Climate Updates

Source; Anonymous, who sees through the Climate Change Scam..... I AGREE

The 27th Conference of the Parties (COP 27) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has come and gone. Almost certainly the tons of emissions generated by the 20,000 or more celebrities, business elites, NGOs, politicians, and bureaucrats who attended COP 27 will be greater than any emission reductions generated by the agreements made at the conference itself. Their demand was unrealistic to the point of being idiotic. They wanted the developed countries to establish and finance a “loss and damage” fund. Estimates of the necessary size of the fund to compensate the developed world fully for present and future damages were in the trillions of dollars.

At the outset biden signaled he was open to negotiating a “loss and damage” agreement, but only if China agreed to participate and contribute. By the end of COP 27, it became clear biden had been lying (AGAIN!), and his red line was erased as if it had never existed. biden committed the US to contribute to a reparations fund even though China flatly rejected participating in any other way than as a recipient of payments. The world’s biggest emitter by far wants to be compensated for the greenhouse gas emissions its economic competitors emit. biden agreed to that.

In the end, biden couldn’t do that if he wanted to without running it past Congress, the governing body that controls the purse strings. The agreement contains no specifics about who will provide the funds or how much the various countries will pay into it. It sets no hard deadline to establish the fund or to start the payments. It describes no mechanism for paying out the funds, how much goes to which countries, and the conditions for receiving payments.

In 1992, 165 countries signed the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), agreeing to “stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.” To do so, 43 industrialized countries agreed to implement voluntary measures to stabilize their greenhouse gas emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2000. 22 years after the deadline, CO2 emissions have increased.

In 1997, parties to the UNFCC negotiated a new treaty: the Kyoto Protocol, with the same developed countries agreeing to legally binding greenhouse gas emission reductions averaging 5% below 1990 levels by 2012. The parties to the Kyoto Protocol missed their greenhouse gas emission reduction targets by a wide margin—with no penalties forthcoming.

In the 2015 Paris climate agreement, 196 countries agreed to cut or stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at levels necessary to prevent the Earth from warming two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. The U.N. estimated this would mean cutting global greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2030 and producing net-zero emissions by 2050. In the meantime, the countries set interim timetables with specific emission reduction targets. 7 years later, no country has met its commitments, and global CO2 emissions are still increasing. Also at Paris in 2015, world governments agreed to provide $100 billion to a Green Climate Fund (GCF) each year—a fraction of what the new loss and damages agreement would require. the GCF is nowhere near $100 billion in total, much less the $100 billion annually required by the agreement.

Despite all the emissions spewed, protests undertaken, 5-star meals shared, solemn presentations made, blustery speeches given, and treaties and agreements signed, 27 COPs have produced no emission reductions. Despite a significant decline in emissions from developed countries relative to the trend in developing countries since the first treaty was signed in 1992, emissions increased overall, despite the imposition of numerous regulatory restrictions and taxes on fossil fuel development and use, plus hundreds of billions of dollars being spent to transition to greener technologies, because the goals proposed in these various climate agreements would have set back the world’s economic development by decades, if not centuries. The idea of ending fossil fuel use by government fiat, when no equivalent replacement is waiting in the wings, puts in a Hobbes quote: life in such a society would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Imagine that future as the Donner Party, not the garden of Eden.

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The Swiss, like other Europeans, had electric vehicles as a way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and meeting the nation’s CO2 reduction commitments. Switzerland's electric power supply comes almost entirely from renewables (70%) and nuclear (29%). Hydropower by itself, long a mainstay of Switzerland’s power grid, accounts for 61% of electric power generated.

The Swiss are now considering banning the use of electric vehicles for “nonessential” purposes. Switzerland’s electric power supplies are tight, and using electric vehicles, which of course requires charging them, is to be discouraged in order to avoid “load shedding,” meaning planned outages for specific customers or neighborhoods.

The Swiss, like other European nations, are blaming lack of access to Russian gas. Although Switzerland did rely on Russian imports for approximately 43% of the natural gas, almost all of that gas is for home heating or industrial and commercial uses. All fossil fuels combined have fallen to almost zero as a source of electricity. Switzerland does not have a single gas power plant devoted full-time to electric power, and it closed its sole oil-powered plant in 1999.

What caused the shortfall in Swiss electric power? Increasing electric power demand from Switzerland’s push to decarbonize transportation emissions, combined with greater reliance on intermittent solar power and the recent closure of some nuclear power plants. In short, politically forced increases in electricity demand and politically required supply reductions are creating the electricity shortfall. Switzerland’s obsession with cutting emissions is threatening the Swiss’s standard of living.

The Associated Press is reporting that France, where nuclear power has long been the most significant source of electric power, is keeping a coal plant open beyond its planned date of closure and reopening a 2nd coal-fueled power plant that was closed to much fanfare earlier this year.

With huge government subsidies and power purchase mandates, wind and solar provide 8.4% of electricity. The end of France’s coal era seemed so certain last year that the operator of one of the country’s last coal-burning plants posted an upbeat educational video on uTube titled Let’s visit a coal plant that's going to be destroyed! But workers were back at the controls, transporting coal from storage heaps and refiring furnaces, as part of emergency efforts to keep the heat and electricity on this winter.

If the state of the planet is so dire, why not just take the hit and tell the French people that living with less and at times no power is a “necessary evil” if they are to save the planet from a catastrophe caused by greenhouse gas emissions? France could have a “climate lockdown” like what it did 2 years ago with COVID.

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A study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications found offshore wind industrial facilities do previously unrecognized harm to marine ecosystems. A team of scientists from various German research institutes and universities examined industrial wind projects in the North Sea, where the world’s largest offshore wind project is found. Running multiple simulations through mathematical models, the scientists analyzed the “systematic, large-scale, time-integrated response of the ocean to large offshore wind farm clusters,” concluding the “results provide evidence that the ongoing off shore wind farm developments can have a substantial impact on the structuring of coastal marine ecosystems on basin scales.” The model simulations indicate the “wind wake” effect of OWFs (the effect turbines individually and collectively have on wind speeds, ocean currents, and sea life) could reduce annual primary productivity—the ability of microbial life, algae, phytoplankton, plants, and animals to obtain food and flourish—in the area encompassed by and beyond the wind farms by 10% or more. Less food for endangered whales and other ocean creatures is not a good thing. The same modeling indicates OWFs slow ocean currents, resulting in less cycling of dissolved oxygen in affected areas and thereby reducing oxygen concentrations. Lower oxygen levels are bad for marine life. Separately, these negative effects on the marine ecosystem in OWF areas indicate the OWFs will harm many species and disrupt ecosystem interconnections. Cumulatively, the harm will probably be much greater, including making it harder for endangered species such as the North Atlantic whale to recover or even survive.

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