Tag: climategate

Why Trump is Pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement (again)

It’s going to be at least four years of “Drill baby, drill!” as President-elect Donald Trump has said numerous times over the last few years.

With Trump’s election, the United States will now definitely withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement.

Trump is seeking to overhaul energy and environmental policies, aiming to dismantle the Left’s climate agenda and eliminate programs that impede the country’s economic growth. While President Joe Biden’s negotiators will be at this week’s COP talks in Azerbaijan, nothing they agree to will be binding for the Trump administration.

In fact, Reuters is reporting that Trump’s transition team has already prepared executive orders and proclamations on withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement and shrinking the size of some national monuments to allow more drilling and mining.

The new Trump administration will push for a major ramp up of oil and gas exploration within the US, roll back environmental protections as well as impose heavy tariffs on electric vehicles and solar panels coming from China.

Trump is also expected to end the pause on permitting new liquefied natural gas exports to big markets in Asia and Europe and revoke a waiver that allows California and other states to have tighter pollution standards, according to a New York Times report.

Trump is also reported to be under pressure to pull the US out of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for the first time if he becomes president.

While leaving the Paris Agreement would be legally straightforward, legal experts had previously been divided on whether Trump could withdraw the US from the UNFCCC without the approval of the US Senate and – if he did – how easy it would be for a future president to re-join.

However, given that the Senate is now in Republican hands, Trump could move forward on this should he so choose.

The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement is an international treaty aimed at limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, with efforts to keep it under 1.5 degrees.

Democrats have made climate change and the goal of limiting global warning a new religion.

They claim Trump risks derailing American climate policy, as well as the global fight against climate change.

They have called his election a “crushing blow,” a “dark day for the climate,” and “the greatest civilizational and climatic setback on our planet.”

Democrats believe the Paris Climate Agreement represents a positive, collective global effort to address climate change.

As part of the Agreement, countries set nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, fostering accountability and progress tracking. Developed nations pledge financial and technical support to help developing countries transition to greener economies and adapt to climate impacts, which can alleviate economic inequality.

The US has already committed billions in American taxpayer dollars to developing countries, a move many conservatives are upset about.

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World Bank Missing $41 Billion in Climate Funds

A new report by Oxfam, “Climate Finance Unchecked,” has determined that the World Bank has $41 billion in unaccounted funds that were destined to fight climate change.

This figure represents 40% of all disbursed climate funds by the World Bank. Oxfam’s audit revealed that between 2017 and 2023, between $24 billion and $41 billion simply went unaccounted for and there is absolutely no record of where the money went. No one knows how the money was used as there is no paper trail revealing where the money went.

“The Bank is quick to brag about its climate finance billions —but these numbers are based on what it plans to spend, not on what it actually spends once a project gets rolling,” said Kate Donald, Head of Oxfam International’s Washington D.C. Office. “This is like asking your doctor to assess your diet only by looking at your grocery list, without ever checking what actually ends up in your fridge.”

The World Bank is a leader in climate finance, controlling 52% of the total flow from all multilateral banks combined. World Bank President Ajay Banga announced in December that the bank achieved 35% of its financing three years ahead of schedule. He then set a new target of 45% by 2025. The bank later said in September that it achieved 44% of climate financing to the tune of $42.6 billion. “We’re putting our ambition in overdrive,” Banga said.

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A victory for energy and climate sanity

Now that President Donald Trump has easily defeated Vice President Kamala Harris, Americans who desire freedom of choice and are at their wits’ end with sky-high energy prices can breathe a massive sigh of relief. Moreover, the millions of Americans who are sick and tired of the never-ending climate alarmist narrative courtesy of the federal government can also rest easy.

In a few months, Trump will return to the Oval Office in one of the most spectacular comeback stories in American political history. As he has said on multiple occasions during the campaign, one of his first priorities will be addressing the energy cost crisis created by the Biden-Harris administration.

Since President Biden entered the White House in January 2021, his administration has declared war on American energy independence as well as the fossil fuel industry in general. From killing the Keystone XL pipeline to slow-walking leases for oil and gas exploration on federal lands, Biden has made it abundantly clear that he sides more with climate alarmists than ordinary, hard-working Americans.

On the other hand, Trump’s track record during his first term and what he has outlined that he will do in his second term tells us that he will embrace commonsense energy policies that puts Americans first, regardless of the propaganda spewed by climate radicals and those who benefit greatly from the scam that is known as the green energy transition.

Unlike Biden and Harris, Trump believes in American energy independence. More accurately, Trump is a strong supporter of American energy dominance. Although these terms sound similar, it is important to understand the difference between the two. When we talk about energy independence, we are basically describing a situation in which the United States does not need to import oil and other energy sources from countries like Venezuela or Saudi Arabia. When we talk about energy dominance, we are describing a scenario in which the United States can supply energy to our allies across the world, especially in Europe.

By mid-2020, Trump had achieved American energy independence for the first time in decades. This is a key reason why gasoline prices, and energy prices in general, plummeted under Trump.

It is no great secret how Trump managed to turn the United States into a net energy exporter during his first term; he simply lifted the throttle off of U.S. energy producers. Trump allowed more fracking, opened up more federal lands for exploration, and reduced regulations that have hindered the industry for far too long.

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Scientists Were Wrong: Plants Absorb 31% More CO2 Than Previously Thought

New research shows plants absorb 31% more CO2 than previously estimated, raising the global GPP to 157 petagrams per year. Using carbonyl sulfide as a proxy for photosynthesis, this study highlights tropical rainforests’ critical role as carbon sinks and stresses the importance of accurate photosynthesis modeling for climate predictions.

A new assessment by scientists reveals that plants worldwide are absorbing about 31% more carbon dioxide than previously believed. Published in the journal Nature, this research is expected to enhance Earth system models used to forecast climate trends and underscores the critical role of natural carbon sequestration in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.

The amount of CO2 removed from the atmosphere via photosynthesis from land plants is known as Terrestrial Gross Primary Production, or GPP. It represents the largest carbon exchange between land and atmosphere on the planet. GPP is typically cited in petagrams of carbon per year. One petagram equals 1 billion metric tons, which is roughly the amount of CO2 emitted each year from 238 million gas-powered passenger vehicles.

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Fear plus ignorance equals climate change

Weather is inherently mysterious.  Multiple forces, such as wind, clouds, seasonal and day-night cycles, and air pressure are constantly interacting and causing continuous chaos.  In the aftermath of two particularly destructive hurricanes, the fear-mongers are bloviating to the max over the catastrophic effects on the climate caused by human existence. 

And yet there is no discernible trend toward either more storms or more intense hurricanes compiled over more than beyond the last century.  (This chart by NOAA was especially easy to find.)  Thus far, the decade of the 1940s saw the most seriously intense storms.  Being historical data, this brings to mind a modification of Santayana’s famous adage: when people are ignorant of their history, they make it really easy for demagogues to lie to them about it.

Rather than human consumption of fossil fuels, two other factors are mostly relevant when it comes to the damage wrought by hurricanes: the path they take and the development of infrastructure within that path.  Out on the open sea, a hurricane may damage a few ships, but when one goes over a population center…well, you know, it just happened.

What determines the path is largely chaotic.  Go figure.  There’s this weird thing called the jet stream, which is sort of the result of the Earth’s continuous rotation within a tenuous atmospheric envelope.  Becoming known to American aviators during World War 2, the particular details of the jet stream were kept as a military secret well into the mid-twentieth century.  Ocean currents and surface temperatures are also involved.  Early forecasts of hurricane paths are typically all over the map.  As the time frame compresses, they tend to become more accurate, but not always.

Then there’s the “atypically” warm weather that sometimes happens in early autumn.  We just had some of that, along with offshore winds and seriously elevated fire danger.  In the olden days, this was called “Indian summer.”  Back in 1919, Victor Herbert even wrote a song by that name.  Maybe I’m just a cynic, but I’m expecting the fear-mongers to start pandering to the general public’s pervasive ignorance of earth science to cause panic over yet another routine weather event.

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Frequent Flyer Tax

The core reason that the establishment is suddenly interested in climate change comes down to one main factor – money. More specifically, the establishment is hunting down YOUR money through taxation. A second motivator is limiting our freedom of movement by demonizing fossil fuels and limiting our ability to travel. The European Union is now seeking to punish those who fly more than once per year with a frequent flyer tax.

The EU has already implemented an aviation tax, but the new proposal is designed to punish the pesky “rich,” but per usual, everyone will suffer. “A frequent flying levy would be a fair aviation measure, reducing excessive flights for wealthy passengers, while raising revenues – including to expand and provide affordable railways and public transport,” the Stay Grounded network told Euro News.

The new levy would target everyone flying from the European Economic Area (EEA) and the UK. The standard aviation tax would apply for the first two flights taken per year, but an additional 50 euro surcharge would be applied to medium-haul flights while long-haul, first-class, and business flights would cost an additional 100 euros. Then they are adding an additional 100 euro fee after the fifth flight on top of the initial surcharge. People will be expected to pay an additional 200 euros for their seventh flight and 400 euros for the ninth.

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WaPo’s Favorite Environmental Group Uses ‘Political’ Research To Link Climate Change to Natural Disasters. It’s Also Bankrolled by WaPo Owner Jeff Bezos.

World Weather Attribution was founded in 2014 to produce research linking extreme weather events to climate change. That research is then funneled to mainstream media outlets, giving them what the group calls the “larger global warming context” as they cover natural disasters.

The group found a friend in Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who in 2022 announced a $10 million grant to WWA and two other organizations to “scale effective communication on the links between climate change and extreme weather.” The Bezos Earth Fund said the money would provide the WWA an outlet to “reach the most important audience segments via trusted messengers.”

One such messenger is Bezos’s newspaper, the Washington Post, which has cited WWA research in more than 70 stories over the past three years, a Washington Free Beacon review found. It does so uncritically, publishing the group’s non-peer-reviewed findings to suggest that climate change is to blame for recent natural disasters, including Hurricane Milton. Nonpartisan experts in the field, however, are not so sure of WWA’s methods, portraying the group’s flashy studies as rushed, partisan, and “incomplete.”

Bezos’s funding for the group, paired with the Washington Post‘s favorable coverage of its research, raises questions about the newspaper’s declared independence from its billionaire owner. The Post’s stories citing WWA do not acknowledge that Bezos—who purchased the paper in 2013, one year before the group’s founding—also bankrolls WWA.

“The motivation is entirely political,” Ryan Maue, the former chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said of the climate group. “I’m not sure what the scientific community’s opinion on it is, but my guess is that it has gotten along this far because of its political weight and the media attention that it is given, meaning you don’t want to be on the wrong side of this.”

Maue particularly criticized WWA’s methodology, which consists of determining the probability of a recent extreme weather event, comparing it with the probability of a similar event that occurred decades ago, and attributing the difference to climate change. That leads to flashy findings—but not necessarily accurate ones, according to Maue, who argued that the WWA values speed over accuracy and, as such, produces “incomplete” research.

“What they are able to put out is the headline that climate change made Hurricane Helene worse and then count on the scientific illiteracy of the corporate media in order to produce headlines that become, you know, more and more outlandish, making claims that obviously are not supported by the science,” he told the Free Beacon.

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The earth is not warming and oceans are NOT boiling – so that would make UN Secretary General, Guterres, A LIAR

From the Weekly Climate Realism Show here:

Climate Alarmist Education – The Climate Realism Show #131 (youtube.com)

Reference is made to a Climate Depot article.

‘No change in the warming rate’ – New climate study finds no warming surge since the 1970s – ‘A recent surge in global warming is not detectable yet’ – Climate Depot .

commenting on “New research published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment has found limited evidence for a significant warming surge since the 1970s.”

Here is the referenced article in Nature:

A recent surge in global warming is not detectable yet | Communications Earth & Environment (nature.com)

From the results section of the paper:

“Can we detect a warming surge yet?

Continuous and discontinuous models were fitted to all annual GMST series (see Methods). Model fits and timings of any found changepoints are listed in Table 1 and illustrated in Fig. 1.

For the continuous model, a single changepoint is detected near 1970 in all datasets (Fig. 1a). Similarly, we find one changepoint in all datasets for the discontinuous models (Fig. 1b).

While the timings detected are slightly earlier for the discontinuous models, both cases do not indicate any changes in trend after the 1970s. “

So, no change in trend of mean global surface temperatures for the last 53 years – more than half a century. Note, changes in climate need to be reviewed over rolling 35-year periods. That is the metric for measuring climate change – not a few years, 35 years.

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Scientists Find No Change in Global Warming Rate Since 1970 Despite “Hottest Year Ever” in 2023

A sensational science paper has blown holes in alarmist claims that global temperatures are surging. Just published results in Nature show “limited evidence” for a warming surge. “In most surface temperature time series, no change in the warming rate beyond the 1970s is detected despite the breaking record temperatures observed in 2023,” the paper says. Written by an international group of mathematicians and scientists, it is unlikely to be acknowledged in the mainstream media where general hysteria reigns over the anomalous 2023 experience. As we have seen, constant misinformation is published to scare the general public and this is exemplified by climate comedy-turn Jim ‘jail the deniers’ Dale forecasting almost daily Armageddon and exhorting people to “join up the dots”.

In science, one swallow does not make a summer and in climate science it is impossible to show a trend by picking on short periods or individual weather events. This paper is an excellent piece of climate science work since it takes the long statistical view and challenges the two-a penny clickbait alarmists looking for a headline on the BBC. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a biased body but it understands the importance of long-term climate trends by stating, much to the chagrin of Net Zero-promoting activists, that it can find little or no human involvement in most extreme weather events either in the past or in the likely immediate future. But these findings, along with the paper on the warming trend, are inconvenient to those promoting the unproven claim that humans control the climate thermostat by utilising hydrocarbons.

The paper is highly technical and mathematically-inclined readers can study the full workings out in the open access publication. It notes that global temperature datasets fluctuate due to short-term variability and this often creates the appearance of surges and slowdowns in warming. It is important to consider random noise caused by natural variation when investigating the recent pauses in temperature and the more recent “alleged warming acceleration”, it adds. In fact there have been a number of plausible explanations given for the recent spike, with attention focused on the massive Hunga Tonga submarine volcano adding 13% extra water vapour to the stratosphere, a strong El Niño and even the reduction in atmospheric particulates caused by recent changes in shipping vessel fuel. Several “changepoints” were used by the mathematicians and it was found that “a warming surge could not be reliably detected any time after 1970”.

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‘Anti-Energy Lawfare’: Millions in Dark Money Fueling Local Climate Lawsuits Across the Country, Congressional Investigation Finds

California law firm Sher Edling received more than $3 million in unreported dark money to push high-profile climate litigation on behalf of dozens of Democratic-led cities and states, according to a Monday congressional report obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Sher Edling, the Senate Commerce Committee and House Oversight Committee report found, received $2.9 million last year from the Collective Action Fund for Accountability, a shadowy group managed by the New Venture Fund. Because the contributions were made in 2023, the New Venture Fund, a Washington, D.C.-based dark money organization, isn’t required to disclose them until it files its next annual 990 form with the IRS in mid-November. Sher Edling also received a previously unreported check worth $235,000 in 2022 from the Tides Foundation, a grantmaking organization that wired a staggering $667 million to dozens of progressive causes in 2022, its most recent tax filings show.

The newly uncovered funds shed light on how powerful progressive interests continue to work hand in hand with Democrats to punish oil and gas companies. Sher Edling was founded in 2016 to take up risky first-of-their-kind lawsuits against the oil and gas industry, accusing the industry of causing global warming and arguing it is financially responsible for extreme weather events such as hurricanes and tornadoes.

Most of Sher Edling’s cases are working their way through state courts, even as the oil industry has pushed for them to be litigated in federal courts. If successful, the suits could force oil companies to pay billions of dollars in climate damages to local and state governments. Sher Edling would receive a large portion of that settlement money, according to its legal services contracts.

As 501(c)(3) nonprofits, the New Venture Fund and Tides Foundation aren’t legally required to disclose their donors. Together, the two groups received $1.3 billion in contributions and grants from anonymous donors in 2022 alone. As a result, it’s largely unclear who exactly employed the organizations to send grant money to Sher Edling.

Since it was founded in 2016, Sher Edling has agreed to represent dozens of states and cities in climate-related cases, including Delaware, Minnesota, Rhode Island, New Jersey, New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Baltimore, and Honolulu. In the cases, Democratic prosecutors have argued the oil and gas industry is responsible for global warming and that it has deceived consumers about the downstream impacts of their petroleum products for decades.

Critics have blasted the litigation, labeling it a backdoor effort to bankrupt oil and gas companies and peg the industry for local emissions. Still, activists say the lawsuits are a critical part of the broader effort to curb reliance on fossil fuels and boost green energy.

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