Weekly clippings #15 - hurricane data, science, energy, EVs, ESG scores, sequestration

With hurricanes in the news this week it seems suitable to include a couple of references to the fact that the best scientific knowledge available finds no significant links between hurricanes and carbon dioxide. Despite this, we constantly see news reports hyping such a link. Even a casual due diligence by a reporter would show this is false, but as usual knowledge and the truth is not what they seek. Also in the Science category the fourth and fifth articles reference a horrible story about a peer-reviewed scientific article being withdrawn by the publisher not for scientific or procedural reasons but because it was fiercely attacked for basically restating what the IPCC and many other reference sources say, that the climate crisis eagerly sought by so many is not yet detectable.

In the Investment/Economics category, I started and finished with a piece by Alex Epstein about how he would debate energy and climate in the wake of the first Republican candidate’s debate and his advice to Canadian energy producers on morally defending their work and products. In the middle, I have three articles highlighting the harms and impossibilities of electric vehicles and their mandates.  

In the Absurdity category, I actually chose an academic research article that finds the correlation between ESG scores and carbon intensity is close to zero, then added one that describes the current language shift away from emissions and towards burning. This will add to the distortion of language and thought that goes back at least as far as opponents of freedom focusing on global warming …climate change…carbon emissions…fossil fuel burning. It highlights how the fundamental opposition is not to any of these, but rather to human efforts to improve the environment for life on Earth and thus is fundamentally anti-human.

Preparing for Hurricane Hype with Actual Data  Large variability and many centuries with much greater activity than in our lifetimes

Global Warming and Hurricanes

“...it is premature to conclude with high confidence that human-caused increases in greenhouse gases have caused a change in past Atlantic basin hurricane activity that is outside the range of natural variability…”


Climate Change Hasn’t Set the World on Fire  It turns out the percentage of the globe that burns each year has been declining since 2001. Related to this the recent fire in Hawaii has incompetence all over it, but then…climate change of course.

The Alimonti Addendum and How Science is Done These Days “One of the most egregious failures of scientific publishing that I have seen, SpringerNature have retracted a 2022 paper — Alimonti et al. — after it received negative press coverage in The Guardian and AFP, including criticism from oft-quoted climate scientists. The hurricane part of this is mentioned here.

 

How I would debate energy and climate if I were running for President In the first 2023 Republican debate, some candidates made good points about energy. But there’s a lot of room for improvement.

 Electric vehicle mandates are an assault on the middle class Only China and the rich will benefit from this hasty transition to an all-electric future

 Policies Pushing Electric Vehicles Show Why Few People Want One  They wouldn’t need huge subsidies to sell if they really were a good choice, and consumers know that.

Electric Vehicles for Everyone? The Impossible Dream and WSJ article about the paper

Alex Epstein returns to Alberta with a prescription for effective energy dialogues  “We do not think clearly about energy. We need to carefully weigh the benefits and the side effects- factoring in the negative and positive climate side effects of fossil fuels with precision.”

 

Companies with good ESG scores pollute as much as low-rated rivals  Keeran Beeharee, vice-president for ESG outreach and research at Moody’s, agreed that ESG investment does not necessarily help an investor create a low-carbon portfolio or any other specific goal. The correlation between ESG scores and carbon intensity is close to zero.

It Was Never About Emissions  For decades, we were told that carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels were dooming the planet and that we needed to slow and then eventually eliminate the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere. Now, with industry on the cusp of validating carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies at commercial scale—an advance that would theoretically allow humanity to benefit from the life-nourishing energy fossil fuels provide while minimizing global emissions of CO2— environmentalists are throwing everything they have at stopping such developments in their tracks.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Weekly clippings #44 - cause and effect, temperature measurements, climate disclosure fraud, no due diligence, racist hiring, windmills vs trees

Image
  A whole lot of science this week: Temperature and CO2: cause and effect The IPCC’s new hockey stick Holocene temperature variations Iceland’s ice not melting Greenland near lowest temp of last 10,000 years The end of el-Nino brings cold for the coming years No trend in Rainfall   Also a bunch of Investment/Economic articles: The regulatory climate disclosure fraud Flawed ESG statistics Canadian fund disclosures required, but complete lack of due diligence by regulators ESG series in Invesmtent Executive, again no due diligence Exxon on the offensive Banks shoot themselves in the foot by adopting ESG Nearly useless battery energy storage Diversity hiring is racist   And then Absurdities: Chopping down 120,000 to place industrial wind turbines to save the environment A true ban on fossil fuels would quickly force a reality check. Will any...
Read more

Weekly clippings #10 - Antarctica, solar activity, executive compensation, net zero causing poverty

Likely the saddest of this week’s articles is the one explaining how The Western world’s net zero policies are condemning hundreds of millions of Africans to a lifetime of poverty . While ESG advocates try to position it as ethical, when we can clearly see how its ideas perpetuate the poverty and suffering of billions of people, we need to check our premises. Three billion people have access to less energy than one of our refrigerators. These people need far more energy and it must be reliable, affordable, scalable, and flexible. This is why every country trying to emerge from energy poverty turns to the same energy source: fossil fuels. The rest of the articles are all very interesting but this one really “hits in the feels.” Limited Impact of Thwaites Ice Shelf on Future Ice Loss From Antarctica Melting of the so-called Doomsday Glacier won’t cause the upstream glacier to move anywhere and would at most raise sea levels by a few millimeters.   Solar Activity: Solar Cycle ...
Read more

Weekly clippings #9 - extreme weather, reefs, models, governance, ESG metrics

 This week once more my collection is growing much faster than one item per category per week, so my clippings are three in science and four in economics/investment. It’s starting to look like an actual newsletter and I included a graphic header each category.  With the media fawning over reports of record temperatures, this is a perfect week to look at what the scientific data actually says and this week I’ve given one about temperature, one about how the Great Barrier Reef is in wonderful shape and a third about the non-scientific models used for justifying pending climate doom. Note that there are no actual measurements that lead us to conclude doom is coming, only models, and a proper understanding of the validity of such models is crucial to choosing any investment actions regarding climate change. Again and again the models are shown to be invalid and even ridiculous in their assumptions and their mathematics.   In the investment category this week I am focusi...
Read more