Climate Change? What Climate Change?

Climate Skeptic Takes on the Latest Climate Hysteria    Climate Skeptic Bjorn Lomborg Excoriates Scientific Community's Hysteria By Rick Moran Aug 10, 2021 12:39 PM ET Photo via Ben Wolf The UN issued a report on Monday that was music to the ears of climate hysterics. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called the report a “code red for humanity,” and the other usual suspects weighed in with varying degrees of terror, outrage, and frenzied excitement. Let’s face it: The end of the world is exciting. The idea of being alive when the world is in the process of dying is exhilarating. So you...

National Public Radio’s Misinformation on Wildfires and Climate: Part 1 By Jim Steele Each day I attempt to synthesize curiously divergent views in the news. In the morning I listen to National Public Radio (NPR) and in the evening I watch Fox News. However, I’m increasingly disturbed by NPR’s unbalanced reporting on wildfires . With every wildfire report, NPR now adds climate crisis comment but ignores wildfire science. I learned more about heat transfer and wildfires as a boy scout. I also expanded my wildfire science as an ecologist researching California’s Sierra Nevada ecosystems for 30 years and I must say an honest NPR would focus on the 3 major issues needed to minimize wildfire devastation. Minimize human ignitions. Improve ground fuel management. Remove introduced annual grasses. Politicians and media journalists that claim reducing CO 2 will save us from bigger wildfires are only exacerbating public fears and promoting ineffective polic...

Trying To See If California’s Energy Plans Add Up –   Trying To See If California’s Energy Plans Add Up August 10, 2021 /  Francis Menton A couple of weeks ago (July 29) I had a post titled “A Little Arithmetic: The Cost Of A Solar-Powered Grid Without Fossil Fuel Back-up.” In that post I did some simple calculations based on California’s current electricity usage and output from its existing solar generating facilities to figure out how much they would need in the way of solar panels and batteries to get through a low-output stretch in the winter without any fossil fuel assistance. Since for solar energy the “low-output stretch” is essentially everything from September 21 to March 21, I calculated that they would need roughly something in the range of 54,000 GWH of grid-scale battery storage, which at current prices would run around $10 trillion — assuming that someone could in the meantime invent the grid-scale batteries for this purpose that could store...

The IPCC Buries 2,000 Years Of Fluctuating Temperatures | Climate Change Dispatch   The IPCC Buries 2,000 Years Of Fluctuating Temperatures Probably nobody in the world has read the 3,949 pages of the latest IPCC report. But many people have studied the 41-page, politically determined Summary for Policymakers. Aside from rhetorical conjecture about increased human-induced emissions of carbon dioxide bringing more storms, fires, and pestilence, the following killer dual chart is placed at the outset of the  Summary . Click to enlarge If this is accurate, it means human actions have changed the climate by at least the 1.1°C temperature increase estimated by the world’s most distinguished and celebrated atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen . Lindzen’s fastidious reliance on science positions him as estimating that a (human-induced) doubling of atmospheric CO2 wil...

That IPCC Report Is Much Ado About Nothing    That IPCC Report Is Much Ado About Nothing   On Monday the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its newest assessment report , the sixth in a series of comprehensive reviews of climate science. It was clever of them to release it during the dog days of August when newsworthy events are few and far between and journalists, desperate for content, think nothing of submitting hysterical think pieces about multi-thousand-page documents they haven’t read. And that’s exactly what’s happened — a quick look around the internet will bring you face to face with the trashiest clickbait headlines, even from supposedly sober and respectable outlets: “ The Latest IPCC Report Is a Catastrophe, ” says The Atlantic . “ IPCC report’s verdict on climate crimes of humanity: guilty as hell ” is The Guardian ‘s headline. Here’s USA Today : “ Code red for humanity ” The Wall Street Journal stands out among major pub...

  Are Voting Machines Safe From Cyberattacks? Here's How They Work CJ Robles , Tech Times 06 November 2020, 06:11 am As millions of Americans went out to cast their votes on Monday, November 3, security officials worked round the clock to ensure the US presidential election is secured against any attempt of cyberattacks. Department of Homeland Security Acting Secretary Chad Wolf said during a press briefing that there were "no indications that a foreign actor has succeeded in compromising or affecting the actual votes cast in this election," according to a Recode report . He added that cybersecurity officials were on high alert throughout the elections. (Photo : REUTERS/Jonathan Drake) A Black feeds her ballot into a tabulator machin...

  An Expert on Voting Machines Explains How They Work Election officials also rely on high-speed scanners, envelope openers and good old-fashioned paper By Sophie Bushwick on November 3, 2020 Election workers check voting machines for accuracy at the Miami-Dade Elections Department headquarters in Florida on October 14, 2020. Credit: Joe Raedle Getty Images Serious political tensions and fears of COVID-19 have led record-breaking numbers of Americans to vote early this year, either by mail or in person. Now the process of counting these votes—whether in states that did so on a rolling basis as they came in or those that waited until Election Day—relies on machines that vary a great deal from state to state and even from county to county. Although the technology used in voting continues to evolve, it remains vulnerable to both malicious and unintentional errors. To protect the systems against both, explains Douglas W. Jones , a computer scientist at the Universi...

  The Vulnerabilities of Our Voting Machines When Americans go to the polls, will hackers unleash chaos? By Jen Schwartz on November 1, 2018 Credit: Getty Images A few weeks ago computer scientist J. Alex Halderman rolled an electronic voting machine onto a Massachusetts Institute of Technology stage and demonstrated how simple it is to hack an election . In a mock contest between George Washington and Benedict Arnold three volunteers each voted for Washington. But Halderman, whose research involves testing the security of election systems, had tampered with the ballot programming, infecting the machine’s memory card with malicious software. When he printed out the results, the receipt showed Arnold had won, 2 to 1. Without a paper trail of each vote, neither the voters nor a human auditor could check for discrepancies. In real elections, too, about 20 percent of voters nationally still cast electronic ballots only. As the U.S. midterm elections approach, Hal...