Baltic Dry Index. 1857 -106 Brent Crude 61.91 Spot Gold 1497
Never ending Brexit now October 31,
maybe. 33 days away.
Trump’s Nuclear China Tariffs
Now In Effect.
USA v EU trade war postponed to
November, maybe.
For every complex problem
there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken.
This Special Update, why 16 year olds
are often wrong-headed, and shouldn’t be given the vote. They are however,
easily led and duped into self-righteous, one-sided, self-serving,
pseudo-scientific nonsense. “How dare you!”
Which is not to say that we can’t or
shouldn’t try to do things better, just not over-simplify complex issues by using
imperfect or slanted data. Using fear rather than reason. But who is funding this fear and why? Cui bono?
If there’s a way to do it
better – find it.
Thomas Alva Edison.
Opinion: On climate change, humanity is not ‘evil’ - The Globe and Mail
Updated September 26, 2019
Bjorn
Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and a visiting professor
at the Copenhagen Business School.
Speaking at
the United Nations, 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg said that if
humanity really understands the science of climate change and still fails to
act, we’re “evil.” This is because climate change means “people are dying.”
Helpfully, she also told us what we must do to act correctly: In a bit more
than eight years, we will have exhausted our remaining allowance for carbon
emissions, so we must shut down everything running on fossil fuels by 2028.
While this
claim is not uncommon, it is fundamentally misguided. Yes, global warming is
real and human-caused, but her vision of climate change as the end of the world
is unsupported. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates
that by the 2070s, the total effects of climate change, including on
ecosystems, will be equivalent to a reduction in average income of 0.2 to 2 per
cent. By then, each person on the planet will be 300 to 500 per-cent richer.
We don’t
emit CO2 with malign intent. Indeed, it is a byproduct of giving humanity
access to unprecedented amounts of energy.
Just a
century ago, life was back-breaking. Plentiful energy made better lives
possible, without having to spend hours collecting firewood, polluting your
household with smoke, achieving heat, cold, transportation, light, food and
opportunities. Life expectancy doubled. Plentiful energy, mostly from fossil
fuels, has lifted more than a billion people out of poverty in just the past 25
years.
That is not
evil – it is quite the opposite.
Ms. Thunberg
believes that climate change means people are dying, but the fact is that
weather-related disasters just a century ago killed half a million people each
year. Today, despite rising temperatures but because of less poverty and more
resilience, droughts, floods, hurricanes and extreme temperatures kill just
20,000 people each year – a reduction of 95 per cent. That is a morally
commendable achievement.
More
Rex Murphy: The Liberals' 2050 net-zero carbon vow is pure delusion
Rex Murphy September 27, 2019 4:30 PM EDT
It’s good to see the Prime Minstrel, as some wit on Twitter
termed him, back on familiar waters. In their desperate fervour to chase away
the images of Justin Trudeau in blackface, this week the Liberal campaign
brought him out in a more familiar guise, paddling about on some sweet lake,
and returning to the one element of his ferociously “woke” brand, P.M. Climate
Superman, not in tatters.The image could not have been more bucolic — the lone Voyager for Global Warming. Add a hooting owl or two on the soundtrack and another loon skipping along on the water and we’d be back to those classic Hinterland’s Who’s Who vignettes of the ’60s and ’70s.
He may have sworn off costumes and cosmetics, but it was clear from this little parable on film that campaigning by photo-op is still very much in the Liberal arsenal. It was the Liberal campaign’s way of signalling that there was still some gas (so to speak) in Mr. Trudeau’s global warming credentials.
It didn’t seem to matter that no Liberal commitments to reduce carbon emissions, as CO2 is now designated, from when they were first made by Jean Chrétien in 1997, up to this present minute have been kept. (See Chris Selley’s column in the National Post this week.)
Nor did that
broken record stop the campaign from yet another pledge, an outlandish promise
of net-zero emissions by 2050, the achievement of which is either a fantasy or
a fraud. It might be thought that a government that has a very spotty record
concerning its promises of 2015 — balancing the budget by 2019, end of
first-past-the-post, are but two eminent examples — would be wary of any fresh
vows, particularly one whose due date is 31 years out.
But on
global warming, such is the sponginess of the issue, and the ooze of
righteousness that surrounds it, that politicians give themselves all sorts of
licence to make promises that not only they have no hope of keeping, but they
will be long, long, out of office, or even passed over to the exquisite
atmosphere of heaven, or to the more sulphurous ambience of the other place,
when the time comes to check their record. The 2050 pledge is pure delusion.
Sadly, many
people are comfortable with delusions when it comes to global warming. What
else are we to make of the phenomenon of a 16-year-old wandering or sailing the
planet, a Joan of Arc of our times, being offered access to the highest
deliberative chambers — at the UN, the U.S. Congress, the U.K. Parliament and
others — to preach her naïve, testy, panic-laden message?
Why
is this 16-year-old of such assumed authority? Were there another
16-year-old available — and I’m sure there are — to preach the opposite, would
the world’s legislatures and the world’s press be quite so supine in offering
that teenager the same access, the same cringing deference, the same
embarrassing applause as Greta Thunberg now harvests? Not a chance. For the
present, and for reasons that cannot be fathomed, the young Swede is now the
anointed one, and her dour, immature sermonettes a fresh gospel for our times.
Morehttps://nationalpost.com/news/politics/election-2019/rex-murphy-the-liberals-2050-zero-emission-climate-vow-is-pure-delusion
The “New Energy Economy”: An Exercise in Magical Thinking
A movement has been growing for decades to
replace hydrocarbons, which collectively supply 84% of the world’s energy. It
began with the fear that we were running out of oil. That fear has since
migrated to the belief that, because of climate change and other environmental
concerns, society can no longer tolerate burning oil, natural gas, and coal—all
of which have turned out to be abundant.
So far, wind, solar, and batteries—the
favored alternatives to hydrocarbons—provide about 2% of the world’s energy and
3% of America’s. Nonetheless, a bold new claim has gained popularity: that
we’re on the cusp of a tech-driven energy revolution that not only can, but
inevitably will, rapidly replace all hydrocarbons.
This “new energy economy”
rests on the belief—a centerpiece of the Green New Deal and other similar
proposals both here and in Europe—that the technologies of wind and solar power
and battery storage are undergoing the kind of disruption experienced in
computing and communications, dramatically lowering costs and increasing
efficiency.
But this core analogy glosses over profound differences, grounded
in physics, between systems that produce energy and those that produce
information.In the world of people, cars, planes, and factories, increases in
consumption, speed, or carrying capacity cause hardware to expand, not shrink.
The energy needed to move a ton of people, heat a ton of steel or silicon, or
grow a ton of food is determined by properties of nature whose boundaries are
set by laws of gravity, inertia, friction, mass, and thermodynamics—not clever
software.
This paper highlights the physics of energy to illustrate why there
is no possibility that the world is undergoing—or can undergo—a near-term
transition to a “new energy economy.”
Among the reasons:
More
Humanity will find ways to adapt to climate change
Climate issue: That is no reason to give up on
stopping it
Sep 19th 2019
AFTER DESTRUCTIVE storms like Hurricane
Dorian, those affected have decisions to make. Should they invest in cellar
pumps and better drainage? Should they rebuild with more robust design and
materials? Should they move? These judgments are informed by a harsh reality:
the weather will get worse. Seas will be higher, rain more diluvial and storms
fiercer. People with means will naturally adjust—as they should. Adaptation is
essential to reduce the human and economic costs of climate change. But
spending on adaptation may further complicate already-confounding politics.
Efforts to slow global warming must
overcome devilish political obstacles. The benefits to reduced warming accrue
over decades and centuries, whereas the cost of cutting emissions must be paid
upfront by taxpayers who cannot expect to see much return in their lifetimes.
And mitigation (as efforts to curb emissions are called) is subject to a
vicious collective-action problem. Climate harms are determined much more by
what everyone else does than by what you do. Each actor has an incentive to
free-ride on the sacrifices of others. Cutting emissions requires every large
country saddling voters with expense and inconvenience that will mostly help
people elsewhere, or not yet born.
More
When in doubt predict that
the present trend will continue.
Anon.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished August
DJIA: 26,403
+52 Down. NASDAQ: 7,963 +59 Down. SP500: 2,926 +53 unchanged.
An inconclusive month, but all three shows signs of weakening.
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