Tuvalu, Tuvalu, Tuvala -- oh, Tuvalu -- now we know.
Tuvalu is the greenies' poster child for AGW - Rising Seas! hyperbole.
How did Tuvalu manage this? I always tell our granddaughters when they don't understand something, google it or follow the money. In this case, it's follow the money.
By claiming to be at risk of going underwater due to anthropogenic global warming, Tuvalu goes to the front of the UN AGW money line. This "nation" is the fourth smallest nation in the world and yet it has more leverage than most countries when it comes to global warming; and, along with the Clintons, may be among the best grifters in the world.
This nation is rich. And it has no land, to speak of, for its 9,000 inhabitants. Their main occupations: fishing and agriculture to feed themselves. The government of Tuvalu depends on a handful of external sources for its operational budget. How do they do it? Let's go down the list:
the Tuvalu Trust Fund: funded by Australia and New Zealand
the Falekaupule Trust Fund: funded by the Asian Development Bank
UN financial support
US government: The US government
is also a major revenue source for Tuvalu. In 1999 the payment from the
South Pacific Tuna Treaty (SPTT) was about $9 million, with the value
increasing in the following years (wiki)
funding from the Multilateral Fisheries Treaty and related agreements (US flagged purse seine vessels to fish 8,300 days in the region in
return for a payment of $90 million made up by tuna fishing industry
and US-Government contributions) (wiki)
commemorative and bullion coins (minted in Australia)
internet royalties (this is incredible -- the agency that administers domain names just happened to give Tuvalu its own domain: ".tv." I can't make this up. Tuvalu earns over $2 million by leasing the rights to its designated
higher-level internet domain name: “.tv”. To media companies in the U.S.
and elsewhere, the appeal of having websites with the “.tv” suffix for
your television properties is obvious. The domain is managed by Verizon
subsidiary dotTV, of which Tuvalu owns 20%
stamps: the Tuvalu Philatelic Bureau issues stamps and first day covers for stamp collectors around the world; the Bureau issued its first stamps in 1976, the same year Tuvalu gained its independence and the first year the country minted bullion coins (the coins are minted in Australia; Tuval simply collects the royalties)
I have some "unique" Tuvalu coins. I knew the Australian-minted Star Trek one-ounce silver coins would be in high demand, and they are. I bought mine at an average price of $27. They are now no longer available from "primary sources." One can find them at significantly higher prices at "second sources" like eBay and Amazon. Although if you wait awhile, they will trend back toward $27. I have found that, generally, these "unique" coins actually lose value as interest wanes (there are exceptions).
Because these are minted in Australian (and marketed as "Australian coins") they sell; my hunch is that if they were marketed as "Tuvalu" coins they would not sell. I assume serious collectors avoid these; speculators buy them and flip them. I could be wrong. Just an opinion.
Anyway, at least for me, the dots between the UN, the greenies, and Tuvalu have now been connected.
The poster-child island for "anthropogenic global warming sea rising" or
AGWSR for short -- is growing. I can't make this stuff up. From phys.org:
The Pacific nation of
Tuvalu—long seen as a prime candidate to disappear as climate change
forces up sea levels—is actually growing in size, new research shows.
Has the UN sent Tuvalu that $50 billion -- mostly from US taxpayers -- to save themselves from rising seas yet?
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.
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The End Of Germany's Energy Transition To Green Energy Energiewende: Energy Transition
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."
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."
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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.
