Archive for the ‘global warming’ Category

Behind the bank failures

Thursday, March 16th, 2023

I want to recommend a good piece at Conservative Tree House, which I read every day.

It is this post which connects a few dots.

This is where we need to keep the BRICS -vs- WEF dynamic in mind and consider that ideologically there is a conflict between the current agenda of the ‘western financial system’ (climate change) and the traditional energy developers. This conflict has been playing out not only in the energy sector, but also the dynamic of support for Russia (an OPEC+ member) against the western sanction regime. Ultimately supporting Russia’s battle against NATO encroachments.

The war in Ukraine, which probably would not have begun if Trump was president, led to a war of economic interests. The western democracies have invested their future in “climate change,” which used to be “global warming” before the failure to warm made that slogan obsolete. Climate change has evolved into a war on energy production. The Biden regime now has even gone after gas stoves. Since I just bought one, I have an interest. Now, they seem to be going after washing machines. Ours has failed recently so I had better be quick to replace it.

The recent Credit Suisse bank crisis is complicated by the refusal of its largest shareholder, the Saudis, to help with a bail out. Why would this be ? This brings up the topic of BRICS. This is a new financial combination made up of Russia, China, Brazil, India and South Africa.

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It’s official. A recession. How about a Depression?

Saturday, July 16th, 2022

The Fed has confirmed that we are officially in a recession. The actual decline in GDP is higher, though. It is at least -1.6%

What caused the Great Depression? Amity Schlaes’ book “The Forgotten Man” suggests that Roosevelt’s “Regulatory Uncertainty” was a big part of the cause. How were businessmen supposed to plan when policies changed from month to month ? The Roosevelt “Brain Trust” could not decide what might work. Some were good ideas, like the CCC which took young men off the street, helped them get into condition and did many worthwhile projects. Some, like the National Recovery Association, were Fascism which was popular in the 1930s.

Now, we face a disastrous shift in the national focus to imaginary threats like Global Warming. This has become all powerful among politicians because none of them know any science and the science people have become dependent on government funding. Fear is a great driver of government money. Climate science has become a rich field through flogging the unskeptics with fear of global warming. It doesn’t matter that there is no evidence of global warming or any of the other alleged threats. The super rich, like Barak Obama, are still buying waterfront estates no matter what they tell their followers.

Here is a proposal that might help.

Central planning always fails, but the utopian visionaries implementing the plans cannot admit that they are at fault. A scapegoat must be found. As a leading example, when Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture led to mass starvation, the official blame was placed on “saboteurs” and “wreckers.”

Our current-day analog is the centrally-planned replacement of our very large, inexpensive and highly functional energy system, mostly based on fossil fuels, with the alternatives of intermittent wind and sun-based generation, as favored by incompetent government regulators who don’t understand how these things work or how much they will cost. Prices of energy to the consumer — from electricity to gasoline — are soaring; and reliability of supply is widely threatened.

All of which brings our President forth to blame the current price and supply issues in the energy markets on anything but his own administration’s intentional efforts to suppress the functional fossil fuel energy. One day the scapegoat is Vladimir Putin; another it is “companies running gas stations,” who stand accused of price gouging.

One possible solution is to use the states as experimental laboratories.

With federalism in energy policy, we can have New York forging ahead with its “Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act,” and California doing the same with its SB 100 — both of them seeking to eliminate fossil fuels from the generation of electricity, and then to force all energy consumers to use only electricity for their supply. Will that work? If New York and California are successful, they will be a model for the rest of the country to follow. Congratulations will be in order. If they fail relative to other states — that is, if they see energy prices soar, or frequent blackouts or shortages of needed energy — then it will be obvious to all that it was the green energy that failed, and not that there were “saboteurs” or “wreckers” or “price gougers,” who after all could have attacked the other states as well.

Well the Feds allow this? Probably not with the current regime in power.

Fortunately, the red states are not just going along with this kind of thing any more. This will be a critical battleground over the next five to ten years.

We will see after the election. Many Republicans are in thrall to the climate hoax.

Will Woke Democrats and Environmentalists scare off our allies ?

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2022

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has set off radical changes in international relationships. The US and other (not all) European nations have imposed severe sanctions on Russia designed to destroy its economy. The precedents set are not all positive. First Ukraine has defined corruption for years. The Biden family and even Mitt Romney’s family got positions on a Ukrainian gas company’s Board for lots of money and no work except influence. The “Maiden Revolution” in 2014 was engineered by the Obama CIA. It expelled a pro-Russian president duly elected in an election probably more honest than the US 2020 election. Not all agree that it was an honest process.

As Ukraine’s political crisis deepened, [Victoria] Nuland and her subordinates became more brazen in favoring the anti-Yanukovych demonstrators. Nuland noted in a speech to the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation on December 13, 2013, that she had traveled to Ukraine three times in the weeks following the start of the demonstrations. Visiting the Maidan on December 5, she handed out cookies to demonstrators and expressed support for their cause.

The extent of the Obama administration’s meddling in Ukraine’s politics was breathtaking. Russian intelligence intercepted and leaked to the international media a Nuland telephone call in which she and U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffey Pyatt discussed in detail their preferences for specific personnel in a post-Yanukovych government.

Ukraine has remained an economic basket case in spite of the change to a pro-western government.

The furious reaction to the invasion by US officials has alarmed some nations that have remained neutral. Some of them have been our allies, or at least friendly.

In a development that suggests trouble ahead, China’s basic approach—not endorsing Moscow’s aggression but resisting Western efforts to punish Russia—has garnered global support. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa blamed the war on NATO. Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, refused to condemn Russia. India and Vietnam, essential partners for any American strategy in the Indo-Pacific, are closer to China than the U.S. in their approach to the war.

Western arm-twisting and the powerful effect of bank sanctions ensure a certain degree of sanctions compliance and support for symbolic U.N. resolutions condemning Russian aggression. But the lack of non-Western enthusiasm for America’s approach to Mr. Putin’s war is a phenomenon that U.S. policy makers ignore at their peril.

The dominant role played by the “Woke” left and the Green New Deal enthusiasts in the Democrat Party has concerned many of them. Right now, Democrats hold all three branches of government, although narrowly.

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Global Cooling

Sunday, October 6th, 2019

I am not sure this is happening but it’s worth considering given the current state of sun spots.

Theodore White

Global Cooling: 2020s, 2030s & 2040s
The Sun’s Grand Minimum: October 2019
‘Prepare For Early Winter in the Northern Hemisphere’

sunspots

by Theodore White, astromet.sci
By the time those who claim that ‘man-made global warming’ causes climate change, the weather of global cooling under the Sun’s Grand Minimum will have made a mockery out of that total fiction of anthropogenic global warming.

For years, the proponents of man-made climate change have failed to notice the altered jet streams; the increasing cloudiness worldwide; the heavy torrential rains and floods; snowfall in the Sahara Desert and the magnified strength of monsoons, cyclones and hurricanes.

They deny that the Earth has been cooling while they continue to believe in the multiple failed predictions of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which uses computer climate models that have not predicted one single climate or weather event accurately in over 30+ years.

These same climate models are unable to predict seasonal weather and climate.

They cannot forecast if a coming season will be early, on time, or late, but somehow are able to project years and decades into the future by claiming rising sea-levels and an ever-hotter Earth that is caused by ‘man-made climate change?’

How is that possible?

Those who believe in ‘man-made global warming’ will be among the first victims of the Sun’s Grand Minimum and climate of global cooling.

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Sunspots and the Ice Age.

Monday, March 11th, 2019

We have been hearing about global warming, allegedly due to CO2 acting as a “greenhouse gas” since the 1980s. There is argument about this as water vapor is a stronger greenhouse gas.

“Water vapour is the most important greenhouse gas. This is part of the difficulty with the public and the media in understanding that 95% of greenhouse gases are water vapour. The public understand it, in that if you get a fall evening or spring evening and the sky is clear the heat will escape and the temperature will drop and you get frost. If there is a cloud cover, the heat is trapped by water vapour as a greenhouse gas and the temperature stays quite warm.

Does this mean the “97% of scientists are correct ? Nope.

My concern is that we are at the end of a Sunspot Cycle which is an 11 year cycle.

cyclew24

The solar cycle was discovered in 1843 by Samuel Heinrich Schwabe, who after 17 years of observations noticed a periodic variation in the average number of sunspots.[2] Rudolf Wolf compiled and studied these and other observations, reconstructing the cycle back to 1745, eventually pushing these reconstructions to the earliest observations of sunspots by Galileo and contemporaries in the early seventeenth century.

Following Wolf’s numbering scheme, the 1755–1766 cycle is traditionally numbered “1”. Wolf created a standard sunspot number index, the Wolf index, which continues to be used today.

The period between 1645 and 1715, a time of few sunspots,[3] is known as the Maunder minimum, after Edward Walter Maunder, who extensively researched this peculiar event, first noted by Gustav Spörer.

What happened with the “Maunder Minimum?” Maybe an Ice Age.

Valentina Zharkova, a professor of mathematics at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom, used a new model of the sun’s solar cycle, which is the periodic change in solar radiation, sunspots and other solar activity over a span of 11 years, to predict that “solar activity will fall by 60 percent during the 2030s to conditions last seen during the ‘mini ice age’ that began in 1645,” according to a statement.

Look at the chart of the solar cycles above. Doesn’t the one beginning 11 years ago look smaller at its peak ?

More evidence something is going on.

Aurora borealis or northern lights are among the most spectacular atmospheric displays. Called Aurora australis in the southern hemisphere they are visible evidence of the relationship between the sun and climate. In early days they called them Petty Dancers from the French petite danseurs. In England, they were also called Lord Derwentwater’s lights because they were unusually bright on February 24th, 1716, the day he was beheaded. A bad omen for him, but they were also an indicator of the bad weather and harvest failures of the period.

The Aurora is getting lower in latitude.

Northern-Lights-in-the-UK-Can-you-watch-Aurora-Borealis-from-the-UK-Where-can-you-see-it-1095446

People have been known to catch a glimpse in Kent and Cornwall, but this is very rare.

Northern areas of England and Scotland are more likely to see the Aurora Borealis.

This is because these areas have a view of the northern horizon, the perfect place to spot the stunning lights.

They are getting more common in UK.

The current debate attracting more and more people is that we are cooling with the only question left as to the extent and intensity. Will it be weather similar to the cooler period coincident with the Dalton Minimum from 1790 – 1830? Alternatively, will it be colder with similar conditions to those by the early fur traders in Hudson Bay or those that spanned the life of Sir Edmund Halley? The appearance of Aurora in northern England suggests the latter, although I can predict who will protest this suggestion.

Next year will be the end of the current Solar Cycle. Then we will find out if the next will be a minimum.

“Flying Rambo” joins the yellow vests in France. All over France !

Monday, January 7th, 2019

Although the US media are not talking about the French protests anymore, they are getting worse and more violent.

paris-riots-3

The Champs Elysees is not the only location these days. They are all over France.

PARIS (Reuters) – Emmanuel Macron intended to start the new year on the offensive against the ‘yellow vest’ protesters. Instead, the French president is reeling from more violent street demonstrations.

What began as a grassroots rebellion against diesel taxes and the high cost of living has morphed into something more perilous for Macron – an assault on his presidency and French institutions.

The anti-government protesters on Saturday used a forklift truck to force their way into a government ministry compound, torched cars near the Champs Elysees and in one violent skirmish on a bridge over the Seine punched and kicked riot police officers to the ground.

And

Generally the protests seem loosely organized, but nationwide around 50,000 to 80,000 people today according to Reuters. The protests are generally peaceful; then, later in the day, the police arrive to remove them and things turn confrontational and violent.

By the time dusk arrives most of the ordinary Yellow Vest protesters have returned home; and that’s when it seems like smaller agitating groups start burning things.

Macron may not survive this. There seem to be few of any Muslims involved. This is global warming policy at the street level

Tomorrow may be “black Saturday” in Paris.

Friday, December 7th, 2018

The protests that have convulsed Paris for two weeks, may hit a peak or be stopped tomorrow.

Carte_Paris-Desktop

The arrondissements of Paris are marked in this map. The police are calling in reinforcements and a confrontation is coming.

Fearing that an “enormous violence” will be part of “Act IV” of the mobilization of the “Yellow Jackets,” authorities have announced the mobilization of “exceptional measures” of more than 65,000 security forces deployed throughout France, and putting the finishing touches the security presence already in Paris.

As the fourth Saturday of mobilization of the “Yellow Jackets” approaches, l’Elyssee dreads that “an enormous violence” will explode in Paris this weekend. Throughout France, the calls to gather in Paris and demolish the current establishment rule are multiplying. Last week, a young man encountered by Le Figaro near the Saint-Lazare station was shouting: “This is not a protest, this is the Revolution!” Tuedsay night, on BFM T, one of the leaders of the movement, Eric Drouet, had even declared wanting to “return” to l’Eyssee Saturday.

There is talk of a “no confidence vote” in the Parliament.

The actual government — the Prime Minister and other Ministers — are, however, proposed by the President and then voted on by the legislature. So they do rely on legislative support.

So the PM Phillipe, the Minister of the Interior Castaner, etc., could be in danger due to a no-confidence vote. Macron would just have to reshuffle the cabinet and bring in a few new people while kicking old ones out and submit them for approval by the legislature.

As that article I translated yesterday mentioned, there is already talk that Phillipe might be on his way out, and talk that an even larger reshuffling is coming. This was before the report of a no-confidence vote. The source said that if Saturday’s protests are violent, we could see Macron forced to shake up the government — “In the best case, by the time of the European elections, in the worst case, by Christmas.”

We’ll see how it goes tomorrow.

Is France Burning?

Tuesday, December 4th, 2018

An interesting Spectator article on France suggests this will not be over anytime soon.

macron

The boy president of France is under siege and seems not to realize it. He has had an impressive background.

Macron was born in Amiens and studied philosophy at Paris Nanterre University, completed a Master’s of Public Affairs at Sciences Po and graduated from the École nationale d’administration (ENA) in 2004. He worked as a senior civil servant at the Inspectorate General of Finances and later became an investment banker at Rothschild & Cie Banque.

He seems not to have any experience as a politician. We elected Donald Trump, who was not a politician, but Macron seems to have been a bureaucrat all his career. His positions seem moderate but he is devoted to the myth of “Climate Change.”

Ahead of the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, Macron called for acceleration of the ecological transition and advocated a “balance between ecological imperatives and economic requirements”, an objective that the French government seeks to achieve by fighting on “five fronts”: “innovation”, “simplification”, “strengthening of our energy efficiency and […] reduction of fossil fuel usage”, “energy competitiveness” and “action in Europe and worldwide”.

He does seem to support nuclear power, which is fine with me. France, unlike Germany, seems to be realistic about nuclear power.

Nevertheless, in the multi-year energy program (programmation pluriannuelle de l’énergie, PPE) Macron committed to reduce the use of nuclear energy in France by 2035. That is not reassuring, however.

From the Spectator: I am not sure this movement is over yet but whether it is durable is another question. The object itself, the gilet jaune – the yellow tabard that is required to be carried in all cars and that became a symbol of la France actif, the France that needs their cars to get to work – has been hijacked, devalued, even random. Antifa, who in France call themselves Black Block, were all immaculately turned out in gilets jaunes in Paris on Saturday, over their black designer combat uniforms.

The demonstrations are being taken over by anarchists.

Macron seems unable to understand the people, like so many US elites as well.

There are elements to this affair that remain unclear if not murky. Who are the gilets? What do they want? Can this really be a spontaneous revolt, triggered by a posting on Facebook, provoked by increased taxes on fuel? Christophe Castaner, who has been minister of the interior for only a few weeks, and is already one of the most hated men in France, has rushed to blame the violence on the extreme right. There is not the slightest evidence of this. As far as I can tell, the rightists spent the weekend watching the news channels and posting acerbic comments on social media. ‘I’m running out of popcorn,’ one delighted Marine Le Pen supporter told me from the safety of his armchair, as he reveled in the humiliation of Macron.

And:

Macron’s behavior meanwhile grows increasingly bizarre. He managed to be out of France again this weekend, at the G20, where he was lecturing Donald Trump on the environment and Mohammed bin Salman on the Khashoggi affair. At his closing press conference, he spoke, without pause, for almost an hour, mentioning the events in Paris only in the last 30 seconds, dismissing them as unacceptable but saying nothing to inspire, comfort or show empathy with the bewildered nation. He then refused to answer questions on the riots.

Macron seems out of his league.

Macron may have won the presidency, albeit in curious circumstances, but he is politically tone deaf. His obsession with the environment and keeping his green allies on board has led him to ignite a wildfire in France that threatens to consume his entire ambitious reform program while diminishing him on the world stage. A comparison with Nero is not inapt. He is fiddling with carbon reduction targets while Paris burns.

It’s too bad as his original ideas seemed an improvement.

Judith Curry resigns from Georgia Tech

Thursday, January 5th, 2017

The world of Climate research lost a great academic figure as Judith Curry resigns her tenured faculty position at Georgia Tech.

She has figured largely in the climate debate as a skeptic in global warming.

I have retired from Georgia Tech, and I have no intention of seeking another academic or administrative position in a university or government agency. However, I most certainly am not retiring from professional life.

Why did I resign my tenured faculty position?

I’m ‘cashing out’ with 186 published journal articles and two books. The superficial reason is that I want to do other things, and no longer need my university salary. This opens up an opportunity for Georgia Tech to make a new hire (see advert).

The deeper reasons have to do with my growing disenchantment with universities, the academic field of climate science and scientists.

She has endured considerable abuse from the alarmist side. She is called a “heretic” in the alarmist circles.

over the past year or so she has become better known for something that annoys, even infuriates, many of her scientific colleagues. Curry has been engaging actively with the climate change skeptic community, largely by participating on outsider blogs such as Climate Audit, the Air Vent and the Black¬board. Along the way, she has come to question how climatologists react to those who question the science, no matter how well established it is. Although many of the skeptics recycle critiques that have long since been disproved, others, she believes, bring up valid points

So, she might have a point. However:

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To Stop the Train.

Saturday, June 4th, 2016

I have been using the analogy of pulling the cord to stop the train when it is headed for the cliff, even if you don’t know what happens next. I see that Richard Fernandez has now adopted the analogy.

I don’t see Trump voters as doing anything noble or particularly courageous but it is a risk and many of us are willing to take it.

Fernandez uses the example of Torpedo Squadron 8 which was a factor in the success of the US Navy in the Battle of Midway. John Waldron did not sacrifice his men and his own life voluntarily but he had a mission and he carried it out in spite of everything that stood in his way. The fighters of Fighting 8 that were supposed to provide cover got lost in the confusion. According to Alvin Kernan’s book “The Unknown Battle of Midway: The Destruction of the American Torpedo Squadrons ,” other pilots nearly attacked the leader of Fighting 8 after the battle.

Fernandez uses the sacrifice of Waldron and Torpedo 8 as a metaphor for the 2016 election while remembering the crucial battle fought 74 years ago today.

While the path leading to the present is disputed, no one appears to deny America has now arrived in a critical place whose abnormality is most evident in a contest between two presidential candidates neither of whom is widely supported by their nominating parties. None of the two candidates is actually expected to solve the multiple foreign policy and domestic crises currently besetting the country. In fact one candidate may have helped cause many of the current problems while the other’s main attraction is that he may function as a demolition charge which will clear out the roadblocks that have paralyzed America.

If political columnist Ron Fournier is right about this election cycle, it is less about achieving incremental policy change than precipitating a radical institutional change. In that case the current unpopularity contest can be seen as an deliberate process to increase instability by hoping the worst man wins, not in order to continue the status quo but to tear things down and start afresh.

I think it is more important to stop the trends initiated by Obama and the increasingly radical Democrats than to attempt any serious foreign policy initiative.

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