Environment

James Delingpole writes about the silliest speech ever:

Oh dear. I’ve just read the speech Ed Davey delivered yesterday at the Met Office and the best thing you could say about it is that was worthy of its host venue: which is to say short on science, shamelessly parti-pris, and completely out of touch with what is going on in the real world.

In the real world, as we know, global warming paused in 1997 and shows little sign of starting up any time soon. If it did it would be good news for almost all of us, for it would make our climate more pleasant, crops would be more abundant and attractive young women would parade themselves in skimpier outfits for longer stretches of the year. But what it increasingly looks like is that the opposite is going to happen. We appear to be entering a period of solar minima – that’s an era of low sun-spot activity – which could, if we’re unlucky, recall the miseries of the Little Ice Age (ice fairs on the Thames; the Year Without A Summer; etc) bringing famine, pestilence and war.  Read more »

There is a reason why the corrupt global warming industry started referring to the phenomenon as “climate change”…to cover themselves when things started going backwards with global cooling. In the 70s it was cooling that was the main issue, then they flip flopped to warming, and now back to cooling and it is all oh so inconvenient for the professional charlatans like Al Gore.

Peter Ferrera writes in Forbes:

As The Economist magazine reported in March, “The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750.” Yet, still no warming during that time. That is because the CO2 greenhouse effect is weak and marginal compared to natural causes of global temperature changes.

At first the current stall out of global warming was due to the ocean cycles turning back to cold. But something much more ominous has developed over this period. Sunspots run in 11 year short term cycles, with longer cyclical trends of 90 and even 200 years. The number of sunspots declined substantially in the last 11 year cycle, after flattening out over the previous 20 years. But in the current cycle, sunspot activity has collapsed. NASA’s Science News report for January 8, 2013 states,  Read more »

Sir Geoffrey Palmer is having a sook that the RMA system he championed is being overhauled. 

The only area in which Palmer won praise from traditional left-wing supporters was in his handling of the Environment portfolio, which he kept when he became Prime Minister – it was his work here in initiating the resource management law reform process that eventually led to the creation of the Resource Management Act.

The highly political Fish and Game has paid Palmer to analyse the Government’s RMA proposals – and shock horror, Palmer is critical.

Fish and Game should front up and tell all the hard-working fishermen how much of their fishing licence money they put in Palmer’s back pocket.

But it’s no surprise Palmer’s “independent analysis” is critical.  Fish and Game wouldn’t have paid someone to analyse the RMA without knowing that the results would suit its agenda.

But what journalists have failed to grasp, is the reason the RMA is being overhauled is because of Palmer’s incompetence in the first place.

The RMA was originally designed to act as planning legislation – where houses and businesses could be built, whether you could build a deck or add a second story to your house etc – but due to Palmer’s incompetence it has turned into something that has halted economic growth.

The RMA as it currently stands puts so much weight on the environment that anyone considering building a house or starting a business is scared off.

Statistics NZ recently released a survey that showed projects worth more than $800 million had been cancelled in the last two years. Is the New Zealand economy is such a good state that we can afford for that to happen?

Surely a better balance between the environment and the economy can be found.

In fact, if journalists actually read what Palmer has written, they will see despite the hyperbole, he admits in his “analysis” that the Government’s proposals are a good idea.

“Many of the proposals will deliver improvements to the current processes under the RMA with limited impacts on environmental protection.

The Environment Defence Society, still bitter than the Environment Ministry cancelled its taxpayer funding to criticise Government policy, accidentally lands a killer blow to Palmer’s criticisms:

“Sir Geoffrey, as former Environment Minister, is the father of the RMA,” said Mr Taylor.

Palmer is the father of screw-ups. If he had done his job right in the first place, the Government wouldn’t have to repair the damage.

Palmer should stop trying to mislead the public and admit he got it wrong when he helped develop the RMA.

God help us if the Greens ever get control of Treasury – they can’t even read a Budget document.

The horribly sanctimonious Holly Walker got it embarrassingly wrong with her Budget analysis on Twitter.

Massive cuts to Ministry for the Environment spending in #Budget2013 – a 34.6% decrease.

— Holly Walker (@hollyrwalker) May 16, 2013

Now that would be massive news – if only it were true. Poor old Clint will be fuming that Holly didn’t check with him before spouting off.  Read more »

Griff Rhys Jones isn’t laughing about a solar farm coming his way.

The actor and comedian Griff Rhys Jones has criticised plans to build a £20 million solar farm in the countryside near his home as “cack-handed and opportunistic”.

Mr Rhys Jones said that the scheme, which would be Britain’s largest solar farm and power between 4,500 and 5,400 homes, was part of a “mad series” of schemes by the Government and accused ministers of “riding roughshod” over localism.

Plans for the 94-acre site in Suffolk have been submitted to Babergh District Council and are under discussion by its planning committee. Hive Energy, the company behind the scheme, said it would help meet the Government’s targets on renewable energy and produce the equivalent power of 12 wind farms.  Read more »

The time of the climate change shills is coming to an end, but not before literally billions has been poured into their pockets. Stephen F. Hayward looks and the whole Climate Change debacle and the decline of the deception.

 [T]he climate change story has been overtaken by facts on the ground. Most significant: The pause in global warming​​—​​now going on 15 years​​—​​has become so obvious that many of the leading climate scientists are grudgingly admitting that global warming has stopped. James Hansen, who recently stepped down as NASA’s chief climate scientist to become a full-time private sector alarmist, is among those admitting that the recent temperature record has flatlined.

After two decades of steady and substantial global temperature increase from 1980 to 1998, the pause in warming is causing a crisis for the climate crusade. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. The recent temperature record is falling distinctly to the very low end of the range predicted by the climate models and may soon fall out of it, which means the models are wrong, or, at the very least, something is going on that supposedly “settled” science hasn’t been able to settle. Equally problematic for the theory, one place where the warmth might be hiding​​—​​the oceans​​—​​is not cooperating with the story line. Recent data show that ocean warming has noticeably slowed, too.

These inconvenient data are causing the climate science community to reconsider the issue of climate sensitivity​​—​​that is, how much warming greenhouse gases actually cause​​—​​as I predicted would happen in these pages three years ago: “Eventually the climate modeling community is going to have to reconsider the central question: Have the models the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] uses for its predictions of catastrophic warming overestimated the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases?”  Read more »

Climate scientists are struggling…struggling to explain what happened to global warming, which is stalled or not happening at all. For years we have heard that the science is settled…but it would appear from this Reuter report that the science is far from settled.

Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding and defies a rise in global greenhouse gas emissions.

Often focused on century-long trends, most climate models failed to predict that the temperature rise would slow, starting around 2000. Scientists are now intent on figuring out the causes and determining whether the respite will be brief or a more lasting phenomenon.  Read more »

The Green Party is an insignificant force in UK politics, with only one MP in their bloated House of Commons.  But the UK is still crushed under the Green Thumb, partly because of the bureaucratic loons of the EU, and partly because their Government is a coalition of the wettest, weakest, trough-loving Tories in history and their minority partners, the creepy intern-molesting chardonnay-left Liberal Democrats.

And as a result, their economy is stuffed and old people are freezing to death because they can’t pay huge power bills while land-owning Dukes are trousering a fortune in wind-farm subsidies.

This is what the Global Warming scam and its apologists and profiteers have done, even with a Conservative government.

Hopefully, Kiwis are slowly waking up to the scandalous Green Taliban attack on the world and its people.

From The Independent, Monday, March 20, 2000, a story headlined: ‘Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.’

It quoted Dr David Viner, head of the climate unit at the University of East Anglia, as saying that in future: ‘Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.’

That would be the same Dr David Viner whose department was accused of suppressing the existence of evidence casting doubt on global warming.  Read more »

Christopher Booker laments the state of the UK energy industry, weighed down with subsidised inefficiencies which will hold Britain back as it emerges from the recession:

An obsession with CO2 has left us dangerously short of power as coal-powered stations are forced to close.

As the snow of the coldest March since 1963 continues to fall, we learn that we have barely 48 hours’ worth of stored gas left to keep us warm, and that the head of our second-largest electricity company, SSE, has warned that our generating capacity has fallen so low that we can expect power cuts to begin at any time. It seems the perfect storm is upon us.

The grotesque mishandling of Britain’s energy policy by the politicians of all parties, as they chase their childish chimeras of CO2-induced global warming and windmills, has been arguably the greatest act of political irresponsibility in our history.  Read more »

It is Earth Hour and the weirdos and media are all lapping it up. Meanwhile I have all the computers, stereo, lights, BBQ and TV running.

A series of public events to celebrate Earth Hour are being held around New Zealand tonight.

The global event encourages people to turn lights and electrical appliances off at 8.30PM as a way to raise awareness about environmental sustainability.

Earth Hour coordinator for the World Wildlife Fund, Rosa Argent, says in central Auckland a group of skaters, BMX riders and cyclists will take to the streets to raise awareness about litter and urban waste.

Hope they don’t run into anything or get run over with their lights off…nice to see the organisers advocating the breaking of road rules to prove their point.

North Koreans experience Earth hour all night, every day. Electricity should be celebrated not used in some pathetic meaningless stunt about global warming.