© Clintel Foundation / Wednesday February 8, 2023
Climate Case of the Century:
Clintel to show the importance of rigorous debate
Clintel is working hard with our advisor Lucas Bergkamp and our lawyers from law firm OSK in Amsterdam, to prepare for an important hearing at the Court of Appeals in The Hague on March 15. At this hearing, Clintel will demonstrate to the court that, despite the opposition from Friends of the Earth (Milieudefensie) and Shell, it meets the legal requirements to be admitted into the procedure. Clintel will also present a brief overview of the important arguments it will present in the procedure on the merits.
Inside Friends of the Earth
Interestingly, it seems that Friends of the Earth has not provided an accurate picture of the opinions of its members on what they call their “climate case of the century”. There is robust discussion inside Friends of the Earth on the issue of “climate protection versus environmental protection”. Their members are increasingly concerned about the one-sided focus on ‘climate’ to the detriment of their core mission of environmental protection. Indeed, as Clintel will demonstrate, the climate policies required by Friends of the Earth, which is a long-standing and dogmatic enemy of nuclear energy, will harm the environment in multiple ways.
A recent article (in Dutch) in Friends of the Earth’s member magazine (“Milieu-Visie”, Winter 2023) entitled: “Does Climate Policy Provide Environmental Protection?” states: “To ask the question is to answer it. No, climate policy contributes little to the environment. It may even be at the expense of the environment due to the many rare raw materials that are needed for batteries, windmills and solar cells. The very one-sided conversation about climate crises comes, in any case, at the expense of public health.”
In the court case, however, Friends of the Earth is silent on this debate within its own constituency. Instead of disclosing the tension, the management of Friends of the Earth doubled down on its misguided course of action and changed the organization’s by-laws to deprive the members of any significant power. This move has further alienated Friends of the Earth’s management from its members.
More than 2500 co-plaintiffs
The number of co-plaintiffs that have joined Clintel in this key fight keeps growing. There are now more than 2,500 people in The Netherlands and around the world who are part of our case.
If you haven’t done so, please go to climatecaseofthecentury.org or klimaatzaakvandeeeuw.nl and fill in the short form. It’s free of charge and the more co-plaintiffs we have, the louder our voice will be. Needless to say, we also need a lot of financial support. Please consider making a donation on our websites at climatecaseofthecentury.org or klimaatzaakvandeeeuw.nl
Thank you!
Guus Berkhout, president of Clintel
Marcel Crok, director of Clintel
‘The final nail in the coffin of renewable energy’, or not (yet)?
There’s currently some controversy between climate sceptics following this post
by Lord Monckton on the Wattsupwiththat website. In it, Mockton refers to work by Douglas Pollock who has proposed that there is a mathematical limit to the share of energy that a given renewable source can supply to the grid without battery backup. Pollock says that this limit is the ‘capacity factor’, the fraction of the nameplate capacity that a renewable source can actually supply. Thus wind and solar power cannot contribute more than about a quarter of total electricity demand on the grid, unless there is battery backup.
Not everyone agrees. Willis Eschenbach, amongst others, voiced his doubts in this post. “While interesting, Lord Monckton’s posts are theoretical exercises. He has not provided any actual data to back them up. And when I looked at the data, I found a problem: most countries are well below the ‘Pollock limit’, and thus they can’t say anything at all about what happens when the windpower share of total electrical generation nears the Pollock limit.”
Eschenbach also refers to actual data from Ireland. “I have exactly zero idea why Ireland is able to exceed the Pollock limit. The claim is that, absent grid-scale batteries, the Pollock limit is a real physical limit equal to the capacity factor. But that is certainly not the case for Ireland. It’s already 22% above the capacity factor.”
Manhattan Contrarian Francis Menton has also criticised the original post by Monckton: here (and Monckton’s rebuttal: here).
To be continued…
Interview with dr. Javier Vinós about the Winter Gatekeeper hypothesis
Recently Tom Nelson did an interesting interview with dr. Javier Vinós about his Winter Gatekeeper hypothesis. He has the radical idea that what happens at the poles in winter, is one of the main reasons the planet has been warming over the past centuries.
The hypothesis proposes that the main natural climate change mechanism at all timescales is a persistent change in the amount of energy transported to the winter poles. At different timescales, different factors affect this meridional transport. The polar vortex acts as an energy barrier for the winter pole. Its strength regulates how much energy is lost every winter at the poles. On centennial timescales, solar activity is the main factor regulating meridional transport. It does this by affecting polar vortex strength and winter atmospheric circulation. Solar activity acts through stratospheric ozone, altering the planetary wave flux that ultimately controls polar vortex strength. Thus, the Sun acts on climate like a winter gatekeeper.
See the interview: here
Read the article by Andy May on the interview with Vinós: here
Mainstream media get extreme weather wrong, again
The popular but mistaken belief that weather extremes are worsening because of climate change, has been bolstered in recent years by ever increasing hype in nearly all mainstream media coverage of extreme events, despite a lack of scientific evidence for the assertion, Ralph Alexander concludes in a recent post. “This month’s story by NPR (National Public Radio) in the U.S. is just the latest in a steady drumbeat of media misinformation.”
“To be fair, the NPR story merely parrots the conclusions of an ostensibly scientific report from the AMS (American Meteorological Society). But these attribution studies that assign specific extremes to either natural variability or human causes, are based on highly questionable statistical methodology (see here and here).”
“The media are misleading and stoking fear in the public about perfectly normal extreme weather, although there are some notable exceptions such as The Australian. The alarmist stories of the others are largely responsible for the current near-epidemic of ‘climate anxiety’ in children, the most vulnerable members of our society.”
Read the full article by Ralph Alexander: here
William van Wijngaarden
visited Ireland and The Netherlands
William van Wijngaarden, professor at York University in Toronto, signee of the World Climate Declaration, and well-known in Clintel circles for his work on the greenhouse effect together with professor Will Happer of Princeton University, recently visited Ireland and The Netherlands. He gave a talk for the Irish Climate Science Forum in Dublin and a slightly different talk in The Netherlands (the picture above was taken during his talk in The Netherlands). His talk in The Netherlands will be available later.
Clintel is an Amsterdam (The Netherlands) based thinktank founded in 2019 by Dutch emeritus professor Guus Berkhout and science writer Marcel Crok. Clintel operates as a climate science and climate policy watchdog. In its first year it launched the World Climate Declaration, stating firmly “there is no climate emergency”. That declaration is now signed by almost 1500 scientists and experts.
Clintel wants to be independent from governments as these are the main funders of climate science and policy. In practice it means we need broad support from citizens and small and medium enterprises around the world.
For more information, please contact Marcel Crok, +31 6 16 236275, marcel.crok@clintel.org
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