Paul Driessen. Pope Francis’s Laudato Si encyclical is often eloquent, always passionate, but too often encumbered by platitudes and simply erroneous thinking. The pope believes climate change is largely manmade and driven by a capitalist economic system that exploits the poor. I believe Pope Francis went wrong – free market capitalism and hydrocarbon energy remain the best way forward at this time.
Soren Andersen, The Seattle Times, Al Gore: Eleven years after the release of “An Inconvenient Truth” comes the sequel, a progress report of sorts from Al Gore, who remains committed to the climate-change cause. Eleven years after the release of 2006’s “An Inconvenient Truth” comes “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.” This new documentary is a progress report of sorts from Al Gore, the message of which, in essence, is: “I’m still here and so is the issue I’ve been championing all these years.” That issue is climate change. Gore argues it’s real; it’s largely the product of human agency; it poses an existential threat to humanity; and mankind needs to act to save itself from the ravages he sees coming down the pike — many of which, he argues, are already here.
Rick McKee, John Shanahan: This article presents ten catastrophic man-made global warming, man-made global cooling, man-made climate change, man-made climate disruptions, man-made sea level rise predictions, gives research and references to their origin. Lots of photos are presented of beautiful parts of the natural world in response to these catastrophic predictions about our planet. We encourage people to come together to work on realistic solutions of genuine problems affecting humanity and nature.
Laura Poppick writing for livescience.com: Stumps and logs have been popping out from under southern Alaska's Mendenhall Glacier — a 36.8-square-mile (95.3 square kilometers) river of ice flowing into a lake near Juneau — for nearly the past 50 years. However, just within the past year or so, researchers based at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau have noticed considerably more trees popping up, many in their original upright position and some still bearing roots and even a bit of bark.
Viv Forbes, Executive Director of the Saltbush Club which opposes the war on carbon energy, opposes real pollution, and promotes the rational and sustainable use of carbon energy and carbon food: When blizzards blow and glaciers grow, the great ice sheets will spread again and mankind will be decimated by cold, drought, crop failures and starvation. A lucky few living in equatorial regions or clustered in shelters and hot houses around nuclear power stations will survive.
America’s electric grid is being mismanaged and consumers will pay a heavy price for that mismanagement.
More evidence of that came with the recent closure of the Palisades Power Plant in Michigan. The 811-megawatt nuclear plant was shut down on the same day that the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) issued a report saying the U.S. electric grid doesn’t have enough generation capacity and that blackouts are almost certain to occur across the country this summer.
In short, the closure of the Palisades Power Plant will increase emissions, reduce energy affordability, and hurt the resilience and reliability of America’s electric grid. That’s a lousy quadfecta.
Paul Bledsoe lectures on environmental policy at American University. John Shanahan, civil engineer, advocates for plentiful energy from fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear: This article in the New York Times at the end of 2018 by Paul Bledsoe is a collection of all the past catastrophic man-made global warming announcements. John Shanahn views the world through the reality of a civil engineer's visison and sees a world with climate in normal past range. He sees a beautiful world, made better by fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear.
CNBC: • Natural gas use is surging across the world and fossil fuel emissions are hitting records that are unsustainable for the planet. • global decline in coal emissions in 2019 was offset by an increase in oil and natural gas emissions across the world. • “Any growth is more than we can afford right now,” says Rob Jackson, an Earth systems scientist at Stanford University and director of the Global Carbon Project. What else would we expect him to say? Continuous catastrophic global warming alarmism from the media and universities in North America and Europe. Doesn't happen in Russia and China. They appreciate energy from fossil fuels.
Michael Shellenberger, Environmental Progress: The news media have been making apocalyptic pronouncements about climate change since the late 1980s, and do not seem disposed to stop. The ideology behind environmental alarmsim — Malthusianism — has been repeatedly debunked for 200 years and yet is more powerful than ever. But there are also reasons to believe that environmental alarmism will, if not come to an end, have diminishing cultural power.
The day of reckoning over the Western world’s self-destructive indulgence of the excesses of the environmental movement must now be almost at hand.
Terry Donze, geophysicist: The Arctic sea ice on June 26, 2018 covered most of the Acrtic Ocean, like most years since 2000. See photos of nature flourishing in the Arctic.
John Eidson, electrical engineer: Despite what the people who try to frighten kids say, it doesn’t look like polar bears are being wiped out by anything. They’ve been around for a long, long time, including many periods when Earth was much warmer than it is today. These big white bears are resilient animals that have always known how to figure things out when there’s less ice.
Physicist, Professor Happer points out carbon dioxide is an important trace gas and an integral part of the carbon cycle, a bio-geo-chemical cycle in which carbon is exchanged between the oceans, soil, rocks and the biosphere. Virtually all of life on the plant requires CO2 concentrations to be above 150 parts per million. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere over the past 500 million years has been as high as 4,000 ppm and as low as 180 ppm.
Half the people on Earth live in warmer climates - the blue circle on the map below. So do most corals, marine life, plants, trees, insects, birds, and animals. A little warming in colder regions of the planet is beneficial. These warmer regions have lived more peacefully for thousands of years than people in the colder regions. Humanity must not be forced to take the climate alarmist pronouncements of European and North Americans, their royalty, politicians, behind the scenes manipulators, and bankers.
Imagine a large room with perfectly insulating walls. The room contains chairs, tables, books, sheets of paper, pitchers and glasses of water, some flowering plants, and so forth. Now comes the question:
“If we add some heat (say 1 MJ) to the room, how much does the temperature rise?”
“If we add a certain heat flux (say 1 W/m2) all over the surface of the earth, how much would the temperature rise? So many assumptions are involved that the calculated temperature rise can be pretty much anything. Start programming your supercomputer!
Now turn that unanswerable question around and ask an answerable question: “If the temperature of the surface rises by (say) 1ºC, how much more IR does it emit?”
Calvin Beisner, Cornwall Alliance: Opponents of fossil fuel-fired electricity generation play the role of those who would demand banning aspirin. They’re focusing on its comparatively minor risks and ignoring both its tremendous benefits and the ready ways to minimize its risks.
Ed Berry, atmospheric physicist: This is a graph showing 10,000 dots representing atmospheric greenhouse gasses. Carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is only 12 dots out of 10,000. How can these 12 dots cause global warming? How can reducing these 12 dots even down to six dots begin to have a significant effect on Earth's climate? Climate Alarmists tell you they can. Most scientists say that reducing these 12 dots representing carbon dioxide from fossil fuels by half or entirely will have negligible effect on Earth's climate. So chose who you think is correct and chose carefully!
Don Bogard, radio-geochemistry, nuclear geochemistry, planetary science: Carbon (C) exchange rates among C reservoirs tend to be at equilibrium unless and until a significant environmental change disturbs that. A significant increase in atmospheric (Atmos) CO2 concentration over the past century has been such a disturbance, and as a consequence a large fraction of that growth in Atmos CO2 has manifested as new plant growth and to increased ocean C levels. Increased temperature over the past century (which mostly has only modestly affected the ocean) and any tendency for warmer surface ocean to degas more CO2, has been over-powered by higher Atmos CO2 shifting the chemical equilibrium toward more dissolution of Atmos CO2 into the oceans. Higher decay rates of soil biotic material caused by the increased temperatures may be a source of part of the Atmos CO2 increase over the past century. However, it is most unlikely that organic decay has been other than a minor source, especially in the past few decades when Atmos CO2 was growing most rapidly.
The total warming effect of all of the greenhouse gases is 324 W m-2. Thus, CO2 is (8.67/324) = 2.7% of the total. The other greenhouse gases, except for water vapour, account for 0.7%. Therefore, water vapour accounts for (100 – 3.4) ≈ 96% of global warming.
The results of these two independent scientific methods agree and show conclusively that CO2 is a very small part of global warming, and that whatever controls the level of water vapour in the atmosphere controls atmospheric temperature.
James Conca, scientist in the field of earth and environmental sciences. Contributor to Forbes: The Center for Global Development recently published a new report, Atoms for Africa, discussing how there is more interest in nuclear energy among African countries than the rest of the world realizes. Co-authored by Jessica Lovering, Director of Energy at the Breakthrough Institute, and three Fellows the report outlines how new nuclear technologies can accelerate deployment and solve fears like meltdowns and weapons proliferation. African countries with the most experience operating nuclear reactors are South Africa and Egypt. They should advance to the next level with more nuclear power and at the same time guide other African countries with strong nuclear regulatory agencies and professionals with nuclear and other engineering degrees.