Weekly ESG clippings #53 - cloud control, scientific integrity, wildfire decline, stupidest litigation, climate culling, ESG proxy retreat, tree cutting
This week we bring you a shorter list than recent posts, but a notable focus on one truly horrific story (see Culling for Climate) about an intellectual leader Bill McGuire, author of HOTHOUSE EARTH: AN INHABITANT'S GUIDE, who let slip how evil his ideas truly are.
SCIENCE
• The cloud thermostat is the dominant climate controlling mechanism
• Scientific Integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters”
• #GettingWorse: Global wildfires edition
INVESTMENT/ECONOMICS
• Even Stupider Than The Stupidest Litigation In The Country
• Culling for Climate
• The Retreat From ESG Proxy Voting
ABSURDITIES
• 17 Million Scottish Trees Lost to Big Wind
The cloud thermostat is the dominant climate controlling mechanism Dr John F Clauser was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics for his experiments with quantum entanglement. Dr Clauser demonstrates, based on his recent groundbreaking research, that there are serious faults in the IPCC models of the Earth’s atmosphere and that its interpretation of observational data from a variety of observational modalities are flawed. He then introduces his original research on the cloud-thermostat mechanism, which he concludes is the overwhelmingly dominant climate controlling feedback mechanism that stabilizes the Earth’s climate and temperature and thereby actually prevents runaway global warming. He therefore asserts that this is great news demonstrating that there is no real climate crisis, and that Earth is not in peril; the clear corollary is that IPCC’s (and NOAA’s) claims are a myth and therefore that trillions of dollars are being wasted on pointless mitigation measures that should instead be put to constructive use.
Our take: the recent Nobel prize winner in physics explains there is no climate crisis. Did you hear this in the popular media or from your friendly neighborhood climate alarmist politician?
Scientific Integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters” "For more than two decades, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA) has published a count of weather-related disasters in the United States that it estimates have exceeded one billion dollars(inflation-adjusted) in each calendar year starting in 1980. The dataset is widely cited and applied in research, assessment and invoked to justify policy in federal agencies, Congress and by the U.S. President. This paper performs an evaluation of the dataset under criteria of procedure and substance defined under NOAA’s Information Quality and Scientific Integrity policies. The evaluation finds that the “billion dollar disaster” dataset falls short of meeting these criteria. Thus, public claims promoted by NOAA associated with the dataset and its significance are flawed and at times misleading. Specifically, NOAA incorrectly claims that for some types of extreme weather, the dataset demonstrates detection and attribution of changes on climate timescales. Similarly flawed are NOAA’s claims that increasing annual counts of billion-dollar disasters are in part a consequence of human-caused climate change. NOAA’s claims to have achieved detection and attribution are not supported by any scientific analysis that it has performed. Given the importance and influence of the dataset in science and policy, NOAA should act quickly to address this scientific integrity shortfall."
Our take: in climate alarmism the facts may be massaged to support the desired message. How long will it take before demonstrably flawed procedures used to assert growth in climate disasters is corrected?
#GettingWorse: Global wildfires edition "Wildfires have been trending down globally and on every continent so far this century. Here, from OurWorldinData are the numbers, as collected by satellites:"
INVESTMENT/ECONOMICS
Even Stupider Than The Stupidest Litigation In The Country "I have had several posts on a collection of related cases that I have called “The Stupidest Litigations In The Country.” These are cases where climate hysterics have sued oil and gas producing companies, or the federal government, or both, seeking various extreme punishments ranging from massive damages up to and including an order to end all production of fossil fuels. The asserted grounds vary somewhat from case to case, but a central theme is a claimed constitutional right to a “clean and healthy environment.”
"NBC News has the story on May 7, with the headline “Vermont passes bill to charge fossil fuel companies for damage from climate change.”
"So what exactly is the game plan? I don’t think that they have thought this one through, to put it mildly. Isn’t every citizen of Vermont a user of fossil fuels? How about the state itself? Exxon may have produced a bunch of gasoline by pumping crude oil and refining it down in Texas, but the state of Vermont is the one that made all those emissions by running a fleet of cars and trucks and heating all its buildings. Is the state prepared to restrict at all the use of fossil fuels in its territory, or is it just going to pretend that nobody but the fuel producers has any role in making emissions?"
Our take: it is amazing to read of several governments suing the energy companies that enable and support the lives of all their taxpayers, claiming they are harming the very people who so eagerly choose to consume the companies' products. A great lesson would be learned if a single small municipality would ban all fossil fuel energy from their jurisdiction, including things made with fossil fuel energy. The swift suffering would be horrible, but instructive, as we expect the politicians would be overthrown almost instantly.
Culling for Climate - Climate research and its misanthropic sect. Bill McGuire, an Emeritus Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London “If I’m being brutally honest, the only realistic way I see emissions falling as fast as they need to, to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown (the latest alarmist dogmatic talking point), is the culling of the human population by a pandemic with a very high fatality rate.” [emphasis added]
"More recently, renowned climate scientist Michael E. Mann suggested that “the natural carrying capacity of the planet … is maybe a billion people.”3 The notion of “carrying capacity” is itself a Malthusian tell — a seemingly scientific metric often used to justify population policies or control based on a hard planetary limit."
"Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes was far more explicit when she recently lamented, “Eight Billion People in the World Is a Crisis, Not an Achievement. More people will not solve the problem of too many people.”
"And along the same lines, Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, explicitly connects his “planetary boundaries” concept to the work of neo-Malthusians Dennis and Donna Meadows of the Club of Rome (Limits to Growth)."
Our take: most people naively accept what intellectual leaders say and never do a proper due diligence. Instead, they repeat empty catch-phrases and repeat anti-human slogans like "net-zero", "energy transition" and "just stop oil." But sometimes, when they let their guard down, leaders of the movement say what they really mean, and we need to pay careful attention.
Also The Malthusians Just Can't Keep Their Goals a Secret "Make no mistake about it: You really are the carbon they want to reduce, and they just can’t stop themselves from saying it out loud. The latest spiller of the Malthusian beans comes to us in the form of one Professor Bill McGuire, whose X profile says he is a “Volcanologist, climate scientist, writer, broadcaster, activist, socialist, best-selling author of HOTHOUSE EARTH: AN INHABITANT'S GUIDE.”
"“If I’m being brutally honest, the only realistic way I see emissions falling as fast as they need to, to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown (the latest alarmist dogmatic talking point), is the culling of the human population by a pandemic with a very high fatality rate.”
"Welp, he said it, not me."
"And hey, let’s be honest: He’s just repeating stuff that’s been said out loud in recent months by luminaries like Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, and many other Cardinals of the Global Church of Climate Alarm. So, what’s the problem?"
The Retreat From ESG Proxy Voting - Major investment funds are losing their zeal to push politics in shareholder votes. "In the murky world of shareholder proxy voting, a little media scrutiny goes a long way. Asset managers hoped investors wouldn’t notice how their shares were being voted, but many have curbed their ESG enthusiasm now that word is getting out. Even BlackRock has turned a new leaf. These are the findings of “Putting Politics Over Pensions,” a new report by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, which tracks big firms’ records on shareholder votes. Last year’s report broke the bad news that portfolio managers were following the progressive political herd on environmental, social and corporate-governance proposals. Most funds backed political resolutions unrelated to enhancing shareholder value, such as forcing companies to divest from fossil fuels or adopt racial equity audits."
"The funds rejecting ESG are embracing their responsibility to investors. All asset managers have a fiduciary duty to maximize returns, and that includes their approach to proxy voting. The advisory firms and other ESG enthusiasts offer strained theories to suggest that costly climate policies somehow boost profits. But fund families managing billions of dollars in stocks should know better, and investors would be wise to flee if they don’t."
Our take: persuading investment managers to do a proper due diligence on the ESG ideas they have seemingly adopted without such diligence is a main purpose of this blog. Let's hope more investment managers back away from ESG proxy voting and instead spend some time reading the science and economic literature on the subject instead.
ABSURDITIES
17 Million Scottish Trees Lost to Big Wind "The Scottish government has approved the destruction of more than 17 million trees in this century to make way for their being replaced by Big Wind industrial developments, including more than 1 million in just the past year."
"This obsession with destroying whatever scenic or arable lands necessary to put up ugly, intermittent, unreliable, and hugely costly developments of dozens of gigantic wind towers with less than a 20% efficiency rate is what has replaced the “environmental” movement in the Western world today. It is one of the saddest and most ruinous social developments in modern times, and it simply must be stopped."
Our take: environmentalists used to work to save trees from being cut down, now they eagerly embrace cutting them by the millions in the name of climate salvation. Their true purpose has never been to improve the world for humans, but to prevent human impact, and now they are caught in their contradiction.
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