Glaciers are Outliving the Environmentalist Who Predicted Their Doom

 Daniel Greenfield

"This August I visited Glacier National Park in Montana," Gianna Kelly, the founder of Climb for Conservation, wrote in the Huffington Post. "I am still stunned to have learned the following fact:  by 2020, no glaciers will exist in Glacier National Park." Kelly, who had worked for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, wrote that back in the first year of the Obama administration. It might stun her more to learn that Obama is out of the White House and that the glaciers of Glacier National Park are still there and waiting to be visited. Throughout the Obama era, visitors to Glacier National Park were frequently harangued with false claims that the glaciers would all be gone in a decade. These warnings decorated dioramas and trash cans even as the hysterical propaganda become more ridiculous with every passing year. In time for the 2019 summer season at Glacier National Park, the embarrassing signs claiming that the glaciers won’t be there next year have begun coming down. But the doomsday predictions won’t leave. The melting glaciers of Glacier have been the subject of countless media stories and at least one book, The Melting World: A Journey Across America’s Vanishing Glaciers, from St. Martin’s Press, which excitingly promised to chronicle the “the first extinction of a mountain ecosystem in what is expected to be a series of such global calamities as humanity faces the prospect of a world without alpine ice.” Melting World followed Daniel Fagre, who heads the Climate Change in Mountain Ecosystems Project for the United States Geological Survey, and is the figure most associated with the 2020 number. Fagre had told the book’s author back in 2008 that all the glaciers would be gone in 10 to 12 years. The USGS global warming expert has been quoted in media outlets every year predicting the death of the glaciers... The glaciers of Glacier seem likely to outlive the environmentalist who had spent the bulk of his career predicting their doom. And, if the Department of the Interior cleans house, they will outlive his career...MORE

Ninth Circuit blocks Trump's second attempt to stop children's climate lawsuit

A federal appeals court has rejected the Trump administration's second attempt to throw out a climate change lawsuit by a group of children. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals' three-judge panel unanimously rejected the administration's request for a judicial writ barring the lawsuit, Juliana v. United States, from being heard. “We denied the government’s first mandamus petition, concluding that it had not met the high bar for relief at that stage of the litigation. No new circumstances justify this second petition, and we again decline to grant mandamus relief,” read the court's order. Our Children’s Trust, representing 21 children in the lawsuit, said the ruling means the case will be heard. "This is a clean case about fundamental constitutional rights of children that not only deserves to be heard, but in our system of law, Article III courts have a duty to hear and decide this case," said Julia Olson, co-counsel in the case. "The Ninth Circuit’s opinion reflects that.”...MORE

U.S. CO2 Levels Drop Again — So Why Aren't Green Groups Rejoicing?

Once more, science provides bad news for global warming alarmists. U.S. CO2 levels again declined during 2017, despite overall global output again rising. Credit U.S. fracking and the natural gas boom. But don't worry: the hysteria won't end.
The new report, based on U.S. data, shows clearly the U.S. continuing downward trend.
"The U.S. emitted 15.6 metric tons of CO2 per person in 1950," wrote the Daily Caller. "After rising for decades, it's declined in recent years to 15.8 metric tons per person in 2017, the lowest measured levels in 67 years."
That's right. 67 years. Green groups and leftist climate extremists should be exulting. The U.S. has found a way to produce more GDP — making all of us better off — with less energy.
Meanwhile, Europe has imposed massive economy-deadening regulations on its economies in order to reduce CO2 output. How has that worked?
Last year, European output of CO2 rose 1.5%, while U.S. output fell 0.5%. For the record, the disaster predicted when President Trump left the Paris climate agreement and rejected draconian EPA restrictions on power plants hasn't materialized. On the contrary, the U.S. model has been shown to be superior.
...The U.S. Energy Information Administration's latest energy report notes that, from 2005 to 2017, U.S. energy related emissions of carbon dioxide plunged by 861 million metric tons, a 14% drop. It's both a result of the decline due to the Great Recession and the fracking revolution.
The EIA forecast expects a slight uptick over the next two  years in the U.S. as the economy continues its Trump boom. But it will still be way below where it was 13 years ago.
Question: Over the same period, how did the rest of the world do? Emissions rose by 21% to 6.04 billion metric tons over the 12 years, mostly due to booming economic growth in India and China, where coal-fired energy output continues to expand.
The truth, and it's proven by the hard data, is that CO2 made in the USA will not choke the world to death or cause it to massively overheat. And you can thank capitalism for that.
Because capitalism, unlike socialism and its welfare-state kin, hates waste. So it does all it can to be efficient. That means using as little energy as possible to make things. And this predates any of the current CO2 hysteria.
In the U.S., the data are clear and utterly convincing: In 1949, it took 1,098 metric tons of CO2 emissions to produce $1 million in GDP in the U.S., after adjusting for inflation. Today, it takes just 301 metric tons to produce that same million dollars, after inflation — a 73% gain in carbon-efficiency.

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Massive Climate Funding By Wealthy Foundations Failed To Sway Public Opinion

A recent study detailing how and where environmental philanthropic grants are allocated shows a lack of “intellectual diversity on the climate issue,” according to leading political scientist, Roger Pielke, Jr. The study, authored by Matthew Nisbet, Professor of Communication Studies and Affiliate Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University, analyzed $556.7 million in “behind-the-scenes” grants distributed by 19 major environmental foundations from 2011-2015 in the immediate aftermath of the failure to pass cap-and-trade legislation in 2010. Nisbet found that more than 80 percent of those funds were devoted to promoting renewable energy, communicating about and limiting climate change and opposing fossil fuels, while only two percent, or $10.5 million, was invested in technologies that would lower carbon emissions like carbon capture storage or nuclear energy. The donations themselves were also very concentrated; more than half of the money disbursed by the philanthropies was directed to 20 organizations in total. Some of the more prominent recipients and grant totals cited by Nisbet include the Sierra Club receiving at least $48.9 million, National Resources Defense Council’s $14.1 million, and Environmental Defense Fund’s $13.4 million. “One of the conclusions that I think is probably the most important from the Nisbet study is that there’s not a lot of support for intellectual diversity on the climate issue, which is a shame because what the world’s doing isn’t working,” Pielke, a professor at the University of Colorado Center for Science & Technology Policy Research, told Western Wire. “So you’d think that there’d be at least some resources going into looking at new approaches, alternatives, even if they’re contingency plans.” But according to Nisbet’s research, that is not where the vast majority of environmental grants are being applied. Funding for non-profit journalism, communications plans, and political campaigns dwarfs that of developing new technologies for carbon abatement. And yet, despite more than $150 million being invested in messaging, polls show that the push has failed to register climate change as a top-tier policy concern for Americans...MORE

UN climate talks stalled as developing countries demand long-promised $100 billion aid from richer nations

Two weeks of climate talks organized by the United Nations finished with developing countries demanding more clarity from their richer counterparts on when a promised package of $100 billion in aid will materialize. Envoys from almost 200 nations are leaving Bonn, Germany, on Thursday without producing a draft negotiating text for ministers to discuss at the end of the year. Instead, they planned another round of negotiations in Bangkok before their annual conference in Poland in December. The holdup threatens to unravel three years of work to complete the Paris Agreement, a landmark deal reached in 2015 that set out an ambition to limit fossil-fuel pollution in all nations for the first time. Negotiators are working toward writing a rule book that will help bring the pact into force even as U.S. President Donald Trump vowed to withdraw from the Paris framework...MORE

A shift to manufacturing in cheaper Asian nations could thwart attempts to curb carbon emissions in line with the Paris Agreement

A rising tide of industries moving operations from China and India to less-developed Asian countries undermines global targets to reduce climate-changing emissions, researchers said. Many energy-intensive industries, including manufacturing and raw materials processing, are relocating to cheaper countries like Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand, a study by Britain's University of East Anglia (UEA) showed on Monday. "The Chinese production system is starting to transform to be more higher value-added," said Dabo Guan, professor of climate change economics at UEA and a co-author of the report. "The price of labour in China has increased quite a lot," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The shifts in production and trade will make it harder to meet the Paris Agreement goal of cutting emissions enough to keep the rise in global average temperatures to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius (3.6F) above pre-industrial times, Guan said. Efforts by smaller developing nations have a growing role to play in staying below that limit - but it could be jeopardised by the new pattern of manufacturing, the report added...MORE

Zinke grilled about edited science report

House Democrats grilled Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke this week about National Park Service officials deleting all references to the human cause of climate change in drafts of a long-awaited report. Zinke told a House Appropriations subcommittee on Wednesday that he and other political appointees at the Interior Department, which oversees the Park Service, have not seen the draft. And he repeated a vow that he will not censor scientific reports. Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting last week reported that Park Service officials had edited the scientific report, which outlines the risks of sea level rise and storm surge at 118 coastal national parks. Groups of Senate and House Democrats on Friday requested an investigation by the Interior’s inspector general. At the hearing, Zinke said the drafts were obtained through a public records request to a university and that he wants an investigation into how the media reviewed the drafts before he did. Rep. Chellie Pingree told Zinke she is concerned about sea level rise at Acadia National Park in her home state of Maine. “When that report comes out, I personally don’t want to see it edited to remove any reference,” she said. Zinke responded, “If it’s a scientific report, I’m not going to change a comma.” Earlier in the hearing, Rep. Betty McCollum, a Democrat from Minnesota, referred to a similar vow Zinke made last month at a Senate hearing. “You even challenged any member to find an altered document and now we have that proof,” she said. “This clear interference of political leadership is forcing employees to violate their scientific integrity policies and it must stop...MORE

How an ancient climate change catastrophe holds vital clues about the Earth's future

...The PETM is the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum — an ungainly name for the time that’s considered one of Earth’s best analogues to this era of modern, human-caused global warming. In a matter of a few thousand years, huge amounts of carbon were injected into the atmosphere, causing global temperatures to rise between five and eight degrees Celsius. The rapid climate change disrupted weather, transformed landscapes, acidified oceans and triggered extinctions. It took more than 150,000 years for the world to recover. If history is allowed to repeat itself, the consequences for modern life could be similarly long-lasting — which is why Wing is so determined to understand this ancient climate catastrophe. Chalk deposits at the bottom of the ocean began to dissolve as carbon dioxide made seawater more acidic. Fossils of tiny, deep sea-dwelling creatures showed evidence of an oxygen shortage — a sign that the water was getting warmer. Everywhere in the ocean, creatures adapted to the changed environment, or else they died out. On land, mammals got smaller and smaller. Ancient ancestors of horses, tiny to begin with, shrunk 30 percent to the size of house cats. Abigail Carroll, a paleoclimatologist at the University of New Hampshire, said this was probably an adaptation to the warmer weather: Smaller bodies are easier to keep cool...MORE

The video is below

Inconvenient Data: Fewer And Fewer People Die From Climate-Related Natural Disasters

...Fewer and fewer people die from climate-related natural disasters This is clearly opposite of what you normally hear, but that is because we’re often just being told of one disaster after another – telling us how *many* events are happening. The number of reported events is increasing, but that is mainly due to better reporting, lower thresholds and better accessibility (the CNN effect). For instance, for Denmark, the database only shows events starting from 1976. Instead, look at the number of dead per year, which is much harder to fudge. Given that these numbers fluctuate enormously from year to year (especially in the past, with huge droughts and floods in China), they are here presented as averages of each decade (1920-29, 1930-39 etc, with last decade as 2010-17). The data is from the most respected global database, the International Disaster Database, http://emdat.be/emdat_db/. There is some uncertainty about complete reporting from early decades, which is why this graph starts in 1920, and if anything this uncertainly means the graph *underestimates* the reduction in deaths...more

Those Fraudulent Climate Litigation Shakedowns

Paul Driessen

The ultra liberal enclaves of New York City and San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Cruz, San Mateo, Marin, and Imperial Beach, California all claim to be deeply worried about manmade climate cataclysms. They detest petroleum, oppose pipelines, fracking and onshore and offshore drilling, and strongly support renewable energy and expensive electricity: already 17-18¢ a kilowatt-hour for families, rich and poor. They also have huge government pension fund shortfalls (NYC alone has a pension debt of some $65 billion), and are suing BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhilips and Royal Dutch Shell. They’re gunning for a collective litigation windfall of several hundred billion dollars, to help bail them out. (They’d probably sue coal companies, too, but the Obama era war on coal drove many into bankruptcy.) Their fundamental cause of action claims greenhouse gases (primarily carbon dioxide) from burning oil and natural gas are disrupting Earth’s climate and weather, causing heat waves and frigid winters, floods and droughts, more frequent and intense hurricanes, melting ice packs and rising seas – costing the cities billions of dollars for repairs and adaptation. The calamities pose an “existential threat” to the cities, humanity and our planet. If they’re not happening already, they will within decades, the litigants assert. The oil companies have known about these risks for decades, the cities and counties continue, but hid the information from the public and failed to disclose it in annual reports, stock offerings and other documents. They are thus guilty of fraud, negligent and deliberate failure to warn, product design defects, trespass with dangerous pollutants, and being a public and private nuisance...The ironies are delicious – ripe for being exploited in courtrooms, Congress and courts of public opinion. Start with the fraud allegations. Much to the chagrin of scientists who say humans are not causing climate cataclysms, these oil companies’ reports and press releases have frequently said fossil fuel emissions are a real concern, and the companies haven’t funded climate chaos skeptics for years. Where’s the fraud?...Compare that to Marin County, whose court pleadings assert a 99% risk of catastrophic storm surges and flooding, because of oil and gas combustion. San Mateo County cites a 93% likelihood of climate-related surges, floods and sewer overflows. San Francisco claims an “imminent risk of catastrophic storm surges.” But SF’s 2017 municipal bond offering downplayed the risks, saying it is “unable to predict whether sea-level rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding will occur.” Marin and San Mateo made similar statements to current and prospective bond investors. Ditto for other litigants and climate chaos claims. Courts don’t like forked tongues, prior inconsistent statements, duplicity or fraud. Neither do investors or SEC commissioners. Watching this lawsuit vs. bond offerings tar baby play out in court will be entertaining, and perhaps even one more reason to dismiss the frivolous lawsuit with prejudice...more

Trial Lawyers Are Using Global Warming ‘Attribution’ Studies To Sue Oil Companies

Trial lawyers are using a relatively new area of climate research as ammunition to sue oil companies on behalf of cities allegedly being harmed by man-made global warming. Climate lawsuits have been brought against oil companies in the past, but now trial lawyers are using “attribution” studies to sue oil companies for billions of dollars. “All of these earlier cases didn’t have the benefit of current attribution science, in terms of drawing the link between emissions and impacts, and emissions during a particular period, and attribution to particular corporations,” Vic Sher, a partner at Sher Edling LLP, told The Verge. “We have all that information now,” Sher said. Sher Edling is handling climate lawsuits for six California cities. The firm’s legal complaints utilize attribution studies to link alleged effects of global warming to damages, including sea level rise....more

New film sheds light on the disappearance of Colorado snowpack

Jane Zelikova’s The End of Snow will be one of many award-winning films set to play at the Colorado Environmental Film Festival this week. The picture premiered at the Boulder Adventure Film Festival in 2016 and has been on tour with the Telluride and Back Country Film fests over the past year. “It’s been viewed by people all over, people we would never have thought, I got an award in Estonia which is weird but wonderful,” said Zelikova. Zelikova is an ecologist who studies climate change. She has a Ph.D. from CU Boulder and has an active project at the University of Wyoming looking at the impacts of dust deposition on snowpack. Her film, The End of Snow, focuses on the effects of dust deposition in mountainous regions. Skiers and snowboarders in Colorado may have noticed the thin layer of red dust that cakes the modest amount of snow this year, especially in the Southwest region of the state. This red dust is blown from land in Arizona and Utah where farmers and ranchers are grazing cattle too early in the winter, when there isn’t enough rain to wet and maintain the soil. Grazing when it’s too dry creates a large amount of dust that is then carried and absorbed into our snowpack. The soil is dark — leading to a higher absorption of heat — which then melts the snow much quicker than normal. Even so, Zelikova understands the difficulty farmers face because of the incredible amount of work they have to finish in a time costly manner. Furthermore, adapting to the changing climate needs a reform on all levels of the farming industry. “It’s not to vilify—it’s ranchers and farmers who have BLM leases that, in the past, would’ve been able to graze without having so much soil disturbance. But because the climate is changing, plants are growing earlier, [animals are] grazing earlier,” she stated. Her movie, The End of Snow, was filmed in the mountainous regions of Wyoming and Colorado, where many ranchers live. It tells the story of three men whose lives are interlinked with the decreasing levels of snow across the Rocky Mountain Region. “As we were thinking about how to structure the film I kind of realized that me talking about dust deposition would be maybe a little bit boring,” Zelikova said. She wanted to give viewers an insight into her research through telling the stories of real people...more

Al Gore under fire for claiming icy storm is ‘exactly what we should expect from climate crisis’

By Valerie Richardson -

Former Vice President Al Gore is taking heat for his claim that the icy nor’easter blanketing the eastern seaboard with snow and freezing temperatures is “exactly what we should expect from the climate crisis.” The debate over global warming’s impact on Winter Storm Grayson was already raging when Mr. Gore jumped in with a tweet positing that the storm was consistent with human-caused climate change, and citing an article by Penn State climate scientist Michael E. Mann. “It’s bitter cold in parts of the US, but climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann explains that’s exactly what we should expect from the climate crisis,” said Mr. Gore in a Thursday tweet. Climate Depot’s Marc Morano pointed out that the climate-change-can-cause-cold-weather theory was never advanced in Mr. Gore’s 2006 global-warming film “An Inconvenient Truth,” which won an Academy Award for best documentary. “Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ did not warn of record cold and increasing snowfalls as a consequence of man-made global warming,” said Mr. Morano. “And as recently as 2009, Gore was hyping the lack of snow as evidence for man-made global warming.” Anthony Watts, who runs the climate-skeptical website Watts Up With That, blasted the “sheer ridiculousness” of Mr. Gore’s comment in a post headlined, “Goremongering and Mannhandling the reality of winter weather ‘bombs.’” A leader of the climate-change “consensus,” Mr. Mann argued that “warmer oceans also mean more moisture in the atmosphere, even more energy to strengthen the storm, and the potential for larger snowfalls.” Other scientists have said that such “bomb cyclone” storms aren’t particularly rare. Roger A. Pielke Sr., University of Colorado Boulder meteorologist, said the culprit behind the storm was cold air, not warm air. “For those who claim USA/Canada nor’easter is stronger because of ‘global warming’, they apparently do not realize that [it’s] so strong because of especially strong horizontal temperature gradient in troposphere. It ‘bombed’ because of usually cold air!” said Mr. Pielke on Twitter...more

EPA moving quickly to write new climate rule in 2018

Environmental Protection Agency staffers are under orders from the Trump administration to complete a replacement for former President Barack Obama’s major climate change rule by the end of the year, far faster than the normal pace the agency uses to develop major regulations, according to three sources familiar with the process. That short time frame would give EPA lawyers the chance to defend the regulation from the legal challenges it is certain to face during President Donald Trump's current term. That would allow the proposal from Scott Pruitt's EPA to avoid the fate of the Obama EPA's Clean Power Plan, which was held up in court and is now being rescinded by a new administration that opposed the original carbon dioxide regulation. EPA's air chief, Bill Wehrum, has directed staffers to develop a schedule for conducting analysis, public hearings and revisions that would be completed in 2018. Staff would need to complete a proposal by summer and allow time for the White House to review it before publication. The tight timeline would mean that the agency would have to repeal and replace the Obama power-sector climate rule simultaneously but in separate processes. EPA would also have to finish revising a separate carbon rule for future fossil fuel plants, which must be in place in order to regulate existing generators. Jeff Holmstead, a partner at the law firm Bracewell who ran EPA's air office under former President George W. Bush, called the time frame “ambitious but not impossible.”...more

Trump reverses Obama, eliminates climate from list of national security threats

President Trump will announce Monday his new National Security Strategy, putting his own stamp on a defense plan that reverses an Obama administration policy by eliminating climate change from a list of threats to national security. Senior administration officials said Sunday that Mr. Trump will release the plan Monday afternoon in a speech that outlines his emphasis on protecting American economic power as well as securing the homeland. Officials briefing reporters Sunday confirmed that Mr. Trump’s national security playbook eliminates climate change as a priority in defense planning. “Climate change is not identified as a national security threat,” an official said, adding that the position is consistent with Mr. Trump’s decision earlier this year to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate accord that was signed by President Obama. The official said the importance of “climate and environmental stewardship are discussed” in the plan...more

Federal Court Hears Oral Arguments in Climate Change Lawsuit From Young People

By Glenn McDonald 

A bold climate change lawsuit faces a pivotal test this week as a federal court considers whether young people can sue the US government for failing to protect the environment. The lawsuit, Juliana v. United States, has attracted growing interest in the legal world for its unique and unprecedented approach to climate change. The plaintiffs — 21 young, US citizens aged 10 to 21 — are essentially suing the US federal government for depriving them of a secure future. The basis of the litigation is a novel legal theory. According to the plaintiffs, the US federal government is responsible for holding natural resources in trust for its citizens. The government is violating that public trust doctrine, in regard to environmental protection, according to the lawsuit. More specifically, the plaintiffs insist that the US government has failed to heed the scientific evidence on how to stop or reverse climate change — evidence that in many cases was provided by the government's own dedicated scientific agencies. For the case to actually move forward and go to trial, it must past muster with the Ninth Circuit court, which began hearing oral arguments today. Attorneys for the Trump administration are asking the court to dismiss the case on the grounds that a broad mandate from the courts to fundamentally change environmental policy would be impossible to implement. The plaintiffs' case is led by the group Our Children’s Trust, which has previously brought similar litigation at the state and federal level, with mixed success. In the case now before the Ninth Circuit, attorneys will argue that the US government is violating the plaintiffs' constitutional rights. “Their complaint asserts that, through the government's affirmative actions that cause climate change, it has violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property, as well as failed to protect essential public trust resources,” the Our Children's Trust said in a statement. Lower courts have allowed the lawsuit to proceed. In fact, a trial date has already been scheduled for February. This week's proceedings will determine whether that date will be postponed or canceled...more

Below is their complaint: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VIitxrWPX9O1VXzNVOnxlnEZozGRNlox/view?usp=sharing
 

Medical Journals and the Global Warming Noble Lie

 John Dale Dunn, MD, JD

For many years I have been collecting research on the effect of warming on human health, counting on the help of Dr. Craig Idso (MS Agronomy, PhD Geography), an energetic researcher who is constantly scanning the scientific literature for research on climate then putting it up at his web site CO2 Science.Org in archives of articles.  The Subject Index includes human health.  Idso, Dunn and others have written extensive discussions on warming and human health, including chapter 9 in Climate Change Reconsidered (2009) and Chapter 7 in Climate Change Reconsidered II (2013), both published by Heartland Institute of Chicago.   Our conclusions, supported by the medical research around the world studying rates of disease and death, are that warming will benefit human health and welfare, for obvious reasons -- warm is easier on the plants and animals, so also humans. 
Lancet is a multi-faceted medical journal entity, iconic in medical history, founded in England in 1823, now with offices in London, New York and Beijing, publishing multiple specialty and general medical journals on line and in print.  Lancet published in 2015 a long term and planet wide study of death impacts of hot and cold extreme or moderately extreme ambient temperatures, by Gasparinni and 22 other authors, 384 locations around the globe, 27 years studying 74 million deaths, and their results showed that cold and cooler ambient temperatures killed 17 times more people than warmer and hot temperatures. On November 1, 2017 Lancet published an article by a group it had created called the “Lancet Countdown on health and climate change,” and the 64 authors produced a 50 page paper with a 195 references that declares a global health crisis due to warming (Climate Change).Consider the contradiction.  Warm is good, warm is deadly.  Which will it be?  Could the Lancet editors and the Countdown group they put together be in the bag for the warmer/climate change movement?  Prepared to do what they can to promote claims that terrible things will happen to people because of warming?  Could this be pushback on their enemy, the warming-skeptical Trump Administration, for leaving the Paris Climate Treaty? ...more

Prominent environmentalist proposes a climate dictatorship

Bjørn Lomborg

Prominent environmentalist proposes a climate dictatorship because democracy is just not willing to do his policies.

The gall of this argument is staggering. It is even more staggering that the Swedish newspaper bringing this large interview today does not clearly mark the viewpoint as extreme and unreasonable. Instead, they seriously have their political analyst muse about whether a climate dictatorship is really necessary, and ending with a conclusion of ‘yeah, possibly.’

The claim comes from Jørgen Randers, professor of climate strategy at BI Norwegian Business School. His main claim to fame is as co-author of the 1972 Limits to Growth book, which scared a generation to believe we would run out of all resources and kill humanity with suffocating air pollution. Time magazine headlined their 1972 story on the book: “The Worst Is Yet to Be?” and it began: “The furnaces of Pittsburgh are cold; the assembly lines of Detroit are still. In Los Angeles, a few gaunt survivors of a plague desperately till freeway center strips, backyards and outlying fields, hoping to raise a subsistence crop. London’s offices are dark, its docks deserted. In the farm lands of the Ukraine, abandoned tractors litter the fields: there is no fuel for them. The waters of the Rhine, Nile and Yellow rivers reek with pollutants. Fantastic? No, only grim inevitability if society continues its present dedication to growth and “progress.””

Of course, their scare scenarios were almost entirely wrong. You can read more in my Foreign Affairs article and my short summary in Project Syndicate below.

Now Professor Randers — correctly – tells us that democracy is unwilling and unable to pay the exorbitant amounts that he and many other environmentalists are asking us to pay. Surveys of willingness to pay for climate policies show most people in the US are willing to pay $180 per household or $70 per person. In China, the average willingness to pay is $30 per person per year. (They would all rather use it on education, health, poverty alleviation etc.)

Yet, the current Paris promises will cost each American $500 per year, each European $600 and each Chinese $170. Of course, most Americans and Europeans are unlikely to elect leaders that will actually incur a much larger cost than most people are willing to pay.

Moreover, these promises will not *solve* global warming – indeed, they will together achieve almost nothing: By the UN’s own estimate, the Paris Treaty will reduce emissions by less than 1% of what would be needed to keep temperature rises under 2°C and yet cost $1-2 trillion per year by 2030, mostly in reduced GDP growth. So Paris will deliver far less than what most people expect, yet will cost much more than most people are willing to pay.

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Anger erupts over EPA’s apparent muzzling of scientists

The Trump administration’s decision to prevent government scientists from presenting climate change-related research at a conference in Rhode Island on Monday gave the event a suddenly high profile, with protesters outside, media inside and angry lawmakers and academics criticizing the move. “This type of political interference, or scientific censorship — whatever you want to call it — is ill-advised and does a real disservice to the American public and public health,” Sen. Jack Reed (D), Rhode Island’s senior senator, said at an opening news conference for the State of Narragansett Bay and Its Watershed event in Providence. “We can debate the issues. We can have different viewpoints. But we should all be able to objectively examine the data and look at the evidence.” Reed was joined Monday by the rest of the state’s congressional delegation, all of them Democrats, who took turns chastising the Environmental Protection Agency for instructing two of its scientists and one contractor not to speak at the conference Monday...more

Judge Allows 'Necessity' Defense by Climate Activists in Oil Pipeline Protest

A judge in Minnesota has cleared the way for an unusual and potentially groundbreaking defense, allowing climate activists to use the "necessity" of confronting the climate crisis as justification for temporarily shutting down two crude oil pipelines last year. Robert Tiffany, a district court judge in Clearwater County, Minnesota, ruled on Oct. 11 that three activists who were arrested and charged with felonies last year can argue that they violated the law in order to protect citizens from the impacts of global warming and that they had no legal alternative. "It is extremely unusual for a court to allow presentation of the necessity defense by environmental protesters," said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. "It will be fascinating to see how this trial goes and how much evidence the court allows."...more