Geo-engineering: Ignoring the consequences

Governments charge ahead on engineering Earth’s climate, ignoring possible harmful effects

Tim Ball and Tom Harris

The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report said we have only 12 years left to save the planet. It triggered the usual frantic and ridiculous reactions.

NBC News offered this gem: “A last-ditch global warming fix? A man-made ‘volcanic’ eruption” to cool the planet.” Its article proclaimed, “Scientists and some environmentalists believe nations might have to mimic volcanic gases as a last-ditch effort to protect Earth from extreme warming.”

Proposal like this are defined as geo-engineering – trying to artificially modify Earth’s climate to offset what are presented as unnatural events. The problem is, the events they are trying to offset are actually natural events. Any scientist or politician who doesn’t understand that will undoubtedly create worse problems than those they are trying to “fix.”

From 1940 to almost 1980, the average global temperature went down. Political concerns and the alleged scientific consensus focused on global cooling. Alarmists said it could be the end of agriculture and civilization. Journalist Lowell Ponte wrote in his 1976 book, The Cooling:

“It is cold fact: the global cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance; the survival of ourselves, our children, our species.”

Change the word "cooling" to warming and it applies to the alarmist threats today.

The problem then was – and still is now – that people are educated in the false philosophy of uniformitarianism: the misguided belief that conditions always were and always will be as they are now, and any natural changes will occur over long periods of time.

Consequently, most people did not understand that the cooling was part of the natural cycle of climate variability, or that changes are often huge and sudden. Just 18,000 years ago we were at the peak of an Ice Age. Then, most of the ice melted and sea levels rose 150 meters (490 feet), because it was warmer for almost all of the last 10,000 years than it is today.

This misunderstanding, combined with the new paradigm of environmentalism (it is illogical and wrong to soil your own nest) created the belief that perfectly ordinary changes must be manmade, and thus had to be corrected by us as well.

During the cooling “danger,” geo-engineering proposals included:

* building a dam across the Bering Straits to block cold Arctic water, to warm the North Pacific and the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere;

* dumping black soot on the Arctic ice cap to promote melting;

* adding carbon dioxide (CO₂) to the atmosphere to raise global temperatures.

All these actions would impact global climate in unpredictable ways. Now we know they would have exacerbated the predominantly natural warming trend that followed.

The recent “volcano” proposal involves adding particulates (microscopic particles) to the high atmosphere to block sunlight, to lessen the supposed manmade global warming. The NBC News article references the cooling effect of the Pinatubo volcanic eruption of June 15, 1991, which ejected more particulates into the stratosphere than any eruption since Krakatoa in 1883. The resulting sulfuric acid haze caused average planetary temperatures to fall by about 0.9 degrees C (1.6 F) between 1991-93.

What NBC News neglected to mention was that this occurred during a warming period. Had the eruption happened during a cooling phase, the results could have been catastrophic. That’s what happened with the volcano Tambora in 1815. It was followed by the “year with no summer” that caused multiple extreme weather events and crop failures because it occurred during a cooling trend.

In the early 1800s, the world was already colder than today, and was in the process of cooling still further as a result of low, and decreasing, solar activity. This was during the period of the low sunspot activity of the Dalton Minimum (1790-1830). The billions of tons volcanic dust injected by the Tambora eruption, the largest in force of ejection for over 10,000 years, reduced sunlight dramatically.

The eruption occurred in April 1815, but its full impact on temperature wasn’t felt until 1816 because the volcano erupted vertically at the Equator and the dust it ejected into the Stratosphere took several months to impact both Hemispheres.

Harvest failures were widespread, especially in the densely populated areas of the eastern US and western Europe. In 1816 it snowed as far south as the Carolinas in July, and the year was dubbed “Eighteen hundred and froze to death.” The US government pleaded with farmers not to eat their seed stock as they would have nothing for the following year. That’s hard to do when your children are starving.

A gravestone inscription reads: “1771-1847, Reuben Whitten son of a revolutionary soldier a pioneer of this town (Ashland NH), cold season of 1816 raised 40 bushels of wheat on this land which kept his family and neighbours from starvation.”

In Germany, they even produced a medal for 1816-1817 with the inscription, “Great is the distress, Oh Lord, have pity.” In England the price of corn ( “wheat” in the USA) soared, and probably for the first time in history a government introduced legislation (The Corn Laws) to control price increases.

Since the best climate experts say that we can expect a gradual cooling over the next few decades as the Sun weakens, the last thing we should be doing now is artificially cooling the planet still further. Consider that as recently as 1680, in the depths of the Little Ice Age, there was a meter of ice on the Thames River in London, something unimaginable today.

In approximately 90 years, the height up the side of the glens in Scotland to which you could farm lowered by 200 meters. That doesn’t sound like much, but such a vertical change took half of Scotland out of food production. That’s the real reason for the Highland Clearances, the forced evacuation of Scotland’s Highlands and western islands.

As always, government response was inadequate or inappropriate. It is setting up to be the same this time, because the government not only ignored science but attacked those who tried to practice proper science.

“Taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,” as advocated by the IPCC in its October 8 news conference, is also foolish. Historic records show that, at about 410 parts per million (ppm), the level of CO₂ supposedly in the atmosphere now, we are near the lowest in the last 280 million years. As plants evolved over that time, the average level was 1200 ppm. That is why commercial greenhouses boost CO₂ to that level to increase plant growth and yields by a factor of four.

The IPCC has been wrong in every prediction it’s made since 1990. It would be a grave error to use its latest forecasts as the excuse to engage in geo-engineering experiments with the only planet we have.

Tim Ball is an environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba. Tom Harris is executive director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition.

Fentanyl 101- Let's Clean Up The Terminology

By Josh Bloom — July 2, 2018

It's more than a bit ironic that nine months after I wrote about how the Kolodny Klan was using misleading words (and numbers) to promote their version of the fake opioid crisis (See The Opioid Epidemic In 6 Charts Designed To Deceive You) that some of the pain patients who are fighting back are doing the same things, albeit, unintentionally. Let's fix this.

ORGANIC CHEMISTRY NOMENCLATURE IS MADNESS

For most people, chemistry is difficult enough, but when you toss in nomenclature, logic becomes illogical. There are multiple ways to name almost all chemicals. It is not rare to see a dozen different names for the same compound, some of which make sense and others are bewildering. As in Figure 1...........To Read More.....

My Take - Make sure to read the comments.

 

Ontario’s new premier must save the province

Neither Ontario nor any country should follow its example on energy and environmental policies

Dr. Tim Ball and Tom Harris

On March 8, 2018, former US Vice President Al Gore visited Ontario, Canada in an attempt to help then-Premier Kathleen Wynne win the June 7 provincial election. Gore said, “I travel all over the world, and I cite Ontario as an example of a provincial government that is doing it right: creating jobs, building the base for economic progress, while also staving off the severe danger that the climate crisis poses to all of us.”

In reality, Ontario’s approach to climate change and so-called green energy has been a disaster – an extreme example of what governments around the world should not do. That may be part of the reason Ms. Wynne lost to Doug Ford.

Ontario’s situation is dire. In “Ontario MPP ‘proud’ of province’s debt and ‘would do it again’”  (April 1, 2018), National Post writer Triston Hopper explained:

“Ontario’s debt, which currently stands at $311.7 billion, is the most held by any sub-sovereign government in the world. It has also grown precipitously under the current Liberal government, who first took government when Ontario’s debt stood at $138.8 billion.”

To fix the province’s woes, new Conservative Premier Doug Ford must first understand the causes of the problems. A major issue has been crippling energy and environmental policies.

The real rot in Ontario began in 1992, when then-premier Bob Rae appointed businessman and former UN Under-Secretary-General Maurice Strong to be the Chairman of Ontario Hydro, the province’s publicly owned electricity utility.

At the time, Ontario was an economically sound, prosperous province. All this started to change when Strong applied the energy and environmental policies he proposed for the entire world through his creation of the United Nations Environmental Program and his chairmanship of the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit (officially, the UN Conference on Environment and Development, UNCED).

At UNCED, Strong introduced Agenda 21, a global energy and environment policy of world-shattering implications, and got it ratified. It was also at the Earth Summit that world leaders signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The UNFCCC’s primary objective was defined as achieving “stabilization of greenhouse gas [GHG] concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic [human-caused] interference with the climate system.”

Under this scheme, the fact that in 1992 (and even today) we had no idea what concentration of GHGs would lead to “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” was immaterial. The die was cast. The world-wide climate alarm had begun.

The UNFCCC even redefined the basic guidelines for the UN’s climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The guidelines now restrict “climate change” to include only variations due to human activity. Specifically, Article 1 of the UNFCCC treaty states:

“‘Climate change’ means a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over considerable time periods.”

The definition predetermines the outcome of the IPCC’s work. In particular, since the IPCC is required to support the Framework Convention, it had to change its mandate from its original purpose of studying all causes of climate change to the UNFCCC’s political definition of manmade climate change.

So the IPCC’s mandate was changed to assessing “the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change.…”

The problem is, you cannot determine the human effects unless you first know the extent and cause of natural climate change. The fact that we cannot meaningfully forecast the weather beyond 72 hours in advance demonstrates how little we understand about natural climate change and its causes.

But the new IPCC mandate worked perfectly to support Strong’s anti-development agenda. He needed “science” to prove that increasing GHG emissions from industrial activities (especially carbon dioxide or CO2) would cause dangerous global warming. Since rising emissions are a natural outcome of increasing global production, energy use and prosperity, linking emissions to alleged climate changes and extreme weather events allowed Strong to target the world’s major energy source: fossil fuels.

Once the science was determined, the bureaucracies of national offices such as Environment Canada could push policies to cripple energy production, industry and development. Other countries and regions were slow to adopt these principles, but in Ontario Strong was able to use his position at Ontario Hydro with impunity, to implement the crippling policies he orchestrated in Rio.

In so doing, he stopped nuclear programs, closed coal plants, and diverted funds to alternate energies that were already shown not to work. . As one report summarized:

“The electrical scam in Ont. started with the Bob Rae NDP government when Maurice Strong, Rae’s god-father, broke up Ontario Hydro. The electricity scam continued through the Harris and McGuinty Governments. Today Premier Kathleen Wynne and the liberal party administer the Enron styled electrical rate manipulation scam.”

Other premiers since, right through to Wynne, tried to privatize Ontario Hydro. But all failed to deal with the problem. Meanwhile, the cost of energy became an increasing drag on the economy and cost of living.

When Strong started as Ontario Hydro Chairman, the province had one of the most powerful provincial economies. It was consistently classified as a “have” province in the federal government equalization program, which begun in 1957 and designated provinces as “have” or “have not” based primarily on their ability to generate tax revenue.

In the ensuing grand socialist scheme, between 2012 through 2018, nearly C$121 billion was transferred from the “have” provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Saskatchewan to the “have not” provinces of Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Quebec – and Ontario. (See the table.)

From Strong’s tenure onward, Ontario energy costs continued to sap the vigor of its economy. Once an industrial powerhouse and the home of hundreds of thousands of high-paying manufacturing jobs, Ontario lost many of these jobs when companies either left the province or went bankrupt. Contributing to the downward spiral were skyrocketing electricity prices.

For consumers and small businesses, electricity prices have increased from 4.3 cents per kilowatt-hour for all times of the day in 2002 to 13.2 cents per kWh in 2018 during peak usage times – a 200% rise. Electricity rates for larger businesses follow the market rate and so vary widely throughout the day. For example, at 5 pm on June 26, 2018, the rate was 22.14 cents per kWh!

Independent energy researcher and former Ontario Independent Electricity Market Operator board member Tom Adams concludes, “The root cause of Ontario’s power rate cancer started with the coal phase-out” – which went from 7,587 megawatts of coal-based electricity in 2003 to zero by 2014!

To supposedly “lead the world” in “stopping global warming,” the provincial government closed all of Ontario’s coal-fired electricity stations, which provided about 25% of the province’s then-inexpensive electricity in 2002. And yet, even in 2003, Ontario accounted for a measly 0.5% of global CO2 emissions.

So regardless of what one believes about the causes of climate change, the sacrifice was worthless.

Making matters even worse, the Ontario government spent billions of dollars erecting about 8,000 industrial wind turbines. In a report co-authored by University of Guelph economics professor Ross McKitrick, Mr. Adams noted: “Solar and wind systems provide just under 4 percent of Ontario’s power but account for about 20 percent of the average commodity cost.”

Electricity market expert and University of Montreal professor Pierre-Olivier Pineau has observed, today “Ontario is probably the worst electricity market in the world.”

And so, Ontario went from being an economic powerhouse to joining the ranks of “have not” provinces that receive payments from Canada’s equalization program.

Not surprisingly, access to abundant, reliable, inexpensive energy has been a major factor differentiating the “have” and “have not” provinces. Mostly because of Hibernia oil, Newfoundland and Labrador became a “have” province. The other “have” provinces are also energy-rich: Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan.

So, the question now is: Can premier-elect Doug Ford get Ontario back on track with a sound energy policy? There is no better place for him to start than by publicly opposing the myth that human CO2 emissions are causing dangerous global warming.

There is plenty of scientific evidence to support this. Ford need only consult the reports of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change,  which summarize thousands of studies from peer-reviewed scientific journals that either refute or cast serious doubt on the climate scare.

Let’s hope Ford uses this important tool – and that the next example Ontario sets for the world is how to rebound from a green energy disaster.

Dr. Tim Ball is an environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. Tom Harris is executive director of the Ottawa-based International Climate Science Coalition.