Weekly clippings #43 - exaggerated reports, flawed models, zero research, no detection, ESG bleed, mineral injustice, failing buses, asthmatic warming

 This week in science we start with an academic study of how research reports in ecology have become so distorted and exaggerate their findings, followed by an article that explains how the growth of assets in risky areas explains greater economic damages, even as human damage has plummeted. Next comes a debunking of the infamous stripes graphic, an explanation that climate models are hugely biased upwards when compared to measurements, and last up we see falling flood risks.

In Investment/Economics we kick off with what government should (not) do about climate change, then an article explaining how bank research on net zero is near zero, followed by how climate change is not detected in insurance losses. Next we see how DEI is filled with fraud, ESG debt is bleeding clients, and Blackrock is turning down climate proposals. We continue with the injustice of "clean energy" minerals, the impossibility of electrifying all vehicles, and the dumping of a business leader who dared to say a net-zero goal was not feasible.

In Absurdities we bring you the ticking time bomb of electric buses, a trial balloon for a new alarmist catchphrase, and how asthma medication is causing global warming. 

SCIENCE

Empirical evidence of widespread exaggeration bias and selective reporting in ecology  and author's discussion here "In many scientific disciplines, common research practices have led to unreliable and exaggerated evidence about scientific phenomena. Here we describe some of these practices and quantify their pervasiveness in recent ecology publications in five popular journals. In an analysis of over 350 studies published between 2018 and 2020, we detect empirical evidence of exaggeration bias and selective reporting of statistically significant results. This evidence implies that the published effect sizes in ecology journals exaggerate the importance of the ecological relationships that they aim to quantify."

Reported effect sizes before and after pre-registration (i.e., publicly sharing your research and analysis plan before starting your research) was required in clinical trials. Before pre-registration was required – effect sizes were mostly large and positive. After pre-registration was required – effect sizes were much smaller and swung around 0. The hypothesized cause of this difference: pre-registration takes away many biases and external incentives to publish exciting, ‘sexy’ results and instead pushes scientists towards more replicable and transparent practices. Most ecologists were not aware of what a huge issue low statistical power was in our discipline. Based on the results of our survey it was apparent that this literature was not being widely taught to ecologists or talked about regularly when training new scientists. On top of our survey results that indicated that power analyses are conducted infrequently at best by most people, only one paper out of the 354 papers included in our dataset even mentioned statistical power.

Did Exxon Make It Rain Today? "Yes, there are many types of disasters, like hurricanes and floods, that are causing greater economic costs in many places than they used to. But this is almost entirely because the places that are most exposed to weather disasters have far more people and far more wealth in harm’s way than they used to. Even if there were no global warming, in other words, these areas would be much more at risk simply because they have much more to lose.

"Once you factor out how many more people and how much more economic activity are in exposed areas, the economic costliness of weather extremes in recent decades has generally been flat or declining, not rising. The human costs, meanwhile, measured by deaths associated with climate and weather extremes, have fallen dramatically over the last century. Improving infrastructure and technology have made most people much more resilient to climate hazards today, even in relatively poor regions and even as the climate has warmed."

Stripes Across My T-Shirt "There’s a famous graphic among climate alarmists called “Stripes” that shows, supposedly, how we’ve experienced unprecedented warming since the mid-19th century. Greta Thunberg put it on the cover of her new book, and posed in front of a poster of it for the book launch. It’s a good illustration of the principle that a picture is worth a thousand words."

"But there are three things about it that make it “propaganda” in the negative sense of that word. First, it’s cherry-picked from near the bottom of a known natural cooling called the “Little Ice Age” and it depicts a natural rebound as if it were unprecedented and terrifying. Second, if you look closely at it, you’ll see that temperature has fluctuated even since 1850 in ways that CO2 cannot begin to explain. And third, if you do the same chart but pick a more meaningful starting point, it tells you the exact opposite of what they think it does."

Global Warming: Observations vs. Climate Models "While global averages produce the most robust indicator of “global” warming, regional effects are often of more concern to national and regional governments and their citizens. For example, in the United States large increases in summertime heat could affect human health and agricultural crop productivity. But as Chart 2 shows, surface air temperatures during the growing season (June, July, and August) over the 12-state Corn Belt for the past 50 years reveal a large discrepancy between climate models and observations, with all 36 models producing warming rates well above what has been observed and the most extreme model producing seven times too much warming.

The fact that global food production has increased faster than population growth in the past 60 years suggests that any negative impacts due to climate change have been small. In fact, “global greening” has been documented to be occurring in response to more atmospheric CO2 which enhances both natural plant growth and agricultural productivity, leading to significant agricultural benefits.

These discrepancies between models and observations are never mentioned when climate researchers promote climate models for energy policy decision-making. Instead, they exploit exaggerated model forecasts of climate change to concoct exaggerated claims of a climate crisis."

Floods have become less deadly: an analysis of global flood fatalities 1975–2022 "Floods are amongst the most frequent disasters in terms of human and economic impacts." "Despite population growth and increasing flood hazards, the average number of fatalities per event has declined over time. Mortality fractions per event have decreased over time for middle- and high-middle-income countries, but increased for low-income countries. This highlights the importance of continuing and expanding risk reduction and adaptation efforts."

INVESTMENT/ECONOMICS

What should government do to address climate change? "“Addressing climate change” is the wrong target; we want to reduce climate danger. And the proven way to do that is: let us use all forms of cost-effective energy, including fossil fuels. Asking how government should “address climate change” assumes that us impacting climate must be a bad thing. But it’s only bad if it endangers us by creating challenges we can’t master. And so far, our climate mastery has far outpaced any new climate challenges."

Opinion: Bank research on net zero is near zero. "We intend to fix that. We're asking the big banks to study what disinvestment from oil and gas is going to cost both their shareholders and the economy. The dogged pursuit of this goal, just 26 years off, has led to carbon taxes, soaring energy prices, “emissions caps” (really production caps) for Canada’s oil and gas sector, deindustrialization and economic hardship for all. That’s not just speculation. To see the effects of net zero, we need only look to Europe. As countries there have pursued similar policies, many energy-intensive manufacturers of basic materials like chemicals, ceramics, glass, steel and fertilizers have either gone elsewhere, drastically cut back production or gone out of business entirely. Manufacturing requires energy, and net zero is premised on making energy more expensive and less abundant. But net zero by 2050 is currently the No. 1 ideological, political and financial goal in Canada. Governments and regulatory agencies are creating and implementing policies to phase out oil and gas, and our financial institutions are tagging along. This economically ruinous crusade is based on dogma and ideology, not on what’s best for those institutions’ shareholders or Canadians at large. So far, the crusade hasn’t done much for carbon emissions, either. Demand for oil and gas around the globe has only gone up."

Changing climates: the heat is (still) on A new Swiss Re report acknowledges that any signal of climate change is not yet discernible in insured loss trends, but remains a risk for the future. "To date, the main drivers of rising economic losses have been growth, urbanisation and associated asset value creation: there are more assets that need to be insured." "Currently, climate change plays a relatively small role but we expect its associated losses will contribute more to economic losses in the future."

Ivy League DEI plagiarists are likely the tip of a vast pyramid of con artists "And these scandals are hitting the Ivies, which presumably find the best: lmagine how low other universities have sunk as they hired thousands of DEI bureaucrats over the last decade."

A $1.5 Trillion ‘ESG’ Debt Market Has Started Bleeding Clients "Extra regulatory requirements, fewer financial incentives and the risk of being accused of greenwashing are putting off clients who just a few years ago were champing at the bit to attach an environmental, social or governance label to their financing, according to bankers and lawyers close to the market. The products in question are so-called sustainability-linked loans, a market that BloombergNEF has estimated is worth $1.5 trillion, making it second in size only to the global market for green bonds. Largely unfettered by regulations, borrowers and financiers have been relatively free to construct their own standards for SLLs. But as financial watchdogs start to erect guardrails around ESG labeling, a broader market retreat appears to be underway."

Wall Street’s DEI Retreat Has Officially Begun "This is what diversity, equity and inclusion looks like on Wall Street today: anxious, fraught – and changing fast." "The seemingly small changes — lawyerly tweaks, executives call them — are starting to add up to something big: the end of a watershed era for diversity in the US workplace, and the start of a new, uncertain one."

BlackRock turned down record number of climate proposals amid inflation, ESG pushback. BlackRock says it assesses climate proposals based on its role as a fiduciary to its clients. "Overall, BlackRock turned down 742 of the 813 proposals it voted on and 373, or 93%, of the social and climate proposals it faced, according to the company's 2023 Investment Stewardship report.

"We observed a greater number of overly prescriptive proposals or ones lacking economic merit,"Joud Abdel Majeid, BlackRock's global head of investment stewardship, wrote in the report. "Importantly, the majority of these proposals failed to recognize that companies are already meeting their asks. Because so many proposals were over-reaching, lacking economic merit, or simply redundant, they were unlikely to help promote long-term shareholder value and received less support from shareholders, including BlackRock, than in years past," she continued.

African leaders call for equity over minerals used for clean energy “We need to make sure that industrialisation happens here and that we’re not just serving another continent’s industrialisation plan,” said Seble Samuel, head of Africa campaigns and advocacy at the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty initiative. “We cannot afford to replicate the same injustices and extractivism that’s happened with the fossil fuel economy.” So, what effect do you think this idea would have on the affordability of the vast mineral extraction and refining needed to make solar panels and windmills? Might the costs increase significantly? You bet.

THE BIG SWITCH: Electrifying all U.S. vehicles would be colossal feat "With California and other states steering toward net zero emission cars and trucks and phasing out gas- and diesel-powered vehicles, the American Transportation Research Institute set out to ascertain what would be required. The institute’s assessment found that electrifying all U.S. vehicles would be a massive undertaking costing untold billions of dollars."

• Nationwide electricity generation would need to increase 40% to power the entire U.S. fleet of trucks.
• Lithium ion batteries require lithium, cobalt, graphite and nickel. For lithium alone, the U.S. would require nearly 35 years of current global production to electrify all vehicles. This new production level would only supply a single round of batteries. Replacement batteries would be needed approximately every 6.2 years.
• Battery weight is another issue. A typical long-haul truck weighs 18,000 to 19,000 pounds. Electric long-haul trucks would weigh about 30,000 pounds, and that eats into the amount of cargo that can be carried.
• Chargers — and lots of them — would have to be installed at every truck stop. Electricity will also have to be available at those truck stops, many of which are rural and don’t have adequate transmission lines. Less than half of the nation’s highways are in charger-accessible areas.
• A new Class 8 diesel truck now costs about $135,000-$150,000. A comparable Class 8 electric truck could cost $400,000-$500,000.

Take Notice - Question the Net Zero Agenda, and You’re Out the Door "Now-former CEO Jay Grewal was appointed in 2019 as CEO of Manitoba Hydro under Brian Palliser’s Progressive Conservatives. Ms. Grewal is an accomplished executive with decades of experience and impeccable credentials. She was the utility's first female CEO, and by all accounts handled her role well, “leading the utility through significant challenges, including two droughts, a severe snowstorm and the COVID-19 pandemic,” in the words of NDP Finance Minister Adrien Sala, who oversees Hydro. So, what was the issue? Well, according to the Winnipeg Free Press, the NDP government decreed that Manitoba Hydro “chart a path to achieve a net-zero energy grid by 2035.” And Ms. Grewal, because she knows her brief, described that mandate as “not feasible.” That is, it can’t be done. What did this quite sensible position, grounded in reality, get her? Fired."

ABSURDITY

Britain Has an 'EV Ticking Time Bomb' Problem "A recall notice for almost 2,000 EV buses. I swear, this story checks off pretty much all the absurdity boxes:
1. So, you got your Chinese batteries - check!
2. You got your virtue-signaling public officials in major liberal cities like London and Manchester buying not a few, but hundreds of these absurdly expensive vehicles - check!
3. You got the fact that these “safety watchdogs” fear the damn things will just spontaneously burst into flames if left unattended - check!
4. And you even got the fact that the maker of the EV buses has no actual idea how to solve the problem - check!

John Kerry Tries Out A New Climate Catchphrase To Ratchet Up The Fear To review, here is the progression of favored terminology dictated by the globalist elites related to their climate hysteria:

1. In the beginning, there was “global warming.”
2. Then, the favored talking point morphed into the more inclusive “climate change” to allow the scaremongers to blame every weather event, whether warm or cold, on their problem.
3. Next, they elevated the fright rhetoric to a nebulous “climate crisis.”
4. When that didn’t work to sufficiently hold the public’s attention, they elevated it further to a “climate emergency.”
5. Seeing their 2024 election year polls lagging, they now move to the even more alarming “climate breakdown.”
6. Can a “climate catastrophe” or, even better, a “climate collapse” be far behind?

How asthma treatment is emitting the same amount of greenhouse gas as 124k homes "Poorly controlled asthma contributes 303,874 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent a year – as much excess greenhouse gas emissions as nearly 125,000 UK homes, according to the same study. Greenhouse gas emissions for the average person with poorly-controlled asthma are eight times higher than those who have their asthma under control."