- Speaking of greenwashing, a few years back a highly-touted celebrity-studded goody-greeny “Aspiration Partners” looked set to go public and produce a major wind(power)fall for backers from Steve Ballmer and Leonardo DiCaprio to Orlando Bloom and Cindy Crawford. With an updated “Greed is good” motto that “Clean rich is the new filthy rich” it made all the right noises including its former CEO running for the Democrats, endorsed by (ugh) Bill Clinton. But it seems there was too much hype and hurry and not enough homework and now the SEC and DOJ are closing in. Looks like virtue-signaling and virtue aren’t the same, incredibly.
- The unkindest cut: Heatmap emails “Biden Is the Problem” and implores him to take one for the team and step aside because “Biden Is Imperiling a Tremendous Climate Legacy/ If he loses – which, at this stage, seems likely – this will all have been for nought.” What legacy other than obscene spending on failed green grifts, we might well ask. But suddenly everyone who last week insisted he was sharp, focused and the man of the hour now knows he’s a tongue-tied “diminished” liability. Now if they could just reconsider the stifling consensus on climate…
- Untethered from facts, climate alarmists are now following Icarus on a perilous flight path. Canada’s Environment and Climate Change minister Steven Guilbeault recently Xed out “Results are in: June heat waves in central & Eastern Canada were 7-10°C above average due to climate change. ☀️🌡️/ 🌍 @environmentca is now assessing how human-caused climate change impacts severe weather.” 10C above average? So that 33C heat wave would have been 23C without “climate change”? The attribution crowd has tried to make these claims before, and they melt on close inspection.
- The sort of thing Guilbeault is hallucinating about was described glowingly by Canada’s state broadcaster thusly: “For the first time, the Canadian government has conducted a rapid analysis of a period of extreme heat and determined its connection to human-caused climate change. The analysis conducted by Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) found that a heat wave in Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada between June 17 and 20 was made two to 10 times more likely because of climate change.” Right. Between two and 10 times. As in a monkey throwing darts would be more precise.
- Mind you under the heading “More than 100 heat records were smashed on June 19” the CBC does show that, for instance, Miscou Island in New Brunswick recorded a high of 34.1, fully 7°C above the previous 2006 mark, and Fermont Quebec at 32.9 beat 1992’s 26 by a similar margin. But unless the suggestion is that the planet has warmed by at least 5°C in the last 20 years, these results must represent some sort of anomaly not a trend. Unless of course you do “attribution studies”… for heat records only. Cold records are just weather.
- Go woke, go dark. Minnesota has mandated that all electric utilities produce only “carbon-free” electricity by 2040. And they mean it, as in they are totally clueless nits: “‘Carbon-free’ means a technology that generates electricity without emitting carbon dioxide” which of course no energy source does since, at a minimum, they all use cement which emits carbon dioxide as do, um, their employees. What’s more, at least one Minnesota company, Xcel, provides power to a lot of people in neighboring South Dakota, whose Public Utilities Commission has asked Xcel not to close coal-fired plants early because it may cause blackouts in their state. Minnesota also buys power from North Dakota, which has warned that refusing to do so violates the Constitution (the Commerce Clause) and conflicts with the Federal Power Act and infringes the authority of the EPA. So a nasty fight brewing over a disastrous policy. Great. What a transition.
- In addition to prating about “Canada’s ongoing and unwavering support for Ukraine” while sending them nothing and being caught fibbing about plans eventually to raise defence spending to well under what we promised NATO, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had the gall to lecture our wincing allies about the “indisputable fact” that “climate change is not only an existential environmental threat, but one of the defining security issues of our time.” Rising sea levels, increasingly frequent and intense natural disasters, a warming Arctic blah blah blah. Which doubtless explains why he’s as unlikely to reinforce our military in the Arctic as he is to get our emissions down. He bloviated that “Back home, our government has shown global leadership in addressing the climate crisis. We’ve placed a price on pollution that simultaneously reduces our emissions and puts more money in the pockets of eight out of ten Canadians.” Proving only that he’s a self-important blatherskite who churns out one false claim after another including inventing global leadership on carbon to deflect attention from his complete irresponsibility on the military.
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17 Jul 2024 | News Roundup
So Minnesota buys power from North Dakota and demands that it must be carbon-free? Not a problem, all that North Dakota needs to do is send a letter to Minnesota saying "let us know when you want us to switch it off, because we ain't changing".
Yet more core conspiracy theory talk from CDN this week: to wit, "green grift." Because grifts are cons, and cons are by definition based on hoaxes. When they use the term 'green', they mean the money, not the planet.
If an event was made between “two and ten times more likely”, then the probably of the event before being made more likely had to be less than 0.5 in the first case, or 0.1 in the second, because the probability after the increase can’t exceed 1.0. Having examined heatwaves in several spots in Canada, I seriously doubt that the period between Jun 17 and 20th was all that unusual. Heatwaves are outliers, and statistical analysis of outliers is mathematical quicksand. I’d love to see the analysis undergo peer review by people with expertise in statistics — like Ross McKittrick.