The Worst Climate Stories of the Week (Tomfoolery and Fiddle Faddle)

This week’s climate stories share a theme. A theme of failure, desperation, and mockery. In other words, this week looks a lot like last week, and the week before . . . And the beat goes on . . .

The more the plans fail, as they used to say in the old Soviet Union, the more the planners plan. When that doesn’t work, they bring the full power of the government to legally enforce the plans. It’s as if they think getting the courts to rule in their favor will make the climate suddenly compliant. If a judge rules, or a bureaucrat writes a rule, the climate will stop ignoring them and take them seriously. No amount of real-world experience can dissuade the practitioners of lawfare from wasting everyone’s time and money.

That’s why we mock their efforts for the climate, every week. Somebody’s got to keep up with their tomfoolery and fiddle faddle.

(Don’t miss last week’s column: The Joshua Tree Sessions)

This week, we have more stories showing green energy makes things worse—par for the course there. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wrote more rules about electricity, leading to less electricity for everyone. We have more mad scientists inventing outlandish ways to muck about in an environment they barely understand with geoengineering they haven’t tested for negative side effects. The propaganda operation continues apace, with revelations this week showing the scope of the green billionaire investments in “climate emergency reporting.” Those same entities have funded even more frivolous climate lawsuits, weaponizing the justice system along with the mainstream media against modern life. And the feds just can’t stop supporting America’s adversaries, even when it involves the Pentagon, because helping China apparently will save the climate.

In our good news segment, we have several stories of folks with basic sense rejecting the green agenda. Olympic athletes have completely abandoned the host city’s attempt to make the games more green; an obscure photo of Antarctica from 1937 doesn’t comport with modern assertions about climate change; and a pro-agriculture nonprofit debunks the myth of “factory farms” in America.

Debunking is good for you—you should make it a part of your weekly fitness routine.

Let’s get our steps in, shall we?

Green Energy and EPA Rules Fail Again

A report re-emerged on social media this week that shows wind turbines cause more local warming than they avert. Originally published in 2018, the study shows wind turbines actually suck warm air down from higher parts of the atmosphere at night, leading to an increase in the local surface temperature. The effects are enough to offset any supposed benefits created by lowering carbon emissions with “green energy:”

We find that generating today’s US electricity demand (0.5 TWe) with wind power would warm Continental US surface temperatures by 0.24C. Warming arises, in part, from turbines redistributing heat by mixing the boundary layer. Modeled diurnal and seasonal temperature differences are roughly consistent with recent observations of warming at wind farms, reflecting a coherent mechanistic understanding for how wind turbines alter climate. The warming effect is: small compared with projections of 21st century warming, approximately equivalent to the reduced warming achieved by decarbonizing global electricity generation, and large compared with the reduced warming achieved by decarbonizing US electricity with wind.

Meanwhile, the EPA continues to write never-ending rules on top of rules, leading to an electrical grid that simply can’t handle the job we want it to do. A study commissioned by the North Dakota state government revealed, “the Environmental Protection Agency’s recently finalized regulations are not technologically feasible and will foreseeably lead to the retirement of coal power generation units,” and, “intermittent and weather-dependent green energy sources, such as wind and solar, will replace such retired generators, leading to unreliable conditions.”

More Adventures In Geoengineering—What Could Go Wrong?

Several reports over the past year have shown the extent to which mad scientists want to reshape our very atmosphere, by injecting aerosol particles into it to reflect sunlight. The theory is to cool the “overheating” globe, without regard to possible negative effects. The ideas don’t stop with just the atmosphere. Yahoo!Newsreported this week on a “desperate plan” to refreeze the Arctic:

One experiment involves pumping water to the surface, where it’ll freeze to form a protective layer over the Arctic snow. Another has scientists scattering reflective glass beads on top of snow to reflect the Sun’s harsh rays.

These are all forms of geoengineering, techniques to mold certain aspects of the environment in order to offset harm from climate change. The fact we are even seriously contemplating these experiments means that our collective mitigation efforts aren’t enough — because last year was the warmest year on record for the Arctic.

The report concludes that these efforts amount to just a “bandaid.” No mention of any negative side effects, as they encourage an all-in approach to reducing global temperatures, consequences be damned.

The Eye-popping Numbers Behind “Climate Emergency Reporting” and Green Lawfare

According to the Daily Sceptic, green billionaires and radical nonprofits have poured massive amounts of money into climate reporting, in an attempt to drown out climate “misinformation:”

Over the last 20 years the tax-efficient billionaire foundations have stepped into the funding gaps left by declining circulation and advertising sales across mainstream media. It is noted by the EJN that journalists “overwhelmingly agreed” that support from external funding organisations was “essential” to enabling their climate and environmental reporting. Any journalist can apply to be a member of the EJN and the “primary benefit” is said to be access to grant funding for stories and “training opportunities”. The operation claims over 25,000 members in 200 countries.

The list of EJN funders is a long one and includes many well-known supporters of climate fear-mongering work. Included is the European Climate Foundation, heavily supported by Michael Bloomberg and Extinction Rebellion paymaster Sir Christopher Hohn. Other supporters include Tides, Gulbenkian, Oak, Packard, Climate Justice Resilience, MacArthur and Rockefeller. Helping out with taxpayer money are political and government organisations including the United Nations and the British Foreign Office.

Meanwhile, The Epoch Times reported on the massive increase in legal attacks on the American energy sector:

As U.S. oil, gas, and coal companies struggle under an array of regulations and permitting roadblocks, they also face new challenges from climate activists in the form of lawsuits, fines, taxes, and shareholder activism from blue-state pension funds.

Meanwhile, U.S. states increasingly are set against each other, with liberal states leading the charge against fossil fuel companies, while red states attempt to defend them.

One estimate puts damages to “fossil fuel” companies from legal settlements and government regulations around $20 trillion since 1985. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said, “This is simply a strategy for the left to accomplish what they’ve been unable to do in Congress through the ballot box, and that is to implement a nationwide climate policy that’s consistent with their green agenda.”

Chinese Solar Panels On the Pentagon?

Congressional Republicans are trying to stop the Pentagon, along with 31 other government agencies, from helping Chinese solar companies:

We write today to express strong concerns regarding implementation of the Biden administration’s executive order to make the federal government carbon neutral by 2050. As part of its green agenda, at the start of this year the Department of Defense announced that it would install solar panels on the Pentagon. We are deeply concerned that the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy are not demonstrating appropriate attention to the economic and national security risks posed by pursuing this initiative when Chinese solar manufacturers continue to dominate the marketplace, historically violate U.S. trade laws, and advance the surveillance activities of Chinese military and intelligence agencies.

Let’s move on to our good news segment for the week.

Olympians Revolt Against Paris Climate Agenda

As the Summer Olympic Games in Paris approach, more stories continue to emerge that athletes from around the world won’t buy in to the host city’s climate agenda. Paris announced months ago that the Olympic Village that houses all the athletes won’t have air conditioning, despite holding the Summer Games during the summer. Every nation that responded for a story in the Washington Post indicated they would supply their athletes with portable air conditioning units, meaning every one of the largest nations to participate will defy the green games agenda.

Scrubbing History Won’t Make It Go Away

Radical environmentalists have made the East Antarctica Ice Shelf their white whale. According to legend, it could break off, which will supposedly cause a catastrophic rise in sea levels. Naturally they ascribe it to global warming. Never mind that naturally occurring ocean currents cause the cyclical thickening and thinning of the massive ice shelf in question. Turns out the claims of impending doom may have no basis in reality:

A study using a whaler’s forgotten aerial photos from 1937 shows East Antarctica’s ice has been stable and even grown, despite some early signs of weakening.

Extreme weather, melting glaciers, and rising sea levels are all indicators that the climate and the world’s ice masses are in a critical state. However, a new study from the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management at the University of Copenhagen reveals a positive anomaly.

Using hundreds of old aerial photographs dating back to 1937, combined with modern computer technology, researchers have tracked the evolution of glaciers in East Antarctica. This area, which spans approximately 2,000 kilometers of coastline, contains as much ice as the entire Greenland Ice Sheet. By comparing the historical aerial photos with modern satellite data, researchers determined the glaciers’ movement and changes in size, revealing that the ice has not only remained stable but also grown slightly over the last 85 years, partly due to increased snowfall.

I Love the Smell of A Good Debunking In the Morning . . .

Protect the Harvest, a pro-agriculture nonprofit, does great work countering the claims of radical anti-farm and animal rights activists. They reposted a guest piece this week debunking the myth of “factory farms:”

In 2022, non-family farms only made up 2.7 percent of all farms in the U.S. These non-family farms tend to vary greatly in size, income, and ownership structure. This means that over 97 percent of all farms in the U.S. are family owned and operated. Family farms make up 90 percent of total agricultural production. Eighty-eight percent of farms are small family-owned and -operated farms. And 5.8 percent of farms are classified as mid-size, with just 3 percent of farms considered large.

Large-scale farms (obviously) tend to be larger and take more land than small farms. In 2022, large-scale family farms accounted for 52 percent of the total value of production and 25 percent of agricultural land.

Farming is still an overwhelmingly family business.

The entire piece is eye-opening, for anyone wishing to educate themselves on how agriculture actually works in America.

Read more coverage by Restoration News of the Left’s assault on science in the name of the climate here.