“Fifty shades of mad, This headline could not be helped” By IRINA SLAV

Indeed, with transition ideal slipping further from their grasp, worshippers have cranked up emotional heater as far as it would go, blaming climate change for earthquakes and, of course, the LA fires

Fifty shades of mad

This headline could not be helped

IRINA SLAV

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It’s not often that a prediction one has only just made turns out to be trailing actual developments, yet this is exactly what has happened to one of my highly informed, expert predictions for the year, namely, that climate catastrophists will start catastrophising much harder than before.

Indeed, with the transition ideal slipping further from their grasp, worshippers have cranked up the emotional heater as far as it would go, blaming climate change for earthquakes and, of course, the Los Angeles fires. That’s a positive development for the rest of us. It confirms hopes that reason is returning, and not a moment too soon. Also, we’re going to be getting even more free entertainment than we got last year.

Now, about those earthquakes. A while ago, some TV anchor or some such individual suggested that climate change had an effect on seismic activity and, if I recall correctly, she received the support of similar individuals in the studio. Now, there’s a study that, per Euronews, supports “a growing body of evidence that climate influences seismic activity.”

The body, you wonder? Well, there’s this one study from Colorado State University that claims “glacier retreat” causes increased seismic activity because as the glaciers melt, their weight on active faults declines, freeing up trapped seismic powers. “Climate change is happening at a rate that is orders of magnitude faster than we see in the geologic record,” according to the lead author of the study, for whom the paper is a master’s thesis and I don’t want to bad-mouth master’s theses but I’d rather hear it from a PhD.

Obviously, there are plenty of PhDs ready and willing to deliver but perhaps none is more appropriate than Michael E., The Hockey Stick, Mann, who was lighting fast in blaming climate change and the consumption of oil and gas for the devastating fires in L.A. this month.

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He’s not the only one, but he was one of the fastest and I am going to stop talking about this individual because it’s like handling a dead and rotting jellyfish, but not before I mention that The Hockey Stick was ordered by a court to pay over half a million dollars to the National Review for trying to, in his own word, “ruin” the publication by means of suing it to death.

Anyway, I said I wanted a PhD to tell me there’s a causal link between climate change and quakes and guess what? I lied about letting go of M.M. Because I found a paper co-authored by Hockey Stick Mann and titled Absence of causality between seismic activity and global warming. Alas, that paper says that seismic activity doesn’t cause climate change rather than the other way around and I don’t even know why I was surprised. After all, you can’t blame A on B while blaming B on A. Or can you?

Of course you can. Here’s one “Professor (Research) at the USC Price School of Public Policy,” who says that climate change increases the risk of wildfires and wildfires in turn exacerbate climate change. It makes sense, in the way “Violence breeds violence” makes sense. However, I have questions and internet has the answers.

Is Professor (Research) Adam Rose a meteorologist? No. Is he a geologist? No. Is he one of the modern pop stars of climate science? No. His “research is on the economics of natural and man-made hazards,” per his professional profile, and his “other research area is the economics of energy and climate change policy.” To summarise, a perfectly reliable source of information on the L.A. fires and their causes.

Back to that growing body of evidence on quakes and climate change, Euronews again tells us that “As melting glaciers change the distribution of weight across the Earth’s crust, the resulting "glacial isostatic adjustment" drives changes in plate tectonics that could lead to more earthquakes, awaken volcanoes and even affect the movement of the Earth’s axis.” I honestly don’t know why we’re even trying to wage this war on climate change. It’s already lost by the looks of it.

Yet the studies keep coming in. Here’s one that was published while the fires raged across L.A. Talk about perfect timing. Anyway, that study, by half a dozen people, detailed a phenomenon called “hydroclimate volatility”, which “refers to sudden, large and/or frequent transitions between very dry and very wet conditions”. I was led to believe by media and random Americans that prolonged droughts followed by copious rains are pretty much weather as usual in California but that belief appears to be wrong. It’s climate change and state policies in wildfire prevention are perfectly irrelevant, which is what I learned in the past few days.

I wholeheartedly agree with this. Climate change is such a monstrously enormous vastness of apocalyptic proportions that we, mere humans, have no chance against it at all — unless we give up hydrocarbons, that is. Meanwhile, we appear to have crossed the 1.5 C threshold identified by the unanimous climate science body as a threshold that’s better not crossed lest we want more apocalypse and cities underwater.

Now, some petty people have expressed doubts about the accuracy of measures taken to reach that conclusion, namely, that 2024 was the first year when the average global temperature was 1.5 C higher than it was before the Industrial Age. I myself, being a layperson, am wondering where the underwater cities are and why the Maldives are still above water but that’s because I know nothing about climate science. What I know for sure is that there’s nothing wrong with the weather stations used to measure temperatures to then be used to calculate the global average and predict the sinkage of cities and the Maldives.

So what if “up to a third of UK weather stations surveyed had errors of up to 5°C while nearly half were up to 2°C out in a time when “hottest years” are being allegedly measured to one tenth of a degree”? So what if “approximately 96 percent of U.S. temperature stations fail to meet what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) considers to be “acceptable,” uncorrupted placement”?

The first report is from last year. The second, from 2022, but it’s from a libertarian think tank so it doesn’t matter anyway. The scientific consensus on climate change stands tall and solid even though “the fossil fuel industry is trotting out its biggest guns to attack renewable energy and electric cars.” The fossil fuel industry never sleeps, too busy plotting its next smear campaign against The Light Transitionastic.

In this recent case, the FFI appears to be targeting noble solar with “solar bashing”, in other words unsubstantiated and perfectly illogical claims that solar is more expensive than their produce. Shocking, I know. But the brave green warriors are also never asleep. They have caught the FFI in the act and are not afraid to tell the world about it.

The culprits: the Wall Street Journal and “a Koch Industries mouthpiece in Canada called the Fraser Institute.” The two claim solar is actually not cheaper than coal and gas, and nuclear. The diligent and righteously outraged CleanTechnica author quoted above did what every good journalist should do in such circumstances: he reached out to none other than the legend of impartiality, Mark Jacobson, who “is always ready with a clear, concise response.” Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the clear and concise response verbatim because there is no way I’m paraphrasing that.

“Table 1 of the paper shows that 10 of the 11 U.S. states with higher fractions of their demand powered by renewables are among the 20 states with the lowest U.S. electricity prices. Six of the states are among the 10 states with the lowest prices. For example, from October 1, 2023 until September 30, 2024, South Dakota (ranked #1 in terms of its penetration of WWS* renewables relative to demand) provided 110% of the electricity it consumed from just wind (77.5%), hydro (30.1%), and solar (2.2%) yet had the 9th-lowest electricity price in the U.S. in March, 2024. South Dakota also produced another 16% of its electricity from fossil gas and 11.2% from coal so produced a total of 137% of the electricity it consumed but exported the additional 37%. Similarly, Montana (ranked #2) and Iowa (#3) supplied 86.5% and 79.4% of their demand with WWS but had the 8th and 12th-lowest prices. Only Maine (#7) had high prices (ranked 42nd).”

I trust we are now all on the same page and that page says in clear and concise manner that solar and wind are invariably cheaper than everything else when all costs of power generation are taken into account. The paperreferred to above, in case you’re curious, is one authored by Jacobson and titled “No blackouts or cost increases due to 100 % clean, renewable electricity powering California for parts of 98 days”. I would like to add a quote from the paper’s abstract, just to make sure we are really all on the same page.

“This paper uses data from the world’s 5th-largest economy to show no blackouts occurred when wind-water-solar electricity supply exceeded 100 % of demand on California’s main grid for a record 98 of 116 days from late winter to early summer, 2024, for an average (maximum) of 4.84 (10.1) hours/day.” To paraphrase: for several hours on a sunny day, reliance on surplus solar generation and hydro does not lead to blackouts. Take that, WSJ!

I think the merciful thing to do would be to stop here. The year is just beginning and there will be a surge in such papers. After all, a cornered animal fights with everything it has.