The Global Warming Scam -- Starting To Hit Mainstream Media -- The [London] Daily Mail; Like Mark Twain And Polar Bears, The Death Of Coral Reefs Greatly Exaggerated -- February 5, 2017

Finally, the global warming scam is getting the attention it deserves. From The [London] Daily Mail: exposed -- how world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data. It may not quite be "mainstream media" but the story is moving in that direction.

• The Mail on Sunday can reveal a landmark paper exaggerated global warming
• it was rushed through and timed to influence the Paris agreement on climate change
• America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) broke its own rules
• the report claimed the pause in global warming never existed, but it was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data

From the article:

The scandal has disturbing echoes of the ‘Climategate’ affair which broke shortly before the UN climate summit in 2009, when the leak of thousands of emails between climate scientists suggested they had manipulated and hidden data. Some were British experts at the influential Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

NOAA’s 2015 ‘Pausebuster’ paper was based on two new temperature sets of data – one containing measurements of temperatures at the planet’s surface on land, the other at the surface of the seas.

Both datasets were flawed. This newspaper has learnt that NOAA has now decided that the sea dataset will have to be replaced and substantially revised just 18 months after it was issued, because it used unreliable methods which overstated the speed of warming. The revised data will show both lower temperatures and a slower rate in the recent warming trend.

******************************************

The End Of Germany's Energy Transition To Green Energy 
Energiewende: Energy Transition

Over at iceagenow: 

• bottom line, Germany ended nuclear energy; is now 50 gigawatts short
• 50 gigawatts short, despite "an enormously expanded [and expensive} network of wind turbines and solar systems

Some numbers:

• wind turbines generally in the range of 2 - 3MW
• fifty to 150 wind turbines on a "farm" that feeds into a network
• 150 x 3 = 450 MW
• 450 MW =  0.45 gigawatts
• 50 gigawatts / 0.45 gigawatts = 110 more wind farms of "max size" needed in Germany to offset loss of nuclear power
• in Germany, because wind is not dispatchable, for every 10 MW of wind energy added to the grid, at least 8 MW of back-up power (coal, natural gas) must be dedicated to back-up wind energy

The fact that Germany is/will be 50 MW short of energy is an incredibly "bullish" data point for America's cheap energy and all the industry it will attract. It turns out that Germany's "miracle economy" to great extent was built on a cheap Deutsche Mark (now called a Euro) due to currency issues in Greece, Italy, and the Balkans that are part of the Eurozone. The US has caught on to this "inconvenient truth."

******************************************

The Coral Reef Page

From joannenova.com.au, yes Australia:

2016 was a good year for coral surprizes. Until recently no one even knew that corals could grow just out from the  river-mouth of the Amazon. Then 9,300 square kilometers of reef was found living in a region no one thought corals could grow.

Volunteers found very nice reefs in Morton Bay, not far from the ferry route, but entirely “unexpected” and “better than tourist sites”.  Researchers also found another 4.000 square kilometers of reef off Queensland, hidden under 20m of water. 

In every media article the corals were immediately called into action against mining, farming, stuff like that. Journalists talk to scientists and head straight over to Greenpeace. 

The poor corals are politicized before they’d even been put on a tourist map.
Somehow scientists that are wrong are always described as surprised, excited or astonished. Other professions dream that their errors would be recounted this way. (Think –tax accountants, pilots, politicians…). 

In terms of hard questions from the media, the only group that gets it easier than Hillary Clinton are scientists. Not that I’m saying they should have known, but the same profession that talks about 97% certainty can’t also get a free run every time their assumptions are 100% wrong. The corals discovered near the Amazon might be quite important. The journalists describe the zone as having a”unique pH”, which is a funny way to say that it was almost certainly a lower pH (because rivers are naturally low). Why hide that –  it might show that corals aren’t under as much threat from “acidification” as some people want you to think.

I guess like Mark Twain and polar bears, the death of coral reefs was "greatly exaggerated."

******************************************

The History Page
Or
The "High Life" Page

The link to the Foreign Affairs article below was through an op-ed over at The New York Times: "the peculiar populism of Donald Trump." Nothing peculiar about it at all. What amazes me is that billionaires who had no political ambition at all had finally had enough. With their billions, like professional hedge fund founders and professional athletes they could have remained on the sidelines, living the "High Life," but they chose to stop the insanity.


From Foreign Affairs, "The Jacksonian Revolt: American Populism and the Liberal Order," Walter Russell Mead, January 20, 2017.

Recommended by a reader; much appreciated. Most of the following, even without quotes, is taken from the original. Much, more more at the linked article. A very, very good article.

Author begins: "For the first time in 70 years, the American people have elected a president who disparages the policies, ideas, and institutions at the heart of postwar US foreign policy:

70 years ago: 1948 election / 1949 inauguration of Harry S Truman (defeated Thomas E Dewey and Strom Thurmond)

Wilsonians: creation of a global liberal order a vital US interest; conceived it in terms of values rather than economics; in the later stages of the Cold War, one branch of this camp, liberal institutionalists, focused on the promotion of international institutions and ever-closer global integration, while another branch, neoconservatives, believed that a liberal agenda could best be advanced thorugh Washington's unilateral efforts (or in voluntary conjunction with like-minded partners).

Jeffersonian and Jacksonian schools of thought, prominent before WWII but out of favor during the heyday of the liberal order, have come back with a vengeance.

Jeffersonians: includes toay's so-called realists, argue that reducing the United States' global profile would reduce the costs and risks of foreign policy; they seek to define US interests narrowly and advance them in the safest and most economical ways

Libertarians take the proposition to its limits and find allies among many on the left who oppose interventionism, want to cut military spending, and favor redeploying the govt's resources and efforts at home (think senators Paul Rand [KY] and Ted Cruz [TX]) -- the latter both thought they could surf the rising tide of Jeffersonian thinking during the Republican presidential primary

Trump: sensed something different that his political rivals failed to grasp -- that the truly surging force in American politics wasn't Jeffersonian minimalism, it was Jacksonian populist nationalism

Jacksonians: the role of the US govt is to fulfill the country's destinty by looking after the physical security and economic well-being of the American people in their national home --and to do that while interfering as little as possible with the individual freedom that make the country unique

Jacksonians: only intermittently concerned with foreign policy; only intermittently engaged with politics more generally

Jacksonians:

• galvanized by external attacks on the US; attacks internal enemies (elite cabals or immigrants from different backgrounds)
• not particularly obsessed with corruption, seeing it as an ineradicable part of politics
• but deeply obsessed with "perversion" -- when politicians try to use the government to oppress the people rather than protect them
• patriotism: defined as an instinctive loyalty to the well-being and values of Jacksonian America
• distrust of elite patriotism has been increased by the country's selective embrace of identity politics in recent decades

The writer discusses:

• the Black Lives Matter movement
• Jacksonian support for the police, military
• gun control -- may be the "biggest" issue for Jacksonians
• immigration -- it's much more than just a walleb/pocketbook issue

Note: the right to bear arms plays a unique and hallowed role in Jacksonian political culture, and many Jacksonians consider the Second Amendment to be the most important in the Constitution 

International trade: it's all about trusting their national leader; to paraphrase neoconservative intellectual Irving Kristol writing about Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1952, there is one thing that Jacksonians know about Trump -- that he is unequivocally on their side

The new world order: identity politics can no longer be denied.

************************************

Hillary, Please Don't Make Up Attacks