- From the “one rule for thee” file, Canada’s governor-general Mary Simon commuted by jet airplane between Nova Scotia and Ottawa during the pandemic because she liked living at home rather than in the official residence, so when she says “It is up to us to act responsibly and sustainably” she means you not her. Evidently hardships are for peasants, as are carbon restrictions.
- From the “took ya long enough” file, the Guardian tells us Antarctica is finally melting, this time for sure. “Record low Antarctic sea ice in recent years may be a sign the region has entered a ‘new regime’ of low sea ice coverage driven by warming, research suggests…. ‘While for many years Antarctic sea ice increased despite increasing global temperatures, it appears that we may now be seeing the inevitable decline, long projected by climate models,’ the study found.” We especially like the bit where they treat ice not melting due to supposed surging heat as perfectly normal, nothing to see here settled science.
- From the “you promised us a catastrophe” file, we fondly recall the Guardian 2004 outburst: “Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters. A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.” We had some fun with that one. And actually Britain did have a cool, damp summer, come to think of it.
- Ryan Maue reminds us that in March President Joe Biden told “The Daily Show” that “If we don’t keep the temperature from going above 1.5 degrees Celsius raised, then we’re in real trouble. That whole generation is damned. I mean, that’s not hyperbole, really, truly in trouble.” Good grief. If that’s not hyperbole, please don’t use any.
- This just in from the New York Times on the Chinese Communist Party that John Kerry and others believe is a true believer on climate change: “When wildfires swept across Maui last month with destructive fury, China’s increasingly resourceful information warriors pounced. The disaster was not natural, they said in a flurry of false posts that spread across the internet, but was the result of a secret ‘weather weapon’ being tested by the United States. To bolster the plausibility, the posts carried photographs that appeared to have been generated by artificial intelligence programs, making them among the first to use these new tools to bolster the aura of authenticity of a disinformation campaign.” Our buddies in Beijing.
- From the “yeah, if” file, The Economist warns of an “almighty supply crunch” in the metals and other minerals needed for the fantasy energy transition where we cheerfully, breezily, bucolically manage by 2050 to create “15 times today’s wind power, 25 times more solar, a tripling of the grid’s size and a 60-fold increase in the fleet of electric vehicles (EVs).” But if absolutely everything goes perfectly we might not face disaster. As in “with nimble buyers, steadfast governments and luck, the green-metal bump need not cause an electric-car crash”. Great. (As Joel Kotkin adds in the National Post, it is mighty strange that the Canadian and American governments are pedal-to-the-metal on making us buy EVs, but grimly hostile to mining critical materials here rather than in dirty, coal-heavy China.)
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20 Sep 2023 | News Roundup
The Economist seems to have gotten very bad at math and rational thinking. They think the world can construct electrical transmission capability of 7.7% of the current grid every year for the next 26 years, the equivalent of over half the current wind generation every year and the equivalent of all the current solar generation capacity every year foe the next 26 years. Somehow I don’t believe they really believe that, the more likely explanation is they are deliberately lying.