Polar bears thriving

Is The Demise Of Polar Bears being Exaggerated?
Ross Clark, The Spectator, 23 July 2020

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could debate climate change for five minutes without hearing about polar bears or being subjected to footage of them perched precariously on a melting ice floe?

But that is a little too much to expect. Polar bears have become the pin-ups of climate change, the poor creatures who are supposed to jolt us out of thinking about abstract concepts and make us weep that our own selfishness is condemning these magnificent animals to a painful and hungry end.

Needless to say, the Guardian and BBC jumped on the opportunity for more polar bear coverage when a paper appeared in the journal Nature Climate Change, predicting that a high carbon emissions scenario ‘will jeopardise the persistence of all but a few high-Arctic subpopulations by 2100.’ The paper uses a new predictive model by Peter Molnar of the University of Toronto.

A BBC report, as usual, upgraded the claims made in the paper in order to state: ‘Polar bears will be wiped out by the end of the century unless more is done to tackle climate change, a study predicts.’ Except that the paper doesn’t quite say that. The high emissions scenario used in the study isn’t what would happen if the world continued on its current trajectory of fossil fuel use. Instead it uses a worst-case scenario called ‘RCP8.5’ dreamed up in 2014, which envisages that coal-burning will globally increase fivefold between now and 2100. This could be a challenge, because it would mean burning through more coal than, according to some estimates, exists on Earth. In fact, global coal-burning likely peaked in 2013. Even Nature Climate Changes’ mother journal Nature published a think piece in January calling for scientists and campaigners to stop using RCP8.5 as a ‘business as usual’ scenario, on the grounds that it is highly improbable.

But even if we were to jack up carbon emissions to the level envisaged by RCP8.5, and Arctic sea ice was to melt in accordance with the models, would it really mean the end of most polar bear populations? Given that polar bears feed on seals they catch by punching through sea ice, this may seem a reasonable claim. Yet the relationship between sea ice and polar bear population isn’t quite so simple.

A lot of the assumptions about polar bears and sea ice have been made on the back of the animals’ decline in the Western Hudson Bay area of Canada. Compared with the 1980s, sea ice there now breaks up on average two weeks earlier and refreezes a week later. As a result, polar bears are spending five months on land – where they struggle to find food – rather than four as before. Their estimated numbers fell by 22 per cent between 1987 and 2004, although this has levelled off since then. Polar bear numbers have also been falling in Canada’s Southern Beaufort Sea.

Yet it is a very different story in the Barents Sea, which lies to the north of Scandinavia and European Russia. There, the retreat of seasonal sea ice has been far more dramatic – it now hangs around, on average, 21 weeks less than it did 40 years ago. Yet polar bear numbers are stable. On Svalbard their numbers have increased by 40 percent – and the females seem to be in better physical condition now than they were 15 years ago. It is a different story, too, in the Chukchi Sea, which lies to the north of Alaska and Russia’s far east. There, sea ice forms for 41 days fewer than it did 40 years ago – yet the polar bear population seems to be stable, with no decline in the bears’ physical condition. The Kane Basin, off north western Greenland, has lost 53 days’ of sea ice in recent decades, yet the estimated number of polar bears more than doubled between 1997 and 2013.

All of which seems to indicate that polar bears, like many other creatures, have proved rather adaptable to changes in their environment. The assumption that they can only catch seals through sea ice, and will inevitably decline if their opportunities to do this disappear, seems simply to be wrong. Somehow or other, most populations of polar bears are finding enough to eat.

The end of polar bears has been predicted many times before. Indeed, one of the authors of the Nature Climate Change paper, Steven Armstrup, claimed in 2007 that the decline of sea ice would lead to a two thirds reduction in polar bear numbers by the middle of this century. The failure of overall polar bear populations to follow this downward trend, in spite of a decline is sea ice, was documented in a book The Polar Bear Catastrophe that Never Happened by anthropologist Susan Crockford. What happened to her follows a familiar story for those who refuse to toe the line on climate change: shortly after publication last year she was relieved of the post of Adjunct Assistant Professor at Victoria University, which she had held for 15 years.

The Denial by Ross Clark will be published by Lume Books in September.

Biden’s New energy Plan Is Terrible

Center of the American Experiment – Biden’s New energy Plan Is Terrible

Written by Isaac Orr in Energy, Environment on July 16, 2020

On Tuesday, July 14, 2020, presumptive Democratic candidate Joe Biden released his updated plan for energy, which calls for expanding renewable energy mandates to meet a 100 percent carbon-free electric grid by 2035, spending billions of dollars on wind turbines, solar panels, and battery storage, an ill-conceived plan to make the entire fleet of school buses electric, a dedication to money-losing energy efficiency projects, subsidizing electric vehicles (EVs), and using taxpayer dollars to build EV charging stations.

A child’s Christmas list to Santa Claus is more realistic than this plan, but it is necessary for us to take a look at the enormous costs and immeasurably small benefits that would accrue from these policies.

What’s the Point?

Any time a politician says they are going to be spending your money, you should demand to know what you will get in return, but this isn’t what the Biden campaign has done. If the whole point of this slightly-watered-down Green New Deal is to prevent climate change, then American taxpayers should be told how much global warming this initiative would potentially prevent, and at what cost.

This information was omitted is because his policy plan would have enormous costs for no measurable benefits.

Unfathomable Costs, Immeasurably Small Benefits

Biden’s energy plan calls for spending $2 trillion in his first term, but it is crucial to remember that this figure only accounts for what the federal government would be spending on these programs. The $2 trillion figure does not account for the additional trillions of dollars American families and businesses would be forced to pay for their energy under these policies, which will make $2 trillion look like a bargain.

Despite an enormous price tag, the policies will have no measurable impact on global warming.

According to climate scientist Pat Michaels, even if the United States were wiped off the face of the planet tomorrow, it would only avert 0.052°C by 2050 and 0.137°C by 2100, which is an amount so small that it is not even scientifically detectable.

Your Green New Electric Bill Is Out of This World

Biden’s plan claims it will “achieve carbon-pollution free energy in electricity generation by 2035.” To accomplish this, “Biden will scale up best practices from state-level clean energy standards.” As we’ve seen here in Minnesota, renewable energy mandates have caused our electricity prices to increase nearly 30 percent faster than the national average. Rather than scaling up these mandates, this should be an example of what not to do.

Impossibly Expensive Batteries, Anyone?

Another key focus of Biden’s plan is to invest in battery storage. But as we have discussed in the past, battery storage is an impossibly expensive fantasy. A slide created by Xcel Energy for the Midwestern Governors Association shows that electricity prices would exponentially increase the cost of electricity in the United States if the grid were to be powered by only wind turbines, solar panels, and battery storage.

If America were to try and use these three technologies to provide 100 percent of our electricity, the nation’s annual electric bill would grow from about $397 billion in 2019, to $6.6 trillion dollars every single year, an annual increase of $6.2 trillion.

This is the equivalent of every man, woman, and child in the country paying an additional $19,000 per year for their electricity, and it is important to remember that these are low end estimates, because they don’t account for the cost of transmission lines, distribution systems, or other costs that are associated with retail electricity rates.

A Lonely Nod To Sanity

In what is perhaps the one nod to sanity in Biden’s plan: it does not call for the elimination of existing nuclear power plants and it allows the United States to “leverage” existing hydroelectric resources into the future.

While this is good news and could avert some of the highest costs involved with a grid powered by 100 percent wind, solar, and battery storage, the plight of nuclear power could be greatly harmed by adding millions of solar panels and tens of thousands of wind turbines to the system because adding these sources of energy will increase the odds that power prices will turn negative, eroding the economics of nuclear plants.

The map below was produced by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley Labs (LBL) and it shows the prevalence of negative prices on the electric grid. According to LBL:

“…Growth in wind and solar had a more consequential impact on prices in some locations and in altering how prices change based on the hour of the day and season. Specifically, growth in wind and solar impacted time-of-day and seasonal pricing patterns, growth in the frequency of negative prices was correlated geographically with deployment of wind and solar (Figure ES-2), and negative prices in high-wind and high-solar regions occurred most frequently in hours with high wind and solar output.”

Negative prices hurt coal and nuclear plants the most because these technologies are not able to quickly increase or decrease their electricity output to adapt to price changes. As a result, coal and nuclear plants are increasingly put in positions where they are selling electricity at a loss on the market because they are unable to reduce their electricity output when high wind and solar output force prices into the red.

Unlike other sources of electricity, wind facilities are able to keep selling electricity at negative prices because they are subsidized by the federal government. In fact, a wind producer can sell electricity at up to -$23 per megawatt hour (MWh) and still make money. In contrast, a coal or nuclear plant would be losing $23 per MWh.

Greatly increasing the amount of wind and solar on the grid, which is what Biden clearly wants to do, will ultimately undermine the ability of coal and nuclear plants to remain in business long term. The result is a grid like California’s, which is heavy on wind and solar during the day, but dependent upon natural gas and electricity imports from saner states (that use a combination of coal, natural gas, and nuclear power to produce their power) to keep the lights on.

What About The Rest of Our Energy?

The costs discussed above are incomplete because they are just a rough estimate of what it would cost to replace the electricity we currently generate with a mixture of technologies including coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, and other renewables with a combination of wind, solar, and battery storage. The estimates above do not even begin to contemplate the enormous amount of energy the United States consumes in the form of oil for transportation, and natural gas for home heating.

This is significant, because according to EIA, oil accounted for 37 percent of all the energy consumed in the United States in 2019, and natural gas accounted for 32 percent. If we were to make a rough estimate of what it would cost to completely electrify these energy sources, the nation’s energy bill would be roughly $10.6 trillion per year, or $32,000 per man, woman, and child.

This is half of the country’s gross domestic product.

These are massive costs for zero measurable environmental benefits.

Subsidizing Electric Vehicles and Charging Stations

Biden’s plan also call for subsidizing electric vehicles (EVs) and building 500,000 EV charging stations. As we have documented many times before, these types of subsidies primarily benefit white, wealthy, liberals, and raise the cost of driving for everyone else. According to EIA, 67 percent of EV owners make more than $100,000 per year, and only 3 percent of those earning less than $25,000 own an EV.

This means EV subsidies are a wealth transfer from low-income families to the wealthy.

EV chargers are also very expensive, with the fastest chargers costing $50,000 per charger. Contrast this with replacing a gasoline pump, which costs $260 to $1,000 per unit. This means Biden wants to spend $25 billion on a project that likely won’t even replace the number of gasoline pumps we already have in existence today.

Conclusion

Biden’s plan is the epitome of the broken window fallacy. It is based on the idea that we can grow the economy by destroying it and rebuilding it over and over again. This does not bring about prosperity for anyone; just ask the Minneapolis City Council if they think the arson and destruction of businesses will be a “stimulus” for the City’s economy.

Former warmist Shellenberger rips Biden-Sanders climate plan

July 8, 2020

‘Extremely radical, terrible for workers, & the environment’ – Former warmist Shellenberger rips Biden-Sanders climate plan: – Plan ‘unscientifically blames climate change for flood, storm, & fire, damage’

Michael Shellenberger on the Biden-Sanders climate plan: “Unscientifically blames climate change for flood, storm, & fire, damage

“Climate change is not making disasters worse. How could it be? *Disasters aren’t getting worse.* They are getting better. Deaths from disasters has declined 90+%. Costs of disasters not rising, when one accounts for rising wealth. Just look at Miami Beach”

– Would raise energy prices & increase unemployment

– Would kill off nuclear, largest source of clean nrg

– Would increase killing of bald eagles & whooping cranes

“What you’re proposing, @AOC @JohnKerry @JoeBiden @BernieSanders is extremely radical, terrible for workers, and terrible for the environment. And we tried it already. Before the Green New Deal, I helped create the New Apollo Project. It was a disaster.”

 

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1281020520918470657.html

By Mike Shellenberger

Biden-Sanders climate plan:

– unscientifically blames climate change for flood, storm, & fire, damage

– would raise energy prices & increase unemployment

– would kill off nuclear, largest source of clean nrg

– would increase killing of bald eagles & whooping cranes

Climate change is not making disasters worse. How could it be? *Disasters aren’t getting worse.* They are getting better. Deaths from disasters has declined 90+%. Costs of disasters not rising, when one accounts for rising wealth. Just look at Miami Beach

Apocalypse Never Slide Deck — Environmental Progresshttps://environmentalprogress.org/apocalypse-never-slide-deck

Both the IPCC & a major new study for the leading journal, Environmental Hazards, finds “little evidence to support claims that any part of the overall increase in global economic losses documented on climate time scales can be attributed to human-caused changes in climate”

The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California

Apocalypse Never Slide Deck — Environmental Progresshttps://environmentalprogress.org/apocalypse-never-slide-deck

The entire first paragraph of the Biden-Sanders climate plan is total and utter pseudoscience, on par with astrology and the belief that wifi and 5G are giving us cancer

The document literally claims that dams failed in Michigan because of climate change.

Biden-Sanders plan calls for massive expansion of solar and wind, which increased energy costs

– 6x more in Calif. than in rest of US

– 50% in Germany over last decade

– by $125 *BILLION* in US states with renewable energy standards, according to Univ. of Chicago study

Nuclear-heavy France generates electricity that is 10x less CO2-intensive than Germany for nearly half the cost

But Biden-Sanders climate plan would kill off nuclear energy, which is 55% of zero-emissions energy

Thus B-S climate plan is not about reducing emissions or climate

The Biden Climate Plan falsely claims investing “tens of billions” into energy efficiency will pay for itself

But the last time the government did this, “the upfront investment costs [were] about twice the actual energy savings,” according to major study

Do Energy Efficiency Investments Deliver? Evidence from the Weatherization Assistance Program *Abstract. A growing number of policies and programs aim to increase investment in energy efficiency, because conventional wisdom suggests that people fail to thttps://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/133/3/1597/4828342?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Powering the US on 100% percent renewables would increase the amount of land required for energy from 0.5% today to 25-50%, according to the largest study to date, by Vaclav Smil, the widely respected analyst

amazon.com/Power-Density-…

Massively expanding industrial wind turbines and the “supergrid” through the pristine Nebraska Sandhills would devastate whooping cranes, bald eagles, condors, and other endangered species

Democrats’ New Climate Plan Will Kill Endangered Species, Environmentalists FearWhooping cranes could be killed by the expansion of transmission lines and industrial wind energy under the Democrats’ proposed climate planhttps://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2020/06/30/democrats-climate-plan-will-kill-endangered-species-environmentalists-fear/#31221d1e7571

Industrial wind and transmission projects are being blocked by grassroots environmentalists — often Democrats — seeking to save endangered species.

What you’re proposing, @AOC @JohnKerry @JoeBiden @BernieSanders is extremely radical, terrible for workers, and terrible for the environment.

And we tried it already. Before the Green New Deal, I helped create the New Apollo Project. It was a disaster:

youtube.com/watch?v=N-yALP…

The Biden-Sanders climate plan is identical to the climate plan of @JohnKerry when he ran for president in 2004. You might recall how that turned out.

Please consider learning from the past rather than making the same mistakes Democrats have been making for decades

 

Reminder: How Progressive “Programs” Keep African Americans Down

June 30, 2020/ Francis Menton

Suddenly the country has descended into a paroxysm of guilt over the situation of African Americans, particularly the fact that as a group they have not caught up to whites or other ethnic groups in average income or wealth. Accusations of “systemic racism” or even “white supremacy” are everywhere, particularly issuing from the Black Lives Matter movement.

And accompanying the accusations are newly insistent demands for more spending on government programs and redistribution schemes of every sort. More for housing programs, more for social work programs, more for education programs, more for homelessness programs, and on and on. Perhaps the ultimate such demand is the demand for “reparations,” which as far as I can tell means very large but unspecified amounts of free cash simply handed over to every African American in the country. Exemplifying this last demand is the cover story from the New York Times Magazine this past Sunday, written by Nikole Hannah-Jones (she of the fraudulent “1619 Project”) with the title “What Is Owed.” Most of the piece is about why if you have any moral compass whatsoever you must feel guilty, guilty, guilty. Only at the very end do we get to the punch line:

If black lives are to truly matter in America, this nation must move beyond slogans and symbolism. Citizens don’t inherit just the glory of their nation, but its wrongs too. A truly great country does not ignore or excuse its sins. It confronts them and then works to make them right. If we are to be redeemed, if we are to live up to the magnificent ideals upon which we were founded, we must do what is just. It is time for this country to pay its debt. It is time for reparations.

Yes, you have inherited the sins of your ancestors, and the only way to redeem yourself is by handing over vast piles of cash. How much? No amounts are mentioned here. I guess you should start with a few trillion, and then we’ll tell you if it was enough. It won’t have been. Then hand over a few trillion more, and we’ll continue from there.

Even assuming that resources are infinite, is there any reason to believe that this kind of thing can ever meaningfully improve the lives of current and future African Americans in this country?

This seems like an appropriate time to remind readers that this site contains a treasure trove of posts giving details of the enormous amounts of means-tested anti-poverty and redistribution programs already in existence in this country (currently running in the range of $1.2 trillion per year if federal, state and local spending are all included), and of the total failure of any of those programs or any of that spending to alleviate poverty of African Americans or other poor Americans to any meaningful degree. The $1.2 trillion comes to some $30,000 for each of the 40 million or so people said to be in “poverty” by the official definition, or some $120,000 for each “poor” family of four. With the official “poverty threshold” most recently (2019) set at $25,750 for a family of four, how is this even possible?

My posts on this subject, some going back as far as 2012, are collected under the “Poverty” tag in the Archive section. But since there are some 119 posts under that tag, I’ll just give a few highlights for today:

• From November 25, 2019, “No Amount Of Disastrous Failure Can Kill The Fantasy Of A Government-Directed ‘Great Society’”. Excerpt:  “And it’s not just that all the government spending has not reduced the measured rate of poverty nor the number of people in poverty. It’s that the failures of the anti-poverty and Great Society programs are well-documented and out there for everybody to see and study. Medicaid beneficiaries have no better health outcomes than non-beneficiaries; job training program beneficiaries have no better job prospects than non-beneficiaries; Head Start program beneficiaries have no better educational outcomes than non-beneficiaries; etc., etc., etc. And on top of all that, where the goal of all the spending was to achieve societal justice and harmony through redistribution of resources, instead we have only fomented anger and resentment in the program beneficiaries.”

• From January 16, 2018, “Surprise: Progressive ‘Anti-Poverty’ Programs Increase Measured Poverty”. Excerpt: “Nearly all “anti-poverty” handouts are provided to the beneficiaries either as in-kind distributions (housing assistance, food stamps, other nutrition programs, Medicaid, cell phones, clothing assistance, energy assistance) or as refundable tax credits (EITC).  But the official poverty measure only counts “cash income” in the definition, and therefore excludes all of these things.  A given family could get $100,000 or more per year in the in-kind benefits and tax credits (and many do, such as those here in Manhattan, where a spot in public housing in a desirable location can by itself be worth over $100,000 per year), and still be counted as “in poverty.”

• From March 16, 2017, “Here’s What’s ‘Cruel’: Trapping The Poor In A Lifetime Of Dependency.” Excerpt: “[From the New York Times] you get the idea.  The little people are incapable of facing any downside risk of life on their own.  Any failure of the federal government to accept and provide for any and all downside risks of life, right down to a couple of aspirin to help with a headache, is “cruel.”  It’s “heartless.”  It’s “a humanitarian crisis.”

• From October 16, 2016, “It Sounded So Good When They Promised To Solve All Of Our Problems”. Excerpt: “[A]fter 80 or so years of promises and tens of trillions spent, have any of the major problems been solved?  Of course, it’s the opposite.  Indeed, it’s fair to say that all of the big government redistribution programs are in crisis.  A trillion dollars of annual spending on “poverty” and there are close to twice as many people today said to be in poverty than the day the War on Poverty started.  Medicaid, supposed to be a temporary thing for a few years until poverty was eliminated, instead explodes bigger and bigger every year (now at over $550 billion per year and still rapidly growing). . . .”

• From August 7, 2016, “A Culture Of Cheating . . .” Excerpt: (quoting from one Dalia Ramos, who lives in a public housing project in Puerto Rico): “The projects were built to house the working poor, like [Ms. Ramos], but over time they have cultivated a beat-the-system culture, in which working off the books and lying about your income means getting more money from Washington.  ‘I have all these people around me who don’t pay anything,”’she says. ‘They just hang out.’”

• From April 28 and 29, 2015 (the time of the riots in Baltimore following the death of Freddy Gray), “Do You Think That The Government Can Fix Poverty? Look At Baltimore” and “Can The Government Fix Poverty? — Part II”. Excerpt (from April 28): “As befits its status as a relatively poor city, Baltimore has long “benefited” — if you want to use that term — from more than its pro rata share of the government programs and handouts supposedly designed to cure poverty.  [In the U.S.] about 14% of the population [is on food stamps].  In Baltimore . . . it’s more like 35%.  Or consider public housing.  According to HUD’s website here, well less than 1% of U.S. families live in public housing.  In Baltimore, it’s more like 4.5%.” From April 29, 2015: “[In Baltimore] the high school student absence rate hovers at 49.3%.  How did it get there?  Baltimore of course follows the Democrat model of government-monopoly unionized public schools.  According to figures compiled by the Baltimore Sun in 2013, Baltimore in 2011 ranked second among the nation’s 100 largest school districts in per student spending.” Plenty more at the links.

There’s plenty more if you want to go through the archives. Have at it!