How Doomy Is The “New” IPCC Hotcoldwetdry Report?

By William Teach April 1, 2014 – 4:23 pm

About as doomy as one would expect professional doomsayers to prognosticate

(UK Register) The summary for policymakers alone is 44 pages and the full report contains 1,552, so it’s necessary to be rather brief in this initial report on the newly-released documents. Later analysis is the place to go deeper. Let’s start with the summary’s assessment of the “observed impacts, vulnerability and adaptation” to climate change.

The summary then presents the following eight “key risks” that the IPCC feels “are identified with high confidence, span sectors and regions.”

The risks are:

  1. Risk of death, injury, ill-health, or disrupted livelihoods in low-lying coastal zones and small island developing states and other small islands, due to storm surges, coastal flooding, and sea-level rise
  2. Risk of severe ill-health and disrupted livelihoods for large urban populations due to inland flooding in some regions.
  3. Systemic risks due to extreme weather events leading to breakdown of infrastructure networks and critical services such as electricity, water supply, and health and emergency services
  4. Risk of mortality and morbidity during periods of extreme heat, particularly for vulnerable urban populations and those working outdoors in urban or rural areas.
  5. Risk of food insecurity and the breakdown of food systems linked to warming, drought, flooding, and precipitation variability and extremes, particularly for poorer populations in urban and rural settings.
  6. Risk of loss of rural livelihoods and income due to insufficient access to drinking and irrigation water and reduced agricultural productivity, particularly for farmers and pastoralists with minimal capital in semi-arid regions.
  7. Risk of loss of marine and coastal ecosystems, biodiversity, and the ecosystem goods, functions, and services they provide for coastal livelihoods, especially for fishing communities in the tropics and the Arctic.
  8. Risk of loss of terrestrial and inland water ecosystems, biodiversity, and the ecosystem goods, functions, and services they provide for livelihoods.

The summary eventually considers “overlapping approaches” to “adaptation” that will help humanity to ameliorate climate change. Many types of adaptation are suggested, ranging from better land planning laws to the creation of “catastrophe bonds”.

So, doom everywhere. Funny thing is, they can’t prove that any changes are caused by global anthropogenic causes, and, their models continue to fail in a big way.

There is so much funky stuff in the report it’s hard to know where to begin. I am amused that they are now all sorts of worried about flooding in Australia, when they had recently been all sorts of worried about drought. Hey, different day, different complaint. Interestingly, none of the adaptation or other recommendations include Warmists practicing what they preach. Strange, eh?

They also are astounded that the world can actually change. Because that never happened during the previous 4.5 billion years. They also fail to note that 17+ year pause.

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If All You See…

By William Teach April 1, 2014 – 1:00 pm

…is a horrible CO2 infused beer causing lakes to rise up, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Datechguy’s Blog, with a post on building a green town.

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Californians To Receive Hotcoldwetdry Rebates

By William Teach April 1, 2014 – 12:36 pm

This isn’t satire, but it should be

(Grist) The state’s cap-and-trade program has raised nearly $1.7 billion so far. About 40 percent of proceeds are earmarked to be spent on clean energy initiatives, while the rest will be distributed to small utility customers through various programs, helping offset any increase in electricity prices. Residential customers of the state’s investor-owned utilities, which together serve more than two-thirds of the state’s electricity, will receive the first California Climate Credits on this month’s electricity bills, reducing the amount due by roughly $30 to $40. The next residential credits will be paid out in October. Small business customers will receive them monthly.

So they pass a law that artificially raised people’s power bill, and essentially everything else, all for a fake issue, and are going to get a tiny rebate for the economic pain.

Sadly, Grist’s article on massaging fish is neither satire nor for April Fool’s Day.

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DOJ Rolls Out Transgender Sensitivity Training for Police

By William Teach April 1, 2014 – 11:11 am

This is not from The Onion

(CNS News) Following several years of “constructive dialog” with the LGBT community, the U.S. Justice Department is now training law enforcement officers on how to better understand and help the “transgender community”

“It’s clear that such  training is as necessary as it is overdue,” Associate Attorney General Tony West told a gathering at the Justice Department on Thursday, as DOJ’s Community Relations Service kicked off its new “transgender law enforcement cultural professionalism training.”

The training will help law enforcement agencies “improve their understanding of the transgender communities they serve and improve their work with those communities,” said Deputy Assistant Attorney General James Cole, who appeared with West to launch the sensitivity training.

Another Special Class of Protected People. When does the DOJ plan on actually enorcing law? Oh, I wonder what would happen if a large group of Redneck Americans complained? Or White Oppressed Males? Would we be afforded the same treatment?

BTW, I know it’s April 1st. This is not satire.

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Will Obamacare Hit 7 Million Signups? Will It Matter?

By William Teach April 1, 2014 – 7:20 am

And, if so, will Kathleen Sebelius re-change her mind about 7 million being important? Better yet, will they pay?

(Fox News) On the last day to sign up for ObamaCare, the health care overhaul was reportedly on track to sign up more than 7 million Americans for insurance coverage, though the number of enrollees who have paid for their insurance premiums is still unclear.

Government officials confirmed the 7 million target to The Associated Press late Monday, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter ahead of an official announcement.

Ms. Sebelius stated that, according to insurers, something like 10-20% haven’t made their first premium payment yet. And insurers and medical facilities are expected to eat the costs for a couple months until they can successfully dump the people.

Yet the bigger question is perhaps whether the law has indeed helped insure at least some of the estimated 48 million Americans who previously did not have insurance or couldn’t get it because of a pre-existing condition.

The most recent finding by the often-cited McKinsey & Company shows 27 percent of enrollees were previously uninsured and that roughly 75 percent of those who signed up for private insurance under ObamaCare have paid their premiums.

Good question: the idea was to insure the, depending on the day, 30-45 million Americans without health insurance. Yet, the majority are people who were the recipients of Obama’s lie of the year, “If you like you plan, you can keep your plan.”

(Forbes) If you apply that math to the RAND figures, you get this: of the people who have paid their first month’s premium on the Obamacare exchanges, and are thereby enrolled in coverage, 76 percent were previously insured, and 24 percent were previously uninsured.

In essence, this will be a break even proposition regarding those who lost their plans. And the uninsured will still be uninsured. Of course, a goodly chunk of those who did get Obamacare insurance might as well still be uninsured, since there is an average Bronze plan deductible of $5,081. Here’s Marc A. Theissen at The Washington Post

Recall that between 5 million and 6 million Americans lost their health plans because of Obamacare last fall. If the administration now succeeds in signing up 5 million to 6 million previously insured Americans, it will have achieved . . . nothing. Breaking even is no great accomplishment.

And let’s not forget: Many of those new Obamacare sign-ups are self-sufficient people who were previously paying their own way and now receive government subsidies for insurance. Creating government dependency is not progress — it’s a step backward.

A $2 trillion price-tag over 10 years, all for virtually zero movement in the uninsured. All while damaging the economy, decreasing work hours, reduced hiring, reduced take-home pay, more people shifted to part time hours, companies holding on to their cash due to the massive uncertainty created by Obamacare, burdensome regulation after burdensome regulation, a virtual federal takeover of the student loan industry (yes, that was part of Ocare), increased taxes, increased consumer costs….we could keep going and going, but, at the end of the day, the CBO predicts that there will still be 30 million uninsured.

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FDA Proposes Burdensome, Costly, Unnecessary Rules For Beer Makers

By William Teach April 1, 2014 – 6:51 am

Why would they do this? In Government World, why not? They have nothing better to do

(Fox News) Beer brewers are objecting to a proposed federal rule that would make it harder for breweries to sell leftover grains as animal feed instead of throwing them away.

The Food and Drug Administration rule change would mean brewers would have to meet the same standards as livestock and pet-food manufacturers, imposing new sanitary handling procedures, record keeping and other food safety processes on brewers.

Beer makers complain that the new rules, if adopted, would force them to dump millions of tons of “spent grains,” which are left over after barley, wheat and other grains are steeped in hot water.

Bear Republic brewmaster Rich Norgrove says the rules would be costly and force brewers to dump the grains, instead of the more sustainable practice of feeding them to livestock.

It’s mission creep, and rule making for the sake of rule making. The FDA states this is part of modernizing the food safety system, and they’re concerned about foodborne illness in animals and people

Chris Thorne of the Beer Institute said he believes once the FDA has all of the information, it will see the benefits of the current system of recycling the old grain.

“This regulation is onerous and expensive, but really it’s just unnecessary. There has never been a single reported negative incidence with spent grain,” Thorne said in a statement.

Unfortunately, Chris, it matters little whether anything has ever happened, and that the regulation would be unnecessary: how often do federal agencies announce regulations and not implement them, regardless of what they hear during the comment period? This will have a negative impact on beer brewers, particularly small ones. And it will be a difficult balancing act between eating the extra costs and passing the costs on to consumers. All because the FDA wants to Do Something about an imaginary issue.

Crossed at Right Wing News.

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Warmists Real Want Other People To Go Vegetarian

By William Teach March 31, 2014 – 5:29 pm

Warmists, part of the hardcore Progressive movement, otherwise known as “nice fascism”, just can’t help telling Everyone Else how to live their lives

To Fight Climate Change, the Entire World Will Have to Eat Less Meat

Serious about battling climate change? Then you might want to consider going vegetarian. That’s because it’s looking like world temperatures will continue to climb unless people stop chowing on so much meat and dairy, according to new research from Sweden.

This isn’t exactly a new notion, having been pushed off and on for a few decades. Right now it is in the “on” position. A good deranged talking point never dies in Liberal World, it just fades away to be revamped.

It May Take a Global Vegetarian Movement to Combat Climate Change

If we really want to cut down on global greenhouse emissions, we’re going to have to do something about cow farts.

That’s the conclusion of a study published today in the journal Climatic Change. If we have any shot of reaching the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s global-warming mitigation goals, the world is going to have to start eating a lot less meat.

Which means Other People will have to give up meat. Most likely with Those People in 3rd World nation, who so often seem to be the recipients of Warmist policy, and by recipients, I mean get hosed by.

Of course, it’s strange that without Everyone Else going vegetarian, we still get

Hmph. A miniscule rise.

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If All You See…

By William Teach March 31, 2014 – 1:00 pm

…is a terrible drought world, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Defy The Narrative, with a post on how people feel about guns in the home.

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IPCC Report Released, Claims We’re Doomed

By William Teach March 31, 2014 – 10:58 am

I’m sure everyone is utterly shocked by the what the report claims, because the IPCC hasn’t been utterly alarmist for decades. It’s like putting Dawn Of The Dead in the DVD player and expecting…zombies

Panel’s Warning on Climate Risk: Worst Is Yet to Come

Climate change is already having sweeping effects on every continent and throughout the world’s oceans, scientists reported Monday, and they warned that the problem is likely to grow substantially worse unless greenhouse emissions are brought under control.

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that periodically summarizes climate science, concluded that ice caps are melting, sea ice in the Arctic is collapsing, water supplies are coming under stress, heat waves and heavy rains are intensifying, coral reefs are dying, and fish and many other creatures are migrating toward the poles or in some cases going extinct.

That’s from hyper-Alarmist Justin Gillis at the NY Times. CNN refuses to be outdone

Little time left to turn down the world’s heat, U.N. says

Your forecast for the next century: Hotter, drier and hungrier, and the chance to turn down the thermostat is slipping away.

That’s the latest conclusion from the United Nations, which urged governments to address the “increasingly clear” threats posed by a warming climate before some options are closed off for good. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that taking steps to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions blamed for rising temperatures could buy more time to adjust to a warmer world.

And the UK Independent

IPCC report: War, famine and pestilence – ‘Climate change is happening and no one in the world is immune’

Washington Post

Panel warns of worsening effects of climate change

MSNBC

UN: World ‘ill-prepared’ for risks from climate change

And it continues on and on, humorously, since these same news organizations, much less the UN IPCC, put out vasts amounts of “carbon pollution” in going about their own business. Perhaps if the UN IPCC did away with their own fossil fueled travel, especially for their yearly working vacations in nice spots around the world, they might be credible.

Jeff Dunetz asks the questions that always go through my head

  • Why did the Earth stop warming 17 years ago? (WT-technically, the rise is statistically insignificant)
  • The climate models used to predict global warming proved to be wrong, what makes the revised models more reliable?
  • What makes the IPCC so sure the warming trend of the 1980s through the mid 199os and the warming stoppage ever since, aren’t simply part of the Earth’s natural climate cycles?
  • Since global warming stopped over 17 years ago, why didn’t their doom and gloom predictions reveal themselves back then?

Let’s not forget, the models have been 95% wrong

As The Hockey Schtick notes in their header “If you can’t explain the ‘pause’, you can’t explain the cause…” Warmists try and explain away the pause, blaming it mostly on natural variability. So, why can’t the short warming spike from 1980 to about 1996 be mostly natural? The same as happened several times since the end of the Little Ice Age?

I’ll flog my meme once more: if Warmists are not concerned enough to change their own behavior, why should we believe them? This year, the UN Convention On Climate Change will hold a big conference in Bonn, Germany in June, followed by the big COP 20 (Conference on the Parties), held via teleconference, in order to make it as “carbon neutral” as possible. Just kidding. It will be held in the exotic vacation spot of Lima, Peru.

More: Lord Christopher Monckton (a name guaranteed to send Warmists into apoplexy, what is referred to scientifically as “Moonbat Level 10”) discusses the report, and offers this interesting graph

Now, Warmists will bleat out “cherry picked!!!!!!” But

Meanwhile, the discrepancy between prediction and observation continues to grow. Here is the IPCC’s predicted global warming trend since January 2005, taken from Fig. 11.25 of the Fifth Assessment Report, compared with the trend on the dataset of datasets since then. At present, the overshoot is equivalent to 2 Cº/century.

You can see Figure 11.25 here, from this page. We continue to see that the “model” prognostications have little to do with real world measurements. This in no way invalidates the notion that the Earth is currently in a warm period. What it does do is provide more evidence that blaming anthropogenic causes mostly/solely for warming at any time during the Modern Warm Period is foolish, unscientific, and wishful thinking, leading any rational thinking person to wonder exactly what the point of this whole exercise in Blamestorming and telling scary stories is.

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Say, Why Is Obama’s Foreign “Policy” So Darned Unpopular?

By William Teach March 31, 2014 – 9:34 am

The NY Times’ Ross Douthat is quite vexed that Obama’s foreign “policy” is so unpopular in polls. First, we have to consider why I’ve put “policy” in quotation marks. Well, he has to actually have a policy platform. There is none. He and his team are essentially winging it, living in the now. There’s no strategic thinking, no planning. He’s tended to annoy our allies. He has no real international “friendships”. No real engagement. Well, except in drone strikes. He likes doing that (and, in all seriousness, I like that he drone strikes the heck out of jihadis).

Why Is President Obama’s Foreign Policy Unpopular?

Writing in the Washington Post this week, Robert Kagan highlights what he calls the “paradox” of the current president’s approach to world affairs — namely, that even though Obama has been allegedly giving a war-weary public “the foreign policy they want” (by pulling out of Iraq, opting for non-intervention in Syria, etc.), his foreign policy ratings are currently terrible. Kagan argues, credibly, that these numbers are actually a judgment on the president’s national security stewardship, and not just an extension of public disillusionment with his domestic policy. Then, somewhat less credibly, he proffers this interpretation of the swoon: (snip to part of the excerpt of Kagan’s piece)

… To follow a leader to triumph inspires loyalty, gratitude and affection. Following a leader in retreat inspires no such emotions.

Douthat then excerpts Daniel Larison, who writes that Obama hasn’t given the public the non-interventionist policy he proclaimed. Douthat goes on to write

Let me suggest a third possibility. If you actually look at the trajectory of the president’s foreign policy approval ratings last year, you’ll see two notable nosedives: One last June, coinciding with the Snowden affair, which took him from favorable into unfavorable territory, and then another when he was contemplating strikes against Syria, when his numbers went from single-digit to double-digit negatives. (They subsequently recovered slightly, but have dipped anew with the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.) The ideological valence of both debates was complicated: The Snowden defection highlighted cases where Obama had taken (or the intelligence bureaucracy had taken, with his blessing) what’s generally seen as a “hawkish” line on national security, while the Syria debate involved a Congressional backlash against a hawkish position that the president then found a way to tiptoe away from himself.

But rather than trying to read the public’s response in ideological terms, maybe it’s more reasonable to look at what the two stories had in common: They both made the White House look incompetent.

Douthat thinks that Obama’s first term was pure awesomeness, but you stupid people rating Obama are stupid

And from the vantage point of the typical voter, it’s the outcomes, not the strategy, that define the major difference between Obama’s first and second terms: The first seemed to produce decent results (Bin Laden killed, Al Qaeda harried, Qaddafi toppled, the Arab Spring in its “people power” phase, the unpopular occupation of Iraq wound down without an immediate disaster for the U.S.), while the second has featured more obvious fumbles by the administration and more crises (Syria, Ukraine, the bloody aftermath in Libya, the post-revolutionary crackdowns in Egypt) where its approach has not reaped ideal results.

We learned that Obama had to be pushed kicking and screaming into taking Osama out. Al Qaeda may have been harried, but they were not on the run (though, awesomely, many were the recipients of drone strikes). He attacked Libya to protect British and French oil imports, and had zero plan for the after action, resulting in the eastern part of the country being under control of hardcore Islamists, and the country being virtually a failed state. Interesting that Ross doesn’t mention Benghazi. Obama mostly ignored, even willing ignored, the Arab Spring, until Egypt, which he made a big mess of. He even messed up the plan drawn up by the Bush Team for ending our engagement in Iraq, which Obama had been following. Are there any real wins for foreign policy during the first term? Our allies sure don’t think so. But, you stupid Americans

But invoking public opinion to prove that his policy has erred in one direction or another seems like (mostly) a mistake: Those numbers reflect casual judgments on outcomes, not informed judgments on strategy, and should be treated mostly just as examples of the near-inevitable orphaning of difficulty, setback and defeat.

Funny, I don’t remember these same judgments while Bush was president. Look, nothing is going to be perfect, mistakes are made, things go wrong. The plan for securing Iraq once the initial military phase was concluded was a big can of idiocy. But, at least there was a plan. Bush spent lots of time engaging with our allies, building relationships. Obama? Not so much. And there are no real plans. It’s the difference between the NFL and a bunch of 10 year olds with a Nerf football told to go out and play.

Obama’s foreign policy is unpopular because it’s inconsistent and inept, and significantly degrades America’s standing.

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