- Ottawa, Canada’s capital, experienced its lowest temperature on April 25 in almost 70 years, proving… nothing. Except that weather fluctuates. Also true when it has a hot day, BTW.
- Oops, they did it again. Canada’s federal Liberal administration and Ontario’s provincial “conservative” one just spewed forth another $5 billion in subsidies for yet more EV batteries that will supposedly appear in just four years and create 1,000 new jobs at a bargain-basement… uh… five million dollars a job. If they appear. Please stop. Just stop.
- It’s not only on EV subsidies where climate boosters fail to check the math. An alert reader sends us a Newsweek puff piece on a high-speed, all-electric, “zero emissions” rail link between Rancho Cucamonga outside Los Angeles and Las Vegas, Nevada. And woot woot “it is anticipated that there will be a reduction in vehicle miles traveled of 700,000 miles per year, removing 400,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year and supporting both California and Nevada climate strategies”. Riiiiiight. Except to produce over half a ton of CO2 per mile, which you’d have to do to spew out 400,000 tones over 700,000 miles, would require burning about 38 gallons of gas per mile. Perhaps somebody looked up the conventional estimate of just under half a kilo of CO2 per mile and figured, ton? Kilo? What’s the diff? And how many billions will this train cost? No, never mind. We wouldn’t trust their estimate anyway.
- As we’ve often noted, climate alarmists are remarkably flexible about when exactly man-made global warming hit. It seems to depend on which data series you’re looking at, and maybe not seeing very well. Thus Gavin Schmidt, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and known on X as @ClimateOfGavin so not in any way a monomaniac, posted recently “Apropos of nothing, we have lake ice duration data from Wisconsin that goes back to the mid-19th Century: Ice duration has shrunk by about a month over that period, and this winter was the second shortest duration (after 2001/2002) in the record.” But as Tom Nelson retorted, “if CO2 is really the Wisconsin lake ice duration control knob, why did CO2 completely fail to operate as that control knob from maybe 1890 to 1980?” Well see um uh the laws of physics and chemistry were different then or something.
- So you admit it: Canary Media says “Critics question assumptions at core of California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard”. No, they haven’t finally discovered that climate models overstate the problem. Instead the “director of Stanford University’s Climate and Energy Policy Program” who “leads a team of climate scientists”, no less, worries that the CARB has made a series of rulings that allow “the Low Carbon Fuel Standard — a marquee program that raises some $4 billion each year to cut carbon emissions from transportation — to rely heavily on crop- and cow-manure-based biofuels that Wara and other climate scientists say are not only an ineffective way to spend the money but also actively harmful for the planet.” What, you’re saying a government might bend the science to suit vested interests, whether farmers or alarmists? Aha! Why weren’t we told?
- When the science is not settled, it’s worse than the settled science. Thus Science, the magazine not the discipline, laments that “Clearer skies may be accelerating global warming”. Yeah. Boo to cleaning up the air, that’s for sure. The piece claims falsely that “When 2023 turned out to be the hottest year in history, it underscored the warnings of some prominent climate scientists, including James Hansen, that the pace of global warming was accelerating and had entered a dangerous new phase.” Actually it showed that the models were leaving out something important, since none of them saw it coming or could explain it even once it did. (And it wasn’t the hottest year in history; the Roman Warm Period was hotter.) And as usual a finding that it’s not CO2 (as in “a set of NASA instruments in space … called the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES), have detected a marked rise in the amount of solar energy the planet has absorbed – well beyond the warming expected from rising greenhouse gases”) proves that it is CO2 (as in “a drop in light-reflecting pollution because of power-plant scrubbers and cleaner fuels” plus “Melting snow and ice expose darker land, and warming can cause low marine clouds to dissipate, revealing a dark ocean”) once you correct for it not being. QED.
See Comments 
Tidbits
01 May 2024 | News Roundup
And how is that high-speed train from San Francisco to LA working out so far?Years behind schedule and many billions over budget.And last that I
heard nowhere near complete.And nothing makes me bristle more than hearing of the billions of taxpayer dollars pledged to finance electric battery
manufacturing.As if subsidizing the end purchase of these EV's wasn't bad enough.Most people don't want to buy one.I predict dealerships full of EV's
sitting unsold in a few years,or sooner.
And do you really want to buy a cheap EV made in Communist China?Bad enough that we buy almost everything else from there.
Posted this to LinkedIn, I would like to see it propagated everywhere.
A personal thought on the carbon tax.
The Trudeau Liberals insist it’s the magic bullet for slaying the imaginary CO2 demon, and they quote a bunch of economists who agree.
But here’s the thing. Every one of those economists say that in return for imposing the carbon tax you eliminate all other programs, caps, limits and regulations and let the tax work as that is most efficient.
But they don’t do that.
Instead we get an endless series of programs and mandates such as all vehicle sales must be EVs by 2035. But such a thing is unnecessary if you believe the carbon tax will work.
It’s bad enough they argue it’s too small to have an effect on inflation and the cost of living while at the same time saying it’s forcing dramatic change. 🙄
Is there anyone in that cabinet smart enough to realize that every pronouncement they make confirms they don’t believe in the carbon tax?
Mike, I’m not sure construction has even started and costs have ballooned over $100billion.
Must be the same group that built the TMX expansion
“Government”.
Those who think that the $5billion in subsidies for yet another EV battery factory will "create 1,000 new jobs" haven't learned the lesson from Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson." First, how many jobs will be killed in the process or stealing that $5billion from taxpayers? That's $5billion that consumers won't be able to spend on things they want more than EV batteries, $5billion that won't find its way into the cash registers of retailers, $5billion that won't be paid in wages to retail sales people.... It will silently kill many multiples of 1,000 jobs. Second, the jobs "created" in the new EV factory will not be net new jobs; the factory will be staffed by employees drawn from other sectors of the economy. If some of the people formerly employed in the retail sector are able to retrain and end up on the floor of the new EV factory, these two factors might cancel each other out for a dozen or so jobs; but the unnatural disruption to the economy makes even that uncertain.
ALL of the numbers quoted in the zero-emissions rail link tidbit are absurd. Some math-illiterate along the way obviously garbled the story beyond recognition. Anyone with Google on their computer could discover that the distance between Rancho Cucamonga and Las Vegas is 230 miles by car. Therefore, 700,000 miles of vehicular traffic reduced per year amounts to 3,044 one-way trips per year, or 8.34 per day on average. If the average vehicle making the trip had, optimistically, four passengers, then the train would be transporting less than 34 people per day (one way) on average - or 17 round trips. Nobody is going to propose building a train link to accommodate 17 travelers per day. Methinks the "alert reader" wasn't so alert after all, and neither was the compiler of this segment of CDN.