Teen activist Greta Thunberg is having another temper tantrum right now, and suggests in a tweet there will be retaliation!
Today the EU failed to #VoteThisCAPdown and basically made their insufficient so-called climate and environmental targets impossible to reach. And no-one even knew it happened. Thanks to all lobbyists, news editors and MEPs who made this happen. We won’t forget…#WithdrawTheCAP
Her indignation is a reaction to today’s European Parliament failure to vote down Common Agricultural Policy’s (CAP) watered down changes that include making money available for landscapes that benefit biodiversity, environmental and climate-related measures and direct direct payments for eco-schemes.
The EU Parliaments voted for its plan by a vast margin 425 – 212, with 51 abstaining.
The WWF EU tweeted that the CAP deal has “no environmental credibility”:
Despite calls from citizens, farmers, scientists & NGOs, the European Parliament shut their eyes to the climate & biodiversity crises & gave a rubber stamp to their #FutureOfCAP deal with almost no environmental credibility. But how did the groups vote? See👇 #VoteThisCAPdownpic.twitter.com/BZLZnyOtY4
The EU Parliament’s decision to approve the CAP signifies climate protection is not as serious an issue as it often makes it out to be. Greta and her cult followers are fuming.
European winter temperature variability is “dominated” by the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), which is, in turn, modulated by solar activity.
Even proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) agree natural processes (AMO, NAO, ENSO, solar forcing, volcanism) drive temperature variability. But they insist the rising temperature trend is human-caused.
So if we don’t have a regional upward trend, is the non-warming natural or anthropogenic?
Lüdecke et al., 2020 find temperatures across Europe have been oscillating, not rising in linear fashion, for the last century. The timings of the temperature undulations correspond quite closely to natural ocean cycles (the NAO and AMO). The authors detail a non-linear and indirect solar activity impact on these ocean cycles, and ultimately to the European climate.
Last week the beheading of a French school teacher by an Islamic terrorist in broad daylight shocked the world. Barbaric attacks on free speech and the exchange of ideas are taking place in Europe. Similar acts have occurred in other western countries in recent years.
The grisly death of the French teacher sends a clear message: Western citizens cannot feel safe expressing their views, not even at home – on their very own soil. Our governments have failed.
At Twitter I started an unofficial small survey, below, to get an idea of the extent of fear people harbor when it comes to expressing controversial views. According to Google Analytics, the vast majority of the readers at this site reside in Europe and North America.
The results, though not representative, are somewhat shocking. 75% say they would not post the Mahomed caricatures together with their name and address because they fear retaliation. This, in their home countries.
Would you post the Mahomed caricatures with your name and address?
The terrorists have won the first battle in Europe
This tells us the terrorists are indeed winning and that our governments are failing to provide us with a sense of security when it comes to expressing views on controversial topics that need to be openly discussed.
Though the French police are clamping down hard on the radicals behind the heinous crime, citizens will remain convinced that free speech on particular topics is no longer safe and that the governments are unable to protect us.
Western citizens now believe that radical elements exist among us and that our governments have failed to keep them out and unable to do anything about until after tragedy happens. Radicalism has been allowed to stream through our borders and now it here terrorizing us. It’s here and it’s not going to go away. Our governments have absolutely no concept on how to uproot it. Now 75% are afraid to speak up publicly. How sad.
Freedom of expression and open discussion has already lost the first battle.
Environmental rape in the name of climate protection.
To meet its CO2 reductions targets, Hamburg plans to deforest Africa in order to substitute coal with wood at its power plants!
Nambia’s bushwood may end up being burned in place of coal at Hamburg’s power plants – all in the European city’s plan to go green! Photo: Scott A. Christy (Heyheyuwb, CC-BY-2.5; Released under the GNU Free Documentation License; CC-BY-SA-3.0-MIGRATED, Wikimedia Commons.
Substituting coal with wood from Africa
German environmental protection group ROBIN WOOD here recently issued a press release calling on the city of Hamburg, Germany to cancel its plan to replace coal with imported bushwood from Namibia at its power plants, such as the Tiefstack cogeneration plant.
In May, 2020, a “Memorandum of Understanding” became known, according to which the Hamburg environmental authority (BUKEA) and Wärme Hamburg GmbH are examining a project of this kind.
ROBIN WOOD is firmly opposed to this project of a “Transcontinental Biomass Partnership Namibia – Hamburg”, which is being promoted by the German Association for International Cooperation (GIZ).
“Obliged” to pursue “socially just, climate-friendly” renewable energies
“With the referendum on the buyback of the energy networks, which was won in 2013, the Hamburg Senate was obliged to pursue the goal of a “socially just, climate-friendly and democratically controlled energy supply from renewable energies,” says the ROBIN WOOD press release. “The intended burning of bushwood from Namibia clearly contradicts this goal.”
Voters apparently were not well informed what meeting the climate-friendly” goals really entailed when they voted.
Namibia land use – to benefit crony euro-corporations
Because of the long transport distances and especially because of changes in land use in Namibia, this form of energy supply would not be climate-compatible. The German environmental group also claims “the main beneficiaries would be corporations in the global North, which would be able to sell machines and transport vehicles and supply themselves with raw materials.”
No transparency
ROBIN WOOD also accuses the green-socialist Hamburg Senate of avoiding an open-ended debate about the project and criticizes the lack of transparency and democratic control.
“We are calling for a climate-friendly, 100 percent renewable energy supply that does not require the neo-colonial import of resources from the global south,” says Ronja Heise, ROBIN WOOD energy consultant.
Namibia already lacking energy
“Namibia is itself in an energy crisis and is importing up to 60 percent dirty coal power from neighboring countries to cover its local energy needs. Instead of exporting biomass, Namibia should use it to produce electricity in its own country. Sustainable methods for bush clearance must be applied. Bushes are an important carbon sink. They must therefore only be harvested in a targeted manner, which cannot be guaranteed if very large quantities of wood are exported,” says Bertchen Kohrs, Director of the organization Earthlife Namibia.
Green-socialist Senate claims support for project
“The Hamburg Senate, in its response to a written petition, gave the impression that the NGOs whichoppose bushwood imports would have a similar number of supporters. This is wrong,” said Gilbert Siegler of the Hamburg Energy Table. “We invite other organizations to join the signatories in opposing the implementation of a ‘Biomass Partnership with Namibia’. This pretense of climate protection must be prevented.”
The signatories of the petition call on the Hamburg environmental authority to stop pursuing this project and to work towards an energy supply for Hamburg that is in line with the binding goals of the referendum.
Highly anomalous terrain (an active volcano), 40 years of cooling temperatures, and a CO2 record that dramatically contrasts with fluctuating values from forests and meadows reaching 600-900 ppm all beg the question: Is Mauna Loa’s CO2 record globally representative?
Mauna Loa is the Earth’s largest land volcano. It has erupted over 3 dozen times since 1843, making this terrestrial landscape extremely unusual relative to the rest of the globe’s terrain. (Forests, in contrast, cover over 30% of the Earth’s land surface.)
Mauna Loa has been thought to be the world’s best location to monitor global CO2 levels since 1958.
While Mauna Loa CO2 levels show a rise of 338 ppm to 415 ppm since 1980, Mauna Loa temperatures (HCN) show a cooling trend during this same time period. The only warming period in the last 65 years occurred between about 1975 and 1985.
As mentioned above, forests are orders of magnitude more terrestrially representative than the highly anomalous site of the Earth’s largest volcano.
In forests or tree-covered areas, CO2 rises from around 300 ppm in the warmth of the afternoon (~3 p.m.) to over 600 ppm before sunrise (~4 a.m.), when it is cooler (Fennici, 1986, Hamacher et al., 1994). This massive fluctuation occurs daily and CO2 values average out to be far higher than the Mauna Loa record suggests.
In open fields, or meadows, air CO2 can vary between 266 ppm and 1,430 ppm. The average variance is from 280 ppm to 980 ppm 2 meters above the soil (Szaran et al., 2005).
Interestingly, just as in forests, temperature drops of 4 to 5°C are associated with rising levels of CO2.
Modern CO2 concentrations beneath snowpack and ice range from 600 to 1800 ppm. These concentrations can fluctuate by as much as 200 ppm within a period of just 4 days (Massman and Frank, 2006).
If this kind of rapid and wide-ranging variability can be observed for modern conditions, our capacity to accurately assess the “global” CO2 concentration for ice and snow thousands of years old becomes all the more suspect.
Within caves, CO2 levels can reach as high as 30,000 ppm. Even in the open air <1 meter from the entrance to a cave, CO2 levels can reach 11,500 ppm (Cowan et al., 2013).
CO2 levels vary by 10s of 1000s of ppm from one cave to the next in the same geographical region.
Cave entrances should probably be considered no less terrestrially unusual than the site of the world largest active volcano. And certainly forests and meadows are far more representative of the Earth’s terrestrial landscape than the Mauna Loa site.
And yet it has been decided, via consensus, that the rarified air above a Hawaiian island in the middle of the Pacific correctly monitors the CO2 levels for the entire globe.
As the globe has warmed since the end of the Little Ice Age, alarms concerning retreating glaciers have been sounded worldwide. The reason for the warming remains hotly disputed: alarmists blame it on manmade CO2 while skeptics say natural factors are just as much at play, if not more so.
Image: Norwegian glace, for illustration purpose. Source: NASA/John Sonntag, public domain.
Very little retreat in Norway this past summer
Yesterday Norwegian NRK here reported “several of the largest glaciers have almost not shrunk” during this past summer.
“This year, several places in the country have almost not shrunk,” according to the Norwegian NVE.
Since 1962 experts have been monitoring the Nigardsbreen glacier, an arm of Jostedalsbreen located in Vestland county. The summer of 2020 has seen the sixth slowest result in about half a century. “If we get more such summers to come, then the glacier front will grow forward again,” says Even Loe in Statkraft.
“The glacier is named after the farm Nigard, which was crushed by the glacier in 1748. At that time the front of the glacier stopped about 4.5 km further ahead than it is today,” reports the NRK.
Experts attribute this past summer’s stagnation to “a good winter with a lot of snow.”
“The Nigardsbreen glacier has actually grown bigger.”
Glaciologist Hallgeir Elvehøywhich said the glacier retreated 4 meters, “something that is very small compared to previous ones.”
“The trend is largely the same elsewhere in the country,” he says.
Although many glaciers have decreased relatively little this year, the Norwegian experts still remain pessimistic about their future, should warming continue as the models project. “But in all the gloom, there is also a small glimmer of light, should the rainfall continue.”
“There is nothing in the way that the climate system can give us several years with so much snow, and then it will have an effect.”
September mean temperature in Sweden has not been warming like alarmists said it certainly would.
Looking at data from the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) for the 6 stations with data going back 22 years, we see that 3 of 6 stations have seen cooling September mean temperature over the past 22 years:
Let us move on to our second piece of evidence, this time from the other side of the “climate emergency” aisle. Professor Fritz Vahrenholt is a giant among environmental circles in Germany. (The country is well known as the world’s leading champion for all things environmental and for pushing Europe to “net zero emissions by 2050”.) Prof. Vahrenholt holds a doctorate in chemistry and started his professional career at the Federal Environmental Agency in Berlin (responsible for the chemical industry) before joining the Hessian Ministry of the Environment. From 1984 until 1990 he served as state secretary for environment, from 1991 till 1997 as minister for energy and environment in the state of Hamburg.
One day before the publication of the Boston Review article on October 5th, Prof Vahrenholt stated baldly in a German TV interview that climate science was “politicized”, “exaggerated”, and filled with “fantasy” and “fairy tales”. He pronounced that “The [Paris] Accord is already dead. Putin says it’s nonsense. […] The Americans are out. The Chinese don’t have to do anything. It’s all concentrated on a handful of European countries. The European Commission in massively on it. And I predict that they will reach the targets only if they destroy the European industries.” He lambasted Germany as a country “in denial when it comes to the broader global debate taking place on climate science”. He went on to characterize Europe’s recent push for even stricter emissions reduction targets to madness akin to Soviet central planning that is doomed to fail spectacularly.”
SnowFan here reports on the latest winter forecasts for the 2020/21 Europe winter. History and statistics show Europe could be in for a frosty winter.
Currently a significant La Nina is shaping up, and history shows that these events in the Pacific have an impact on Europe’s winters:
The NOAA reanalysis above shows the temperature deviations (left) and for precipitation (right) from the WMO average 1981-2010 during the six La Niña years of winter in Europe. Large parts of Europe have average temperatures and precipitation is distributed differently, with Germany being slightly drier overall than the WMO average. Is a 2020/21 winter in Germany under La Niña conditions shaping up to have average temperatures and slightly less humidity?
Strong winter-solar correlation
A more important factor determining winter in Europe may be solar activity. Data from the German DWD national weather service since 1954 show a remarkable higher frequency of cold winters in times of low solar activity, such as we are now in the midst of.
The following chart shows the December-January-February cold temperature anomalies occurring in the times of low solar activity (circled):
After the current minimum of solar activity in December 2019, statistically it leads us to expect a crisp winter 2020/21 – not only in Germany. Source: DWD time series with supplements.
It could look like the chart below because the NOAA reanalysis shows the high statistical probability of cold winters in Europe during the weakest solar cycles after 1948. What follows is a chart showing the temperature anomalies for the winters occurring at times of low solar activity:
The winters in Europe since 1948 with the weakest solar activity so far have all been significantly colder than the 1981-2010 WMO climate average. The solar activity cycle ending in December 2019 was one of the weakest cycles ever since observations began. Source: NOAA reanalysis and long-term weather.
But with the different statistical approaches, one thing already seems to be clear: The winter 2020/21 will probably not be particularly mild in Europe…
Also IRI expects cool 2020/21 winter
Last message: IRI continues to expect a rather supercooled winter 2020/21 in Central Europe with slightly more precipitation than average.
Like in September 2020, the IRI October forecast of Columbia University in New York also predicts a slightly cooler winter 2020/21 with slightly increased precipitation over Central Europe. Source: IRI Seasonal Forecast
As recently as 2000 to 1000 years ago, spanning the Roman to Medieval Warm Periods, East Antarctica was 5-6°C warmer than it is today. The consequent ice melt resulted in >60 meters higher water levels in East Antarctica’s lakes.
East Antarctica has been rapidly cooling in recent decades, with magnitudes reaching -0.7°C to -2.0°C per decade since the mid-1980s (Obryk et al., 2020).
A new study (Myers et al., 2020) reports that until about 15,000 years ago and throughout the Last Glacial Maximum, East Antarctica was 4-9°C colder than it is today.
Antarctica then abruptly warmed 15°C within centuries. From 12,000 to 6,000 years before present, East Antarctica was about 5°C warmer than it is today.
And then as recently as 2,000 to 1,000 years ago, East Antarctica was so warm (~6°C warmer than present) that its lakes were filled with 60 to 80 meters more meltwater than exists in lake basins today.
“Resistivity data suggests that active permafrost formation has been ongoing since the onset of lake drainage, and that as recently as 1,000 – 1,500 yr BP, lake levels were over 60 m higher than present. This coincides with a warmer than modern paleoclimate throughout the Holocene inferred by the nearby Taylor Dome ice core record. … Stable isotope records from Taylor Dome (located roughly 100 km west of the MDVs) indicate mean annual air temperatures ca. 4-9 °C lower than modern during the LGM (Steig et al., 2000).”
“Between 12,000–6,000 yr BP, Taylor Dome ice core record indicates that regional temperatures were up to 5 °C warmer than modern conditions (Fig. 2) (Steig et al., 2000).”
“Permafrost age calculations indicate late Holocene lake level high-stands (up to ~81 masl, 63 m higher than modern Lake Fryxell) roughly 1.5 to 1 ka BP that would have filled both Lake Fryxell and Lake Hoare basins (Fig. 3b). … Taylor Dome ice core records show a highly variable Holocene, with short lived peaks up to + 6 °C above modern temperatures between 1-2 ka BP (Steig et al., 2000).”
“Lake levels were higher potentially during and after the LGM when an ice dam blocked the mouth of TV, allowing for lake levels to increase by over 280 m compared to modern level. Taylor Dome ice core records indicate an abrupt warming of >15 °C from 15 – 12 ka BP, (Steig et al., 2000), which may have coincided with the maximum lake level of GLW.”
“Short lived changes in temperature such as a 6°C increase in the late Holocene could have resulted in anywhere between 60 to 80 m of lake level rise and subsequent drawdown.”
This substantial regional warmth can also be verified by the 1,000-year-old elephant seal remains that document a time when Antarctica was sea ice free 2,400 kilometers south of where sea ice free conditions occur today (Koch et al., 2019). Elephant seals require sea ice free conditions to breed, and the same locations where they used to breed during the Medieval Warm Period are today buried in sea ice.
The whole publicity stunt was probably supposed to go something like as follows: To protest against forest clearance to make way for a new stretch of autobahn, a group of 9 masked German tree-huggers would rappel from a speedway overpass and hang a banner demanding that the planned deforestation be stopped. And for their courageous activism, they’d surely make the regional news – maybe even the national news – and draw needed attention to man’s ruthless destruction of nature. Of course they’d be adored by the public as environmental heroes. They’d maybe even hold press conferences – and be surrounded by TV cameras and mikes.
Except for the national attention, things didn’t quite work out that way for the group of German radical environmentalist tree-huggers after tragedy struck.
According German daily Bildhere, they ended up causing an 8-kilometer traffic jam and one “horror accident” as a 29-year old driver suffered serious injuries and had to be airlifted to a trauma center.
One German national daily labelled the activists as environmental idiots.
According to Bild, the “anti-autobahn activists” blocked the A3 autobahn near Idstein as two of them “rappelled off an overpass” and hung a banner across it. Their publicity stunt caused the fast moving traffic to jam to a sudden halt, causing an 8-kilomter traffic jam. The 29-year old driver mentioned above failed to noticed the end of the traffic jam in time and crashed into the rear of a truck.
“A 29-year-old drove into the end of the traffic jam and his Skoda crashed into the back of a truck – the man was seriously injured,” online Bild reports.
“Horror crash because of this idiot,” was the headline in Bild’s hard copy print edition this morning, with an arrow pointing at a young female activist hanging from the overpass. Another Bild photo showed authorities dragging off one of the protesters.
The online Bild here also reports that one protester is still being detained by the police. But: “Six have been released.”
“A protest that endangers human life has no legitimacy,” said Home Secretary of Hesse, Peter Beuth. “Anyone who endangers his fellow citizen has to be punished severely.”
Since everyone is preoccupied with Corona, hardly anyone notices what is being decided to continue destroying Germany:
The German government now wants to make the use of renewable energies a question of national security. “The use of renewable energies for electricity generation is in the public interest and serves public security,” says the draft of the new German Renewable Energy Sources Act, on which the newspaper “Welt am Sonntag” reported.
From the point of view of experts, the decision is of enormous significance.
It concerns a energy-political turning point, say legal experts of energy law at the law firm of Luther, Gernot, Engel, reports Die Welt am Sonntag.
In the controversy over the building of wind parks, for example, the reference to “public security” may fundamentally impact court rulings. In court proceedings in connection with the expansion of bioenergy, wind and solar power, the reference to “public safety” could restrict the impact rulings by judges, business representatives fear, according to the “Welt am Sonntag”.
The new norm threatens to become a basis for far-reaching state intervention.
The federal government confirmed to Die Welt am Sonntag that the new state consecrations for eco-energy should make it easier to enforce building applications. “The regulation stipulates an overriding public interest in electricity generation from renewable energies as well as a public security interest,” the Federal Ministry of Economics announced in response to an inquiry by the newspaper.
The specification is important for discretionary and public interest rulings by authorities and institutions.
Latest government power-grab
If this law passes, and it will pass because there is no real opposition apart from the AfD party, the path is cleared for Germany. Then wind turbines will be forced to be built directly next to residential areas, and ownership rights will be undermined.
That is the revolution from above. That is energy fascism. Resistance must be stirred up here – and it fatally reminds us of the power grabbing in these times of Corona!
The massively green electricity damaged Wattenrat East Friesian comments on this new underhanded approach as follows:
The renewable energy industry is insatiable, ideologically consolidated and closely linked to politics – and above all very inventive,
if it concerns the preservation of its ecclesiastical income, which is paid by all current customers through the EEG green energy feed in act to the tune of double-digit billions annually.
Now the use of renewable energies is even supposed to “serve public safety”, says the draft of the new Renewable Energy Sources Act. This would make wind farm sites easier to implement. This is incredibly brazen and wrong because the renewable energies (wind and sun) only work depending on the weather. Especially wind power plants endanger the security of supply due to the erratic feed-in through grid instability unstable power grids, are therefore a public safety risk.”
It didn’t receive much a attention in 2015, but a comprehensive Nature journal study of 0-2000 A.D. global sea surface temperatures shows 1) climate changes occurred more than twice as fast during the Little Ice Age (LIA) than since 1800, 2) the entire first millennium was >1 standard deviation (s.d. unit) warmer than today, and 3) 1800-2000 ocean changes amounted to just 0.08 of a s.d. unit per century.
There are several reasons to question the presentation of data in McGregor et al., 2015. – a global-scale reconstruction of sea surface temperatures.
The myriad authors decided not to clearly depict actual temperature changes in their reconstruction, preferring instead to “reimagine” temperatures as standard deviation units.
The graphical presentation of “standardized SST [sea surface temperature] s.d. units” abruptly and curiously stops in 1900. This unexplained truncation was used despite mentioning in the body of the paper that the 1900-2000 period had a “statistically significant” warming trend of (just) 0.08 s.d. units/century – half of the century-scale changes during 1200-1400 and 1400-1600 (0.17 and 0.18 s.d. units/century, respectively). Perhaps the insignificance of the post-1900 uptick wasn’t considered helpful to the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) narrative.
The graphs depicting no remarkable modern global ocean temperature changes (shown below), such as the ones with flatline trends from the 1860s to 2000, are buried in the supplemental information for the paper, making the data and graphs less accessible. One would think that the lack of any remarkable or anomalous global temperature changes occurring during modern times would deserve some scientific attention.
Finally, this study shows the Roman Warm Period and Medieval Warm Period were globally warmer than today at the ocean surface (with some location and timing differences). It also affirms the LIA was “globally coherent.” The authors even identify the mechanism for “robust” LIA cooling: “high frequency explosive volcanism” with centennial-scale impacts.
At least the latter point made its way into the paper’s abstract…rather than hidden or buried.
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