Category: AGW is a Cult

Protected forests in Europe felled

Published on by sunshinehours14 Comments

What an insane world we live in where environmentalists are killing forests and bats and eagles all in the name of saving them from AGW.

Today the outrage is forests.

Protected forests in Europe felled to meet EU renewable targets – report

Europe’s bioenergy plants are burning trees felled from protected conservation areas rather than using forest waste, new report shows.

Protected forests are being indiscriminately felled across Europe to meet the EU’s renewable energy targets, according to an investigation by the conservation group Birdlife.

Up to 65% of Europe’s renewable output currently comes from bioenergy, involving fuels such as wood pellets and chips, rather than wind and solar power.

Bioenergy fuel is supposed to be harvested from residue such as forest waste but, under current legislation, European bioenergy plants do not have to produce evidence that their wood products have been sustainably sourced.

Birdlife found logging taking place in conservation zones such as Poloniny national park in eastern Slovakia and in Italian riverside forests around Emilia-Romagna, where it said it had been falsely presented as flood-risk mitigation.

 

Average Temperatures and Adaptation

Published on by sunshinehours134 Comments

I was looking at the weather forecast for today and I noticed the historical high and low section (1947 to 2015).

For November 26 the average temperature is 7.7C.

If global warming occurs, how will we adapt to 8.7C or 9.7C on this day in the future?

Isn’t that a stupid question? Or just plain silly. There isn’t really an “average temperature” to adapt to. We’ve already “adapted” to a 26C swing in temperatures.

That’s right. The historical low is -10.5C in 1985 and the historical high is 16.1C in 1949.

I’d love a 16C day today! Isn’t going to happen today. It could. And it did. Back in 1949.

 

 

A global tax on meat and milk … to punish the Poor and Middle Class

Published on by sunshinehours12 Comments

“A new report has called for taxes to be added to food prices in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prevent obesity-related deaths by cutting consumption.

The team of researchers from the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food in the U.K. and the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington modelled what effects tax hikes on meat and dairy products would have on consumption, gas emissions and health.

The report based the amount of tax charged on how much greenhouse gas emissions each food group was responsible for through its farming and transportation around the world. Therefore meat including beef, lamb and pork would incur higher taxes than rice and other crops.

The report found that a 40 per cent tax on beef would reduce consumption by 15 per cent and cut global greenhouse gas emissions by around 600 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, while a 20 per cent tax on milk cut consumption by around 7 per cent and reduced emissions by around 200 million tonnes.”

Instead of taxing meat and milk, lets tax stupid climate research and private jets at 100%. Or maybe 1000%. And trips to climate conferences.

Whatever it takes to punish people who wrote that report or are named Leonardo DiCaprio or work for organizations like The International Food Policy Research Institute.

Bad Science Evolves

Published on by sunshinehours1Leave a comment

“As long as the incentives are there, then rewards will be there for those who can cheat the system, whether they do so intentionally or not.”

Now, imagine you’re a researcher who wants to game this system. Here’s what you do. Run many small and statistically weak studies. Tweak your methods on the fly to ensure positive results. If you get negative results, sweep them under the rug. Never try to check old results; only pursue new and exciting ones. These are not just flights of fancy. We know that such practices abound. They’re great for getting publications, but they also pollute the scientific record with results that aren’t actually true. As Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet once wrote, “No one is incentivized to be right. Instead, scientists are incentivized to be productive.”

http://www.thegwpf.com/the-inevitable-evolution-of-bad-science/

 

Guns and Tractors Threaten Biodiversity More Than Global Warming

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Finally … and so blindingly obvious to those not blinded by the AGW propaganda.

The main driver of wildlife extinction is not climate change, but humanity’s harvesting of species and our ever-expanding agricultural footprint.

This is according to a new study of nearly 9,000 ‘threatened’ or ‘near-threatened’ species.

While scientists acknowledge climate change is a threat, they found that three-quarters are being over-exploited for commerce, recreation or subsistence.

Demand for meat and body parts, for example, have driven the Western gorilla and Chinese pangolin to near extinction, and pushed the Sumatran rhinoceros – prized in China for bogus medicines made from its horn – over the edge.

And more than half of the 8,688 species of animals and plants evaluated are suffering due to the conversion of their natural habitats into industrial farms and plantations, mainly to raise livestock and grow commodity crops for fuel or food.

By comparison, only 19 per cent of these species are currently affected by climate change, they reported in a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.

Conservation budgets, the researchers argued, must reflect this reality.

And then some of the usual BS

‘There is no need to see tradeoffs among different conservation priorities – we need them all,’ Peter MacIntyre, an expert on the ecology of fresh-water systems at the University of Wisconsin, told AFP.

Translation: The AGW cult wants all the money.

Simon Fraser University Hates Air Quality in Vancouver

Published on by sunshinehours11 Comment

Imagine a giant wood stove at the top of Burnaby Mountain (where my alma mater SFU is situated).

Imagine all the CO2. Imagine all the smoke.

It appears the idiots running SFU hate air quality in Vancouver and the lower mainland.

“The district energy system will produce energy using locally sourced biomass that would otherwise be destined for local landfills. It could include urban wood waste (from tree cuttings and trimmings), uncontaminated wood waste (such as wood chips from sawmills and shavings), and clean construction wood waste.”

If we know anything about wood waste we know:

  1. They will run out of wood waste and start burning whole trees
  2. There will be more CO2 produced than if they were burning coal (let alone natural gas)
  3. There will be more particulate matter than if they are burning clean natural gas.

SFU

 

 

Liberals are more prone to “psychoticism”

Published on by sunshinehours11 Comment

The original study was flawed  (understatement) and said the opposite.

…the American Journal of Political Science … published a finding much beloved of liberals a few years back that purported to find scientific evidence that conservatives are more likely to exhibit traits associated with psychoticism, such as authoritarianism and tough-mindedness, and that the supposed “authoritarian” personality of conservatives might even have a genetic basis

Oops

The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies” American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34–51. The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed.

Read the whole article.