August 27, 2017

EPA Will No Longer Sponsor the Annual Climate Leadership Awards

August 26, 2017

(Engadget via Reuters) - It's no secret that Scott Pruitt is a climate change skeptic, and the Environmental Protection Agency has been undoing Obama-era policies ever since he took office. The agency's latest move follows that trend: the EPA has announced that it's no longer sponsoring the 2018 Climate Leadership Awards program, which recognizes companies that take steps to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and publicly report their progress. As a result, the awards program itself and the Climate Leadership Conference that usually goes with it have both been canceled for next year.

EPA spokesperson Jahan Wilcox apologized but didn't explain why the EPA withdrew its support. As he told Reuters in an email "It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that [the EPA doesn't] plan to fund an awards ceremony on climate change." To start with, the administration's proposed budget for 2018 will see its funding cut by 31 percent, which will specifically affect its climate change and pollution initiatives. Even without the budget cut, though, it's hard to imagine the EPA supporting a climate change award in its current state.

Earlier this year, the agency pulled down its climate science pages to reflect the views of the White House. The president also signed an executive order rolling back climate policies approved by the previous administration. And let's not forget that the United States withdrew from the Paris Accord, an agreement between 142 countries to make an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

While the awards program for 2018 was canceled, the EPA's former co-sponsors, non-government organizations C2ES and the Climate Registry, intend to continue the tradition. They're now looking for a new co-sponsor willing to fund and host the program in the future.


Study: Majority of Climate Scientists Don’t Agree with ‘Consensus’

July 31, 2015

(Breitbart) - Nearly six in ten climate scientists don’t adhere to the so-called “consensus” on man-made climate change, a new study by the Dutch government has found. The results contradict the oft-cited claim that there is a 97 percent consensus amongst climate scientists that humans are responsible for global warming.

The study, by the PBL Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency, a government body, invited 6550 scientists working in climate related fields, including climate physics, climate impact, and mitigation, to take part in a survey on their views of climate science.

Of the 1868 who responded, just 43 percent agreed with the IPCC that “It is extremely likely (95%+ certainty) that more than half of [global warming] from 1951 to 2010 was caused by [human activity]”.

Even with the “don’t knows” removed that figure increases only to 47 percent, still leaving a majority of climate scientists who do not subscribe to the IPCC’s statement.

The findings directly contradict the claim that 97 percent of climate scientists endorse the view that humans are responsible for global warming, as first made by Cook et al in a paper published in Environment Research Letters.

Cook’s paper has since been extremely widely debunked, yet so ingrained has the 97 percent consensus claim become that The Guardian has an entire section named after it, and President Obama has cited it on Twitter.

Commenting on the new study, Australian climate blogger Joanne Nova said: “Finally there is a decent survey on the topic, and it shows that less than half of what we would call 'climate scientists' who research the topic and, for the most part, publish in the peer reviewed literature, would agree with the IPCC’s main conclusions. Only 43% of climate scientists agree with the IPCC '97%' certainty.”

The authors of the study warn that climate sceptics may be slightly over-represented, given the small pool of responses. But as the scientists invited to participate were picked for having published work that included the phrases “global warming” or “global climate change,” Nova counters that, to the contrary, they are likely to be under-represented.

“Given that sceptics get sacked, rarely get grants to research, and find it harder to get published, they are under-represented in every way in the 'certified' pool of publishing climate scientists. Sceptical scientists, I dare say, would be much less likely to use the keyword phrase 'global warming' in the papers they do publish. I imagine it’s easier to get papers published that don’t specifically poke the mainstream buttons,” she noted.

However, mounting evidence against climate change theory and the ‘consensus’ is unlikely to stem the tide of policy designed to combat global warming, thanks to the sheer size of the climate change industry that has built up over the last few decades.

New estimates published by the Climate Change Business Journal put the total size of the industry at $1.5 trillion a year, or $4 billion a day, equivalent to the size of the global online retail market. The figure includes carbon markets, carbon consulting, biofuels, carbon sequestration, renewable technologies, eco buildings and hybrid cars.

The climate change consultancy market alone is worth $1.9 billion worldwide; $670 million in the United States, thanks to businesses need to keep on top of climate policy. And these figures are expected to more than double by 2020.

“Most industries this size exist because they produce something the market wants,” commented Nova. “They worry that competitors might chip into their market share, but they don’t worry that the market might disappear overnight. Normal industries fear that a “bad” political outcome might reduce profits by ten or twenty percent, and sometimes they donate “both ways”. But the climate industry has literally a trillion on the table that depends on big-government policy and election outcomes.

“So while The Guardian worries about the dark and evil influence of the fossil fuels industry they don’t seem at all concerned about the vested-monster-in-the-kitchen, the 1.5 Trillion Climate Industry. 

Ditto for the intrepid souls at the ABC/BBC/CBC who think they speak truth to power, but miss the most powerful lobby in the climate debate.

2 comments:

  1. William 22 hours ago

    Why give awards to climate 'scientists' who after all these years STILL have not told us HOW much or warming is man made. 5% 50% 100%....man made? All they say is vague generalities like 'Mostly man made" or "largely" or "strongly linked" A leader cannot make policy involving billions or trillions of dollars based on generalities. Maybe it's really a small number and letting that little secret out may disrupt the whole climate industry.

    J 22 hours ago

    "It's no secret that Scott Pruitt is a climate change skeptic, and the Environmental Protection Agency has been undoing Obama-era policies ever since he took office." Fantastic! The best one "undone" is the Paris fiasco. That one alone will save the US taxpayers trillions of dollars.

    jamesh 22 hours ago

    It is no secret that the EPA had fundamentally lost it's way and needed to refocus on its core mission of clean air and clean water. Scott Pruitt is just the man to do that. For far too long it was an arm of leftist climate advocacy, and bludgeon of property rights.

    K 22 hours ago

    The Paris Deal Was A 'Fraud' And A 'Sham' ... Until Trump Decided To Ditch It. James Hansen, the undisputed hero of the climate change movement called the Paris deal "a fraud really, a fake. … It's just worthless words." A joint letter signed by nearly a dozen top climate scientists said the agreement suffered "deadly flaws lying just beneath its veneer of success." These scientists complained that the agreement could actually be counterproductive, since it gave the impression that global warming was being dealt with when in fact it wasn't. A study in the peer-reviewed journal Global Policy said that even if every country lived up to its CO2 emission reduction promises through 2030, the Paris deal would "likely reduce global temperature rise about 0.17°C in 2100." "Current climate policy promises will do little to stabilize the climate and their impact will be undetectable for many decades," the study concluded. Kevin Anderson, a climate-change professor at the University of Manchester told the London Independent that the Paris deal was "worse than inept" and that it "risks locking in failure." Friends of the Earth International labeled it "a sham of a deal" that will "fail to deliver." "Politicians say it is a fair and ambitious deal," the group's Dipti Bhatnagar said, "yet it is the complete opposite. People are being deceived." New Internationalist magazine said it was "a disaster for the world's most vulnerable people. " Physicist Mark Buchanan, writing in Bloomberg View, called the Paris agreement an "abject failure." Nick Fillmore, in a piece for the left-wing Huffington Post, said that politicians had "convinced themselves and the compliant mainstream media that the accord all 195 countries signed was an amazing breakthrough document." Despite the "lofty language and idealistic goals," it is, Fillmore said, "totally lacking in legally binding mechanisms that will hold governments to emission limits that will stop global warming from reaching devastatingly high levels." I could go on, but you get the picture. If the climate-change threat is real, the Paris deal really was a sham, for all the reasons these critics cited.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anthony 22 hours ago
    The EPA should have never had a program like this. it does nothing but highlight their inherent bias when it comes to the whole climate change scam. I fully support protecting the environment but the EPA has overstepped its bounds at every opportunity especially when to comes to small business and land owners. They use the term "navigable waterway) whenever it suits them to tie people up in court for years until the landowner is bankrupt and is forced to give up his property. Its time for that to end.

    Plutarch 22 hours ago
    Remember the climate is 100% dependent upon the sun. The EPA (and its Parent... totalitarian Liberalism) 100% dependent upon absconding with our wallets.

    John 22 hours ago
    Only one percent of life on the planet remains after nature has purged itself five times and man was not even on the horizon. We are part of a natural order, not the cause of it. Patent medicine salesmen have been around as long as mankind and this is just the latest incarnation. If not for the gullibility and arrogance of the great unwashed, these whining researchers would be forced to get real jobs.

    Al 22 hours ago
    Is man also responsible for the last ice age, or is that just part of earth's cyclical change??????????????????????

    michaels 22 hours ago
    I dont think the taxpayers want the EPA to be conducting awards ceremonies wasting taxpayer money, what do the hacks not understand

    Big 22 hours ago
    Global Warming Caused by Man is a Hoax! They want trillion$ to fight it! Nuf $aid!

    Adam 19 hours ago
    ...That the EPA ever was involved in sponsoring the annual climate awards was a crock... a liberal government agency using our tax dollars to advance an questionable agenda, given the opportunity to influence national policy by handing out awards to their liberal allies... this wasn't their role or place. There should be an investigation... and a lot of somebodies should go to jail.

    Eatatjoesforadvice 21 hours ago
    I cannot believe how many brainwashed people there are that think human activity dominates climate change. We can measure man-made emissions reasonably well, but we can’t measure the natural emissions and sequestrations of CO2 at all precisely. Try the 500+ methane seeps found off of the Pacific Coast in just the past YEAR! Warmists will try and say permafrost thaws from seeps. That is laughable as no one knows which happened first. Permafrost or seeps and WHO knows what actually caused the seeps. They are probably normal occurences. That is just one small part of the world. The error bars are huge, Humans emits 5Gt or so per year, but the oceans emit about 90Gt and the land-plants about 60Gt, for a total of maybe 150Gt. Many scientists have assumed that the net flows of carbon to and from natural sinks and sources of CO2 cancel each other out, but there is no real data to confirm this and it’s just a convenient assumption. The problem is that even small fractional changes in natural emissions or sequestrations swamp the human emissions. Read the PUBLISHED articles written by: Dr Tim Ball, Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. (U of Colorado talks about LOW incidence of bad weather the past 100 years)), Dr Roy Spencer (NASA & overreach of warming), Dr. Jay Zwally (NASA & Antartica ice) Dr. John Bates (NOAA & data is way overstated), Dr John Christy (winner of NASA award), Dr Richard Lindzen (Nobel Prize), Dr Judith Curry, Dr Don Easterbrook, Dr. Will Harper, Dr Robert Balling, Dr. Lucka Bogataj, Dr Rosa Compagnucci, Dr John Daniel, Dr Robert Davis, Dr Willem de Lange, Dr Chris de Freitas ,Dr Oliver Frauenfeld, Dr Garth Poiltridge, Dr Bob Carter and I could present hundreds more (I love the lie of 97% being on one side), who state the climate change is 99% natural variability. Let the haters typically reply and attack them personally as being moronic, idiotic, and ignorant. Their studies and publications are merited. LOL

    ReplyDelete