Donald Trump Is So Right to Wage War on Wind Farms…

Donald Trump is not a fan of wind turbines, as he has hinted occasionally on Twitter.

But there’s a very powerful lobby which would like us to see wind turbines as being clean, eco-friendly and vital for the planet’s future. So if President Trump is to crush this bloated, parasitical industry as it deserves he’ll need some serious fire support.

This piece by Matt Ridley is a big help. It convincingly demonstrates that wind turbines are even more of a monstrous stupidity than any of us had hitherto imagined.

It starts with a quiz, whose answer may surprise you:

To the nearest whole number, what percentage of the world’s energy consumption was supplied by wind power in 2014, the last year for which there are reliable figures? Was it 20 per cent, 10 per cent or 5 per cent? None of the above: it was 0 per cent. That is to say, to the nearest whole number, there is still no wind power on Earth.

Yep. All those views blighted; all that wildlife sliced and diced; all those billions of dollars of subsidies wasted – in order to produce a form of power so inefficient and triflingly irrelevant that it still supplies not much more than 0 per cent of the world’s energy consumption.

This isn’t something you ever hear from renewables industry lobbyists who would like us to believe that wind is the future:

Nationwide, wind provided 5.6 percent of all electricity produced in 2016, an amount of electricity generation that has more than doubled since 2010. Much of the demand for new wind energy generation in recent years has come from Fortune 500 companies including Home Depot, GM, Walmart and Microsoft that are buying wind energy in large part for its low, stable cost.

But then, so many and varied are the half-truths, distractions and outright lies put out the wind industry that in any other sector half of these reptilian scumbags would be behind bars by now for selling a false prospectus.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

How I Totally Crushed the Ocean Acidification Alarmist Loons

Delingpole
Meet Dr Phil Williamson: climate ‘scientist’; Breitbart-hater; sorely in need of a family size tube of Anusol to soothe the pain after his second failed attempt to close down free speech by trying to use press regulation laws to silence your humble correspondent.
Williamson – who is attached to the University of East Anglia, home of the Climategate emails – got very upset about some articles I’d written for Breitbart and the Spectatorpouring scorn on his junk-scientific field, Ocean Acidification.

In my view Ocean Acidification is little more than a money-making scam for grant-troughing scientists who couldn’t find anything more productive to do with their semi-worthless environmental science degrees. The evidence that Ocean Acidification represents any kind of threat is threadbare – and getting flimsier by the day.

But if, like Williamson, you are being paid large sums of money to conduct a research programme into Ocean Acidification, you’ll obviously want to defend your mink-lined, gold-plated carriage on the climate change gravy train. So first he wrote a long, earnest defence of his income stream in Marine Biologist.

Then, when no one cared, he made a formal complaint about one of my articles to the UK press regulatory body IPSO. And to judge by the punchy tone of this piece he published in Nature before Christmas, he fully expected to win.

Tragically, though, he just lost.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Alarmist Scientists Are Trying To Hide The Good News That The Planet Is Getting Greener

Alarmist scientists are trying to cover up the good news that rising CO2 levels are making the planet turn greener. And that even includes one of the scientists who made the discovery in the first place.

The discovery was first announced in 2012 in a lecture by Professor Ryanga Myneni of the University of Boston.

Rising CO2 levels are causing the planet to get greener, Myneni revealed. In the last 30 years, he estimated, the planet’s greenery has increased by 14 per cent. About half of this, he calculated, was a direct result of increased carbon dioxide levels, rather than of other factors like warmth, irrigation or fertilisers. And the area covered is vast: as Myneni’s co-author Zaichun Zhu, of Beijing University, puts it, it’s equivalent to adding a green continent twice the size of mainland USA.

What’s more, Myneni showed, this greening is taking place across the board, in all manner of vegetation: tropical rain forests, subarctic taiga, grasslands, semi-deserts, farmland, the lot.

We have reported on this greening before at Breitbart here and here – and, of course, it’s very good news. But it hasn’t been widely circulated in much of the media for reasons which will soon become clear.

The first person to break the good news was science author and journalist Matt Ridley, who wrote it up in the Wall Street Journal in a piece titled How Fossil Fuels Have Greened The Planet.

He began:

Did you know that the Earth is getting greener, quite literally? Satellites are now confirming that the amount of green vegetation on the planet has been increasing for three decades. This will be news to those accustomed to alarming tales about deforestation, overdevelopment and ecosystem destruction.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the notion that CO2 could be beneficial was not something the greenies wanted to hear. And that included the co-author of the study Ryanga Myneni, who did everything he could to discredit Ridley’s (entirely accurate) account of his study.

Read the rest at Brietbart.

OK Everyone: Your Chance to Salt the Slug of Ocean Acidification

GLYN KIRK/AFP/Getty Images

Somewhere in an environmental science department at some cruddy university not far from you, a bunch of otherwise unemployable marine biology graduates are working on yet another paper demonstrating that Ocean Acidification is a really serious problem which can only be solved if millions of dollars in funding grants are chucked at it.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to steer these shysters towards a career more suited to their talents ie: “You want a large fries and a McFlurry with that?”

Here’s the background to why we’re doing this.

Basically, what I require from you is some solid scientific input. (Not snark and smart-arsery: that’s my domain). Anything useful you have in the form of comments or links which thoroughly rebut Williamson’s article below I will incorporate into the body of the piece.

To try to avoid confusion I have put my original article on Ocean Acidification in bold; Williamson’s attempted rebuttal in regular typeface; and the guest criticisms of people like Patrick Moore in italics.

Read the rest (there’s a LOT) at Breitbart.

The Slow Death of Environmentalism

Where 25 years ago the environment was considered everyone’s domain, it has since been hijacked by the left.

Would you describe yourself as an ‘environmentalist’? I would, mainly to annoy greenies, but also because it’s true. If your definition of an environmentalist is someone who loves immersing himself in the natural world, makes a study of its ways and cares deeply about its future, I’m at least as much of one as David Attenborough.

But I can see why many fellow nature lovers might balk at the term, especially now that it has become so grievously politicised. That would explain the recent Gallup poll — it was taken in the US but I suspect it applies to Britain too — showing how dramatically this label has plunged in popularity. In 1991 the majority of Americans self-identified as environmentalists — 78 per cent of them. Now, it’s just 42 per cent: less than half.

Why has the term so fallen out of favour? Well there’s perhaps a clue in the fact that the decline has been far more precipitous among Republicans (down to 27 per cent) than among Democrats (down to 56 per cent). In other words, where 25 years ago the environment was considered everyone’s domain, it has since been hijacked by the left and turned into yet another partisan issue.

If you believe the greenies, the blame for this lies with an intransigent right so imprisoned by ideology that it stubbornly denies ‘the science’. Actually, though, I’d say it has more to do with the militant left exploiting environmentalism as a fashionable cloak for its ongoing war on liberty, free markets and small government.

Note the tactics. Like the Viet Minh or the Taleban, the environmental movement has become hugely skilled in the art of asymmetric warfare. The number of true believers is much smaller than you’d think — but they’ve managed in recent years to punch massively above their weight by infiltrating all the key positions of influence and by terrorising those who disagree with them.

Read the rest in the Spectator.

The Best Things in the World Have Always Sprung up by Accident. Take the Internet, for Instance

And almost everything bad is the result of utopians trying to plan the world into a better state.

Since no one has bothered to ask what my must-read book of last year was I’m going to tell you here: it’s Matt Ridley’s Evolution of Everything.

I don’t think it has appeared on nearly so many recommended lists as his previous bestsellers Genome and The Rational Optimist, nor has it been so widely reviewed. And I have a strong inkling as to why: its message is so revolutionary as to alienate pretty much everyone across the spectrum, from Christians and Muslims to corporate bosses, historians, feminists, educationalists and conspiracy theorists, from Greens and socialists all the way across (if there’s a difference) to Conservatives like George Osborne and David Cameron.

It also happens to be, in my view, as near as damn it to 100 per cent right about every subject it broaches, from the internet to bankers, from crop circles to education, from the nurture vs nature debate to religion. And no one likes a smart arse — especially not when he’s an Eton-educated smart arse with a title, an estate (built on coal-mining) and an unfortunate reputation as the man who was chairman of Northern Rock when it had to be bailed out by the taxpayer — do they?

What I find almost more interesting than the book, though, is the way it has been reviewed by those of a bien-pensant persuasion — most notably John Gray in the Guardian. He hated it. So much so, it’s pretty clear to me, that he couldn’t even bring himself to read it. Or if he did read it, he was so consumed by righteous rage that he couldn’t bring himself to address any of the utterly disgusting points made in the book.

There’s lots of invective and lofty contempt: ‘bumptious and tediously repetitive tract’; ‘if he was a more serious and reflective writer, Ridley might…’ [‘if he were’, surely?]; ‘a dated and mechanical version of right-wing libertarianism’. Plus, there’s a whole paragraph of ad homs, majoring on Eton, titles and Northern Rock. Precious little on what the book actually says.

Basically, what it says is that evolution is a phenomenon which extends far beyond Darwin to embrace absolutely every-thing. The internet, for example. No one planned it. No one — pace Al Gore and Tim Berners Lee — strictly invented it. It just sprang up, driven by consumer need and made possible by available technology. As Ridley says: ‘It is a living example, before our eyes, of the phenomenon of evolutionary emergence — of complexity and order spontaneously created in a decentralised fashion without a designer.’

Which is what, of course, is such anathema to control freaks everywhere, from the Chinese, Iranian and Russian regimes to Barack Obama, who famously declared in 2012: ‘The internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the internet.’

Read the rest in the Spectator.

Jonathan Chait Talks Chait on Climate Change

There’s a long article in the grown-up Australian magazine Quadrant which I wouldn’t expect columnist Jonathan Chait to be capable of finishing, let alone comprehending.

But since it’s quite germane to a silly piece he has published in New York magazine entitled “Scientists Drop Science Bomb on Climate Skeptics,” I thought I might kindly help the afflicted by offering a precis.

The piece is by science writer Matt Ridley (well known to readers of London’s Times, The Wall Street Journal, and of books including Genome and The Rational Optimist) and it’s called”What The Climate Wars Have Done to Science.”

Ridley, formerly a believer in Catastrophic Man Made Warming (CAGW), describes how the scales fell from his eyes and he came to realise that climate change alarmism was a massive fraud akin to Stalin-era Lysenkoism or the persistent myth (invented in the 1950s by Ancel Keys) that dietary fat is the main cause of heart disease.

He reached this conclusion using the traditional scientific method of “looking at the evidence.”

From Michael Mann’s utterly discredited “Hockey Stick” to the similarly bankrupt nonsense that there is a “97 per cent” consensus on CAGW, Ridley demonstrates that almost all the evidence climate alarmists have marshalled in order to support their extravagant claims about man-made climate doom is in one way or another doctored, dishonest or corrupt.

The problem has got so bad, Ridley argues, that “it is at risk of damaging the whole reputation of science”.

Sure, we occasionally take a swipe at pseudo-science – homeopathy, astrology, claims that genetically modified food causes cancer, and so on. But the great thing about science is that it’s self-correcting. The good drives out the bad, because experiments get replicated and hypotheses put to the test. So a really bad idea cannot survive long in science.

Or so I used to think. Now, thanks largely to climate science, I have changed my mind. It turns out bad ideas can persist in science for decades, and surrounded by myrmidons of furious defenders they can turn into intolerant dogmas.

One of these dogmas, just like Lysenkoism, just like Ancel Keys’s now discredited theories on dietary fat, is Catastrophic Man Made Global Warming theory.

Ridley goes on to provide lots of examples of this establishment-endorsed junk science in action – many taken from an excellent book which I highly recommend (not least because it features me) called Climate Change: The Facts (which you can buy here at Mark Steyn’s place).

He tells the tale of Camille Parmesan who produced a paper on the Edith checkerspot butterfly which, though subsequently proved to be utter nonsense by an ecologist, nevertheless earned her 500 citations, an invitation to the White House and a slot contributing to the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report. Why? Just because her paper conformed to the Establishment’s approved narrative that almost everything going wrong in the natural world can be blamed on “climate change.”

Read the article. There’s plenty, plenty more where this came from. So much, indeed, that you can’t help wondering: how do these shysters get away with it? How can so many scientists have been bent from the true path? How come their work gets such unquestioning coverage from science correspondents whose job ought to be to sniff out dishonesty and fraud? Why are these scientists not held to account by the supposedly distinguished institutions where they work or by the government bodies which fund them?

The answer, Ridley explains, is that the truth has fallen victim to a greedy and out of control green industry.

“…inch by inch, the huge green pressure groups have grown fat on a diet of constant but ever-changing alarm about the future. That these alarms – over population growth, pesticides, rain forests, acid rain, ozone holes, sperm counts, genetically modified crops – have often proved wildly exaggerated does not matter: the organisations that did the most exaggeration trousered the most money.

In the case of climate, the alarm is always in the distant future, so can never be debunked. These huge green multinationals with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars, have now systematically infiltrated science, as well as industry and the media, with the result that many high-profile climate scientists and the journalists who cover them have become one-sided cheerleaders for alarm, while a hit squad of increasingly vicious bloggers polices the debate to ensure that anybody who steps out of line is punished. They insist on stamping out all mention of the heresy that climate change might not be lethally dangerous.”

So when Jonathan Chait pompously invokes the name of “Science” to support his cause – and accuses “skeptics” of being anti-science – what he in fact means by “Science” in nothing that Newton or Einstein would have understood by the word.

Chait is not a scientist. Neither am I. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that Chait – presumably – considers himself to be a journalist and something of a master of snark.

You can tell from the sarcastic relish of his concluding paragraph:

So now that we know there is no pause, or even a slowdown, science-loving conservatives can rest assured that the conclusions of the climate-science field are correct, and the release of heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere does in fact trap heat. Obviously, right? Conservatives placed so much weight on the apparent existence of this pause that there’s no way they would just immediately switch over to some other justification for their same skepticism, like some kind of reflexive ideologues.

Well all I’ll say, as a fellow snark practictioner, is that if you’re going to adopt a tone as lofty and sneery as that, then you’d better be damned sure of your facts.

You’d better be aware, for example, as Chait so clearly isn’t, that there is a very effective counterargument to this “Science” paper he has set so much store by, which shows it up for the dishonest, incompetent, politically motivated artefact it really is.

If not, there’s a severe danger that you’ll end up being accused by the better-informed of having churned out an article which we in England are fond of dismissing with a phrase not unakin to, “This is a load of complete and utter Chait!”

2 thoughts on “Jonathan Chait talks Chait on climate change”

Sackerson says:6th June 2015 at 3:12 pmAwfully vulgar title, old chap.
james says:7th June 2015 at 1:05 pmYes, you’re quite right. I have now changed it.

Comments are closed.

No, Stephen Hawking, Science Doesn’t Need Any Help from The European Union

Stephen Hawking and 150 other distinguished scientists – all fellows of the Royal Society – have written a letter to the (London) Times saying that if Britain leaves the European Union it would be a “disaster for UK science.”

No it wouldn’t.

Only 3 per cent of science R & D funding in Britain comes from the European Union. And it’s not as though we should be grateful for this sop: not when you consider that Britain puts far more into the EU than it gets back in return. If we were out, we could decide for ourselves how much we want to spend on science – and on which projects – rather than having a bunch of incompetent foreigners decide for us.

When I say “a bunch of incompetent foreigners” I mean just that. Look at the example of the EU’s flagship GPS project in which 28 states have come together in peace and unity and utter pointlessness to spunk Euros 13 billion of taxpayers’ money on a satellite navigation programme that no one actually needs any more because there’s a perfectly good one available already.

Is that the kind of science project we’d tragically miss out on if Britain were to quit the EU? Thirteen years delayed, three times overbudget and the space age equivalent of a chocolate ashtray? If so, I can’t say I’m going to be weeping too many bitter tears for the scientists we would have paid for to do that particular job.

Oh but what about CERN? Imagine! If it hadn’t been for the EU we might never have discovered the Higgs Boson…

Bollocks we wouldn’t have done.

Another of the myths being put about is that leaving the political structures of the EU will affect our participation in the CERN project – the European Organisation for Nuclear Research and home of the Large Hadron Collider. This is simply not true. CERN is an international collaboration of many countries, including many non-EU nations. The UK were founding members of the project back in 1954, and are currently CERN’s third largest contributor. The official status of the EU in respect to CERN is that of an OBSERVER, along with UNESCO, Russia, India, Japan and the USA.

Freedom of movement for scientists then. Think of all the brilliant researchers who’d be denied entry to Britain…

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Happy 18th Birthday, No Global Warming!

All right, so we’re slightly premature. By one measure – according to Bishop Hill – we’re still a month away before “no global warming” achieves its coming of age.

But by other measurements, as Matt Ridley notes in the Wall Street Journal, we’re already as much as 19 or even 26 years into “no global warming” “depending on whether you choose the surface temperature record or one of two satellite records of the lower atmosphere.”

Still, whichever measurement you pick, it’s really not looking good for the Warmists – whose stubborn ongoing refusal to acknowledge the failure of the planet’s temperatures to accord with their computer models’ doomsday predictions is starting to look so shameless and desperate it’s really about time they considered a name change. How about “deniers”?

Sure, they’ve found lots of excuses to explain the so-called “pause” in global warming. (“Pause” by the way is a most unscientific term which we really shouldn’t allow them to get away with. It presupposes that they know that continued warming is inevitable. Which they don’t. No one does – and that’s the fundamental problem)…

Read the rest at Breitbart London

Wales Is in Danger: Why Isn’t the Prince of Wales Saving It?

Bird-crunching, bat-chomping menaces

Anyone think this would be improved by 600ft wind turbines?

I hope this photograph give you a good idea of why every summer for the last 12 years I have taken my family on holiday to mid-Wales, for me one of the most beautiful and special places on the planet. Its all the better for being so little known. You can go for a walk on those magnificent uplands at the peak of the tourist season and glimpse barely another soul. Note too, how completely unspoilt it is. But for how much longer?

This is why I have just signed the petition No To The Industrialisation of Mid-Wales and why Im wishing the very best to the protestors wholl be gathering at a rally outside the Welsh assembly this Tuesday to voice their outrage at the destruction of their countryside in which their elected representatives in Cardiff disgracefully connived. It was back in 2005 that Cardiff’s joke quasi-parliamentary assembly of clownish second-raters otherwise known as AMs voted for huge swathes of the Principality to be covered in wind farms. But its only now that people have started to catch up with the environmental havoc this is going to wreak. (H/T Mike Blood who runs the Conservation of Upland Powys Facebook page, which deserves our support).

The wind farms are bad enough on their own. But to make matters far worse, as Christopher Booker reports, in order for these bird-crunching, bat-chomping, view-blighting, rent-seeking monstrosities to be connected to the grid a huge 400kv power line is going to be constructed all the way from Montgomeryshire through some of Britains most spectacular scenery to the equally beauteous Shropshire. Its not just happening in Wales, of course. Alex Salmond is wreaking similar havoc in Scotland. Cumbria is under threat; so is the Kent Weald; so are the Mendips; so is the Isle of Wight; so are dozens of other beauty spots: first will come the wind farms themselves, with their vast concrete bases; then the power lines, over 300 miles worth, 160feet high.

Its one of those subjects that makes me so upset it leaves me almost lost for words. Ours is going to be the generation forced to witness the most grotesque act of vandalism ever committed against the British countryside and what makes it so much more painful is that there is no reasonable justification for it whatsoever. From wind farms to solar arrays to biofuels, Britain is committing both economic and aesthetic suicide. Even if one were to believe the discredited theory that CO2 is a dangerous driver of climate change, even then the argument for wind farms wouldnt wash because being so unreliable and sporadic in their power generation they replace not one single conventional power station.

The sheer madness of Britains energy policy is beautifully captured by Matt Ridley in this must-read Spectator article.

Welcome to the neo-medieval world of Britain’s energy policy. It is a world in which Highland glens are buzzing with bulldozers damming streams for miniature hydro plants, in which the Dogger Bank is to be dotted with windmills at Brobdingnagian expense, in which Heathrow is to burn wood trucked in from Surrey, and Yorkshire wheat is being turned into motor fuel. We are going back to using the landscape to generate our energy. Bad news for the landscape.

The industrial revolution, when Britain turned to coal for its energy, not only catapulted us into prosperity (because coal proved cheaper and more reliable than wood, wind, water and horse as a means of turning machines), but saved our landscape too. Forests grew back and rivers returned to their natural beds when their energy was no longer needed. Land that had once grown hay for millions of horses could grow food for human beings instead — or become parks and gardens.

Whether we like it or not, we are now reversing this policy, only with six times the population and a hundred times the energy needs. The government’s craven decision this week to placate the green pressure groups by agreeing a unilateral and tough new carbon rationing target of 50 per cent for 2027 — they wanted to water it down, but were frightened of being taken to judicial review by Greenpeace — condemns Britain to ruining yet more of its landscape. Remember that it takes a wind farm the size of Greater London to generate as much electricity as a single coal-fired power station — on a windy day (on other days we will have to do without). Or the felling of a forest twice the size of Cumbria every year.

Why is this madness happening? Why is nobody in a position of power or influence save the odd brave soul such as Glyn Davies, Tory MP for Montgomeryshire doing something to stop it before its too late?

Simple: its because the very environmentalists who ought to be campaigning against such wanton destruction have instead been responsible for fostering the warped thinking, junk science, and knee-jerk anti-capitalism which made it possible.

Consider George Monbiot: the man lives in Machllyneth, just down the road from the wind farm development, for Gods sake, yet here is as far as he is prepared to go in his Komment Macht Frei column on the subject:

Three conclusions seem obvious. Unless the new powerlines are buried, the renewables programme will stall: underground cables must become a firm green demand, though they will add significantly to the cost. Even so, its now clear that theres a limit to how much more renewable power can be deployed before it clatters into a mountain of public opposition. This is one of the reasons why we should start considering other options for decarbonising the electricity supply: especially new nuclear technologies such as thorium, integral fast reactors or travelling wave reactors.

Do you see the pusillanimity and muddled thinking, here? He has neither the intellectual lucidity nor the moral courage actively to oppose this utterly pointless desecration of his local landscape. All he can manage is an unrealistic demand that the powerlines be buried (aint gonna happen: renewables are expensive enough already), followed by a tacit admission that his most serious objection to renewables is not that theyre expensive, environmentally destructive and dont work, but merely that they are likely to generate a climate of public resentment towards decarbonisation.

And what about the Prince of Wales? Where is he in all this? Doesnt he have some connection or other with Wales and her people? Isnt that why, er, he went through that ceremony at Caernarfon in 1969? Isnt there something in his current title I forget which, though Im sure sharper-witted readers will be able to remind me that suggests a special concern for Wales might be part of his job?

Yet what does the man have to say about the most grotesque crime committed by Big Government against the Welsh people since Llewellyn Ap Gruffydd? What efforts has this famed floral conversationist, this defender of old-school values, this ex-foxhunting, stalking-about-the-Highland-Glens-with-his-crooked-stick countryman made to prevent a 100 square mile stretch of Britains most glorious countryside being transformed into a sterile Golgotha of wind towers?

Zip. Nada. Nothing.

Or as they say in Welsh (and I must say the word does seem peculiarly apt where our future King is concerned):

Dim.

Tag: Matt Ridley

Donald Trump Is So Right to Wage War on Wind Farms…

How I Totally Crushed the Ocean Acidification Alarmist Loons

Alarmist Scientists Are Trying To Hide The Good News That The Planet Is Getting Greener

OK Everyone: Your Chance to Salt the Slug of Ocean Acidification

The Slow Death of Environmentalism

The Best Things in the World Have Always Sprung up by Accident. Take the Internet, for Instance

Jonathan Chait Talks Chait on Climate Change

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2 thoughts on “Jonathan Chait talks Chait on climate change”

No, Stephen Hawking, Science Doesn’t Need Any Help from The European Union

Happy 18th Birthday, No Global Warming!

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Wales Is in Danger: Why Isn’t the Prince of Wales Saving It?

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