Environment
Third of Himalayan glaciers can no longer be saved: study
KATHMANDU, Nepal — One-third of Himalayan glaciers will melt by the end of the century due to climate change, threatening water sources for 1.9 billion people, even if current efforts to reduce climate change succeed, an assessment warns.
If global efforts to curb climate change fail, the impact could be far worse: a loss of two-thirds of the region’s glaciers by 2100, said the Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment released Monday by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development.
“Global warming is on track to transform the frigid, glacier-covered mountain peaks of the Hindu Kush Himalayas cutting across eight countries to bare rocks in a little less than a century,” said Philippus Wester of the
The five-year study looked at the effects of climate change on a region that cuts across Asia through Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, China, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Myanmar. The area, which includes the world’s tallest mountain peaks, has glaciers that feed into river systems including the Indus, Ganges, Yangtze, Irrawaddy and Mekong.
The assessment said that the impact of the melting could range from flooding from the increased runoff to increased air pollution from black carbon and dust deposited on the glaciers.
Saleemul Huq, director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development, an environmental research
“All the countries affected need to prioritize tackling this upcoming problem before it reaches crisis proportions,” he said in an email. Huq was one of the study’s external reviewers.
The study said that even if the most ambitious Paris climate accord goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century were met, more than a third of the region’s glaciers will be lost. If the global rise in temperature were 2 C (3.6 F), two-thirds of Himalayan glaciers will melt, it said.
The 2015 Paris Agreement was a landmark moment in international diplomacy, bringing together governments with vastly different views to tackle global warming. It set a headline target of keeping average global temperatures from rising by more than 2 C, or 1.5 C if possible.
According to a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, emissions of the most abundant greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, would need to be reduced to a level the planet can absorb — known as net zero — by 2050 to keep global warming at 1.5 C as envisaged in the agreement.
The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development said the study included work by more than 350 researchers and policy experts from 22 countries. It said it had 210 authors and 125 external reviewers.
The Kathmandu-based
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Associated Press writer Elaine Kurtenbach in Bangkok contributed to this report.
Binaj Gurubacharya, The Associated Press
Environment
Climate Scientists declare the climate “emergency” is at an end
The Chamber of Deputies, Prague, Czechia
News release from the Climate Intelligence Group (Clintel)
Climate scientists have issued a shock declaration that the “climate emergency” is over.
A two-day climate conference in Prague, organized by the Czech division of the international Climate Intelligence Group (Clintel), which took place on November 12-13 in the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic in Prague, “declares and affirms that the imagined and imaginary ‘climate emergency’ is at an end”.
The communiqué, drafted by the eminent scientists and researchers who spoke at the conference, makes clear that for several decades climate scientists have systematically exaggerated the influence of CO2 on global temperature.
The high-level scientific conference also declared:
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which excludes participants and published papers disagreeing with its narrative, fails to comply with its own error-reporting protocol and draws conclusions some of which are dishonest, should be forthwith dismantled.”
The declaration supports the conclusions of the major Clintel report The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC [presented to the Conference by Marcel Crok, Clintel’s co-founder].
Moreover, the scientists at the conference declared that even if all nations moved straight to net zero emissions, by the 2050 target date the world would be only about 0.1 C cooler than with no emissions reduction.
So far, the attempts to mitigate climate change by international agreements such as the Paris Agreement have made no difference to our influence on climate, since nations such as Russia and China, India and Pakistan continue greatly to expand their combustion of coal, oil and gas.
The cost of achieving that 0.1 C reduction in global warming would be $2 quadrillion, equivalent to 20 years’ worldwide gross domestic product.
Finally, the conference “calls upon the entire scientific community to cease and desist from its persecution of scientists and researchers who disagree with the current official narrative on climate change and instead to encourage once again the long and noble tradition of free, open and uncensored scientific research, investigation, publication and discussion”.
The full text of the communiqué follows:
The International Scientific Conference of the Climate Intelligence Group (Clintel), in the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic in Prague assembled on the Twelfth and Thirteenth Days of November 2024, has resolved and now declares as follows, that is to say –
- The modest increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide that has taken place since the end of the Little Ice Age has been net-beneficial to humanity.
- Foreseeable future increases in greenhouse gases in the air will probably also prove net-beneficial.
- The rate and amplitude of global warming have been and will continue to be appreciably less than climate scientists have long predicted.
- The Sun, and not greenhouse gases, has contributed and will continue to contribute the overwhelming majority of global temperature.
- Geological evidence compellingly suggests that the rate and amplitude of global warming during the industrial era are neither unprecedented nor unusual.
- Climate models are inherently incapable of telling us anything about how much global warming there will be or about whether or to what extent the warming has a natural or anthropogenic cause.
- Global warming will likely continue to be slow, small, harmless and net-beneficial.
- There is broad agreement among the scientific community that extreme weather events have not increased in frequency, intensity or duration and are in future unlikely to do so.
- Though global population has increased fourfold over the past century, annually averaged deaths attributable to any climate-related or weather-related event have declined by 99%.
- Global climate-related financial losses, expressed as a percentage of global annual gross domestic product, have declined and continue to decline notwithstanding the increase in built infrastructure in harm’s way.
- Despite trillions of dollars spent chiefly in Western countries on emissions abatement, global temperature has continued to rise since 1990.
- Even if all nations, rather than chiefly western nations, were to move directly and together from the current trajectory to net zero emissions by the official target year of 2050, the global warming prevented by that year would be no more than 0.05 to 0.1 Celsius.
- If the Czech Republic, the host of this conference, were to move directly to net zero emissions by 2050, it would prevent only 1/4000 of a degree of warming by that target date.
- Based pro rata on the estimate by the UK national grid authority that preparing the grid for net zero would cost $3.8 trillion (the only such estimate that is properly-costed), and on the fact that the grid accounts for 25% of UK emissions, and that UK emissions account for 0.8% of global emissions, the global cost of attaining net zero would approach $2 quadrillion, equivalent to 20 years’ global annual GDP.
- On any grid where the installed nameplate capacity of wind and solar power exceeds the mean demand on that grid, adding any further wind or solar power will barely reduce grid CO2 emissions but will greatly increase the cost of electricity and yet will reduce the revenues earned by both new and existing wind and solar generators.
- The resources of techno-metals required to achieve global net zero emissions are entirely insufficient even for one 15-year generation of net zero infrastructure, so that net zero is in practice unattainable.
- Since wind and solar power are costly, intermittent and more environmentally destructive per TWh generated than any other energy source, governments should cease to subsidize or to prioritize them, and should instead expand coal, gas and, above, all nuclear generation.
- The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which excludes participants and published papers disagreeing with its narrative, fails to comply with its own error-reporting protocol and draws conclusions some of which are dishonest, should be forthwith dismantled.
Therefore, this conference hereby declares and affirms that the imagined and imaginary “climate emergency” is at an end.
This conference calls upon the entire scientific community to cease and desist from its persecution of scientists and researchers who disagree with the current official narrative on climate change and instead to encourage once again the long and noble tradition of free, open and uncensored scientific research, investigation, publication and discussion.
Given under our signs manual this Thirteenth Day of November in the Year of our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Four.
Pavel Kalenda, Czech Republic [Conference Chairman]
Guus Berkhout, The Netherlands [Co-founder, Clintel]
Marcel Crok, The Netherlands [Co-founder, Clintel]
Lord Monckton, United Kingdom
Valentina Zharkova, United Kingdom
Milan Šálek, Czech Republic
Václav Procházka, Czech Republic
Gregory Wrightstone, United States (see below)
Jan Pokorný, Czech Republic
Szarka László, Hungary
James Croll, United Kingdom
Tomas Furst, Czech Republic
Gerald Ratzer, Canada
Douglas Pollock, Chile
Henri Masson, Belgium
Miroslav Žáček, Czech Republic
Jan-Erik Solheim, Norway
Video below from interview with Gregory Wrightstone.
Better to turn around halfway, than to get lost completely
Not climate change but climate policy is the main threat for the prosperity of western societies at this moment. The Clintel Foundation has stated, with a global network of 2000 scientists and experts, that there is no climate emergency. Western leaders, however, have all voted in favour of Net Zero targets for 2050, which will have a disastrous effect on our economy and therefore our prosperity. Meanwhile, the UN is increasing its effort to fight ‘disinformation’, which in practice means less open debate and more censoring of alternative views.
Climate policies are a threat for entrepreneurs and it enters deeper and deeper into the private life of citizens. Wind turbines of close to 300 meters in height industrialise our countrysides, harming the environment,, biodiversity and public health. House owners are forced to replace their gas heaters by costly heat pumps, leading to rising energy bills. More and more cities reduce speed limits to 30 kms per hour.
There is no support base among the population for all these costly measures but our political leaders so far ignore these objections. Sooner or later the tide will turn, because these policies are unfeasible and unaffordable. Clintel wants to speed up this process by making both citizens and political leaders aware of all the pitfalls. Clintel receives no funding from the government nor from the Postcode Lottery or the industry. We therefore ask citizens and small businesses to support us in our mission.
Your support will be used to:
* Explain in all details there is no climate emergency. No one should be afraid of climate change. We use our websites and social media channels to spread this information and also give interviews in the media.
* Analyse and criticize IPCC reports. We check them for alarmism and one-sidedness. In 2023 we published the book The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC. We confront the IPCC with our results and will force them to respond to our criticism.
* Raise awareness for the negative side-effects of the current climate policies, both in terms of cost and impact on humans and the environment.
* Intervene in high profile climate court cases such as the one between Friends of the Earth and Shell in The Netherlands. Climate policy should be discussed in Parliaments, not in the courts.
If you share our views, please consider to support us through a (monthly) donation or by becoming Friend of Clintel.
Daily Caller
Climate Change Fanaticism Was The Big Election Loser
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Stephen Moore
A few days before last week’s election, Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders issued a dire warning to voters. If Trump won, “the struggle against climate change will be over.”
He had that right.
Climate change fanaticism was effectively on the ballot last week. That green energy agenda was decisively defeated.
It turns out the tens of millions of middle-class Americans who voted for Trump weren’t much interested in the temperature of the planet 50 years from now. They were too busy trying to pay the bills.
The result shouldn’t be too surprising. Polls have shown climate change ranks near the bottom of voters’ concerns. Jobs, inflation and illegal immigration register much higher on the scale of concerns.
But if you asked the elite of America in the top one percent of income, climate change is seen as an immediate and existential threat to the planet. Our poll at Unleash Prosperity earlier this year found that the cultural elites were so hyper-obsessed with climate issues, they were in favor of banning air conditioning, nonessential air travel and many modern home appliances to stop global warming. Our study showed that not many of the other 99 percent agree.
Wake up, Bernie and Al Gore.
Climate change has become the ultimate luxury good: the richer you are, the more you fret about it.
Among the elite, obsessing about climate change has become a favorite form of virtue-signaling at the country club and in the faculty lounges. There is almost no cross that the green elites — the people who donate six figures or more to groups like the Sierra Club — aren’t willing to make lower income Americans bear to stop global warming.
Herein lies the political curse of the climate issue. A millionaire doesn’t care much if the price of gas rises by $1 a gallon or if they have to pay another $100 a month in utility bills. But the middle class hates paying more.
It wasn’t just economic concerns that turned the voters against climate crusaders like President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Workers weren’t too thrilled with the heavy fist of government commanding them to buy an electric vehicle — whether they wanted one or not.
It hasn’t helped the greens’ cause that the same progressives who are out to save the planet with grandiose transformations and global government, seem to have no problem with the garbage polluting the streets of our major cities or the graffiti or the feces and urine smell on the street corners of San Francisco and New York. That’s real pollution. And it’s affecting us here and now.
The good news is this year’s voter revolts against the radical green agenda are not a vote for dirtier air or water. The air that we breathe and the water we drink is cleaner than ever — a point that President Donald Trump correctly made. We will continue to make progress against pollution.
To try to sell middle America on the climate-change agenda of abolishing fossil fuels, the greens peddled bogus arguments that climate change would hurt poor communities most. In reality the financial costs of the climate policies and the paychecks lost were felt by the non-elite.
Democrats forgot to visit the steel-mill construction sites or the auto plants or the oil patch and ask those workers what they thought.
Well, now we know the reality. Americans think their shrinking paychecks and the higher price of gas they pay at the pump is the real clear-and-present danger. If Democrats don’t start to get that, they too will go to bed worrying about their jobs.
Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a co-founder of Unleash Prosperity. His latest book is titled: “The Trump Economic Miracle.”
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