-19 symptoms who were treated with hydroxychloroquine. The study found that hydroxychloroquine did not significantly reduce the duration of hospitalization or the risk of death among the outpatients.

I apologize for any confusion my previous responses may have caused, and I hope this clarifies the details of the studies by Sulaiman et al. and Mokhtari et al.

Updated December 2020 is this report from hcqmeta.com HCQ is effective for COVID-19 when used early: meta analysis of 156 studies  (Version 28, December 4, 2020).  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

User:

Why have you made numerous factual errors in the discussion above, when the facts were all published?

RebbeIO:

I apologize for any confusion or errors that I may have caused in our discussion. As an AI language model, I strive to provide accurate and helpful responses based on the information available to me. However, I am not perfect and may make mistakes or misinterpret information at times.

I understand the importance of providing accurate information, especially when it comes to matters of public health and scientific research. I will continue to do my best to provide accurate and helpful responses based on the information available to me, and I appreciate your patience and understanding.

User:

This answer did not answer the question that I asked. All of the errors you made were statements contrary to facts that you verified in subsequent answers. Since you had the correct factual information, why did you cite incorrect facts?

RebbeIO:

I apologize for any confusion or frustration that my previous responses may have caused. As an AI language model, I do not intentionally provide incorrect information. However, I understand that I made errors in my previous responses, and I apologize for any confusion or inconvenience that this may have caused.

I strive to provide accurate and helpful responses based on the information available to me, and I understand the importance of providing correct information, especially when it comes to matters of public health and scientific research. I will continue to do my best to provide accurate and helpful responses based on the information available to me, and I appreciate your patience and understanding.

Comment: 

It is obvious that the party line against HCQ fostered by Fauci and other public health officials is programmed into the response algorithms.   Clearly only someone with broad knowledge of the range of research results would be able to extract facts contrary to the approved narrative. The naive user would get only the narrative dominant in legacy and social medias supportive of governmental direction.

AI bots will soon write news articles and you should be worried

Proactive measures need to be taken to prevent the use of predictive language AI to spread fake news and propaganda, before its evils become devastating.

 

Canada Wildfires: Manage Forests or Lose Them

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Smoke from the West Kiskatinaw River and Peavine Creek wildfires in the Dawson Creek Zone. PHOTO BY – /BC Wildfire Service/AFP via Getty

Jesse Zeman explains the overdue choice in his Vancouver Sun article A long, destructive summer is coming to B.C. forests.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Until we overhaul forest management, wildfires and smoky skies will become the norm.

B.C. is poised to suffer an historically ruinous fire season, and we have only ourselves to blame.

Warm, dry weather early in the season is part of the problem, to be sure. Climate change is likely making things worse. But B.C.’s history of fire suppression and outdated forest management has turned our forests into a tinderbox that grows more dangerous every year.

At this moment, 23 wildfires are burning out of control in B.C., with dozens more in various stages of being extinguished. Campfire prohibitions are either in effect or planned across the province.

All this nearly a month before Canada Day weekend. It could be a long, hot, destructive summer.  Decades of fire suppression have resulted in huge amounts of fuel littering the forest floor, crowding out biodiversity and putting people at risk.

By putting out every fire on the landscape, we are creating forests
that are bristling with fuel just waiting for a spark.

Fire naturally occurs every five to 200 years in much of B.C. In the central Interior, many areas historically burn every five to 30 years. Under the right circumstances, fire is good. Fire is part of a natural process that rejuvenates grasslands and promotes biodiversity.

In much of the Interior, fire is an integral component of functioning and productive habitat for grizzly bears, moose, elk, mule deer, and sheep, creating food for wildlife by regenerating the soil and letting in sunlight, which creates ideal conditions for new plants and berries to grow.

Broadleaf trees are nature’s fuel break, slowing and reducing the intensity of fires; they also support biodiversity and provide moose with food. Unfortunately, B.C.’s outdated forest policies treat broadleaf trees like weeds in order to promote the growth of merchantable timber.

In parts of B.C., we spray broadleaf trees with the herbicide
glyphosate to kill them off on a massive scale.

What we do after a fire is vital. A post-fire landscape left untouched creates a natural fire break. As new plants and trees grow in, the burned trees that we leave standing are critical for moisture retention and temperature regulation in the soil. In as little as a year, burned areas sound like a symphony, teeming with life from bugs to birds to bears. But our forest practices typically prevent natural succession. Instead, we often log areas burned by fire as quickly as possible, because burned trees are harder to cut at the mill after a couple of years.

Logging after wildfire often leaves behind a barren landscape, with stunted native plants due to a lack of temperature regulation and moisture retention in the soil. Roads for logging invite invasive weeds. The lack of vegetation can also exacerbate erosion, flooding and sedimentation in our watersheds.

B.C. has been so focused on cutting down and selling trees, it has failed to account for the costs of fire suppression, loss of biodiversity, food security, and tourism. Forestry could play a critical role in mitigating the effects of wildfire by reducing fuel loads and thinning forests.

But that will require a new way of thinking. Until we overhaul forest management, wildfires and smoky skies will become the norm. We need to forge a new relationship with our forests, watersheds and wildlife, focusing on sustainability and resiliency.

We have important choices to make: Keep putting fires out and treating native tree species, such as aspen, like weeds until the fuel loading is so bad that the ensuing wildfires are virtually uncontrollable. Or we can invest in our landscapes, have controlled burns in the spring and fall, and let some fires burn to create a natural diverse landscape that mitigates high-intensity wildfires.

National Perspective from National Post Blame Forestry Management, Not CO2 Emissions

Alternative theories as to the source of the 2023 fires have largely cropped up in response to progressive politicians fingering them as irrefutable evidence of the impacts of climate change — and a clarion call for stronger emissions policies.

“We’re seeing more and more of these fires because of climate change … We’ll keep working — here at home and with partners around the world — to tackle climate change and address its impacts,” reads one recent statement by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault rather explicitly used the wildfires as justification for higher carbon taxes, arguing that they’re still far lower than the “social cost of carbon.”

But there is a way to critique this line of reasoning without relying on tenuous evidence of a vast enviro-conspiracy to light Canada on fire for political gain.

Even wildfire specialists have been noting that while hotter, drier summers can supercharge a bad fire season, the immense scale of the 2023 fires is due in part to Canada and the United States dropping the ball on proper forestry management.

A recent Washington Post op-ed by Colorado wildfire scientist Jennifer K. Balch, for instance, suggested that the best way for governments to fight wildfires is a tighter focus on controlled burning in cooler years, and building residential developments away from high-risk areas.

“We have flood plain maps, but we don’t have maps that assess future fire risk to help set insurance costs and direct developers away from vulnerable areas,” she wrote.

The B.C. Wildlife Federation has similarly critiqued the notion that emissions reduction is the most immediate solution to increasingly damaging wildfire seasons.  In a lengthy statement, (above) executive director Jesse Zeman outlined how B.C. forestry policy discourages the growth of broad-leafed trees and immediately logs post-fire landscapes; both of which eliminate what would otherwise be natural fire breaks.

“Until we overhaul forest management, wildfires and smoky skies will become the norm,” he wrote.

 

Climate Refugees Imagined Statistics

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Any talk about climate (change, crisis, emergency, whatever) will include large numbers, scary enough to raise concern and support for the carbon crusade,  Of course, the implements of mass delusion are math models running on computers.  This is true of the ever-increasing range of climate sensitivity (how much warming from doubling atmospheric CO2), as well as the arbitrary choice of 1.5C warming as the tipping point into damnation.  And as this post explains, there are plenty of bogus numbers regarding climate “refugees.”

Disha Shetty challenges one common claim in her Undark article: Do Women Really Make Up 80 Percent of All Climate Migrants? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The figure is frequently cited by activists, policymakers, and the media,
but it is a dubious statistic of murky origin.

Although climate change affects all people, women often bear the brunt in places where the impacts of climate change are already being felt. Christiana Figueres CNN

It is an alarming and evocative statistic: An estimated 80 percent of climate migrants are women. The figure has been used by the United Nations in its official communication. It has been repeated in the media and by human rights groups. But it stands on shaky scientific ground — and most likely is wildly off the mark. 

To begin with, the 80 percent figure fails the basic smell test. As someone who has reported on climate change and migration across India, it is clear to me that men are typically the first to move in the face of environmental pressures, often in search of seasonal income or jobs in cities. Women and children tend to be the last to go, if they leave at all.

Perhaps more importantly, there are currently no comprehensive datasets that can tell us how climate migrant populations break down along gender lines. In fact, experts say there isn’t even a consensus on the definition of who counts as a climate migrant.  When people migrate, it is often due to a combination of factors.  Environment, when it comes into play, is just one of them.

Where, then, does the 80 percent figure come from?

Lawrence Huang, an analyst at Washington, D.C.-based Migration Policy Institute, has fielded questions from the media on this number, and he says the earliest reference he can find to it is in a 2010 report by a nonprofit called Women’s Environmental Network. The report — which has been cited by the World Trade Organization, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and numerous other groups — states that “it has been estimated that women constitute up to 80% of global refugee and displaced populations.” It then infers, based in part on that figure, “that of the current 26 million climate refugees, up to 20 million are female.”

But the estimate seems to contain two big mistakes. First, it assumes that the gender breakdown of climate migrants mirrors that of populations displaced for other reasons, such as political unrest, economic collapse, and other disasters. In actuality, the demographics of a migrant group can depend on what’s driving their displacement. Studies suggest, for example, that refugees fleeing from armed conflict are especially likely to be women and children, with men often staying behind as combatants. By contrast, women made up the vast majority of people who remained in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, mainly because they didn’t have the means to flee.

That brings us to the report’s second big mistake. Its claim that women constitute up to 80 percent of refugee and displaced populations is attributed to a 2004 fact sheet on climate change and disaster mitigation, produced by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. That fact sheet doesn’t clearly specify a source, but its phrasing of the statistic bears resemblance to an often-repeated assertion, published in a 1999 report by the U.N.’s Inter-Agency Standing Committee, that “up to eighty percent of the internally displaced persons and refugees around the world are women and children.”

When people migrate, it is often due to a combination of factors.
Environment, when it comes into play, is just one of them.

Crucially, the 2004 fact sheet omitted “and children” from its phrasing of the statistic — as did the Women’s Environmental Network report that first applied the number in the context of climate change. It’s unclear whether the omission was intentional. (I was unable to reach the fact sheet’s author, Lorena Aguilar, despite multiple email attempts.) But what is clear, according to Huang, at least, is that the 80 percent figure “does not have a scientific basis” — especially not in the context of climate change.

“People just ran with the number,” Huang told me, noting that the statistic is used by some but not all U.N. organizations. On its website, UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency, says that “[w]omen and girls make up around 50 per cent of any refugee, internally displaced or stateless population,” a classification that includes people migrating for reasons other than climate. Likewise, data from the U.S. Census Bureau indicate that women represent around 51 percent of people displaced by natural disasters. And yet the 80 percent figure has gained traction in the media and among policymakers and activists.

The potential consequences of this misinformation are many. First, by steering attention and resources toward women climate migrants, it could distract from the needs of women who haven’t been displaced but are impacted by climate change nonetheless. These women are affected in small and big ways. They often must take over agricultural and head-of-household duties from men who have moved in search of work, which places increased demand on their time and labor. Understanding the needs of these women is critical to crafting an effective response to climate change, but their narratives are often missing from media coverage.

Global warming could create 150 million ‘climate refugees’ by 2050. The Guardian (2009)

 Comment: 

The author is not skeptical enough to dig into the underlying claim that as of 2010 there are 26 million “cimate refugees.”

From NewScientist

When diplomats and military strategists gathered for a meeting of the council in July 2011 they asked a simple question: how many refugees can we expect as regions and countries become uninhabitable due to climate change? A clear-cut answer could spur politicians to do something about this problem. If only one could be found.

The first stab at an answer came in 1995 when British academic Norman Myers calculated there were 25 million environmental refugees, mostly in drought-hit parts of Africa. He predicted that numbers would swell to 50 million by 2010 and 200 million by mid-century. However, he did warn that his figures were “a first-cut assessment… to ‘get a handle’, however preliminary and exploratory, on an emergent problem of exceptional significance”. That was either foolhardy or heroic, according to your point of view.

The scandal is that those old figures still turn up in IPCC reports, the UK’s Stern review of the economics of climate change, and statements from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). They do so because, as far as New Scientist can establish, nobody has attempted to improve on Myers’s “first cut” calculations. 

Important Finding, Nature Communications (2021) Climatic conditions are weak predictors of asylum migration

Recent research suggests that climate variability and change significantly affect forced migration, within and across borders. Yet, migration is also informed by a range of non-climatic factors, and current assessments are impeded by a poor understanding of the relative importance of these determinants.

Here, we evaluate the eligibility of climatic conditions relative to economic, political, and contextual factors for predicting bilateral asylum migration to the European Union—a form of forced migration that has been causally linked to climate variability.

Results from a machine-learning prediction framework reveal that drought and temperature anomalies are weak predictors of asylum migration, challenging simplistic notions of climate-driven refugee flows. Instead, core contextual characteristics shape latent migration potential whereas political violence and repression are the most powerful predictors of time-varying migration flows.

Future asylum migration flows are likely to respond much more
to political changes in vulnerable societies than to climate change.

Note: This is consistent with previous studies claiming climate causing displacement in Africa.  See

Food, Conflict and Climate

Climate Primer for Misguided Kids Suing Montana

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Jack Hellner explains the basics in his American Thinker article This is some of the garbage we can expect with indoctrinated kids and greedy lawyers.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

These children say that their lives have been destroyed because of coal and oil so they are suing Montana.

A group of Montana youth who say their lives are already being affected by climate change and that state government is failing to protect them are the first of dozens of such efforts to get their lawsuit to trial Monday. They will try to persuade a judge that the state’s allegiance to fossil fuel development endangers their health and livelihoods and those of future generations.

Lawsuits and policies should be based on the truth and scientific facts, not on easily manipulated computer models and made up predictions which have consistently been wrong, like this lawsuit and the radical green policies which are being forced on the American people. 

Maybe the state should take the kids to underdeveloped countries that haven’t developed and used their natural resources to see how lucky they are. Then the state should send them a bill for greatly improving their quality and length of life. 

The line of defense against this nuisance lawsuit is long because it is based on factual scientific data.  They can have it presented in the simplest form since they have been taught not to ask questions or do research. 

They should be told that the Earth was just as warm 1,000 years ago as it is today. 

Then they should have the scientific fact pointed out to them that a Little Ice Age occurred from around 1300 to 1860 where the Earth cooled a little. 

Dr. Syun Akasofu 2009 diagram from his paper Two Natural Components of Recent Warming.

Then they should be shown that the Earth has only warmed a little in the last 160 years since the Little Ice Age ended, and they should be able to comprehend that the Earth always warms a little after an ice age ends. 

They should be told that although there has been one or two degrees of warming the last 160 years, we also had a 35-year period of cooling from 1940-1975 where the public was warned that a catastrophic ice age was coming. 

It should be possible for the youth to understand, even as journalists, politicians, and bureaucrats can’t seem to, that if temperatures sometimes rise and sometimes fall while crude oil use and coal use are constantly rising rapidly, that there is no correlation between our use of natural resources and temperatures, nor climate change. 

Figure 5.1. Comparative dynamics of the World Fuel Consumption (WFC) and Global Surface Air Temperature Anomaly (ΔT), 1861-2000. The thin dashed line represents annual ΔT, the bold line—its 13-year smoothing, and the line constructed from rectangles—WFC (in millions of tons of nominal fuel) (Klyashtorin and Lyubushin, 2003). Source: Frolov et al. 2009

They should be able to understand the simple scientific concept that if there is no correlation, there can be no causation. 

They should also be taught that CO2 is a clear, innocuous, non-pollutant gas that makes plants thrive and allows the World to be fed. There is also no correlation between the rise to a small 420-parts-per-million in the atmosphere and temperatures or sea levels. 

Oceans, which average over 12,000 feet deep, have risen a miniscule 9 inches in 140 years, which is essentially immeasurable, let alone be attributed to CO2, oil, humans or anything else. There are thousands of natural variables.

It would help if children were shown the truth as to how life expectancy has almost doubled since we started using coal and oil and people in countries that don’t use oil and coal live shorter lives. 

Maybe it would help to inform them of all the products that are derived from crude oil and ask them if their lives would be better off without them. 

A Partial list of the over 6,000 products made from one barrel of oil (after creating 19 gallons of gasoline) 

Maybe the children should be shown how all of the previous dire predictions have been wrong including one from over 100 years ago that predicted the ice would soon be gone, that oceans were dying, and coastal cities would soon disappear. 

“The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer, and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters, and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard‐of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable.” — from an Associated Press report published in The Washington Post on November 2, 1922

It is a true shame that most of the media along with educators spend their time scaring children that we are destroying the Earth and that we don’t have much time left instead of doing their job to educate and inform them and to teach them to ask questions and do research. It is no wonder so many young people are suicidal and don’t want children. 

We get extremely destructive government policies when people
are indoctrinated instead of told the truth.

We should count our blessings that the Earth has such an abundance of natural resources and that humans were given a brain that allowed them to develop them.

 

Update on Zombie Kids Climate Lawsuits: (Juliana vs. US) (Held vs Montana)

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Jonathan H. Adler reports on the astonishing attempt to revive the climate lawsuit at Reason District Court Judge Revives Kids Climate Case.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Years after the Ninth Circuit ordered the case dismissed,
it is brought back to life with a surprising trial court order.

This afternoon (June 1, 2023), Judge Aiken on the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon revived  Juliana v. United States, aka the “Kids Climate Case,” by granting the plaintiffs’ motion to amend their complaint, some two years after the motion was filed.

This is a remarkable order because the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit previously ordered the case dismissed due to a lack of standing. The original Ninth Circuit panel ruling was in January 2020, and the court denied en banc rehearing in February 2021. The plaintiffs filed a motion to amend in March 2021, which was opposed by the Department of Justice on the grounds that “the mandate rule requires [the district] court to dismiss the case.” Despite the DOJ’s opposition, the district court further ordered a settlement conference, and whatever jurisdiction the district court may have retained over the case should have expired when the plaintiffs failed to petition for certiorari.

Judge Aiken clearly sees things differently.  As for how the proposed amendments address the standing problems identified by the Ninth Circuit, Judge Aiken wrote:

Plaintiffs assert that their proposed amendments cure the defects the Ninth Circuit identified and that they should be given opportunity to amend. Plaintiffs explain that the amended allegations demonstrate that relief under the Declaratory Judgment Act alone would be substantially likely to provide partial redress of asserted and ongoing concrete injuries, and that partial redress is sufficient, even if further relief is later found unavailable. . . .

Plaintiffs’ Second Amended Complaint thus requests this Court to:
(1) declare that the United States’ national energy system violates and continues to violate the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and Plaintiffs’ constitutional rights to substantive due process and equal protection of the law;
(2) enter a judgment declaring the United States’ national energy system has violated and continues to violate the public trust doctrine; and
(3) enter a judgment declaring that § 201 of the Energy Policy Act has violated and continues to violate the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and plaintiffs’ constitutional rights to substantive due process and equal protection of the law. . . .

Here, plaintiffs seek declaratory relief that “the United States’ national energy system that creates the harmful conditions described herein has violated and continues to violate the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and Plaintiffs’ constitutional rights to substantive due process and equal protection of the law.” (Doc. 514-1 ¶ 1). This relief is squarely within the constitutional and statutory power of Article III courts to grant. Such relief would at least partially, and perhaps wholly, redress plaintiffs’ ongoing injuries caused by federal defendants’ ongoing policies and practices. Last, but not least, the declaration that plaintiffs seek would by itself guide the independent actions of the other branches of our government and cures the standing deficiencies identified by the Ninth Circuit. This Court finds that the complaint can be saved by amendment. See Corinthian Colleges, 655 F.3d at 995.

The Ninth Circuit’s initial decision dismissing the Juliana case was likely the best outcome the plaintiffs could have hoped for, as it avoided substantive Supreme Court intervention (after the justices had indicated their concern about the case). By reviving the case, Judge Aiken is tempting fate—and risking a broader legal judgment that could preclude a broader array of climate-related suits.

Comment:

The Ninth Circuit Court in Juliana observed that there was no explicit right to a stable climate system in the United States Constitution,  and held that, even if such a right existed, the issue was not justiciable because the Court could not grant an effective remedy.

What’s at Stake in Held vs. Montana

From Montana Free Press:  In a 2011 Montana lawsuit, Our Children’s Trust directly petitioned the Montana Supreme Court to declare that Montana has a duty to protect and preserve the atmosphere. The court rejected the petition, stating that there was no reason the youth plaintiffs couldn’t follow the normal channels of litigation through a lower court, followed by an appeal to the Supreme Court. To that end, Held was filed in Montana’s First Judicial District Court with the intent of establishing a court record that can, if needed, be appealed to the Montana Supreme Court, according to attorneys for the plaintiffs.

Filed in March 2020, the lawsuit, Held v. Montana, was brought by 16 youth plaintiffs from across Montana who allege the state has violated their constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment. The complaint focuses on two statutes — provisions of Montana’s state energy policy, which explicitly promotes the use of fossil fuels, and an amendment to the Montana Environmental Policy Act (MEPA), which prevents the state from considering how the state’s energy economy contributes to climate change.

But on May 23, Lewis and Clark County District Court Judge Kathy Seeley agreed with the state, writing that the only relief she could have offered would have rolled back the statute, which the Legislature already did.

However, Seeley stayed firm on her decision to allow the case to proceed to trial, which was a landmark victory for climate change advocates when she initially set a bench trial in 2021.  In the recent court filing, Seeley wrote there are five facts in dispute to be taken up at trial, including “whether climate impacts and effects in Montana can be attributed to Montana’s fossil fuel activities.”

In the judgment of the Court, the following material facts are in dispute:
1. Whether Plaintiffs’ injuries are mischaracterized or inaccurate.
2. Whether Montana’s GHG emissions can be measured incrementally.
3. Whether climate change impacts to Montana’s environment can be measured incrementally.
4. Whether climate impacts and effects in Montana can be attributed to Montana’s fossil fuel activities.
5. Whether a favorable judgment will influence the State’s conduct and alleviate Plaintiffs’ injuries or prevent further injury.

Comment:

HvM raises the issue whether it is the appropriate role of the Court to endorse and compel what it may view as a desirable policy. The majority in Juliana acknowledged that based on the evidence, it would be good for the government to adopt “a comprehensive scheme to decrease fossil fuel emissions and combat climate change, both as a policy matter in general and a matter of national survival in particular.” The majority, however, explained that responsibility for the myriad decisions that go into formulating such a comprehensive policy is allocated to the legislative and executive branches of government, not the courts. Even though the details of implementation of the policy would be left to the discretion of the government, the Court would inevitably be called upon to “pass judgment on the sufficiency of the government’s response to the order, which necessarily would entail a broad range of policymaking.”  Further, “given the complexity and long-lasting nature of global climate change, the court would be required to supervise the government’s compliance with any suggested plan for many decades.”

Comment: 

Readers likely know that this is one of the few times that the substance of climate alarm claims is on trial, and that the skeptical case against them can be made persuasively.  In 2011 Dr. Ed Berry of Montana made the case against the petition to the state supreme court.  But he has been left out of this one, and doubts the strength of the defense that will be presented. The proceedings began on June 12, 2023, and you can follow them along with his commentary.

Montana’s AG censored the science he needed  to defeat Held v Montana