Yet again. This one is from Watts Up With That.
A bloke bought a sheep property of half a million acres in western Queensland for $2.0 million. Instead of running sheep on it, he now gets $350,000 per annum under the federal government’s Direct Action scheme for not using the grass on his property. The idea being that the grass locks up carbon and reduces Australia’s carbon emissions. A neighbouring property gets $600,000 per annum.
The Environmental Protection Agency has sent out more than 1,000 buy-out notices to its employees….
The positions are being eliminated, and the incumbents aren’t being offered positions elsewhere on the government’s teat payroll. The horror. The union-demanded, if not God-given, sinecures are not sinecures, after all. American Federation of Government Employees Local 704 President Michael Mikulka is quite vocal with his dismay.
EPA wants over 1,200 of us to leave, purportedly to save money going forward and claiming that they no longer need the positions occupied by staff that in some cases worked at EPA for over 30 years[.]
…is in the offing. The piece by John O’Sullivan in Principia Scientific International is a bit optimistic, but the outcome is legitimately expected under Canadian law. The offing-ed outcome concerns Penn State pseudo-scientist Michael Mann and his slander lawsuit against Canadian climatologist Dr Tim Ball in a British Columbia court.
It turns out that there are two legal factors of interest here. One is that Canadian courts always grant adjournments before a trial in their belief that an out of court settlement is preferable, and Mann had moved for such an adjournment of the lawsuit’s trial that was scheduled to months ago on 20 Feb. Ball agreed (of course), but he was able to get conditions imposed on that adjournment, one of which was that Mann would produce the data underlying his suit in court by 20 Feb.
Nope. Eric Worrall, writing at the link, quoted Doug Erwin, a Smithsonian Paleontologist on whether we’re in the middle of one, as many climatistas (not all) insist [emphases in the original]:
Many of those making facile comparisons between the current situation and past mass extinctions don’t have a clue about the difference in the nature of the data, much less how truly awful the mass extinctions recorded in the marine fossil record actually were[.]
And
I got an email ad over the weekend, inviting me to join the American Association for the Advancement of Science—AAAS, which used to be a respectable organization. The ad said in part,
Organizations that have propelled us forward—NIH, NOAA, and the EPA, just to name a few—are facing major funding cuts.
Because fraud, waste, and abuse are important only when it’s the other guy’s FWA. We wouldn’t been involved with any of that. Not us.
No, even were these organizations sound, their spending can be tightened, and they can absorb budget cuts. They can do the same amount of work, or more, did they only spend with efficiency rather than profligacy.
The US has reduced its CO2 emissions steadily, and by lots, since the 1990s while Europe is lately increasing its emissions, yet the EU is chastising us for going out from a foolish Paris Climate Accord, whose pseudo-commitments—by design not enforceable—would not have materially reduced global temperature rises even if fully met.
And this:
The report suggests a slightly colder winter across Europe also contributed to increased emissions, due to higher demand for heating.
Wait, wait—colder winter? But, global warming….
David Rank, Chargé d’affaires at our embassy in the People’s Republic of China, has resigned his position and is retiring from the foreign service over President Donald Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the Paris Climate Accord.
Although Rank is wrong on the matter, he has displayed considerable with his retirement: unlike so many Obama administration hold-overs (he held several senior diplomatic positions throughout Asia during those eight years), he’s chosen to leave the service rather than stay on and sabotage the new administration’s policies from within.
Related to this, albeit tangentially, is the AP’s carefully slanted final paragraph in its piece carrying this report of Rank’s resignation and retirement.
Some information provided by Matthew Dalton in The Wall Street Journal is illuminating, if not in the way he—or the WSJ—might have intended.
The US’s willingness under the Obama administration to propose major emissions reductions and put money on the table helped solidify global consensus behind the deal. It also helped persuade politicians world-wide of the need to seek more ambitious cuts and channel more money into the fight against global warming, officials and experts say.
Neil deGrasse Tyson in some recent remarks:
…when it comes time to make decisions about science, it seems to me that people have lost the ability…to judge…what is true, and what is not. What is reliable, what is not reliable. What should you believe, what should you not believe.
And
When you have people who don’t know much about science, standing in denial of it, and rising to power, that is a recipe for the complete dismantling of our informed democracy.
We can’t be sued because we deliberately lie engage in hyperbole. That’s Greenpeace’s new story, and they’re sticking to it. As cited by Watts Up With That, we get this from the Financial Post. The proximate subject is Greenpeace’s accusations against Resolute Forest Products Inc, a Canadian forest-products company that’s suing Greenpeace over those, which Resolute holds are false claims and defamatory about the company’s forestry operations.
But now Greenpeace says it never intended people to take its words about Resolute’s logging practices as literal truth.