How much can capitalism help address the climate crisis? This is Climate One, I’m Greg Dalton.

SpaceWeatherNews @SunWeatherMan
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Trying to shoot a hole in this argument. Can’t. Any takers?
prayingforexits 🏴‍☠️
@mrexits
He is kind of asking the right questions here

There exist magic rocks that can boil water.

Boiling water gives us energy.

We stop using magic rocks because they exploded that one time.

Are we re*ed? Imagine if pre historic (sic) peoples stopped using fire because some red burnt his house down once.
10:54 AM · Dec 2, 2024

It's an interesting question. It's also a great illustration of the irrational thinking in some quarters when things like climate change are concerned. The fact is that nuclear energy is safer, with a lower rate of injury, than any energy method other than solar.

Climate scolds, people who want to keep the earth at some human-approved level, are all about "clean energy." They love the intermittent, low-energy-density sources - windmills, solar power - but can't abide and will not discuss nuclear power or "magic rocks." And when it comes to energy density, there just isn't any comparison. One fuel pellet of uranium in a light-water reactor produces as much energy as 1.3 tons of coal, 250 gallons of oil, and 34,000 cubic feet of natural gas. In a breeder reactor, the numbers are much higher: 22 tons of coal, 4,350 gallons of oil, and 590,000 cubic feet of natural gas. //

Forget what climate scolds claim to want. Look at what they are in favor of: You (not they) reducing your standard of living to meet their claimed goals. Look at the actions of the high-profile members of the opposition: Jetting around the globe in private jets, living in huge mansions a few feet above the tide line in the oceans they claim are rising out of control. They expect you to pay the price they aren’t willing to.

Do you want clean energy? This is clean energy. It's safe energy. No “still just thirty years away” fusion boondoggles are required. Not that fusion wouldn’t be even greater if we can make it work on an industrial scale, but how long have various organizations been trying to make that happen? This technology, nuclear power, especially the promising small modular reactors, is a technology we have now.

The new, improved small modular reactors described above could and should be built today. Technological societies like ours are dependent on abundant, cheap energy, and nuclear power has the ability to provide that power. Throughout our history, every major technological advance in power – from animal to machine, from wood to coal to oil to gas – has had one key characteristic in common, and that is increased energy density. Nuclear power represents just such an increase over generating electricity with coal or gas. Solar and wind power run in just the opposite direction, which is why they don’t scale up. //

anon-j5pd
a day ago
I’m an engineer and was a nuclear operator in the Navy. I’m a big supporter of nuclear power.
My dad used to work at the Palo Verde nuclear power plant in AZ. It’s the biggest nuke in the country.
Just for fun I calculated the area of solar panels required to match Palo Verde’s output. It would require a field of panels 25 miles on a side, 625 square miles of panels. I used the power conversion factor and highest rate of sunlight incidence on the panels.
Palo Verde churns out the same amount of power day and night and isn’t impacted by dust. //

They Call Me Bruce
a day ago
Can't argue with a word of this.

As for safety, I used to be fond of pointing out that more people died in Ted Kennedy's car than in every civilian nuclear accident in the US combined.

When it first appeared in their radar images, NASA scientist Chad Greene and his team of engineers weren’t sure what they were seeing.

Flying above northern Greenland in a Gulfstream III in April of this year, Greene and his crew were monitoring radar information collected from the ice sheet below when, about 150 miles east of Pituffik Space Base—formerly Thule Air Base and still the northernmost installation operated by the U.S. Armed Forces—they spotted something unexpected.

The aircraft’s radar system had detected some kind of structure buried beneath the ice.

“We didn’t know what it was at first,” recalled cryospheric scientist Alex Gardner with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). In the radar imagery, what appeared to be a massive structure had been revealed deep beneath the frozen landscape.

“We were looking for the bed of the ice,” Gardner said, “and out pops Camp Century.” //

A remote U.S. military base once used as a top-secret testing site for the deployment of nuclear missiles from the Arctic, Camp Century was constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers within the Greenland Ice Sheet in 1959. Remaining in use for less than a decade, the base was decommissioned after just eight years and abandoned beneath Greenland’s frozen landscape.

Also known as the “city under the ice,” this forgotten Cold War relic consists of a network of tunnels hewn into the near-surface portions of the ice sheet. Today, the remnants of the secretive base lay hidden beneath close to 100 feet of snow and ice that have continued to accumulate since it was decommissioned. //

Although the radar imagery obtained in April by Greene and Gardner could prove useful in terms of ongoing monitoring of such threats as melting continues, the researchers said the images of this forgotten vestige of the Cold War they obtained occurred entirely by chance.

“Our goal was to calibrate, validate, and understand the capabilities and limitations of UAVSAR for mapping the ice sheet’s internal layers and the ice-bed interface,” Greene said.

“Without detailed knowledge of ice thickness, it is impossible to know how the ice sheets will respond to rapidly warming oceans and atmosphere, greatly limiting our ability to project rates of sea level rise,” Gardner added.

Educating the public on the benefits of carbon dioxide is the mission of the CO2 Coalition, which I lead. We sponsor speakers and publish scientifically based materials for adults and children. Much of the information is about the role of CO2 as a beneficial greenhouse gas in moderating the extremes between daytime and nighttime temperatures and as a photosynthetic plant food.

“Fossil Fuels Are the Greenest Energy Sources” by Dr. Indur Goklany is an example of our work. Did you know that up to 50% of the globe has experienced an increase in vegetation and that 70% of the greening is attributed to plant fertilization by carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels? Or that nearly 200,000 square kilometers of the southern Sahara have been converted to a lush grassland from desert? //

Below about 150 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric CO2 is not compatible with plant life; in other words, below that level, plants would die, and all animal life, including humans, would follow.

Current CO2 levels are at about 440 ppm, and yes, they are rising, due to several factors. This is leading to the effects that are noted in the work of Dr. Indur Goklany: //

Based on satellite data, Zhu et al. (2016) found that from 1982–2009, 25–50% of global vegetated area had become greener while 4% had become browner. They attributed 70% of the greening to CO2 fertilization from emissions from fossil fuel combustion (which increases photosynthesis and water use efficiency, WUE, of most vegetation), 9% to nitrogen deposition (also from the use of fossil-fuel-derived fertilizers), 8% to climate change, and 4% to land use change. The first three, responsible cumulatively for 87% of the greening, are related to the use of fossil fuels. //

A slight increase in atmospheric CO2 is good for plants, good for human agriculture, and good for greening the Earth. //

anon-2hhh
9 hours ago
I’ve been suspicious of ‘experts’ motives ever since I realized that the scientific solution for the coming ‘Ice Age’ (1970s) and the scientific solution for ‘Global Warming’ was the same;
‘Stop using fossil fuels’. //

Val U Eigen
9 hours ago
There's one more benefit that NO ONE talks about—fewer violent tornadoes. Check this out.

https://www.spc.noaa.gov/faq/tornado/f5torns.html

Break this into 25 year segments, and you'll notice that:
in 1950–1974 we had 33 cat 5 tornadoes.
in 1975–1999 we had 17 cat 5 tornadoes.
in 2000–2024 we had 9 cat 5 tornadoes (and none in the last 11 years.)

This is due to global warming. The explanation comes from the second law of thermodynamics (and it's too complicated to explain here). But the bottom line is that tornadoes are getting weaker.

Cat 4's are getting much less common too, but the data isn't as easy to display. //

Val U Eigen Hoover the Great
9 hours ago
First, global warming mainly warms the coldest places at the coldest times (because the effect is essentially like insulation). So temperature differences are reduced. Technically, it's temperature "gradients" that are reduced. This is not in dispute.

Second, the second law of thermodynamics says that temperature differences, not simply heat, is the energy source for all heat engines. It is impossible to build a device that simply converts heat into energy (that is, gets cold while spitting out electricity or mechanical motion). Otherwise, you could build a refrigerator that produced electricity instead of consumed it.

Because this is a result of the second law of thermodynamics, this is cleverly called perpetual motion of the second kind. This is the complex part that takes a long time to explain. The best way to learn about it is to google perpetual motion of the second kind.

Temperature gradients are the energy source for tornadoes. //

ibt
9 hours ago
The next time your climate change deranged relative talks about CO2, ask, "What is the ideal atmospheric PPM of CO2 for the planet?" Show your work. Then ask what the current PPM is. You can also remind them that 4 times as many people die of cold than of heat related issues so a warmer planet would save lives. That's a "good" thing right? ///

What's the ideal temperature for the planet? Why?

Legal Insurrection readers will recall that in my post on the United Nations climate conference in Azerbaijan this week, its president boldly declared that oil and gas were a ‘gift from God’.

The eco-activists attending the event were enraged.

The climate cultists will likely be working themselves up into even more hysteria because of another climate conference that occurred mid-November in the Czech Republic city of Prague.

The Czech division of the International Climate Intelligence Group (Clintel) organized a two-day climate conference in Prague on November 12-13, 2024, where climate scientists declared that the “climate emergency” is over. The conference concluded with a communiqué drafted by the participating scientists and researchers that targeted the climate hysteria promoted by the United Nations body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

‘The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which excludes participants and published papers disagreeing with its narrative, fails to comply with its own error-reporting protocol and draws conclusions some of which are dishonest, should be forthwith dismantled.’

Moreover, the scientists at the conference declared that even if all nations moved straight to net zero emissions, by the 2050 target date the world would be only about 0.1 C cooler than with no emissions reduction.

So far, the attempts to mitigate climate change by international agreements such as the Paris Agreement have made no difference to our influence on climate, since nations such as Russia and China, India and Pakistan continue greatly to expand their combustion of coal, oil and gas.

The cost of achieving that 0.1 C reduction in global warming would be $2 quadrillion, equivalent to 20 years’ worldwide gross domestic product.

The declaration has 18 different point referencing climate science and facts that counter the narratives being pushed by the IPCC and those who want to push their green agendas. //

1 The modest increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide that has taken place since the end of the Little Ice Age has been net-beneficial to humanity.

2. Foreseeable future increases in greenhouse gases in the air will probably also prove net-beneficial.
3. The rate and amplitude of global warming have been and will continue to be appreciably less than climate scientists have long predicted.
4. The Sun, and not greenhouse gases, has contributed and will continue to contribute the overwhelming majority of global temperature.
5. Geological evidence compellingly suggests that the rate and amplitude of global warming during the industrial era are neither unprecedented nor unusual. //

Though I have to say, #17 is a favorite of mine:

17. Since wind and solar power are costly, intermittent and more environmentally destructive per TWh generated than any other energy source, governments should cease to subsidize or to prioritize them, and should instead expand coal, gas and, above, all nuclear generation.

But, perhaps most importantly, the conference attendees demand the end of persecution of those researchers doing real science who struggle to share their reasonable and reliable findings whenever the data counters the political narratives.

Since 2005, one spot in particular — the Solfatara crater — has been releasing increased volumes of gas, catching the attention of researchers and locals alike. //

Even without a major eruption, the Solfatara crater outs out between 4,000 and 5,000 tons of carbon dioxide each and each day. That's roughly the equivalent of burning half a million gallons of gasoline - every day.

Bjorn Lomborg
Dr. Bjorn Lomborg researches the smartest ways to do good. With his think tank, the Copenhagen Consensus, he has worked with hundreds of the world’s top economists and seven Nobel Laureates to find and promote the most effective solutions to the world’s greatest challenges, from disease and hunger to climate and education.

cupera1 Mike P. 2 days ago edited

About 40 years ago an ASU professor conducted an experiment in Tempe Arizona with orange trees in two greenhouses one was a control and the other he had increased the CO2 level to 3X of what he had in the control, ~1000 ppm of CO2. All other conditions: water, fertilizer and temperature were left the same. The results of that study were astounding. The growth rate and fruit production that the trees in the greenhouse with the higher CO2 was incredible, it was almost double what the control was able to produce. If you look at the production per acre that farmers have experience with the higher CO2 levels is close to matching those results. With the higher CO2 crops are producing more and have a higher tolerance to drought.

anon-f9f0 mopani 2 days ago

Dr. Sherwood Idso wrote many, many articles on this experiment. You might be interested in:
CO2 enrichment of sour orange trees: 2.5 years into a long-term experiment
S. B. IDSO, B. A. KIMBALL, S. G. ALLEN. Plant, Cell, & Environment
Volume14, Issue 3. Pages 351-353
First published: April 1991 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-3040.1991.tb01512.x

CO2 enrichment of sour orange trees: 2.5 years into a long-term experiment

S. B. IDSO, B. A. KIMBALL, S. G. ALLEN. Plant, Cell, & Environment
Volume14, Issue 3. Pages 351-353
First published: April 1991

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-3040.1991.tb01512.x

Abstract. Eight sour orange trees have been grown from seedling stage in the field at Phoenix, Arizona, U.S.A., in four identically-vented, open-top, clear-plastic-wall chambers for close to 2.5 years. Half of the chambers have been maintained at ambient atmospheric CO2 concentrations over this period, while half of them have been maintained at 300 ppm (300 μlmol CO2 per mol air) above ambient. Initially, the trees in each treatment were essentially identical; but in less than 2 years, the trunks of the CO2-enriched trees had become twice as large as their ambient-treatment counterparts. After 2 full years of growth, the enriched trees had 79% more leaves, 56% more primary branches with 172% more volume, 70% more secondary branches with 190% more volume, and 240% more tertiary branches with 855% more volume. In addition, the CO2-enriched trees also had fourth-, fifth- and sixth-order branches, while the ambient-treatment trees had no branches above third order. Total trunk plus branch volume of the CO2-en-riched trees was 2.79 times that of the ambient-treatment trees after 2 fulf years of growth.

Watch the full episode here: Ep. 320 -    • Climate "Science" | Dr. Richard Lindz...  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LVSrTZDopM

so the narrative was the climate is
determined by a greenhouse effect
and adding CO2 to it
increases it causes warming and moreover
the natural greenhouse substances
besides CO2 water vapor clouds upper
level clouds will amplify whatever man
does
now that immediately goes against Le
chatelier's principle which says if you
perturb a system and it is capable
internally of counteracting it it will
and our system is and that
applies so that was a
little bit odd you began wondering where
did these feedbacks come from
and uh immediately people including
myself
started uh looking into the feedbacks
and seeing whether there were any
negative ones or how did it work
but underlying it and this is what I
learned if you want to get a narrative
established
learned if you want to get a narrative
established
The crucial thing is to Pepper it with
errors
questionable things so that the critics
will seize on that and not question the
basic narrative the basic narrative in
this sense was that climate is
controlled by the greenhouse effect
in point of fact the earth's climate
system
which has many regions but two distinct
different regions are the tropics
roughly the minus 30 to 30 degrees
latitude
and the extra Tropics outside of 30
degrees plus or minus
they have very different Dynamics

It didn't take long for the media to run a hit piece on Chris Wright, who President-elect Donald Trump nominated as his Secretary of Energy. Wright, the founder and CEO of Denver-based Liberty Energy, a fracking company, was nominated earlier this week; see NEW: Trump Taps Fracking Exec As Next Energy Secretary. Today, Reuters is on the move with a story headlined: Trump energy pick wrote ESG report hailing oil, gas, downplaying climate worry.

President-elect Donald Trump's pick to lead the energy department believes fossil fuels are the key to ending world poverty which, he says, is a greater problem than climate change's "distant" threat, according to a report he penned as CEO of oilfield services company Liberty Energy.

In a corporate report released in February called 'Bettering Human Lives,' Chris Wright said that the energy transition has not begun and that climate change, while a challenge, is not the greatest threat to humans.

Poverty is a bigger threat that can be alleviated with access to hydrocarbons, said Wright, who started a foundation aimed at expanding propane cook stoves in developing countries. //

Wright wrote "the wealthy world has gone beyond over-optimism surrounding the breadth and scalability of a narrow slice of alternative energy and, unfortunately, has rushed head-long into outright obstruction of hydrocarbon infrastructure and production." //

Wright places the welfare of people and communities above scientific grift. He supports what works and is critical of what doesn't and can't work...looking at you, wind and solar. He understands that energy production is inextricably linked to our freedom and prosperity. This bill of indictment against Wright should be read into the Congressional Record ...

We understand that some increase in CO2 levels is good for plants, and can increase crop yields. We understand that too little CO2 can result in a catastrophic collapse of the food web. And we do not understand the global climate well enough to interfere with it, as the results could be bad - very bad indeed.

Yes, a slight increase in CO2 can have some warming effects. So can the sun, so can volcanoes, and so can many other factors. But everything comes with tradeoffs, and if you ask people around the world who depend on plant crops for survival if they would prefer a couple of degrees cooler summers or having plenty to eat, I'm pretty sure I know which option they will choose.' //

ibt
2 hours ago
Next time your "climate change" relative starts bloviating, ask them "What is the ideal Global Surface Mean temperature in Celsius degrees?" or "What is the ideal PPM for CO2 in the atmosphere?". And ask them to show their work. //

anon-lsnr
3 hours ago
Every acre of corn produces enough oxygen for 131 people per year. 90 million acres of corn in US =enough air for 1.1 billion people per year.Jul 19, 2023. //

Bertrand du Guesclin
an hour ago
With a more CO2-rich atmosphere, plants don't have to open their pores as much to ingest the compound. That means such ingestion allows less water evaporation from the plant. Such water conservation is important in dry regions, which is why such regions (like Africa's Sahel) are getting greener. //

stripmallgrackle
an hour ago edited
Two years ago I watched and interview with a physicist (can't remember his name). He was discussing the saturation point of CO2. He mocked climate science for predicting all hell breaking loose due to runaway atmospheric heating. He stated that physics supports no such hypothesis and presented a curve that is familiar to any electronics student: the saturation curve for the transistor (tubes for us old farts). This, he pointed out, shows the limit on the conversion of UV to IR by CO2 by density in a gas mixture. For those not familiar, at the top the curve flattens to horizontal and any additional input voltage (for transistors) or UV energy (for CO2) will not increase the output of the transistor or the CO2 mixture. Saturation. His point was that arguing client sensitivity is absurd, as CO2 is self limiting on how much heat it can trap no matter how many PPM.

Almost as an aside, he mentioned at one point that all the plant species on Earth, except corn, evolved in a much richer CO2 atmosphere, and today the plant kingdom is living in a CO2 desert. //

anon-73eu mopani 2 days ago

https://skepticalscience.com/pics/fosteretal2017fromexcel-1600px.jpg

stripmallgrackle mopani 2 days ago

Wish I could help. I found these two YouTubes from Dr. William Happer. It may have been him, but I remember a man with somewhat longer hair. Searching for CO2 saturation/physicist puts Happer at the top of hits. The short 2 min video is specifically his statement about plants and a CO2 famine. I will be watching the longer lecture video tonight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKcBM5gaFEk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8iEEO2UIbA

david says:
January 20, 2015 at 1:50 PM

There’s a big difference in what we’re told about climate change versus the effects of radiation.

Decades ago people subjected test animals to “large” amounts of radiation, and extrapolated their results to “small” amounts of radiation. The assumption was that as the amount of radiation decreased, then so did the effects of the radiation linearly. This implies that even at low doses of radiation there would be some damage. (ie. 1/10th the radiation = 1/10th the damage, 1/100th the radiation = 1/100th the damage..)

However, that’s not how science works. They had an hypothesis, but where were the experiments to prove it true?

Eventually it was found that the LNT model didn’t hold to be true. The expected cancers from Chernobyl didn’t match what was expected. Different parts of the world have different background levels of radiation, yet those changes don’t seem to correspond with the LNT hypothesis. There were accident where people were subjected to radiation, yet once again no correlation with cancer rates as suggested by the LNT hypothesis; in fact, in such cases it sometimes appeared that low doses of radiation could decrease cancer rates.

The LNT hypothesis is dead, or at least it should be. But there are people who benefit from keeping it alive, and rather than going back to the labs to try to figure out the proper relationship between radiation at low levels, and genetic damage, they try to muddy the waters.

Climate change might have its fear-mongers, much like the supporters of the LNT hypothesis do, but it has yet to be proven wrong. We know that greenhouse gases do affect the Earth’s climate, though to what degree our meddling will affect it is open to some debate, as is how harshly those changes will affect us humans. But, since the Earth isn’t a frozen wasteland, we “know” that greenhouse gases do affect the climate.

In short:
———-

Low doses of radiation:
-> has fear mongers
-> those fear mongers have been proven wrong.
-> end of story, (or it should be.)

Climate Change:
-> has fear mongers, and also
-> has those who benefit from denying it.
-> greenhouse gases affect climate, else the Earth would be a lot colder.
-> end of story, including how bad it will be, is yet to be written.

Given we don’t know the full story, we should research, and act, because the worse case scenario is disaster for us human. Replacing coal with nuclear is a no brainer. If there is room for some small release of greenhouse gases by us humans, it won’t include the use of coal to generate electricity. That’s one of the lower-hanging branches that we should be eliminating now.

Allan Savory delivered a highly publicized talk at a “Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED)” conference in February of this year (2013) entitled “How to fight desertification and reverse climate change.” Here we address one of the most dramatic claims made – that a specialized grazing method alone can reverse the current trajectory of increasing atmospheric CO2 and climate change. //

Approximately 8 Petagrams (Pg; trillion kilograms) of carbon are added to the atmosphere every year from fossil fuel burning and cement production alone. This will increase in the future at a rate that depends largely on global use of fossil fuels. To put these emissions in perspective, the amount of carbon taken up by vegetation is about 2.6 Pg per year. To a very rough approximation then, the net carbon uptake by all of the planet’s vegetation would need to triple (assuming similar transfers to stable C pools like soil organic matter) just to offset current carbon emissions every year. However, the claim was not that holistic management would maintain current atmospheric CO2 levels, but that it would return the atmosphere to pre-industrial levels. Based on IPCC estimates, there are now approximately 240 more Petagrams (Pg) of carbon in the atmosphere than in pre-industrial times. To put this value in perspective, the amount of carbon in vegetation is currently estimated at around 450 Pg, most of that in the wood of trees. The amount of carbon that would need to be removed from the atmosphere and stabilized in soils, in addition to the amount required to compensate for ongoing emissions, to attain pre-industrial levels is equivalent to approximately one-half of the total carbon in all of Earth’s vegetation. Recall that annual uptake of carbon is about two orders of magnitude smaller than the total carbon amount stored in vegetation.

Brian Mays says:
January 13, 2015 at 2:40 PM

By the way, I wonder in what world funding for global warming research can be called “enormous”.

Welcome to the world of R&D for advanced reactor concepts! If only a tiny fraction of the money that has been wasted on deeply flawed, ideologically driven “climate studies” (keep in mind that I used to be part of this world when I was in graduate school) had been spent on genuine nuclear R&D … well … I’m sure that the DOE would have wasted most of it … but the remainder that went to those of us who just want to make a product that we can sell would have resulted in some very substantial progress.

But the reality is that I’ve just been tasked with tidying up and documenting the calculations that I performed to better understand severe-accident analysis of advanced gas-cooled reactor designs. This is work that resulted in a couple of published papers, but the budget for this cleanup/documentation work is $0, because there is no budget. There wasn’t even enough budget to get the papers done in the first place. That’s what nights and weekends are for. Fortunately, my day job manages to pay the bills.

Gee … I wished I worked in a field so flush with money that they’d fly me to Bali or Peru to discuss my latest “research” (or the made-up crap that I call “research”). I was fortunate enough to go to the last year’s meeting on new nuclear power plants (ICAPP’14), but that’s only because it was in Charlotte, NC, and I could drive there. I have nothing against Charlotte, but it’s no Bali.

The amount of money that has been, and still is being, wasted on the Climate BS is truly obscene, and those who refuse to see it are the real “deniers.”

Brian Mays says:
January 12, 2015 at 8:05 PM

“The question arises: Were the decisions concerning this enormous funding for global warming research taken out of genuine concern that the climate is allegedly changing as a result of CO2 industrial emissions, or do some other undisclosed ideas stand behind this money, IPCC activity, Kyoto, and all the gruesome catastrophic propaganda the world is now exposed to? If this concern is genuine, then why do we not see a storm of enthusiastic environmentalists and United Nations officials demanding to replace all fossil-fuel plants with nuclear plants, which have zero emission of greenhouse gases, are environmentally friendly, more economical, and much safer for plant workers and much safer for the general population than other sources of energy?”

– Zbigniew Jaworowski

What I don’t believe is that society needs to seek to reduce either “man-made” CO2 or “man-made” radiation doses to near zero. There are reasons to limit both CO2 and radiation doses, but there is no logical or moral reason to impose too tight a limit on either one.

In fact, I’ve often found that people working very hard to impose such limits don’t even like other people and seek to restrict their access to economic prosperity and physical power.

Human Health and Welfare Effects from Increased Greenhouse Gases and Warming
-- John Dunn and David Legates

Claims that global warming will have net negative effects on human health are not supported by scientific evidence. Moderate warming and increased atmospheric concentrations of carbon-dioxide levels could provide net benefits for human welfare, agriculture, and the biosphere by reducing cold-related deaths, increasing the amount of arable land, extending the length of growing seasons, and invigorating plant life. The harmful effects of restricting access to fossil fuel energy and subsequently causing energy costs to increase would likely outweigh any potential benefits from slightly delaying any rise in temperatures. Climate change is likely to have less impact on health and welfare than polices that would deprive the poor living in emerging economies of the benefits of abundant and inexpensive energy. //

As this chart shows, by a wide margin, the Gasparrini et al. study illustrates that cold extremes kill far more people that heatwaves—and by a wide margin. They concluded:

Our findings show that temperature is responsible for advancing a substantial fraction of deaths…7.71% of the mortality…. Most of the mortality burden was caused by days colder than the optimum temperature (7.29%) compared with days warmer than the optimum temperature (0.42%). So cold produced 17 times the number of heat deaths.7 //

Underlying the concept of Net Zero is the LNT [Linear No Threshold - nuclear radiation] philosophy laid down more than three decades earlier: no net emissions of greenhouse gases are acceptable. There is no threshold that allows some net production of greenhouse gases such that at any level, the net emission of greenhouse gases at any non-zero level is detrimental to the environment and must, therefore, be stopped. The belief is that since urgent action must be taken to avoid any additional warming of the planet, greenhouse gases must be removed from the atmosphere.71 When “emissions released by human action are taking a catastrophic toll on our planet and propelling us further into an irreversible climate crisis,” no threshold is acceptable.72 //

Linear No-Threshold theory began in 1927 when H. J. Muller examined phenotypical damages in fruit flies resulting from x-ray exposure, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1946.78

Ibid.
It was introduced in radiological risk studies in 1959 and subsequently into general cancer risk. Consequently, the U.S. National Academy of Science recommended use of the LNT model to the induction of radiation-related mutations in somatic cells and, subsequently, to the study of cancer initiation.79

Edward J. Calabrese, “Cancer Risk Assessment, Its Wretched History and What It Means for Public Health,” Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene, Vol. 21 (2024). 
In low-energy radiation, The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation based its radiological protection system on the assumption that the radiation-induced risk was directly proportional (i.e., linear) to the dosage, with no dose threshold below which no risk exists.80

Dominique Laurier et al., “The Scientific Basis for the Use of the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) Model at Low Doses and Dose Rates in Radiological Protection,” Journal of Radiological Protection, Vol. 43 (2023), 024003.

About a decade after receiving the Nobel Prize, Muller admitted that he did not discover small mutations in fruit flies with the x-ray exposure for which he was heralded; rather, the high-energy radiation nearly obliterated large portions of their chromosomes. However, his Nobel Lecture argued that no safe radiation dose existed and that the LNT model must replace a threshold-dose-response model.81

Ibid., and Edward J. Calabrese, “Flaws in the LN Single-Hit Model for Cancer Risk: An Historical Assessment,” Environmental Research, Vol. 158 (2017), pp. 773–788; Edward J. Calabrese, “From Muller to Mechanism: How LNT Became the Default Model for Cancer Risk Assessment,” Environmental Pollution, Vol. 241 (2018), pp. 289–302; and Edward J. Calabrese, “Ethical Failures: The Problematic History of Cancer Risk Assessment,” Environmental Research, Vol. 193 (2020), 110582.

A Better Rule. An obviously better rule than LNT (and to net zero and other greenhouse gas–reduction strategies) is that of Paracelsus, a Swiss physician and alchemist of the 16th century: “All things are poison and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison” (Sola dosis facit venenum).82 //

Eighty percent of modern energy is produced by burning petroleum, natural gas, or coal to turn the turbines inside electricity generators. (See Chart 2.) Running 24 hours a day and seven days a week, a traditional coal, natural gas, or nuclear plant requires about 12.5 acres per megawatt of electricity. By contrast, solar (43.5 acres per megawatt) and wind (70.6 acres per megawatt) arrays occupy vastly more land area and have a much larger negative impact on the local habitat and its environment.93

a new study described by The Daily Sceptic's Environment Editor Chris Morrison shows that the sea ice around Antarctica has actually been increasing since satellite monitoring began in 1979. https://dailysceptic.org/2024/11/16/antarctica-sea-ice-has-slowly-increased-since-1979-science-paper-finds/

Sea ice around Antarctica has “slowly increased” since the start of continuous satellite recordings in 1979 with any changes caused by natural climate variation. In a paper published earlier this year, four environmental scientists further state that any sign that humans are responsible for any change is “inconclusive”. Not of course for mainstream media that have been crying wolf about the sea ice in Antarctica for decades to promote the Net Zero fantasy. Last year there was a reduced level of winter sea ice and this caused the Financial Times Science Editor Clive Cookson to exclaim that the entire area “faces a catastrophic cascade of extreme environmental events… that will affect climate around the world”. //

Thoughts and prayers are also the order of the day for those who set great store in all the coral disappearing. Three years of record growth on the huge Great Barrier Reef put an end to that headliner. Polar bears are just as bad and keep breeding to top up new Arctic highs. Satellites keep discovering vast colonies of penguins in Antarctica, and mainstream media seem shocked into complete silence to report that the eyes in the sky have detected a vast recent plant greening of the Earth. There is a growing trend to debunk any ‘extreme’ weather claim – the great citizen journalist Paul Homewood even writes a book about the BBC’s more egregious climate howlers, every year no less, such is the volume to process. //

Musicman
5 hours ago
Here is a trick question. When did the last ice age end? Most people guess 10,000 years ago. Correct answer: it hasn't. By definition, an ice age is any time there are glaciers on the poles. 10,000 years ago the current ice peaked. It's now waning but no one knows for how long. And the reason it has a special name--"ice age"--is because it's not the norm. Over the last 541 million years or so, Earth has been in ice ages about a quarter of the time, and hotter the other times.

Would we need to adjust in a major way if the ice age ends? You bet. And will need to adjust if the ice age worsens and the glaciers cover Minnesota again. You bet. That's life on planet earth. Our species can survive because we can adapt. We can't control the temperature of the planet.

At the 29th Conference of the Parties (COP29) in Azerbaijan, attendees are full of dire predictions that the world’s climate will worsen under President-elect Trump. But when Trump fulfills his campaign promises to increase U.S. oil and gas production and removes President Biden’s pause on new liquid natural gas exports, global emissions will likely decline rather than rise.

This is because exports of U.S. natural gas generally displace coal, reducing global CO2 emissions. Even Germany, Europe’s largest manufacturer, is using lignite coal (rather than the less-polluting bituminous coal) to deal with shortages of renewables now that it has closed its nuclear power plants and Russian gas is no longer available.

About 3 billion people in emerging economies lack electricity and running water, and cook over wood and dung. Natural gas power plants would reduce particulates from wood and dung and make the air cleaner. Under President Biden, the World Bank does not make loans for fossil fuel power plants. //

a dramatic increase in American oil and gas production will have a significant effect on prices - even gas we don't export, as these are fungible commodities. And that will make the use of gas-fired power plants more practical, which will incentivize gas rather than coal plants, and will reduce emissions. That's what the climate scolds want, right?

But American exports of coal to Europe have been increasing under President Biden.