Commentary
SCIENCE SPEAKS – How often have you read about something being “settled science,” as if there’s no room for further discussion? In the Summer edition of Issues of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, however, the authors write of the consequences of pervasive, implausible climate scenarios in “How Climate Science Scenarios Lost Touch With Reality:”
“A continued focus on implausible emissions in climate research is a failure of science’s supposed internal quality assurance mechanisms and thus a failure of scientific integrity.
“The persistent use of implausible scenarios introduces error and bias widely across climate research. They are now woven through the climate science literature in ways that will be very difficult to untangle.
“Many of the thousands of published papers project future impacts of climate change on people, the economy, and the environment that are considerably more extreme than an actual understanding of emissions and forcing pathways would suggest is likely.”
How about that for an admission?
THE MAD RUSH TO CLOSE COAL PLANTS and build wind turbines in the United Kingdom has left the country completely subject to just-in-time natural gas deliveries from other countries, particularly Russia, according to Francis Menton, who covers climate change like a glove in his blog Manhattan Contrarian.
“When a period of calm hit the North Sea wind farms,” noted Menton, “gas prices spiked by a multiple, and Britain was left closing factories and begging Russia for supply.”
GOOGLE PLANS TO STIFLE climate change discussion in two ways beginning next month. First, at the request of their advertisers, Google will not place their ads alongside any content that calls into question or denies the scientific consensus around anthropogenic climate change.
Secondly, Google will no longer run any advertising that “contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.”
POPE FRANCIS has called for governments to commit to ambitious goals at the UN climate summit n Glasgow, Scotland later this month. “That of political and government leaders” – aren’t they the same? – “is especially important, and indeed crucial,” he told a group of parliamentarians meeting in Rome in preparation for the summit.
If I suggested that the Pope should stick to the scriptures, why do I think he would respond with a reference to climate change in the Bible? Would he dare spin the story in Exodus 3:1-4 of the burning bush into a climate change tale? No.
THE CITY OF PHOENIX, with a budget of $2.8 million for climate mitigation, that covers 14 positions across city government, now has its own publicly-funded director of heat response and mitigation in David Hondula, an environmental scientist and heat research, who will retain his post at Arizona State University.
Without widespread heat-mitigation, Phoenix has reportedly grown hotter. “Heat is an issue we have to get right,” Mayor Kate Gallego said in introducing Hondula.
Hondula plans to offset climate change by planting trees, installing shade structures and adding light-colored surfaces to streets and rooftops, all to make city cooler.
But get this … Although the left-leaning Arizona Republic hired Hondula, with his sensors, in 2017 as an advisor on heat mitigation, four years later, he still could not specify which new solutions he might propose. His first priority, he said, was to hire a tree and shade administrator. Really?
FOREST-THINNING – While numerous studies credit intensive forest-thinning projects with helping save communities like those that recently threatened near Lake Tahoe, environmental groups disagree … naturally.
So, as the U. S. Forest Service believe forest-thinning has slowed the spread and lessened the intensity of the fires, a flurry of dueling scientific studies with claims that each science maybe skewed by ideology, reports Ben Thompson of AP.
Now, more than ever … may God continue to bless the United States of America.
