BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Tuesday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "[On Davos and Climate Change] ‘In fact, everything is 100% offset here including all of the private aircraft. The numbers for those private aircraft actually, we calculated last year was about 270 movements, about 135 there and back. And most outside of those are actually for what we call public figures. So officials who under the Vienna Convention actually have to fly privately. But nevertheless, we offset all of that, and everything else.’...
‘Offsets are of course open to question. A lot of people don't accept they’re real action on climate change. They’re about future carbon reduction, not about current carbon production. I remember going to a party at Davos where a whole, in fact three years in a row where a whole plane full of wine from California was flown in just for one party by a private equity company.’"
The opposition to carbon offsets is a good (and revealing) admission that climate change hysteria is not about saving the planet from climate change, but moral purity
Sciences, Publics, Politics: The Trouble With Climate Emergency Journalism - "Organizers say they want to hear from a wide range of stakeholders on what is needed. So far, they seem more interested in uniform messaging... Studies conducted by social scientists in the United States and Europe using statistical techniques to rigorously evaluate hundreds of news stories show that journalists frequently gloss over the uncertainties and caveats inherent in a single study or line of climate change research, neglect to report on the varying predictions offered by different climate models, and fail to include in their reporting the careful language that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has developed to qualify the likelihood of various consequences of climate change. In coverage of major climate change-related events such as a new IPCC report or United Nations summit, journalists also tend to dramatize their significance by emphasizing the most calamitous future climate change scenarios, framing a new scientific report’s findings in terms of disastrous and fear-inducing risks, rather than emphasizing in the face of those risks opportunities to protect health or sustainably grow economies. Reviewing available studies, the German journalism researcher Michael Bruggeman concludes that reporting too often “simplifies science and turns context-dependent and preliminary findings into established facts.”... These findings support longstanding concerns voiced by the veteran environmental writer and former New York Times journalist Andrew Revkin, who has cautioned that too many of his peers write stories about the most calamitous scientific studies featuring the “hottest,” most dramatic conclusions, while ignoring other research of similar quality that emphasizes the uncertainty of such risks. For example, studies concluding that climate change is contributing to extreme weather and natural disasters generate widespread journalistic attention, but when studies by equally well-qualified scientists suggest that global warming may have had at most a minimal impact on such events, they generate far fewer stories... Historically, environmental reporters have tended to take a less critical stance regarding the arguments of green groups and activists than political, general assignment, and business journalists who may only write occasionally about climate change and energy. This pattern, of course, is consistent with a general tendency among journalists on any beat to adopt the perspective of their key sources... journalists covering those stories may find that mirroring the angles and frames of reference used by the most experienced environmental journalists is both professionally safe and time saving. Climate activists and political leaders then amplify the cycle of hype by using the narratives emanating from science and the media as further grist for their messaging mill. The ubiquity of worse-case scenario narratives in the news and via social media, in turn, enables political leaders and activists to claim that we have no time for compromise since such efforts run up against the laws of physics. These claims then trigger fresh news attention and social media discussion... To protect preferred narratives about climate change and its solutions, a main strategy by some activist scientists and writers has been to discredit experts who question these worse-case scenario narratives or the related advocated policies by labeling them “deniers,” “delayers,” “contrarians,” “confusionists,” and “lukewarmers,” as the journalist Keith Kloor has documented. These attacks are not so much about the specifics of climate science or policy, but instead about controlling who has the authority to speak on the subject. Such labeling comports well with the political mood of the day: it breeds incivility and cultivates a discourse culture where protecting one’s own identity, group, and preferred storyline takes priority over constructive consideration of knowledge and evidence... In a blog post titled “Whiplash Warning When Climate Science is Publicized Before Peer Review,” Revkin analyzed the authors’ apparent motivations, explaining to readers Hansen’s career arc as “climatologist-turned-campaigner.” Revkin identified key differences between arguments in the online discussion paper posted at the journal and the supporting materials supplied to journalists, which included claims that dramatic sea level rise was “likely to occur this century.” He also posted replies to emails he had sent requesting reactions to the paper from leading climatologists, many of which were critical of the assumptions used by Hansen and his colleagues... When journalists fail to represent a range of expert opinion on these complex topics, or to investigate scientists’ own biases, motives, and practices in promoting their research results and policy preferences, they risk allowing themselves to be captured by a narrow ideological perspective, doing further damage to waning trust in the news media. In a recent paper with my colleague Declan Fahy, we argue that this style of critically oriented science reporting is what is needed to help maintain public faith in climate science and journalism. The main challenge for a new generation of climate change journalists is not to turn up the threat level on behalf of the Green New Deal, but to identify for their audience the flaws in conventional narratives about climate change, holding all sides accountable for their claims and actions"
The Limits of Clean Energy – Foreign Policy - "The problem here is not that we’re going to run out of key minerals—although that may indeed become a concern. The real issue is that this will exacerbate an already existing crisis of overextraction. Mining has become one of the biggest single drivers of deforestation, ecosystem collapse, and biodiversity loss around the world. Ecologists estimate that even at present rates of global material use, we are overshooting sustainable levels by 82 percent... It’s important to keep in mind that most of the key materials for the energy transition are located in the global south. Parts of Latin America, Africa, and Asia will likely become the target of a new scramble for resources, and some countries may become victims of new forms of colonization. It happened in the 17th and 18th centuries with the hunt for gold and silver from South America. In the 19th century, it was land for cotton and sugar plantations in the Caribbean. In the 20th century, it was diamonds from South Africa, cobalt from Congo, and oil from the Middle East. It’s not difficult to imagine that the scramble for renewables might become similarly violent.If we don’t take precautions, clean energy firms could become as destructive as fossil fuel companies—buying off politicians, trashing ecosystems, lobbying against environmental regulations, even assassinating community leaders who stand in their way."
Bjørn Lomborg - Posts - "Congrats:Double or quadruple electricity prices in EU by 2030:Wholesale electricity price in the EU will at least double by 2030, because of increasing CO₂ and fossil fuel prices.If we implement EU “Clean energy for all Europeans” price will quadruple"
Glacier National Park to remove all 'glaciers will be gone by 2020' signs - "Park spokeswoman Gina Kurzmen explained that since the early 2000s scientists have reflected and analyzed data stating glaciers would recede by 2020."
Article from 2020. I'm guessing they were hoping the glaciers would melt at the last minute, fulfilling The Prophecy
The only thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from history. But due to cognitive dissonance, just like with doomsday cults, true believers will only be even more assured in their faith
Commentary: Companies are cutting costs but dressing up moves as climate action - "I went to one of my favourite local restaurants and had a curry that was splendid but so enormous that I asked the waiter if he could bag up the leftovers so I could guzzle them later at home.“Sorry,” he said. “I can’t. We have a no takeaway policy because we’re trying to cut down on plastic use.” Customers who wanted to take food home had to bring in their own containers... I am all in favour of deterring single-use plastic. But when it involves dumping half a bowl of fresh prawn laksa in the bin, it does raise a question: Why not offer a non-plastic, recyclable box instead?... Politicians are well aware of polls such as one in the US last year that showed 69 per cent of Americans want “aggressive” action to combat climate change — but only 34 per cent are keen on paying an extra US$100 a year in taxes to help. Even fewer favour a US$100 rise in annual electricity bills. An earlier US survey showed nearly 60 per cent of people backed a US$1 monthly charge to fight climate change. But that support plummeted to 28 per cent when the fee rose to $10 a month... cutting carbon emissions is going to be hard enough without businesses needlessly using climate change as an excuse for unpopular measures, especially ones as awful as hot-desking."
Of course, when you socialise or otherwise hide the high costs of pointless attempts to "fight climate change", people will be on board with them
Life cycle analysis of incineration compared to anaerobic digestion followed by composting for managing organic waste: the influence of system components for an Italian district - "The benefits and environmental burden of two different strategies (incineration vs anaerobic digestion followed by composting) to manage the organic fraction of municipal solid waste were assessed... Incineration of organic waste leads to maximum environmental benefits compared to anaerobic digestion and composting. Furthermore, anaerobic digestion and composting was characterized by high gaseous emissions with high greenhouse gas potential even if the production of organic fertilizer gave some benefits concerning the avoided exploitation of mineral resources"
Of course, secular religion is immune to logic; composting (especially home composting) is a ritual for worshippers
The Ecological Footprint of Composting and Incineration of Garden Waste in Denmark - "This report assesses the environmental impacts of incineration with energy recovery and composting as two options for the disposal of garden waste in Denmark. By analyzing literature and speaking with experts in the field of waste management a recommendation was formed as to the most ecologically friendly plan for garden waste management. This study concludes that in most instances, incineration proves to be more environmentally friendly"
Waste management options to control greenhouse gas emissions – Landfill, compost or incineration? - "he goal of diverting waste from landfill is over-emphasised as Melbourne has adequate landfill space, and more is created by quarrying activities. The huge volume of poor compost produced if all household waste is composted may lead to a collapse in the market for compost... Incineration of waste had the least climate impact of the three methods of disposal, followed by landfill with gas capture... Diverting organic waste to compost now, without capturing emissions from the compost, may be counter-productive, merely hastening the melting of Arctic and Antarctic ice... Municipal waste should not be routinely composted before disposal, and certainly not in open air windrows. Landfill with gas capture is a better option for reducing emissions, and producing bio-fuel"
Let them sail yachts: Why Greta Thunberg and the environmental elite hate you - "Despite the cheers of bourgeois bugmen, Greta’s trip of a lifetime reveals the feckless elitism at the heart of her activism. Sailing across the Atlantic on a multimillion dollar racing yacht is a wonderful stand against climate change when you’re Greta Thunberg. But to dock in New York and demand the miserable masses give up car and air travel is the ultimate in anti-humanitarianism.Us common folk don’t have access to vessels like the Malizia II. In Thunberg’s utopia, we’d have to row. And even if we did, how many of us can take two weeks’ annual vacation just to get to America to see our friends? Or hire actual Monegasque royalty to get us there in one piece? The airplane and the automobile have democratized travel, and Thunberg wants to take that away from us. Troublingly, Thunberg is not a lone crusader. As she addressed the British parliament in April, the streets of London were thronged with ‘Extinction Rebellion’ climate protesters. Holding placards demanding an end to fossil fuels, meat eating and, seemingly, modernity itself, these activists visibly and forcefully demanded the government strong-arm them into being green. “Please tread on me,” they may as well have cried. In the US, 104 members of Congress have co-sponsored the ‘Green New Deal,’ an ambitious piece of legislation that calls for a complete abolition of fossil fuel consumption by 2050, alongside government-mandated wealth redistribution programs. An earlier draft of the Green New Deal also called for the immediate elimination of air travel and “farting cows,” and for the dismantling of industry.The green fervor preached by Thunberg et al. has two potential outcomes. In one scenario, the political elite will listen to her sermons, clap politely, pose for selfies and then go back to doing nothing: case in point, her meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, who rode to power promising environmental reforms, but found his cities almost razed by protesters when he tried so much as a fuel tax hike last year. The second, more terrifying outcome, is that Thunberg’s pontification will become policy. And, if the world’s governments decide to commit civilizational hara-kiri like this, they already have a propaganda department working overtime to bludgeon the masses with their message.The elite don’t just want to regulate how you travel and how you heat your home. They want to control what you eat and how you breed, too. Open the pages of any mainstream magazine; turn on your television; scroll through any mainstream news site and you’ll see headlines like “To feed the world, why not eat bugs?,” “Eating insects is good for you – and the planet!,” “To Confront Climate Change, the Modern Automobile Must Die,” and “Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children.”Thunberg, her elite backers, and their court scribes – if they’re to be taken at their word – want you alone, immobile and, literally, eating insects in the name of environmentalism"
Meat tax will take food off poor people’s tables so that wealthy eco-socialists can feel virtuous - "This is how you impose an unpopular and ineffective environmentalist policy that will hit the poorest citizens hardest, is bound to create a host of unintended consequences, and is founded on speculative science to begin with... The fruits of your labors will be evident within months.Being a wealthy lawmaker you will eat as much or as little meat as before, as food makes up a small proportion of your monthly budget. Your constituents – that is a different matter. Perhaps some will get the message, and eat more vegetables instead. Or perhaps, instead of buying organic, cruelty-free, carbon-neutral meat, they will now buy more factory-farmed meat. Or perhaps they will spend the money on a decent steak but will not be able to afford to repair their car, or take that holiday to the Balearics. Though I guess that could be a result in itself – after all, as a rule, the poorer someone is in the West, the less CO2 they emit. Some might be so deprived, however, that they will eat no meat at all. Their remaining money will now go to other, cheaper and more harmful high-calorie processed foods, like cakes or oven-fried chips. While your farmers will simply find it more profitable to export the food abroad, over longer distances, increasing their emissions. Is this what you wanted? Oh, sin taxes, they used to be so simple when you were targeting the universally agreed-upon harms, such as smoking, with the aim of their complete eradication. But this is getting more nuanced now. Meat has been eaten by the homo sapiens since its emergence, and played an important role in its evolution. It still remains a key source of protein for your population. Ethically too, eating it is a source of legitimate pleasure to the sensory organs of millions. Is it the job of the government to strip its citizens of their daily pleasures, to literally deny adults the full choice of food for their dinner? What’s the morally correct trade-off between seven-course feasts of imported ostrich and elk and government-mandated buckwheat three times a day?... even if every resident of the United States, the country with the highest consumption of meat per capita, stopped eating meat tomorrow, that would only slice 2.6 percent off its emissions. Meanwhile, a Chinese person now eats five times as much meat as they did in the 1980s, and still only half as much as Americans – so he wants more. And the world population will likely double by the end of the century. Germans eating two fewer sausages a week was never going to be more than a gesture, and everyone knows it. Though bearing in mind other environmental policy perversities – like banning nuclear to rely on dirty coal, or incentivizing biofuels and, in the process, rainforest destruction – perhaps “negligible” is the best effect we can all hope for. And you get to enjoy your steak guilt-free."
Eating meat could be made illegal like smoking in pubs, says top barrister - "Eating meat could become illegal in the future due to the damage caused to the environment, says a leading barrister calling for a new "ecocide" law.Michael Mansfield QC says new legislation is needed to criminalise the "wilful destruction of nature", which he described as a "crime against humanity"."
So much for the "myth" of the slippery slope
Carl Hodson-Thomas - "If climate activists weren't such austere dullards, they would be advancing the case for Gen IV nuclear reactors because they provide the cheapest, most sustainable source of energy, with the positive externality that there are no emissions. Unfortunately, they don't make this case, because they are Naturalists. Naturalists are not interested in emancipating humans from poverty by providing cheap, clean energy to enable human flourishing. Largely, because they think humans are a scourge on the earth. It's ironic then, that of the proposed "renewable solutions" solar emits 40x the amount of radiation as Nuclear per unit of energy, due to the rare earths mining necessary. How's that for a negative externality from renewables you won't hear about!?! Similarly, nuclear requires the least materials inputs versus the "renewable" alternatives... Another second order consequence that goes unreported. If you want to reduce emissions and enable your human brethren, going nuclear is the only option. Particularly since nuclear reactors are no longer required to produce weapons grade nuclear materials through the reactor process, they have been able to improve their efficiencies and waste. The half-life of most of the waste material is now as short as 30 years, whilst other radioactive isotopes (Bi-213) can be used for Targeted Alpha Therapy, which kills specific cancer cells without irradiating the patient. Finally, Gen IV nuclear reactors don't meltdown, so there is none of the popularised catastrophic risk you will see if you watch the series inspired by Chernobyl. Nuclear has just been the victim of bad marketing and a history marred by a focus on weapons, rather than cheap clean energy. Surely, this positive insight is a better message for our children who are told the world will end in 12 years if we don't stop travelling, trading goods and doing all the things that modern economies require. Then, at least the Greta Thunbergs of the world might disappear from the spotlight, plan for the future and find a better hobby!"
Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us
I previously linked this, but ironically in 2020, The Guardian has appended at the bottom of this 2004 story about how the UK will become Siberia by 2020: " Climate misinformation is rife…… and never more dangerous than now, as the crisis escalates across the world. The Guardian’s accurate, authoritative journalism has never been more critical – and we will not stay quiet. This is our pledge: we will continue to give global heating, wildlife extinction and pollution the urgent attention and prominence they demand. We recognise the climate emergency as the defining issue of our lifetimes."
The Rush To Renewable Energy Defies Science, Economics, And Common Sense - "Many approaches to climate change are analogous to saying that the best way to produce energy is to build perpetual-motion machines, which perform work indefinitely without an energy source — a concept that violates the laws of thermodynamics. In other words, the goal is laudable, but the means to achieve it is, literally, fantastic. In the case of climate change, the anti-hydrocarbon contingent seeks to violate basic tenets of science and economics.The reality is that there are insurmountable or cost-prohibitive obstacles to the scale-up of renewable energy and to creating the necessary infrastructure for it. Here are some facts that provide a reality check:
Solar conversion to electricity is already more than 75% toward the maximum possible efficiency, according to the laws of physics. There are no possible breakthroughs that will reduce significantly the sheer numbers of solar panels needed to increase the overall power derived from the sun.
Likewise, with respect to efficiency, wind conversion to electricity is already approximately two-thirds of the way to the maximum physical limit. The number of wind turbines would need to increase massively.
A single wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete, and 45 tons of plastic (produced from hydrocarbons and not recyclable). Solar is even more resource consumptive.
The mining of silver, indium, and rare earths would have to soar by up to 20-fold over today’s yields just to meet the Paris climate accord’s goals. The mining process (for both those minerals and for battery materials) itself is dirty, ecologically destructive, and consumes significant amounts of hydrocarbon energy; and the plastic needed for solar and wind requires hydrocarbons.
No step-function improvement in batteries has been attained in spite of 25-plus years of huge investment, including that from dozens of innovative startup companies. Counting on a breakthrough at this point is probably wishful thinking.
To store the energy equivalent of a single barrel of oil, which can be stored in a $20 container at minimal cost, requires $200,000 and 10 tons of Tesla batteries.
Tesla’s “Gigafactory” produces only enough batteries in an entire year to store three minutes of U.S. power demand. That is not enough to handle a cloudy or calm day for the renewables, let alone provide the needed two months of backup. Proper backup would require the equivalent of almost 30,000 production-years of similar factories.
A single car requires 1,000 pounds of batteries. This, in turn, requires mining, moving, and processing some 500,000 pounds of raw materials. So, imagine scaling that up to provide batteries for a public utility the size of ConEd or Pacific Gas & Electric.
Neither batteries nor wind nor solar equipment lasts forever. Currently available, state-of-the-art batteries have a useful life of just seven years, leading to massive disposal and pollution issues. And all the steel and other elements of retired equipment need to go somewhere.
A shale-oil rig produces almost 15 times as much energy per hour/day/year as two 500-foot turbines turning in the wind. Putting it another way, one producing rig is the equivalent of 30 wind turbines.
Wind turbine farms are unsightly and kill huge numbers of birds.
The intermittent nature of wind and solar imposes huge infrastructure and operating costs due to the necessary continual re-balancing of the electrical grid. Extensive reliable backup sources are needed in the absence of massive batteries at every wind or solar site, which inevitably will consume hydrocarbons...
Mankind is resourceful enough to find innumerable ways to adapt to climate change. Many of the predictions of planetary doom are almost certainly exaggerated. Common-sense measures such as protecting rain forests, planting more trees, fortifying coastal protection, and abandoning overly vulnerable property will be necessary. But these costs are eminently manageable.There are also many ingenious approaches to “geoengineering,” the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s natural systems to counteract climate change; these include solar radiation management and greenhouse gas sequestration.We are best served by “un-brainwashing” ourselves about climate change — that is, dispensing with the hyperbole and nescience that distract from reality."
So much for listening to what the scientists are saying
The Global Warming Scare — The Perfect Trojan Horse For Tyranny - "CNN’s climate townhall, a slog that lasted seven grueling hours, was a prohibition-fest. The candidates suggested banning nuclear energy, fracking, offshore drilling, conventional automobiles, all fossil fuels, even red meat, plastic straws, and babies. It devolved into a contest to see which Democratic presidential aspirant could propose the greatest volume of proscriptions."
Chief of World Meteorological Organization Castigates Climate Alarmists - "The head of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) issued an unprecedented rebuke to climate alarmists... Petteri Taalas, the secretary-general of the WMO, told Talouselämä magazine that he called for a calm and rational approach to the climate debate, and disagreed with those who are promoting end-of-the-world scenarios.“Now we should stay calm and ponder what is really the solution to this problem,” Taalas told Talouselämä magazine. “It is not going to be the end of the world. The world is just becoming more challenging. In parts of the globe, living conditions are becoming worse, but people have survived in harsh conditions.” The WMO and the United Nations Environment Programme created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. Since then, the IPCC has become the leading institution worldwide to promote the theory that human activity contributes to global warming.Taalas said that while skepticism of the human-activity theory has abated in recent years, climate scientists are under increasing assault from radical climate extremists.“While climate skepticism has become less of an issue, now we are being challenged from the other side. Climate experts have been attacked by these people and they claim that we should be much more radical. They are doomsters and extremists; they make threats”... The head of the WMO noted that the media in his country are creating additional anxiety... Taalas pointed out that climate extremists are selectively picking out facts from the IPCC reports to fit their narrative. For example, Ocasio-Cortez and the movement she represents often refer to the 12-year deadline to end the use of fossil fuels. That 12-year timeline was selectively plucked from a range of 12 to 44 years in the IPCC’s special report, which states that “Global warming is likely to reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate.” “The IPCC reports have been read in a similar way to the Bible: you try to find certain pieces or sections from which you try to justify your extreme views. This resembles religious extremism”... Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, has acknowledged the activists’ objective is not to save the world from overheating but to hijack markets and tear down capitalism.Activist and influential author Naomi Klein asked, “what if global warming isn’t only a crisis?” in a preview of a documentary inspired by her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.“What if it’s the best chance we’re ever going to get to build a better world?” The world must “change, or be changed,” she says, because an “economic system” — our free and open markets — has caused environmental “wreckage.”The former chief of staff for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who last week said Miami will not exist “in a few years” due to the effects of global warming, has admitted the New York Democrat’s radical climate plan is a ruse... Armstrong Economics reminds us that “climate change has been a routine scare tactic since the 1930s.”"
AOC's Chief of Staff Admits the Green New Deal Is Not About Climate Change - "Saikat Chakrabarti admitted recently that the true motivation behind introducing the Green New Deal is to overhaul the “entire economy.”Chakrabarti said that addressing climate change was not Ocasio-Cortez’s top priority in proposing the Green New Deal during a meeting with Washington governor Jay Inslee.“The interesting thing about the Green New Deal, is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” Chakrabarti said to Inslee’s climate director, Sam Ricketts, according to a Washington Post reporter who attended the meeting for a profile published Wednesday.“Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing,” he added... The Green New Deal, proposed earlier this year by Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey (D., Mass.), would transition the U.S. economy entirely away from fossil fuels within ten years while simultaneously providing a federal jobs and healthcare guarantee. It would also, according to its proponents, advance “social, economic, racial, regional and gender-based justice and equality and cooperative and public ownership.”All told, the proposal will cost up to $93 trillion in new government spending over ten years"
Climate change can be solved by ending poverty, not focusing on fossil fuel use, says one Danish economist - "not only have we been dealing with climate change for hundreds of years, we’ve also been very good at adapting to it. “Back in the 1920s, about half a million died from climate-related problems per year, but since then, it’s declined to 20,000 per year. It’s not because disasters have become less frequent, it’s simply because by becoming rich, we are not nearly as affected by them,” he says. “Some say Shanghai is going to be flooded in several years due to rising sea levels, but the fact is, we’ve been combating it for hundreds of years.”... According to the World Bank, there is a direct link between poverty and energy, in that the poor are “least likely to have access to power”, and are likely to remain poor until they do. Additionally, close to 3 billion people are entirely dependent on fossil fuels. “Telling them to cut back on using fossil fuels is the same as asking them to stop doing the stuff that allows them to escape poverty, which clearly isn’t going to work,” Lomborg explains. Climate change doesn’t have a “quick fix”, so instead of spending huge sums of money on initiatives that will produce minimal results, we should be investing in ways to lift people out of poverty"... “The reality is even if we spend trillions of dollars on this we can only fix a tiny bit of it, such as cutting back temperature rise by only a few tenths of a degree. In contrast, with just billions, we could vaccinate people, invest in higher-efficiency agriculture, education – we can tackle so many other problems”... “We should aim to develop green technologies until they become so cheap that everyone will want to use them, and choose them over fossil fuels – true innovation has to be the solution.”"
A climate of burning money - "After 30 years of failed climate policy, more of the same is not the answer. Since the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, our use of renewable energy has increased by only 1.1 percentage points — from meeting 13.1 per cent of the world’s energy needs in 1992 to 14.2 per cent today. Most nations are failing to deliver on carbon cut undertakings already made — yet politicians will be feted in New York for making new, empty promises... Alternative energy has increased so little because green energy remains incapable of meeting all of our needs met by fossil fuels. Replacing cheap and reliable fossil fuel energy with more expensive and less reliable energy alternatives weighs down the economy, leading to slightly lower growth.This means the Paris treaty is likely to cost between $US1 trillion and $2 trillion ($1.5 trillion and $2.9 trillion) a year, making it the costliest treaty in history. Not surprisingly, research shows that it will increase poverty. Its effects are not evenly felt; increasing electricity prices hurts the poor the most... politicians are being celebrated for going even further than the Paris treaty’s current promises, vowing to make entire economies “carbon-neutral” within decades.It speaks volumes that few governments ever establish the costs of such promises. One of the few that has is New Zealand. A government-commissioned report found that aiming for net zero emissions by 2050 would cost more than the entire current annual national budget. There would be “yellow vest” riots worldwide if such policies were genuinely pursued.We need to challenge the ever-more rampant talk about “catastrophic” climate change. Rhetoric has become unpinned from science. According to the UN climate science panel’s last major report, if we do absolutely nothing to stop climate change, the impact will be the equivalent to a reduction in our incomes of between 0.2 per cent and 2 per cent five decades from now.Work by Nobel laureate climate economist William Nordhaus based on the UN findings shows the likeliest outcome is a cost to the planet of about 3 per cent of gross domestic product in coming centuries. That should be taken seriously — but it does not equal Armageddon. The havoc wreaked by Hurricane Dorian is tragic but it cannot be pinned on global warming, according to the UN’s climate scientists, who say “globally, there is low confidence in attribution of changes in tropical cyclone activity to human influence”. Indeed, a study shows hurricane damage currently costs 0.04 per cent of global GDP.As we expect a global increase in prosperity and hence resilience, unchanged hurricane costs will drop fourfold to 0.01 per cent by 2100. And even though global warming will make hurricanes fewer but stronger and double total damage, the net impact still will be a smaller 0.02 per cent of GDP.As a study from the Royal Society concluded, cutting CO2 has “extremely limited potential to reduce future losses”. Instead, adaptation can be up to 52 times more effective... if all 4.5 billion flights this year were stopped from taking off, and the same happened every year until 2100, temperatures would be reduced by only 0.03C, using mainstream climate models — equivalent to delaying climate change by less than one year by 2100.Nor will we solve global warming by giving up meat. Going vegetarian is difficult; one US survey shows 84 per cent fail, most in less than a year. Those who succeed will reduce their personal emissions by only about 2 per cent.And electric cars are not the answer. Globally, there are only five million fully electric cars on the road. Even if this climbs to 130 million in 11 years, the International Energy Agency finds CO2 equivalent emissions would be reduced by a mere 0.4 per cent of global emissions. Put simply, the solution to climate change cannot be found in personal changes in the homes of the middle classes of rich countries. The Paris Agreement cannot do much — just as the Rio and Kyoto pacts before it mostly failed — because in essence this approach requires rich countries to promise future economic hardship to achieve very little. Indeed, the real problem is that most of the 21st-century emissions are not being emitted by the rich world: if every single rich country stopped all CO2 emissions today and for the rest of the century — no plane trips, no meat consumption, no petrol-powered cars, no heating or cooling with fossil fuels, no artificial fertiliser — the difference would be just 0.4C by the end of the century... The starvation catastrophes in developing nations from the 1960s to the 80s weren’t fixed by asking people to consume less food but through the Green Revolution in which innovation developed higher-yielding varieties that produced more plentiful food.Similarly, the climate challenge will not be solved by asking people to use less of more expensive green energy. Instead, we should dramatically ramp up spending on R&D into green energy.The Copenhagen Consensus Centre asked 27 of the world’s top climate economists to examine policy options for responding to climate change. This analysis showed that the best investment is in green energy R&D. For every dollar spent, $11 of climate damages would be avoided."
Getting Religion: NBC Solicits Confessions of Climate Change Sins - " “Climate change is some kind of religion—all eschatology, minus the redemption.”An apt description considering that NBC’s “Climate Confessions” page declared, “Even those who care deeply about the planet's future can slip up now and then. Tell us: Where do you fall short in preventing climate change? Do you blast the A/C? Throw out half your lunch? Grill a steak every week? Share your anonymous confession with NBC News.” Confessions were not confidential. They were publicized on the NBC website, but it was unclear whether public confessions were meant to assuage guilt for climate change “sins” or foster more guilt.Some commenters sounded grieved by their use of plastics, food waste, cars and energy consumption"
'Climate Change’ Ranks Dead Last in United Nations' Own Survey - "more than seven million people who responded to a recent U.N. global survey ranked climate concerns at the very bottom of their priorities.“A good education” topped the 16-item priority list in all demographic and geographic categories, followed by “better healthcare,” “better job opportunities,” and “an honest and responsive government.”Most survey respondents put “action taken on climate change” in last place, indicating widespread skepticism of the U.N.’s claims that the Earth faces irreversible and catastrophic damage from rising temperatures if carbon dioxide emissions are not completely eliminated over the next three and a half decades.That skepticism can be traced in part to satellite and weather balloon data showing no global warming for the past 18 years, as well as the obvious disconnect between global warming alarmists’ rhetoric and their actions. For example, U.N. delegates who flew to Lima in jet-fueled airliners are calling for the total elimination of fossil fuels, but the vast majority of them would not ride a bicycle less than six miles to the conference venue to reduce their own carbon footprints."
Climate change won't be stopped with fear (or hypocrisy) - "Activists, politicians and many in the media have stopped heralding the benefits of a cleaner, greener policy. No time to promote clear skies, green hills or a better quality of life. Instead, it’s all fear, all the time.Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish climate activist, chose fear as a centerpiece of her message... 69% of Americans want aggressive action to combat climate change.So far, so good.How many would support a rate hike of $100 a year to tackle the problem? Only 29%.The years-long fear campaign hasn’t worked; any Marketing 101 student would change the messaging. Instead, progressive politicians just ramp up the panic. Throughout our lives, eco-fearmongering has been a constant. My first-grade teacher handed out maps showing how a pollution-caused ice age would soon cover our Chicago suburb with a glacier... After that, acid rain was going to kill us, then the ozone hole, then global warming, then “global weirding,” and now, climate change. Granted, the climate has always changed, but progressives think it started about a century ago.Despite the wildly different scenarios, from freezing oceans to boiling ones, the solution is always the same: curtail capitalism and let government control more of our lives... Sen. Bernie Sanders endorsed using federally funded abortions as a means of population control. Mayor Pete Buttigieg called climate change “a kind of sin” but defended his private air travel “because this is a very big country.”Former vice president Joe Biden promised to "take millions of vehicles off the road” via high-speed rail. The next day, he held a fundraiser co-hosted by a fossil fuel magnate. The hypocrisy is galling, but it reveals that so many environmental doomsayers don’t actually believe we’re in a crisis at all... Leonardo DiCaprio, Prince Harry and others in the top 0.1% flew to a Google Camp in Sicily, requiring 117 separate flights. Seems like a Google Hangout would be better for the planet."
Sweden’s Biggest Cities Face Power Shortage After Fuel-Tax Hike - "Sweden’s introduction on Thursday of a tax aimed at phasing out the nation’s last remaining coal and gas plants to curb global warming comes with an unintended consequence for some of its biggest cities... Some new daycare centers have to wait for months to be connected to the grid in Stockholm. A bread factory in Malmo was denied a license to expand because it would consume too much power."
BBC World Service - The World This Week, Hong Kong Protests - "[On Kashmir becoming equal to the rest of India] It's been extensively celebrated, and not just by the people who support the ruling party, but you know, across India. To begin with, I mean, a lot of people who didn't even know that Kashmir enjoyed some kind of special status, right. And that has actually made a lot of people question that why shouldn't you know, why should someone have a special status and you know, like, as citizens of India, you know, all parts of the country are the same. So no one should have any special rights, just as no one should be, you know, like treated badly...
Is it reasonable for us to expect the people who stand up and take a stand on these issues, to also be careful about their own behavior? I'm thinking about the story at the moment about Prince Harry being criticized for calling publicly on people to make personal changes. And then we find out he took his family on holiday to Ibiza by private jet."
What if We Stopped Pretending the Climate Apocalypse Can Be Stopped? | The New Yorker - "If collective action resulted in just one fewer devastating hurricane, just a few extra years of relative stability, it would be a goal worth pursuing.In fact, it would be worth pursuing even if it had no effect at all. To fail to conserve a finite resource when conservation measures are available, to needlessly add carbon to the atmosphere when we know very well what carbon is doing to it, is simply wrong. Although the actions of one individual have zero effect on the climate, this doesn’t mean that they’re meaningless. Each of us has an ethical choice to make. During the Protestant Reformation, when “end times” was merely an idea, not the horribly concrete thing it is today, a key doctrinal question was whether you should perform good works because it will get you into Heaven, or whether you should perform them simply because they’re good—because, while Heaven is a question mark, you know that this world would be better if everyone performed them. I can respect the planet, and care about the people with whom I share it, without believing that it will save me... if you accept the reality that the planet will soon overheat to the point of threatening civilization, there’s a whole lot more you should be doing... In times of increasing chaos, people seek protection in tribalism and armed force, rather than in the rule of law, and our best defense against this kind of dystopia is to maintain functioning democracies, functioning legal systems, functioning communities. In this respect, any movement toward a more just and civil society can now be considered a meaningful climate action. Securing fair elections is a climate action. Combatting extreme wealth inequality is a climate action. Shutting down the hate machines on social media is a climate action. Instituting humane immigration policy, advocating for racial and gender equality, promoting respect for laws and their enforcement, supporting a free and independent press, ridding the country of assault weapons—these are all meaningful climate actions"
The secular religion of environmentalism in a nutshell. But this goes beyond even normal hysteria, and has become an excuse to bulldoze any political agenda through
Of course, during the Protestant Reformation, the "end times" was a horribly concrete thing to them - just as Climate Apocalypse if nothing was done in a decade was a horribly concrete thing in 1989
Parents told not to terrify children over climate change as rising numbers treated for 'eco-anxiety' - "Rising numbers of children are being treated for “eco-anxiety”, experts have said, as they warn parents against “terrifying” their youngsters with talk of climate catastrophe.Protests by groups such as Extinction Rebellion, the recent fires in the Amazon and apocalyptic warnings by the teenage activist Greta Thunberg have prompted a “tsunami” of young people seeking help.A group of psychologists working with the University of Bath says it is receiving a growing volume of enquiries from teachers, doctors and therapists unable to cope. The Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA) told The Daily Telegraph some children complaining of eco-anxiety have even been given psychiatric drugs."
Climate change hysteria has very real costs
No, 2020 Dems, the conflict in Syria wasn't caused by climate change. - "This is an example of the messy game of "Telephone" that passes for climate policy discussion today. Scientists write a nuanced research paper. These findings become distorted in the interests of sharing a clear narrative with the public. Then a politician seizes on the news and twists the story even further.To make the case for the link between terrorism and global warming, Sanders linked to a news story with a provocative headline: “Climate change will increase risk of violent conflict, researchers warn”. But that paper hardly offers compelling evidence that terrorism is bigger today thanks to global warming. The authors actually looked at 16 factors that drive conflict risk. When they ranked that list in terms of influence, climate came in 14th, behind more important factors like poor development, population pressure and corruption. As the researchers write, “Other drivers, such as low socioeconomic development and low capabilities of the state, are judged to be substantially more influential, and the mechanisms of climate–conflict linkages remain a key uncertainty.”... A paper that studied the role of drought and climate change in the Syrian uprising found, “An exaggerated focus on climate change shifts the burden of responsibility for the devastation of Syria’s natural resources away from the successive Syrian governments since the 1950s and allows the Assad regime to blame external factors for its own failures.” It concluded: “The possible role of climate change in this chain of events is not only irrelevant; it is also an unhelpful distraction.”... Sanders repeats the oft-heard claim that we are seeing more drought. Yet, the United Nations climate panel concludes that there “is low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought.”In fact, global hydrological drought area has been declining since 1900, and a recent Nature study reconfirmed this... If we worry that wars will be worsened because drought will increase in Syria, we should also be thankful that less future drought from global warming will make civil war less likely in many other countries."
Climate change deniers are dangerous - they don't deserve a place on our site - "At The Conversation Australia we’ve recently vowed to improve our climate change coverage, and part of that means moderating comments with a similar degree of rigour... Not only will we be removing their comments, we’ll be locking their accounts."
Wrongthink is not to be tolerated
Bjørn Lomborg - Posts - "CO₂ and air pollution damages from gasoline and electric cars
Electric cars are only much better than gasoline cars in a few places in the West
Electric cars are worse almost everywhere in the East."
Paper: Are There Environmental Benefits from Driving Electric Vehicles? The Importance of Local Factors - "Ninety percent of local environmental externalities from driving electric vehicles in one state are exported to others, implying they may be subsidized locally, even when the environmental benefits are negative overall."
Nico Alba - "Wanna know how I feel about a 16-year-old telling me about global climate issues? Same way I feel about an 18-year-old Mormon missionary knocking on my door to tell me the meaning of life.I don't care really whether their opinions conflict or coincide with mine. They're ignorant children with zero life experience, under-developed brains, and over-developed confidence. They've no clue what they're talking about and they've likely been heavily manipulated by their elders. They regurgitate what they've been told because that's what kids do.Come talk to me when you're off your family's phone plan, maybe."
Religious indoctrination bad
Environmental indoctrination good
What AOC & co. get horribly wrong about Dorian, climate change - "With Hurricane Dorian striking the Bahamas and the East Coast, the climate blame game is now in full swing again: Global-warming activists, newspaper columnists, TV commentators and politicians are drawing links between climate change and hurricanes... When hurricanes Harvey and Irma both hit mainland US in quick succession in 2017, critics claimed this was the “new normal.”In fact, those two storms, along with Michael in 2018, were the only three major hurricanes greater than a Category 3 to hit the continental US in the last 13 years. That’s a record low since 1900. For comparison, the average over the same timeframe has been nearly eight major hurricanes. It’s vital to consider the science. In its most recent assessment, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that “no robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes … have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin.”Globally, the international scientific body finds “no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency.”What’s more, “confidence in large-scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones [big events like Superstorm Sandy] since 1900 is low.”The person who did more than most to link global warming to hurricanes was Al Gore. A poster for his movie “An Inconvenient Truth” showed a hurricane growing out of a smokestack, and the former vice president blamed Hurricane Katrina on global warming.Gore was following 2005 talking points from the Sierra Club that were intended for environmentalists looking to sell expensive limits on carbon emissions: “Ride the wave of public concern created over extreme weather,” the group advised. Activists continue to ride that wave by taking advantage of fear, and by misusing the fact that hurricane costs do keep escalating. Yet this cost spike isn’t caused by climate change but by having more people with more wealth live in harm’s way... No wonder researchers who study extreme weather and climate change warn that overselling the link risks eroding “scientific credibility” and distracting from the things we need to do to be better prepared for extreme weather. To reduce hurricane impacts, our first priority isn’t cutting carbon. Rather, we need to improve building codes.And we should not allow so many houses to be built on vulnerable coastlines. One way to achieve that would be to stop subsidizing home insurance for building houses most likely to get wiped out in hurricanes — literally a subsidy for building irresponsibly.We could also encourage more wetlands to soak up storm surges and undertake some of the many smart, adaptive measures in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan for NYC, including subway covers to stop underground lines flooding.We also need to keep in mind that more prosperous communities are better able to cope with disasters. This is especially clear when we consider the poor shantytowns in developing countries hit by hurricanes. They don’t need people in rich countries piously trying to cut carbon emissions, which will at best slightly ease their increased suffering in 2100. They need to grow their economies, feed their kids, stop easily curable diseases and expand access to education so they can move into the 21st century and boost resilience."
Switzerland's heatwave – made by greens - "Climate change has recently made people suffer in Switzerland, with areas of Zurich reaching 45.2 degrees Celsius, and other parts of Switzerland 42.3 degrees. Some people have complained that they are struggling to work, while others have been reportedly close to collapsing in the heat. At the University Hospital Zurich, the 40-degree heat has made patients’ lives a misery, stopping many from sleeping despite their being given sedatives. Some patients with dementia reportedly stripped naked to cool down... The unbearable temperatures recorded in Switzerland this year all occurred on public transport and within hospital buildings and other workplaces.In the interests of saving the planet from disaster, University Hospital Zurich (UHZ) has banned air-conditioner use, with the exception of operating theatres and other places in the hospital where cooling is vital. Staff were advised to cool the wards, waiting rooms and public areas by opening windows and doors, putting up screens, and by airing the hospital at night. A UHZ spokeswoman said that the high temperatures inside the hospital, which were at times 10 degrees higher than outside, are not a problem. The ‘sensation of heat’ is nothing but an ‘individual’ feeling, she said. One wonders if she feels the same insouciance towards global warming... This absurd situation begins to make sense – at least from the perspective of officialdom – when one considers that UHZ is committed to reducing its ‘energy requirements’ by two per cent per year. It is a plainly unsustainable policy, drawn up by greens who are more concerned about the fate of future generations than they are about the plight of people in the present"
Bjørn Lomborg - Posts - "When no major hurricanes hit US in 11 years (longest hurricane drought in history) nobody linked it to climate,then back to normal, and every hurricane was climate caused.The reality? Since 1900, number of major landfalling US hurricanes *not* increased."
The New York Times Says Heat Waves Are Getting Worse. The National Climate Assessment Disagrees. - "chapter six of 2017's Fourth National Climate Assessment reports that heat waves measured as high daily temperatures are becoming less common in the contiguous U.S., not more frequent... According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, climate models tend to significantly underestimate the decrease in the diurnal temperature range—that is, the difference between minimum and maximum daily temperatures—over the last 50 years"
Claim that human civilization could end in 30 years is speculative, not supported with evidence - "Six scientists analyzed the article and estimated its overall scientific credibility to be ‘low’.
A majority of reviewers tagged the article as: Alarmist, Misleading.
This article at IFLScience describes a report produced by an Australian think tank. The report attempts to describe a possible worst case climate scenario in 2050. The report claims this scenario leads to a “high likelihood of human civilization coming to an end”, but does not support this claim with evidence.Scientists who reviewed IFLScience’s story found that it failed to provide sufficient context for this report—differentiating, for example, between speculative claims and descriptions of peer-reviewed research. In particular, the story’s headline (“New Report Warns ‘High Likelihood Of Human Civilization Coming To An End’ Within 30 Years”) misrepresents the report as a likely projection rather than an exploration of an intrinsically unlikely worst case scenario."
Why setting a climate deadline is dangerous | Nature Climate Change - "The publication of the IPCC Special Report on global warming of 1.5 degrees C paved the way for the rise of the political rhetoric of setting a fixed deadline for decisive actions on climate change. However, the dangers of such deadline rhetoric suggest the need for the IPCC to take responsibility for its report and openly challenge the credibility of such a deadline... the rhetoric of a 2030 deadline arises from political (mis)use of science in setting an artificial deadline... The imagery of deadlines and countdown clocks offers an illusory cliff-edge after which the world heads inevitably to its imminent demise. It promulgates the imaginary of extinction and the collapse of civilization.The impacts of climate change are more likely to be intermittent, slow and gradual... Despite good intentions, the rhetoric of a 2030 deadline is the political (mis)use of science for setting an artificial deadline. Although the rhetoric is usually seen by scientists as a misleading interpretation of the IPCC findings, the IPCC and most climate scientists have so far kept silent, thereby implicitly seeming to endorse it. However, given that the IPCC’s SR15 report helped to create the condition for this rhetoric, as the institutional authority for climate science the IPCC should take responsibility for more actively engaging in political conversations around it."
Lawrence Solomon: Wikipedia’s climate doctor - "The Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm.The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history.The Medieval Warm Period, which followed the meanness and cold of the Dark Ages, was a great time in human history — it allowed humans around the world to bask in a glorious warmth that vastly improved agriculture, increased life spans and otherwise bettered the human condition.But the Medieval Warm Period was not so great for some humans in our own time — the same small band that believes the planet has now entered an unprecedented and dangerous warm period. As we now know from the Climategate Emails, this band saw the Medieval Warm Period as an enormous obstacle in their mission of spreading the word about global warming.If temperatures were warmer 1,000 years ago than today, the Climategate Emails explain in detail, their message that we now live in the warmest of all possible times would be undermined. As put by one band member, a Briton named Folland at the Hadley Centre, a Medieval Warm Period “dilutes the message rather significantly.”... “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period” read a pre-Climategate email, circa 1995, as attested to at hearings of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works.But the Climategate transcripts were more extensive and more illuminating — they provided an unvarnished look at the struggles that the climate practitioners underwent before settling on their scientific dogma.The Climategate Emails showed, for example, that some members of the band were uncomfortable with aspects of their work, some even questioning the need to erase the existence of the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years earlier... With the help of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the highest climate change authority of all, they published what became the icon of their movement — the hockey stick graph. This icon showed temperatures in the last 1,000 years to have been stable — no Medieval Warm Period, not even the Little Ice Age of a few centuries ago.But the UN’s official verdict that the Medieval Warm Period had not existed did not erase the countless schoolbooks, encyclopedias, and other scholarly sources that claimed it had.Rewriting those would take decades, time that the band members didn’t have if they were to save the globe from warming. Instead, the band members turned to their friends in the media and to the blogosphere, creating a website called RealClimate.org."
Wikipedia Meets Its Own Climategate - "'[Connolley] rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug. 11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band [of climatologist activists]. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band [of activists] especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.'...
The political exploitation of science has gone on for some time — discrediting nuclear power in addition to the use of oil and coal has been just one of its several goals. One unintended consequence, as Fred Singer said recently, is that the public may begin to disbelieve everything that begins “science says.” In the present climate, that might be healthy, but in the long run it would not work to America’s or the world’s advantage."
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "Al Gore’s Oscar winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, featured a historical temperature graph called the ‘hockey stick’ because it showed a sharp increase in temperatures in recent years. This same graph was featured in the 2001 IPCC climate report. This graph was considered by many to be ‘proof’ of runaway global warming. The graph came from a paper written by prominent climate change scientist Michael Mann published in 1998. It was a big deal.Skeptics of the runaway global warming hypothesis noticed the ‘hockey stick’ did not show a bump for the Medieval Warming Period in the 1500s — a known spike in global temperatures that is believed to be as high as today’s temperatures. The hockey stick also did not show a dip for the Little Ice Age — a cooling period that ended in the mid-19th century. Mann would not provide his data so other scientists went about attempting to reverse engineer his results from his reported data sources... A few years later a couple of studies by others were published that refuted the hockey stick and the IPCC stopped using the hockey stick graph in future reports.Which brings us to today’s story — the dismissal of a second Michael Mann lawsuit aimed at a critic. The notoriously thin-skinned Mann had filed a lawsuit against Dr. Tim Ball for his criticisms of Mann’s study. The British Columbia court threw out the case and awarded Ball his legal costs when Mann refused to provide the data and formulas he used to create the hockey stick graph"
Young climate change warriors meet with councillors at City Hall - "Around 20 home-educated youngsters from across the county, aged between three and eight years old, presented handwritten letters to City Hall councillors to express their concerns on climate change"
If this were about religion some people would be complaining about indoctrination. But since it's about climate change it's good
Climate Central: The New Obama $15 Million Mansion Will Sink - "Barack and Michelle Obama are currently in escrow on a $15 million beachfront estate which itself may one day be completely underwater if climate research funded by his own administration is anything to go by.How can they sleep at night?... what about the optics involved? It can't look very good, the Obamas spending eight figures on a summer home supposedly at risk of inundation. Or Al Gore's carbon footprint, which is one of the few things on Earth still larger than Al Gore. And all those celebrities and royalty flying off in private jets to tiny islands, to be whisked away from the airfield in high-performance cars, all to attend a conference on climate change. How do they think they look, emitting all that carbon and then telling us to jack up our thermostats to 82° on summer nights?... as the price of luxuries falls year after year, the cost of feeling smug rises faster than the sea levels ever could. And while the Obamas and DiCaprios and Windsors would never admit it, there's nothing so luxurious as being able to afford the princely sums required by modern hypocrisy."
Revealed preferences! Alternatively: You don't have to be poor to be stupid
NY Times Discovers Desert Summer Is Hot, Blames Climate Change - "The article concludes with something painfully predictable from the climate crowd -- a plea for the government to do more.The government can't make outdoor summer temperatures any cooler in Phoenix.Because it's a desert."
Swedish Scientist Proposes Cannibalism to Fight Climate Change - "Swedish behavioural scientist Magnus Söderlund has suggested that eating other people after they die could be a means of combatting climate change."
Examining the Latest False Alarm on Climate - WSJ - "You’ve probably seen the latest alarming headlines: Rising sea levels from climate change could flood 187 million people out of their homes. Don’t believe it. That figure is unrealistic—and it isn’t even new. It appears in a new scholarly paper, whose authors plucked it from a paper published in 2011. What the earlier paper actually found was that 187 million could be forced to move in the unlikely event that, in the next 80 years, no one does anything to adapt to dramatic rises in sea level.In real life, the 2011 paper explained, humans “adapt proactively,” and “such adaptation can greatly reduce the possible impacts.” That means “the problem of environmental refugees almost disappears.” Realistic assumptions reduce the number to between 41,000 and 305,000—at most, less than 1/600th of the figure in those headlines. Sober findings get less attention than alarming and far-fetched speculation. The United Nations’ climate-panel scenarios all show that the world will be far richer and more resilient by the end of the century. That means we’ll be better able to tackle challenges like flooding—as much poorer societies have done for centuries. We have more know-how and technology than ever to build dikes, surge barriers and dams, expand beaches and construct dunes, make ecosystem-based barriers like mangrove buffers, improve building codes and construction techniques, and use land planning and hazard mapping to minimize flooding. Journalists looking for alarming headlines get help from climate scientists who gloss over adaptation and from public-relations teams that know their audience"
Your Bowl of Rice Is Hurting the Climate Too - Bloomberg - "Global rice farming, it turns out, could have the same detrimental effect on global warming in the short term as 1,200 average-sized coal power plants, according to the New York-based Environmental Defense Fund advocacy group. That means the grain is just as damaging over the long term as annual carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in Germany, Italy, Spain and the U.K. combined... “The amount of attention that rice receives for these issues is relatively small compared to the size of the problem,” says Paul Nicholson, who heads rice research and sustainability for Olam from Singapore. “People are very informed on their chocolate, coffee, hair care solutions, but rice is an afterthought.”Rice is the staple food of hundreds of millions of Asians and by far the most polluting grain — emitting twice as much of the harmful gases as wheat... For millennia, rice farmers from Spain to Indonesia have relied on the practice of flooding paddy fields because it stops weeds from growing. But there’s a big drawback: submerging the crop allows tiny underwater microbes to decay organic matter, producing methane, a greenhouse gas that is 25 times more potent than CO2 even though it lingers in the atmosphere for a shorter time. Growing rice in flooded conditions causes up to 12% of global emissions of methane, a gas blamed for about one quarter of global warming caused by humans... rice consumption is rising in Europe and the U.S. as more people adopt vegetarian and vegan diets"
Looks like cultural imperialism is the solution to climate change
Bernie Sanders indicates climate plan will require nationalization of US energy production - "The "Green New Deal" proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., seeks a complete transition to "energy efficiency" and "sustainable energy" — much of which would be owned and administered by the federal government.During an appearance on MSNBC Thursday night, Sanders told host Chris Hayes that the U.S. needed an "aggressive" federal approach to producing electricity and nodded after Hayes claimed he proposed a "federal takeover of the whole thing."... "Sanders' plan would cause energy prices to skyrocket, bankrupting families and businesses and empowering the federal government to control America’s energy economy," he said in a statement provided to Fox News. "And what would we get for it? A change in the earth's temperature that’s barely measurable. The Green New Deal isn’t a 'climate thing' at all. Turns out it’s a green-glossed Trojan horse designed to increase government control over the economy.""
Unofficial Artist formally known as Diversity and Comics Yaboiposting - Posts - "Gullible Millennials: "Ok, I gave up all my wealth, my car, starting a family, and I now live in a dirt hut and eat bugs and people in order to implement socialism and fight climate change. Now it's your turn."
AOC and Bernie Sanders: *laughs*"
China Emits More Carbon Dioxide Than The U.S. and EU Combined - "China's emissions passed those of the U.S. in 2005, and by 2012 had surpassed the combined contribution of both the U.S. and the EU. Should recent trends continue, China will be responsible for the most atmospheric carbon dioxide in less than 20 years.China has lots of regional company, t00. The Asia Pacific region is home to both China and India -- the world's two most populous countries and two of the largest carbon dioxide emitters. It is also home to other fast-growing and/or populous countries, like Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Japan. Over the past decade, this region's carbon dioxide emissions have grown at an average annual rate of 3.1%, which was nearly triple the global average. As a result, Asia Pacific is now responsible for nearly 50% of global carbon dioxide emissions... Over the past decade, the U.S. has decreased annual carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 800 million tons. This is by far the most of any country in the world... Regardless of the actions taken by developed countries, the primary driver of carbon dioxide emissions in coming decades will be areas of the world with huge populations, but with low, and growing per capita emissions."
Clearly, the solution to climate change is to continue bashing Western countries and ignoring Asia
G-7 Meeting: Climate Action Flops as Countries Pursue Their Own Economic Growth - "While blaming Trump for the lack of progress on climate change might make for a good headline, the broader story is more complex. Indeed, a look at the numbers shows that the U.S. has slashed its coal use and cut its total greenhouse emissions more than any country in the G-7. It has also become a major supplier of liquefied natural gas (LNG) — which emits about half as much carbon dioxide as coal during combustion — to other members of the G-7. Before turning to those issues, it must be noted that international efforts to achieve major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions have largely failed. While it’s true that more than 170 countries signed on to the Paris Agreement, that accord’s CO2 targets are not legally enforceable... Why, despite the urgency of dealing with climate change, aren’t more countries making big cuts to their emissions? The most succinct explanation can be had by understanding what Roger Pielke Jr. has dubbed the Iron Law of Climate Policy: “When policies on emissions reductions collide with policies focused on economic growth, economic growth will win out every time.”... Although the G-7 members say they want to slash their emissions, several members remain heavily reliant on coal. In the wake of the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Japan closed almost all of its nuclear plants. That, in turn, has forced it to rely more heavily on coal. Between 2016 and 2018, Japan opened eight new coal-fired generation plants, and the country has plans to build about 30 more coal plants with a total capacity of about 17,000 megawatts.A similar situation is playing out in Germany. After Fukushima, the country’s environmental groups persuaded the government to shutter Germany’s nuclear reactors. That, in turn, has forced Germany to rely more heavily on coal. In 2017, the country’s lignite-fired power plants had the same share in Germany’s electricity mix as they’d had in 2000. Germany’s continuing reliance on coal has meant that the country — which has the largest economy in Europe — has not come close to achieving the emissions cuts targeted under the Energiewende, the name for the country’s plan to overhaul its energy and power systems. Now let’s look at the U.S., which has cut its greenhouse-gas emissions by a total of 600 million tons since 2008. For comparison, Germany has cut its emissions by about 100 million tons and the United Kingdom has cut its emissions by 169 million tons. To be clear, per capita emissions in the U.S. are far higher than they are in Germany and the U.K.; Americans drive more and live in bigger houses than their European counterparts. Nevertheless, the drop in overall U.S. emissions is nearly as large as what was achieved in all of Europe over the past decade (756 million tons).Furthermore, the reductions in U.S. emissions were largely due not to government mandates but to the shale revolution. Over the past decade, thanks to hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, domestic natural-gas production has nearly doubled. The surge in production has encouraged U.S. electricity producers to shutter coal plants and replace them with ones fueled by natural gas. The result is that in 2018, U.S. coal consumption was at its lowest level since the 1970s. It appears that domestic coal consumption will continue falling over the next few years as lower-cost gas continues to displace coal. The other dynamic at play at the G-7 is that the U.S. has become a major supplier of liquefied natural gas to dozens of countries around the world... American natural gas is helping Japan reduce the amount of coal it burns for electricity production, which is helping cut Japan’s greenhouse-gas emissions. Increasing the use of natural gas around the world, along with more deployment of nuclear energy, should be a key strategy in rich and poor countries alike to help reduce emissions and improve living standards"
China scientists warn of global cooling trick up nature’s sleeve - "A new study has found winters in northern China have been warming since 4,000BC – regardless of human activity – but the mainland scientists behind the research warn there is no room for complacency or inaction on climate change, with the prospect of a sudden global cooling also posing a danger.The study found that winds from Arctic Siberia have been growing weaker, the conifer tree line has been retreating north, and there has been a steady rise in biodiversity in a general warming trend that continues today. It appears to have little to do with the increase in greenhouse gases which began with the industrial revolution, according to the researchers.Lead scientist Dr Wu Jing, from the Key Laboratory of Cenozoic Geology and Environment at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the study had found no evidence of human influence on northern China’s warming winters... Wu and her colleagues are concerned that, as societies grow more used to the concept of global warming, people will develop a misplaced confidence in our ability to control climate change. Nature, they warned, may trick us and might catch us totally unprepared – causing chaos, panic, famine and even wars as the global climate system is disrupted.There are already alarming signs... The 2014 research, which drew on 5,000 years’ worth of data, suggested the current warm phase of the cycle could terminate over the next several decades, ushering in a 250-year cool phase, potentially leading to a partial slowdown in man-made global warming. Wu said the latest study, with 10,000 years’ worth of new data, not only helped to draw a more complete picture of the 500-year cycle, but also revealed a previously unknown mechanism behind the phenomenon, which suggested the impact of the sun on the Earth’s climate may be greater than previously thought... As a result of the research findings, Wu said she was now more worried about cooling than warming.“A sharp drop of temperature will benefit nobody. The biggest problem is, we know it will come, but we don’t know exactly when.”"
Experts Warn We Have Only 12 Years Left Until They Change The Timeline On Global Warming Again | The Babylon Bee - ""If we don't take action, then in 12 years we will have to explain why the world hasn't ended and come up with a new number," one UN scientist warned. "This is a very serious threat, and we urge everyone to hand control of the economy to the government immediately before we have no more time left to change the timeline again.""
Bjørn Lomborg - "Absurd
UN that claims climate will "undo last 50 years of progress". Eh, no. Just no. In 2100, UN's own middle-of-road scenario has average developing person 600% as rich as today.
Deducting climate damage, that person will be 580% as rich"
Bjørn Lomborg - Posts - "One of the reasons climate alarmism works so well: when something bad happens, it gets blamed on climat, but when nothing bad happens — you don't hear about it. For instance: the US is right now experiencing the lowest amount of drought since 2000."
Cory Booker Compares Anti-Nuclear Democrats To Republican Climate Deniers - "“As much as we say the Republicans when it comes to climate change must listen to science, our party has the same obligation to listen to scientists,” Booker said. “The data speaks for itself.”... In Vermont, where the Yankee nuclear plant generated 70% of the state’s electricity, emissions spiked after its closure. Because the state switched primarily to hydro power, the increase was primarily due to its dependence on wood-fired heating in cold winters and an aging fleet of gas-guzzling pickup trucks.. in New England overall, where the plant produced 4% of the region’s total electricity output, emissions spiked 15% between 2014 and 2015"
This climate strike is a joke. Childish socialism won't help the environment - "It is a never a good sign when adults defer to children and when an angry placard becomes a manifesto for government... Their Luddite war on capitalism would raise prices, see workers sacked, lead to power shortages in the West, and destroy the incentive to innovate. It would also condemn people in poorer countries to subsistence farming. Eco-socialism amounts to rich people insisting that the Third World remains stuck in the past – because it looks prettier to the Western eye."
It’s capitalism, not socialism, that will beat climate change | Coffee House - "some of the most egregious examples of environmental damage took place in the communist economies of the 20th century. In practice, command-and-control governments turned a blind eye to their own environmental pollution because ministers would have to take the blame and finance clearing it up, from Chernobyl to the Aral Sea. Far-left economics, as history shows, is not the way to a better environment and it does not offer a credible solution to reducing carbon emissions."
Panel Of Third Graders To Dictate Nation's Climate Change Policy | The Babylon Bee - ""These kids have ideas and they are passionate, so we must listen to them," said Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii. "There are no possible downsides to taking kids who have been told the world is ending by the public school system and allowing them to dictate national policies on important issues.""
"A transitioning kid is much like a vegan cat. We all know who is making the decisions"
The ‘Climate Strike’ is a crock that exploits kids - "in advance of the United Nations Climate Summit, students across the country will walk out of their schools as part of a Climate Strike. In New York City, the Department of Education has given its stamp of approval to the walk-out and won’t mark it as an absence, making it less “a strike” and more a coordinated effort by the school system to force political action on children... The department is only giving kids a pass to skip school to protest on this one issue. So while school brass may applaud students raising their voices, only preapproved political posturing will be granted official protest status.Sure: Children are our future, goes the adage. Shouldn’t they have a say in what happens to their planet?But what “say” are they having by marching around with signs — repeating slogans and talking points spoon-fed to them by … adults?... it’s hard to ignore that in this call for action there’s no, well, action. They’re literally doing what they’re urging politicians to stop doing: talking.We could have had an army of teenagers cleaning up parks or beaches instead of striking and making signs. Teens could have led the way by not using cars or plastic utensils for the day.Or how about something as simple as this: Give up their phones for a day (or, heck, 15 minutes!) to save energy. (Right!)Instead, expect stories on Saturday about how much garbage the protesting kids left behind. In my Russian-speaking community, people took to Facebook to discuss the similarities they saw to their time in the Soviet Union. One mom posted that the strike is “Soviet-style brainwashing and propaganda” Another mom wrote that the particular issue doesn’t matter; “having children demonstrate on school time was the Soviet way.”One Park Slope elementary school sent parents a note that the entire school will be walking out for the strike. A mother of a 6-year-old told me, in response: “I am all for people supporting causes they believe in, but do not force your causes and beliefs on my first-grader.”... In any event, the real test to see if kids care about the Climate Strike would be to do it after school or on a weekend. After all, almost any teen will agree to skip school, no matter the cause. But every grown-up knows that far fewer teens would spend their free time protesting than school time... I believe climate change is real and we must deal with it. I teach my children to be good stewards of the environment. But that’s separate from allowing them to be exploited for political goals — even if I happen to agree with the mission.Sticking kids with the job of solving climate change or even just using them as puppets is deeply inappropriate.De Blasio tweeted: “New York City stands with our young people. They’re our conscience.” Maybe adults should have their own conscience."
Indoctrinating and politicising kids is good when you agree with the politics
50 years of failed doomsday, eco-pocalyptic predictions; the so-called 'experts' are 0-50 - "Modern doomsayers have been predicting climate and environmental disaster since the 1960s. They continue to do so today. None of the apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true. What follows is a collection of notably wild predictions from notable people in government and science.More than merely spotlighting the failed predictions, this collection shows that the makers of failed apocalyptic predictions often are individuals holding respected positions in government and science. While such predictions have been and continue to be enthusiastically reported by a media eager for sensational headlines, the failures are typically not revisited."
"This time, it's different" doesn't just apply to financial crises
Ironically, those who believe the prophecies are the same people who mock economists for inaccurate forecasts, even if they are many orders of magnitude less inaccurate
Think Globally, Shame Constantly: The Rise of Greta Thunberg Environmentalism - "Like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), and a host of other American politicians, Thunberg believes that we've only got a few years left to settle the fate of the planet, a basic tenet pushed by supporters of the Green New Deal and by most of the Democrats running for president. In fact, Thunberg thinks that "cutting our emissions in half in 10 years," the target invoked by many environmentalists, is too little, too late... Such catastrophic thinking is similar to AOC's equally apocalyptic statement that "The world is gonna end in 12 years" and Warren's contention that "we've got, what, 11 years, maybe" to cut our emissions in half to save the planet...
'If humanity does nothing whatsoever to abate greenhouse gas emissions, the worst-case scenario is that global GDP in 2100 would be 8.2 percent lower than it would otherwise be. Let's make those GDP percentages concrete. Assuming no climate change and an global real growth rate of 3 percent per year for the next 81 years, today's $80 trillion economy would grow to just under $880 trillion by 2100. World population is likely to peak at around 9 billion, so divvying up that GDP suggests that global average income would come to about $98,000 per person. Under the worst-case scenario, global GDP would only be $810 trillion and average income would only be $90,000 per person.'...
"The most inexorable feature of climate-change modeling isn't the advance of the sea but the steady economic growth that will make life better despite global warming," writes science journalist Will Boisvert. The environmental Kuznets curve, by which countries get wealthier and their citizens demand a cleaner environment, is the rule, not the exception. Such a dynamic is predicated upon economic and technological innovation that would be almost impossible under the sort of regulations promulgated by Green New Dealers and activists such as Thunberg and Naomi Klein, who wants to "decimate the entire neoliberal project" in the name of environmentalism"
Affordable solutions better than exaggerations - "we are constantly told that climate change is to blame for an increase in extreme weather conditions such as flooding, droughts and cyclones. But the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found the evidence does not support claims that floods, droughts and cyclones are increasing.The scientists have said, "there is low confidence in a global-scale observed trend" in drought, a "lack of evidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale" and "no significant observed trends in global (cyclone) frequency over the past century."What's more, the scientists have found that current human-caused global warming cannot reasonably be linked to any of these extreme weather phenomenon-"globally, there is low confidence in attribution of changes in (cyclone) activity to human influence", "low confidence in detection and attribution of changes in drought" and low confidence "that anthropogenic climate change has affected the frequency and magnitude of floods". This doesn't mean there is no problem－just that the facts matter... it's eye wateringly expensive to cut net emissions to zero. Although many politicians casually promise this should be the goal, few dare ask how much it will cost. A report commissioned by the New Zealand government found that achieving "net zero" emissions by 2050 would cost that country more than its entire current annual national budget every single year, and that's a best-case scenario, with costs more realistically doubling to 32 percent of GDP. Proponents of vastly expensive climate policies appear to believe that the only way to overcome these exorbitant costs with voters is by scaring people silly. Unfortunately, this approach is unlikely to work. Not only is it turning climate unnecessarily into a more polarizing issue, but also it could damage the credibility of science, as research is being increasingly seen as a partisan attempt to push a particular policy rather than a disinterested search for truth. Even as a political strategy, it seems destined to fail, for as costs mount, we will see more street protests such as those in France, or eventual ballot losses like those in Australia, Brazil and the Philippines as voters turn to politicians who promise to reverse expensive climate policies. Compare proposals to spend many thousands of dollars on climate with a new survey showing nearly seven-in-10 Americans would vote against spending just $120 each per year to combat climate change. There is a far more sensible approach: Instead of scaring voters to accept fossil fuels costing more, we should innovate the price of green energy－when it becomes cheaper than coal and oil, everyone would switch."
josh on Twitter - ""EAT BUGS"
"LIVE IN PODS"
"DON'T HAVE MEANINGFUL RELATIONSHIPS"
"DON'T MAKE BABIES"
"STOP FLYING AND DRIVING"
...or else we'll live in a dystopian hell hole"
How Climate Policies Hurt the Poor by Bjørn Lomborg - "The German government, for example, plans to spend €40 billion ($44 billion) over four years to help the country cut its carbon dioxide emissions. Such measures will likely reduce the global rise in temperature by 0.00018°C in a hundred years – an immeasurably small gain for such a huge cost. By contrast, spending the same amount on preventing tuberculosis in developing countries could save more than ten million lives. Similarly, New Zealand’s government has promised to achieve net-zero CO₂ emissions by 2050. But a government-commissioned report found that the cost of meeting this goal would be greater than the entire current national budget, every single year – and that’s a best-case scenario that assumes policies are implemented as efficiently as possible. Likewise, Mexico’s pledge to halve its emissions by 2050 will likely cost 7-15% of GDP. And the European Union’s plan to reduce emissions by at least 80% by 2050 could entail average annual costs of at least $1.4 trillion.Globally, the 2015 Paris climate agreement is the most expensive international accord in history, because it aims to wean entire economies off fossil fuels, even though alternative energy sources such as solar and wind remain uncompetitive in many contexts. As a result, the agreement will slow economic growth, increase poverty, and exacerbate inequality.A new study suggests that the massive cost of reducing emissions under the Paris agreement will lead to an increase in poverty of around 4%. And the authors issue a stark warning that “stringent mitigation plans may slow down poverty reduction in developing countries.” This finding is consistent with other studies of the effects of climate policies on poverty, including the vast research project undertaken for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that maps five alternative global futures. That study shows that humanity – including the world’s poorest people – will be much better off in a “fossil-fueled development” scenario than under a “sustainable” scenario of a lower-CO₂ world. And this still holds true even after accounting for climate damage. While global inequality will decrease dramatically in both scenarios, it will decline slightly fasterin the “fossil fuel” scenario... Polarizing campaigns about climate change have created an absurdly distorted view of the future, leading policymakers to make poor decisions. In its most recent major report, the IPCC estimated that if the world does absolutely nothing to stop climate change, the impact will likely be equivalent to a 0.2-2% reduction in average incomes in the 2070s. And by then, incomes will likely have risen by some 300-500%. Yet catastrophic visions of climate change abound. As a result, about one-third of all development spending now goes to climate projects, according to an OECD analysis of about 70% of global development aid. This money could be far better spent – not only on preventing tuberculosis, but also on immunization, infant nutrition, improved access to family planning, and many other development priorities.Moreover, policies that reduce poverty are climate policies. History has shown conclusively that making people richer and less vulnerable is one of the best ways to strengthen societies’ resilience to challenges such as climate threats... the world is in great danger of spending scarce resources on climate policies that hurt rather than help its poorest people"
Opinion: On climate change, humanity is not ‘evil’ - "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... 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... Ms. Thunberg tells us that if we don’t cut off fossil fuels by 2028, the young generation will never forgive us. This, however, is reflective of a blinkered first-world view. When the United Nations asked 10 million people around the world what they prioritize, they highlighted five issues: health, education, jobs, corruption and nutrition. In sum, they care about their kids not dying from easily curable diseases, getting a decent education, not starving to death... Climate came last of 16 choices. That’s not because it is unimportant, but because for most of humanity, other issues are much more pressing. The problem is that climate is increasingly trumping all other issues. A third of all development aid, for instance, is now spent addressing climate, in direct defiance of the priorities of the world’s poor."
COMMENTARY: Climate change discussion needs to get back to science - "For decades, we’ve been told we need to listen to the scientists. Yet now we are being told to listen to a teenager, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg... the environmental movement has sunk to a new low by weaponizing Thunberg’s obvious terror and anguish, rather than doing the responsible things adults are supposed to do, which is to provide her with context and perspective. People are not dying, ecosystems are not collapsing, and human beings are in no danger of extinction from carbon dioxide... I have seen memes of Thunberg dressed up to resemble the Virgin Mary, with “In Greta We Trust” emblazoned across them.I do not know what this is, but it is not science. Shame on the scientific community for allowing it to get this far. They never should have allowed the IPCC report to become a vehicle for exaggerating scientific claims. Now that they have, it is going to require the effort of all the grownups to try to deprogram these school children... It took 20 years to get to this level of hysteria and it may take 20 years to return the public discussion to normal"
51% of young voters believe life on Earth will end in a decade, poll finds - "“Over the next 10-15 years, 29% of all voters believe it is at least somewhat likely that the earth will become uninhabitable and humanity will be wiped out,” says a timely new Scott Rasmussen/HarrisX national survey.Keep in mind, though, that 71% overall disagree with this finding and say Armageddon is an unlikely prospect.“There is a dramatic difference by age on this question. Half (51%) of voters under 35 believe it is at least somewhat likely humanity will be wiped out in the next decade or so. Only 12% of senior citizens agree, and only 4% of senior citizens believe it is very likely,” the survey said.The data also revealed a significant geographical divide: 21% of urban voters consider it very likely the earth will quickly become uninhabitable, compared to 6% of rural voters and 5% of suburban voters."
AOC says only a 'sea sponge' would believe her '12 years' doomsday remark, but most Dems bought it - "Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s claim that the world will “end in 12 years” unless climate change is tackled was accepted as a fact by two-thirds of Democrats, even though she said herself that only those with the “social intelligence of a sea sponge” could actually believe it... Ocasio-Cortez has emerged as the key Democratic voice on how to tackle climate change, proposing the Green New Deal resolution that seeks to radically reorganize the economy to ensure climate change is tackled.The proposal was endorsed by a number of 2020 presidential candidates even before the disastrous rollout of the proposal, which included the now-infamous FAQ document that suggested making air travel obsolete and supporting those “unwilling to work.”"
A Message for Children About Climate Change - "I’m sorry adults have frightened you about climate change and how it might affect your future. You might be less afraid if you knew some facts that adults intentionally do not explain to you. I’ll tell you here. The news was once a source of real information, or so we thought. But in the modern world, the news people discovered they can make more money by presenting scary news regardless of whether it is true or not. Today, much of the news on the right and the left is opinion that is meant to scare you, not inform you, because scary things get more attention, and that makes the news business more profitable. The same is true for people who write books; authors often make books scary so you will buy them. Most adults know all the scariness is not real. Most kids do not. You just learned it... Today’s nuclear power plants (the ones built in the past 20 years all over the world) have killed zero people, and are considered the safest form of energy in the world... Nuclear energy as a solution to climate change is one of the rare solutions backed by several Democrats running for president and nearly all Republicans. Please note that two Democrats in favor of nuclear energy (Corey Booker and Andrew Yang) are among the youngest and smartest in the game. To be fair, the oldest Democrat running for president, Joe Biden, also supports nuclear energy because he is well-informed.If you are worried about nuclear waste, you probably should not be. Every country with nuclear energy (and there are lots of them) successfully stores their nuclear waste. If you put all the nuclear waste in the world in one place, it would fit on one football field. It isn’t a big problem. And new nuclear power designs will actually eat that nuclear waste and turn it into electricity, so the total amount of waste could come way down.The United Nations estimates that the economic impact of climate change will reduce the economy by 10% in eighty years. What they don’t tell you is that the economy will be about five times bigger and better by then, so you won’t even notice the 10% that didn’t happen. And that worst case is only if we do nothing to address climate change, which is not the case. A number of companies have recently built machines that can suck CO2 right out of the air... Throughout all modern history, when we humans see a problem coming from far away, we have a 100% success rate in solving it. Climate change is no different... If you are worried about rising sea levels, don’t be. The smartest and richest people in the world are still buying property on the beach. They don’t see the problem. And if sea levels do rise, it will happen slowly enough for people to adjust.Adults sometimes like to use children to carry their messages because it makes it hard for the other side to criticize them without seeming like monsters. If adults have encouraged you to panic about climate change without telling you what I am telling you here, they do not have your best interests at heart. They are using you."
Climate Change Protestors 'Shut Down' D.C. Streets, Increase Carbon Emissions
Net-Zero Carbon Dioxide Emissions By 2050 Requires A New Nuclear Power Plant Every Day - "More than a decade ago, Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner characterized climate policy as an “auction of promises” in which politicians “vied to outbid each other with proposed emissions targets that were simply not achievable.” For instance, among Democrats competing for the presidency in 2020, several, including Joe Biden, have committed to achieving net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. Candidate Andrew Yang bid 2049, and Cory Booker topped that by offering 2045. Bernie Sanders has offered a 71% reduction by 2030... I’ve found that some people don’t like the use of a nuclear power plant as a measuring stick. So we can substitute wind energy as a measuring stick. Net-zero carbon dioxide by 2050 would require the deployment of ~1500 wind turbines (2.5 MW) over ~300 square miles, every day starting tomorrow and continuing to 2050... Of course, in this analysis I am just looking at scale, and ignoring the significant complexities of actually deploying these technologies. I am also ignoring the fact that fossil fuels are the basis for many products central to the functioning of the global economy, and eliminating them is not nearly as simply as unplugging one energy source and plugging in another... We don’t often see these numbers for obvious reasons. The scale – no matter what assumptions one begins with – is absolutely, mind-bogglingly huge."
Global warming ‘hiatus’ debate flares up again - "An apparent slowing in the rise of global temperatures at the beginning of the twenty-first century, which is not explained by climate models, was referred to as a “hiatus” or a “pause” when first observed several years ago. Climate-change sceptics have used this as evidence that global warming has stopped. But in June last year, a study in Science claimed that the hiatus was just an artefact which vanishes when biases in temperature data are corrected. Now a prominent group of researchers is countering that claim, arguing in Nature Climate Change that even after correcting these biases the slowdown was real. “There is this mismatch between what the climate models are producing and what the observations are showing,” says lead author John Fyfe, a climate modeller at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis in Victoria, British Columbia. “We can’t ignore it.”... Susan Solomon, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, says that Fyfe’s framework helps to put twenty-first-century trends into perspective, and clearly indicates that the rate of warming slowed down at a time when greenhouse-gas emissions were rising dramatically."
So much for climate models being super accurate and those who criticise their inaccuracy being "climate change deniers"
Climate Models and Climate Reality: A Closer Look at a Lukewarming World - "The case for lukewarming — modest anthropogenic climate change in accordance with the lower end of expectations from mainstream science — is simple, straightforward, and compelling.It is readily demonstrated that the rate of warming that has taken place over the past several decades, both at the earth’s surface as well as is the lower levels of the earth’s atmosphere critical for the development of the world’s weather patterns, has been slower than what was anticipated by the large collection of the climate models... Over some time periods, the observed rate of warming has been so slow as to have been completely unexpected by any of the climate models, a worrying indication that the current state-of-the-art climate models are not up to the task of simulating the actual behavior of the earth’s climate... we conclude that future global warming will occur at a pace substantially lower than that upon which US federal and international actions to restrict greenhouse gas emissions are founded...
'During all periods from 10 years (2006-2015) to 65 (1951-2015) years in length, the observed temperature trend lies in the lower half of the collection of climate model simulations, and for several periods it lies very close (or even below) the 2.5th percentile of all the model runs. Over shorter periods, such as the last two decades, a plethora of mechanisms have been put forth to explain the observed/modeled divergence, but none do so completely and manyof the explanationsare inconsistent with each other.'"
Climate Models Are Warming Earth Two Times Faster Than Reality - "Climate models show twice as much warming during the 21st Century than what’s actually been observed, according to a new report highlighting the limitations of global climate models, or GCMs.“So far in the 21st century, the GCMs are warming, on average, about a factor of 2 faster than the observed temperature increase,” Dr. Judith Curry, a former Georgia Tech climate scientist who now runs her own climate forecasting company, wrote in a report for the U.K.-based Global Warming Policy Foundation.
The climate strikers' hard-Left agenda would only make things worse - "“Hey hey! Ho ho! Climate change has got to go!” The teenagers I passed in Westminster yesterday were certainly having a good time... On the Global Climate Strike website, the official demands include “stop burning fossil fuels and ensure a rapid energy revolution with equity, reparations, and climate justice at its heart”. Follow the link on “climate justice”, and you end up on another site listing “The People’s Demands” – the people, in this case, being an assortment of Left-wing groups... [Decarbonising would] shut down much of the economy.But we must also decarbonise in a very specific way – by rejecting “false solutions”. These include nuclear power, geoengineering, carbon capture, “technofixes”, biofuels, “smart agriculture”... if we can’t use economics or technology, what are we left with?Apparently we need to “facilitate and support non-market approaches to climate action”, back “environmentally sound, socially acceptable, gender responsive and equitable climate technologies” and “respect and enable non-corporate, community-led climate solutions that recognise the traditional knowledge, practices, wisdom and resilience of indigenous peoples and local communities”... subsistence farmers in the Third World should be respected for their deep feminist wisdom, not connected to international markets. If they want to use modern agricultural technology, heaven help them. This manifesto is not asking “What is the most cost-effective way to prevent or protect against climate change?” Or indeed “How do we grow the maximum amount of food as cheaply as possible, with minimum emissions?” It simply tells us that progress, science and capitalism are evil. This programme is fundamentally illiberal and totally misguided."
A thread written by @rcolvile - "One of the key demands of @GretaThunberg et al is that people respect the science, and unite behind it. I completely agree. But the manifesto for the climate strike movement isn't just unscientific, but actively anti-science - and hugely dangerous as a result... his isn't just about saving the planet - it's about 'climate justice'. Including 'reparations'. This presumably means that since Britain invented the Industrial Revolution and has bumped X million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere since, it should pay Y% of the cost... The current target is to decarbonise the economy by 2050. Philip Hammond has said this will cost £1 trillion. That equates to about £33 billion, or 1.5% of GDP. I've tried to look up how much extra it would cost to bring that forward by 20 years(!) to 2030. But there are no reliable estimates. Because it would be INSANELY expensive. (In fact, pretty much just insane.)But it gets worse, because Greta and co want us to do this with our hands tied behind our backs... [They] reject the use of nuclear power, insist on 'non-market approaches', condemn corporations, and praise 'agro-ecology' and 'food sovereignty'... Agro-ecology, when you look it up, involves “an explicit focus on social and economic dimensions of food system [and] a strong focus on the rights of women, youth and indigenous peoples”Food sovereignty insists on “culturally appropriate” food markets rather using boring things like price signals, market mechanisms and comparative advantage to ensure that we maximise output.These techniques involve using agricultural methods that "avoid institutionalised prejudices that are inherent in society (such as gender, age, language, occupation)... [They are] telling us that market mechanisms like carbon taxes - by overwhelming consensus the mechanism favoured by serious economists - have no place at all in fighting climate change. Nor do drought-resistant crops, or plants engineered to withstand seawater.Nor does rewarding companies for low-carbon innovation - or even investing in the fundamental technologies that could have a transformative impact.Nor, if worst comes to the worst, will we be able to use technology to mitigate the impacts - despite the fact that the UN climate predictions literally have an acceptance of limited geoengineering built into themIn my book, I diagnosed what I called 'utopian authoritarianism' - the idea that the only way to save the planet is for people on the left to command others, in the developed and developing world, to live poorer, meaner lives"
Science is only good when it supports liberal ends
Teenage Climate-Change Protestors Have No Idea What They’re Protesting - "The low level of sophistication on display at such gatherings is such that many participants seemingly would be fine with laws than banned flying, driving, gas boilers or even cows.Indeed, such protests often are presented to young people as social events. If there is a guarantee that you, as a young person, will be stuffed into a public place for a good few hours with a group of your peers, and given social licence to vent at great volume, why not just go and cause some trouble? The spectacle of state-sponsored educational bodies encouraging children to attend climate protests compounds the problem further, as it essentially shifts the cost of the missed lessons onto the taxpayer. If schools truly did want to encourage their students to engage productively with the climate-change issue, they should simply expose children to a full range of relevant literature. But this would not be nearly as exciting as street protest. Moreover, some of the ambiguities in the literature might even give students grounds for pause."
Climate change deniers are dangerous - they don't deserve a place on our site - "Climate change deniers, and those shamelessly peddling pseudoscience and misinformation, are perpetuating ideas that will ultimately destroy the planet. As a publisher, giving them a voice on our site contributes to a stalled public discourse.That’s why the editorial team in Australia is implementing a zero-tolerance approach to moderating climate change deniers, and sceptics. Not only will we be removing their comments, we’ll be locking their accounts."
“If the people of this religion are asked about the proof for the soundness of their religion, they flare up, get angry and spill the blood of whoever confronts them with this question. They forbid rational speculation, and strive to kill their adversaries. This is why truth became thoroughly silenced and concealed.” ― Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi
120 years of climate scares - "Scientists seeking funding and journalists seeking an audience agree: panic sells. “Global cooling is going to kills us all!” “No, wait: global warming is going to kill us all!”...
1895 - Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again – New York Times, February 1895...
1933 – “…wide-spread and persistent tendency toward warmer weather…Is our climate changing?” – Federal Weather Bureau “Monthly Weather Review.”
1938 - Global warming, caused by man heating the planet with carbon dioxide, “is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power.”– Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society...
1959 - “Arctic Findings in Particular Support Theory of Rising Global Temperatures” – New York Times...
1970 - “…get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come…there’s no relief in sight” – Washington Post
1974 - Global cooling for the past forty years – Time Magazine
1974 - “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age” –Washington Post
1974 - “As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed” – Fortune magazine, who won a Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics for its analysis of the danger"
Of course, what we are told is the scientific consensus today is infallible, just as it was infallible in the 19th century
Shaming people into fighting climate change won't work, says scientist - "Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe says strategies that aim to shame aren't effective.She told The Current's guest host Matt Galloway it's better to find common ground, and start a conversation that could inspire change."Talk about values that we share, connect the dots to how that matters to climate and how that affects us — and then talk about positive solutions that we can get on board with that make our lives better. Hayhoe recalls being told by a fellow climate activist that "every time you turn on your car, you're sinning.""My visceral reaction to somebody saying that to me was: 'Oh, so when I take my child to the doctor, you're saying I'm sinning? When I go to work to support my family, I'm sinning?'"She told Galloway "that shaming made me want to just go out and find a Hummer and drive circles around that person.""
Listen to scientists - when they reinforce our biases
Journal 'Nature' retracts ocean-warming study - "Lewis, a mathematician and critic of the scientific consensus supporting the climate crisis, posted a critique of the paper shortly after its publication."
The purity of Greta Thunberg and her young anti-BP comrades is delusional - "There are few sensations more discomfiting to a woolly centrist than agreeing with Vladimir Putin. “I don’t share the common excitement about the speech by Greta Thunberg,” sniffed the Russian president this week. “No one has explained to Greta that the modern world is complex and diverse. People in Africa or in many Asian countries want to live at the same wealth level as in Sweden. Go and explain to developing countries why they should continue living in poverty.”What a state of affairs this is, when a constitutional despot is the only person brave enough to speak truth to a frowning teenager. Not one of the adults in the room managed so much as a politely demurring cough when Thunberg made her now-famous speech to the UN, accusing the older generation of “betraying” the young. How they whooped and clapped, like ingratiating courtiers at the feet of an intemperate queen, as she dished out her final warning: “If you choose to fail us, we will never forgive you.”... Perhaps it’s harder than it looks, kids – this business of making people richer and healthier without harming the planet. Ideological purity has always been the vice of the young. The belief that the right path is “simple” or “obvious” can only exist in those who have not lived long enough to experience the law of unintended consequences. Each generation believes it has reached a new peak of enlightenment, from whence it can see with perfect clarity everything that needs to be done to put the world right. First on the list, obviously, is corporate sponsorship of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Since 2013, BP has funded a £5 ticket scheme to encourage young people to visit the RSC. This will now end, after school strike activists argued that a fossil fuel company – even one at the cutting edge of sustainable energy development – was unfit to pay for their seats. “How can you sleep at night,” demanded one youngster, “knowing that you’ve tied the purity and hope of the arts to BP’s dirty, colonial extractive practices?”I’m curious to know the point at which this tide of juvenile piety might lap the shores of self-awareness. Do any of these young activists ever shop online or take an Uber? Do they realise what environmental damage they do every time they look at their phones? Powering the internet generates the same carbon footprint as the global aviation industry. A single pop song – 2017’s Despacito – consumed as much electricity, via streaming and downloads, as Chad, Guinea-Bissau, Somalia, Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic put together. I don’t blame the young for being blind to their own inconsistencies, or idealistic to the point of idiocy. What alarms me more is the fawning capitulation of the grown-ups. “The elders, lowering themselves to the young, sate themselves with pleasantries and wit, mimicking the young in order not to look unpleasant and despotic,” wrote Plato. He was describing the origins of anarchy."
Wind farm turbines wear sooner than expected, says study - " The analysis of almost 3,000 onshore wind turbines — the biggest study of its kind —warns that they will continue to generate electricity effectively for just 12 to 15 years.The wind energy industry and the Government base all their calculations on turbines enjoying a lifespan of 20 to 25 years.The study estimates that routine wear and tear will more than double the cost of electricity being produced by wind farms in the next decade... The extra cost is likely to be passed on to households, which already pay about £1 billion a year in a consumer subsidy that is added to electricity bills."
From 2012
Experts blame UK's over-reliance on wind energy on worst power cut in years - "The power cut which brought chaos to large parts of Britain was caused in part by an over-reliance on wind energy, experts have warned.The Mail on Sunday can also reveal there have been two other sharp drops in energy supply in the past three months alone – as a leading expert warned that blackouts will become ‘increasingly frequent’... ‘Because there was so much wind and solar on the system, there was very little conventional generation – coal and gas – which provides inertia that helps stabilise the frequency of the grid. The system should have coped. So when National Grid say things like, “the system worked” and that the power blackouts didn’t spread, that’s like a doctor saying the operation was a success but the patient died. It’s not much comfort to consumers.’"
One of the longest running climate prediction blunders has disappeared from the Internet - "From the Independent’s most cited article: Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past by Charles Onians:
However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.
It seems however, that after over 15 years, the Independent has removed that article"
One response by climate change hystericists to the long history of failed doomsday predictions is that they were not made by scientists. Maybe Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit is not a real scientist. Then again the majority of the current doomsday predictions are not made by scientists either, but the hystericists are still credulous
Climate scientists: It’s basically too late to stop warming - "Scientists have been saying for a while that we have until between 2015 and 2020 to start radically reducing our carbon emissions... Natural climate feedbacks will take over and, on top of our prodigious human-caused carbon emissions, send us over an irreversible tipping point. By 2100, the planet will be hotter than it’s been since the time of the dinosaurs, and everyone who lives in red states will pretty much get the apocalypse they’ve been hoping for."
From 2012. Presumably Will Steffen, executive director of the Australian National University’s climate change institute, is not a real scientist either
After 1989's failed doomsday prophecy, in 2012 Judgment Day was brought forward by another 15-20 years. Naturally, it has since been brought forward once again to 2030.
Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us - "Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents... As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions... Among those scientists present at the White House talks were Professor John Schellnhuber, former chief environmental adviser to the German government and head of the UK's leading group of climate scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. He said that the Pentagon's internal fears should prove the 'tipping point' in persuading Bush to accept climatic change.Sir John Houghton, former chief executive of the Meteorological Office - and the first senior figure to liken the threat of climate change to that of terrorism - said: 'If the Pentagon is sending out that sort of message, then this is an important document indeed.' Bob Watson, chief scientist for the World Bank and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, added that the Pentagon's dire warnings could no longer be ignored."
I remember how excited people were when this story broke in 2004. Today, it is yet another in the series of failed predictions
Presumably all the scientists who endorsed this report aren't real scientists either
What Does '12 Years to Act on Climate Change' (Now 11 Years) Really Mean? - ""All this work gets summarized as 'in order to avoid really bad outcomes, we have to be on a realistic glide path toward a carbon-free global economy by 2030.' And that gets translated to something like 'emissions have to fall by half in a decade,' and that gets oversimplified to '12 years left.'"There's certainly a grain of truth in the phrase, but it's so oversimplified that it leads to comically bad misconceptions about how to get there, conjuring up ridiculous cartoon imagery suggesting we just go on with life normally for the next 11 years and then the world ends," Denning said.That's not what the IPCC writers envisioned, he said.The science on the 2030 date is clear, said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. The controversy stems from people mischaracterizing the carbon reduction timeline as a threshold for climate disaster. He noted that people promoting climate science denial and delay have also latched on to the phrase "to intentionally try to caricature the concern about climate change."... Missing the target doesn't imply the onset of cataclysmic climate change in 2030, Denning said... "in the physical climate system, there are no scientists claiming that there is a magical threshold that we breach or don't breach that determines whether we have a habitable climate system," said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Center for Climate and Weather Extremes... The world will still exist if we breach 1.5°C and 2°C, but "the climate impacts and risks will be higher and the temperature will be higher," said Glen Peters, research director at the CICERO climate research center in Oslo"
Seems all the climate change hystericists who claim that we should listen to scientists should take their own advice
It's quite funny "climate change deniers" get blamed for "caricature", given the antics of Extinction Rebellion and the like
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Friday's business with Dharshini David - "One in five Europeans are cutting back on air travel due to environmental concerns... Dr. Phil Porter is a glacier scientist who has to fly to the Arctic for fieldwork are also looking at different modes of transport.
‘I was trying to cut down on flying generally, and I won't be flying long haul anytime soon. And I've refused to fly domestically. And I'm refusing to work with collaborators in some instances where they're flying domestically within the UK. It does ruffle a few feathers but I really think that's, that's the way it has to be now.’
By contrast, aircraft makers assume passenger numbers will actually rise by 4-5% per year...
‘Sweden, where domestic travel year to date has been coming down 9%. Last year was also a negative 3%. The year before was more like plus two or 3%. And we know how Swedish people like to go on holidays abroad. And now international travel this year is negative down 3% for the first time in a very, very long time’
‘Which is a sharp contrast to the assumptions being made by the likes of Airbus and Boeing when they plan how many planes to actually make. so what are the implications here for aircraft makers and airlines?’
‘Yes. So I think at the moment, we see more as a topic for developed markets.’"
Climate change hysteria is hurting science too
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Labour conference - "‘Adrienne Buller says the scheme can only happen’
‘Provided that it does not harm workers and ensures adjust transition that they are at the helm of and sign off on.’
‘Is that promise enough, though, that there’ll be a just transition for workers currently employed in carbon intensive industries?’
‘The proposal to do it by 2030 threatens whole communities, threatens whole jobs and frankly, GMB members in communities right up and down the UK. I've heard it all before, we've heard before about just transition. What does a just transition mean?... this would mean that within a decade, people's petrol cars being confiscated. This would mean families can only take one flight every five years.’...
'I'm going to have to lose my Apple iPhone, there is something called rare earths in my Apple iPhone. And the clue is in the name. They're rare'...
‘Net zero carbon emissions by 2030 is utterly unachievable. We can't go to the country with a plan that is frankly, not credible, is not deliverable.’...
'Yet another change in Labour Party policy. Your own MPs have been mocking it. Some of them, Stephen Kinnock says that Labour Party on Brexit now has more positions than the Kama Sutra.'"
Socialism is an environmental nightmare - "Modern environmentalists are increasingly identifying as socialists, almost to the point where a capitalist-environmentalist is considered a contradiction. This, however, is a dangerous trend. Modern day eco-socialists like Jill Stein and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are woefully ignorant of how socialist economies wreak far more havoc on the environment than capitalist ones... The relationship between socialism and environmentalism has been becoming more intense for some time now. The Green Party calls itself eco-socialist, and thought leaders such as Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez also call themselves democratic-socialists and frequently trash capitalism as responsible for a whole range of environmental problems. Finally, consider the Green New Deal: This massive policy prescription calls for a nationalization of the economy and a restructuring of several huge industries.If that isn’t socialist enough, the GND also checks off several other items on the socialist wish list that have nothing to do with the environment, including universal healthcare and a union job for everyone. Meanwhile, solutions to current environmental woes that embrace the free market (such as carbon credits), as well as proposals that don’t involve a dismantling of our capitalist system (such as the expansion of nuclear power), are shunned by many environmentalists. What environmental activists fail to realize is that socialism has an atrocious environmental track record. Consider the Aral Sea tragedy, where socialist planners quite literally caused one of the largest lakes in the world to disappear."
The Book That Incited a Worldwide Fear of Overpopulation - "As 1968 began, Paul Ehrlich was an entomologist at Stanford University, known to his peers for his groundbreaking studies of the co-evolution of flowering plants and butterflies but almost unknown to the average person. That was about to change. In May, Ehrlich released a quickly written, cheaply bound paperback, The Population Bomb. Initially it was ignored. But over time Ehrlich’s tract would sell millions of copies and turn its author into a celebrity. It would become one of the most influential books of the 20th century—and one of the most heatedly attacked. The first sentence set the tone: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” And humanity had lost. In the 1970s, the book promised, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” No matter what people do, “nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”... It gave a huge jolt to the nascent environmental movement and fueled an anti-population-growth crusade that led to human rights abuses around the world... Some population-control programs pressured women to use only certain officially mandated contraceptives. In Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Korea and Taiwan, health workers’ salaries were, in a system that invited abuse, dictated by the number of IUDs they inserted into women. In the Philippines, birth-control pills were literally pitched out of helicopters hovering over remote villages. Millions of people were sterilized, often coercively, sometimes illegally, frequently in unsafe conditions, in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia and Bangladesh. In the 1970s and ’80s, India, led by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay, embraced policies that in many states required sterilization for men and women to obtain water, electricity, ration cards, medical care and pay raises. Teachers could expel students from school if their parents weren’t sterilized. More than eight million men and women were sterilized in 1975 alone. (“At long last,” World Bank head Robert McNamara remarked, “India is moving to effectively address its population problem.”) For its part, China adopted a “one-child” policy that led to huge numbers—possibly 100 million—of coerced abortions, often in poor conditions contributing to infection, sterility and even death. Millions of forced sterilizations occurred... According to a widely accepted count by the British economist Stephen Devereux, starvation claimed four to five million lives during that decade—with most of the deaths due to warfare, rather than environmental exhaustion from overpopulation.In fact, famine has not been increasing but has become rarer. When The Population Bomb appeared, according to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, something like one out of four people in the world was hungry. Today the proportion of hungry is about one out of ten. Meanwhile, the world’s population has more than doubled. People are surviving because they learned how to do things differently. They developed and adopted new agricultural techniques—improved seeds, high-intensity fertilizers, drip irrigation."
"This time, it's different" doesn't just apply to financial crises
It's telling that this previous prediction of doom also came with repressive policy prescriptions
Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the Climate - Stuart Basden - "I’ve been with Extinction Rebellion (XR) from the start. I was one of the 15 people in April 2018 who came together and made the collective decision to try to create the conditions that would initiate a rebellion... for the sake of transparency: that previous paragraph is all about me ‘pulling rank’ — I’m trying to convince you to listen to what I have to say…And I’m here to say that XR isn’t about the climate. You see, the climate’s breakdown is a symptom of a toxic system of that has infected the ways we relate to each other as humans and to all life. This was exacerbated when European ‘civilisation’ was spread around the globe through cruelty and violence (especially) over the last 600 years of colonialism, although the roots of the infections go much further back... Euro-Americans violently imposed and taught dangerous delusions that they used to justify the exploitation and reinforced our dominance, while silencing worldviews that differed or challenged them... The task of Extinction Rebellion is to dispel these delusions. We need to cure the causes of the infection, not just alleviate the symptoms. To focus on the climate’s breakdown (the symptom) without focusing attention on these toxic delusions (the causes) is a form a denialism. Worse, it’s a racist and sexist form of denialism, that takes away from the necessary focus of the need for all of us to de-colonise our selves... Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the climate. It’s not even about ‘climate justice’**, although that is also important. If we only talk about the climate, we’re missing the deeper problems plaguing our culture. And if we don’t excise the cause of the infection, we can never hope to heal from it.
Since he's admitted that Extinction Rebellion is about destroying modern civilisation and pushing through a radical left-wing agenda, not about climate change...
Extinction Rebellion Has A Rough Weekend As People Fight Back Against Climate Protests - "In San Francisco — a city which is certainly sympathetic to Extinction Rebellion’s aims — at least the ones that XR typically makes public — an angry commuter wearing scrubs came upon a line of Extinction Rebellion protesters blocking traffic with a huge sign and quickly took matters into his own hands, ripping down their banner and chucking it away, clearing the path for cars to continue on their way."
Extinction Rebellion files reveal climate zealots are paid £400-a-week - "Protesters have received payments totalling more than £70,000 in four months alone.But the eco-protest group privately fears it could face a six-figure tax bill if the money, which is given as expenses, is deemed to be payment for work done on XR's behalf. Last night, one Tory MP called on HMRC to launch an immediate investigation into the movement's tax affairs... Crowdfunding for the 'October Rebellion' currently stands at £859,534 and XR's fundraising efforts have brought in more than £2.5 million in the past year.Major donors include rock band Radiohead, which gave £250,000, and City billionaire Sir Christopher Hohn, who gave £50,000.Oil mogul John Paul Getty's granddaughter part-funded a donation of £330,000 though the Climate Emergency Fund... Extinction Rebellion activists have drawn up plans to attract activists who are 'poor' and from ethnic minorities in a bid to change the white, middle-class make-up of the movement... 'XR has been following the conventional model of virtue signalling ('yes, we agree working people are oppressed etc') and tokenism ('we need to get more black people into working groups' – as if this is just a matter of ordering them out of catalogue).'... 'If you were to come to our actions and only walk straight up to the people being arrested on the front line, such as the affinity group members blocking the bridges on Rebellion Day, you'd probably end up seeing the same type of people.'This is where you'd likely see the 'stereotype' of XR: white, British national, middle-aged or a pensioner, middle-class, educated, and probably a Left-leaning Guardian reader.'The documents also reveal that children are viewed as a key target for the organisation in winning support for their radical demands.Spokesman Rupert Read published an online pamphlet in August which claimed: 'Imagine an October with tens of thousands of children and students on the streets of London.'...
A First World War memorial has been defaced with Extinction Rebellion slogans – sparking a furious reaction from the public.The statue of Army commander-in-chief Earl Haig in Whitehall was daubed with the group's hour-glass symbol, along with the slogan 'Live simply and in peace', with a green heart above it."
Of course, since they have the correct beliefs, funding is not an issue
Extinction Rebellion activists smeared faeces on restaurant walls - "Climate activists smeared faeces on restaurant walls and targeted staff with abuse when they sold out of crushed pea salad, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.Protesters even tackled a member of staff when she tried to clean up the human waste at a branch of the healthy-eating chain Leon in Westminster during the Extinction Rebellion demonstrations in October... ‘Used sanitary products were stuck to the walls and doors.’An internal briefing, seen by this newspaper, records that when staff members tried to clean the sickening mess, a manager named as Erika was tackled by an activist, leaving her bruised and shaken.Another manager also reported that locks to the bathrooms had been tampered with to allow activists to continue using them"
Pipe down, Elton, you eco-snob - "In the green world, it is clear that it is the poor, given they lack the means to pay for their eco-sins, who have more chance of getting through the eye of a needle than getting into the heaven of eco-aware self-congratulation. The new green elites seem determined to price or pressure the less well-off out of the skies. If flying is only acceptable when you can afford to apologise for it with money, what does that say to poorer air travellers? Extinction Rebellion of course wants to go even further and impose stiff taxes on flying. This will allow the wealthy to jet at will while pushing the poor back on to buses to Bognor Regis."
Why is Australia the target of climate eco-cult? - "XR co-founder Gail Bradbrook explained how it all began while she was using psychedelic drugs. She took time off after a series of failed protests and got high. Or, as Bradbrook puts it: “I went on a retreat and prayed in a deep way with some psychedelic medicines.”... Climate activists have spent the past week protesting in low-emission nations of the West while ignoring the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters. Australia’s XR fanboys are yet to explain why they are protesting here when our nation contributes only 1.3 per cent of global emissions. Why don’t they protest against China for producing 27.2 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions? Perhaps they could try locking themselves to the nearest United Nations office for refusing to hold China to account... Like all doomsday cults, XR believers frame martyrdom as a high calling. Speaking to The Australian, Melbourne Extinction Rebellion spokesman Kegan Daly predicted arrests would “100 per cent” rise during the week of protests. While not being pleased about the prospect, Daly praised those “willing to sacrifice their freedom for this cause”.The development of a will to martyrdom is rarely a good sign, but it is especially problematic among members of groups who share the belief in a doomsday scenario. If XR activists think the world will enter a death spiral after 2025, they have nothing to lose. Already, some appear to be suffering the effects of mass hysteria. Footage from protests has shown activists breaking down, weeping and wailing after chaining or gluing themselves to things. Others have spoken about their despair and despondency about the world coming to an end. As the collective’s emotional state deteriorates, its members seem less willing to consider counterintuitive facts. NSW Transport Minister Andrew Constance elucidated the problem by questioning why climate activists planned to target the state’s transport system if the rail network is 100 per cent offset. The widening gulf between XR theory and reality is a reason the public has begun to turn against the group. Despite professing regret for political stunts that hold up traffic and drain emergency services, climate activists continue to stage them. They are not truly sorry for blocking streets, occupying parks and holding people hostage to hard-left demands because they cannot get what they want by democratic means... Without a democratic mandate or a rational plan for conservation, XR activists can only shout and stamp their feet. They use resistance tactics to bypass democracy because they have no hope of implementing their policies by democratic means. Over time, they are becoming more militant and people are tiring of the soap opera. Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk upset some Labor colleagues last week by proposing laws to ensure people can go about their lives without protesters preventing their freedom of movement. She wants to stop the use of locking devices. Employment Minister Michaelia Cash suggested the suspension of welfare payments for the activists. The green doomsters are not sorry for bypassing democracy to get what they want. They are not sorry for putting themselves first and forcing others to clean up their mess. They are unrepentant because they are determined to remake the world in their own image, whatever the cost to the rest of us."
Climate protests spark anger in Melbourne as activists block woman from mum's home - "A grief-stricken woman has broken down sobbing after becoming caught up in today's climate action blockade in Melbourne's CBD.Sally (last name withheld) was desperately trying to access her late mother's Spring Street apartment this morning but was prevented from driving through the intersection with Collins Street... "I heard that these d-------- were here yesterday so I've come along this morning, and they're here again!"Sally says she tried to explain to the Extinction Rebellion activists that her mother had just died after a 12-year battle with cancer. "He said 'well we're only here because lots of people are going to die.' I said 'I don't care about those people, I care about my mum and dad!" she said.To make matters worse, Sally couldn't park and walk up the slippery street as she had just dislocated her knee... She slammed the protestors and their claims that "civil disobedience" is the only way to encourage governments to act on climate change."They think it's so important but what is important is the everyday, good Australian people just trying to go about their everyday lives. It's not fair," she said.A Current Affair arranged for Sally to drive through the blockade with a police escort, however, that didn't stop one activist from stepping in front of the car, prompting an angry response from the grieving woman."
Climate change hysteria has very real costs
Our children deserve better than Extinction Rebellion's dangerous fantasies. Sadly their teachers are encouraging them - "One of the strangest anomalies in our already bizarre politics has been the implosion of the established order. Unexpected coalitions are emerging from the Brexit realignment. Rock stars and “edgy” comedians now stand shoulder to shoulder with Goldman Sachs executives and Tony Blair. The Conservative Party – the spiritual home of agas, doilies, golf clubs and quiche – finds itself in opposition to Parliament and other ‘august’ British institutions. And today came the alarming sight of teachers and parents encouraging their charges to skive off school to join the latest round of Extinction Rebellion protests.Many teachers, usually so quick to penalise parents for pupil absences, have wholeheartedly embraced this brand of uncompromising environmentalism – and the disruption to school ritual... children barely out of nappies marched, or were carried, alongside banners with deeply unsuitable language, and chants of “F**k Boris!” (Why not demonstrate on a Saturday, you might ask? Perhaps because teachers don’t fancy herding children around on their day off, or suspect that fewer would be interested at the weekend). It's bad enough that some teachers are openly seeking to politicise pupils and distract them from their studies - but at worst, they are failing in their duty of care. Anyone who has ever listened to the youthful protesters will know the sense of rigid moral certainty – and fear – recent activism has inspired. One Australian teenager interviewed this morning committed herself to lifelong childlessness, not wanting to bring more people “into this dying world”. Scores of placards prophesied imminent doom; (“You’ll die of old age. I’ll die of climate change”, one read). Others propagated the myth that adults in the developed world are doing nothing to combat climate change – despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Few countries have done more to reduce their emissions in recent decades than Britain, or enacted a more drastic set of emissions targets. In the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, protesters erected a gallows and staged a mock hanging, standing on blocks of melting ice, while children looked on. I can still remember my fear when exposed to Al Gore’s doom-mongering, now-discredited predictions of dramatic sea level rise in his polemic An Inconvenient Truth by my Geography teacher in the mid-noughties. I hate to imagine the impact of visceral mock executions on these (much-younger) children. Earlier in the week, it was reported that doctors are prescribing growing numbers of psychiatric drugs to treat “eco-traumatised” youngsters who believe the world is about to end. In this climate, who can blame them?... Rarely, if ever, do the protesters speak in specifics, preferring to combine their fatalism with aims diffuse enough to be meaningless. Though the group demands net zero carbon emissions in under a decade, it offers vanishingly little guidance on how to get there. Since free market, practical solutions like carbon taxes, nuclear power or carbon capture tend to be dismissed out of hand... the only alternative is immediate retreat into a ‘prelapsarian’, pre-industrialised past. This, too, is no accident. One recent report from the think tank Policy Exchange delves into the history of 'Extinction Rebellion', concluding that the group is an extremist outfit whose end goal is global communism and a wholesale reduction in Western living standards. XR’s founders even wish to sideline democracy in favour of appointed "People's Assemblies" that will do their bidding. Their environmental mantra masks dangerous anti-capitalist fantasies. This is not about denying climate change – though interrogating Extinction Rebellion’s aims or questioning the ethics of ushering children into the political sphere will usually earn you the tagline “denier”. It is about closing down all sensible forms of debate... here’s a revolutionary suggestion: why not teach children to read and write properly and do basic maths? Or better yet, encourage critical thinking and serious engagement with the issues rather than regurgitating Extinction Rebellion’s doomsday narrative"
Extinction Rebellion spray fake blood on Treasury building as police arrest eight for criminal damage - "In London, Scotland Yard has warned that it is under more pressure from Extinction Rebellion protests than they faced during the terror attacks of 2017... Policing protests in London is draining frontline resources on a greater scale than the London Bridge terror attack and Grenfell tragedy in 2017, figures suggest."
Extinction Rebellion mocked for 'trying to hide' diesel generator in protest camp - "Former SAS Regimental Sergeant Major, James Deegan MC, retweeted the video to his Twitter page in view of his 16.6 thousand followers, calling the climate activists “hypocrites” as they insist on lecturing people against using fossil fuels."
The madness of Extinction Rebellion - "like all death cultists, they handed out leaflets that contained within them ‘THE TRUTH’. The leaflets foretell floods and fire: ‘We are in trouble. Sea levels are rising… Africa and the Amazon are on fire.’ The only word that was missing was locusts. They can’t be far behind these other ghastly visitations to sinful mankind.And if you question their TRUTH? Then, like those heretics who were hauled before The Inquisition 500 years ago, you will be denounced as a denier. A denier of their revelations, a denier of their visions. ‘Denial is not a policy’, their placards decreed. Spotting me filming their spooky, apocalyptic ceremony, one of the attendees waved that placard in my face. A warning from the cult to a corrupted outsider... This is a millenarian movement that might speak of science, but which is driven by sheer irrationalism. By fear, moral exhaustion and misanthropy. This is the deflated, self-loathing bourgeoisie coming together to project their own psycho-social hang-ups on to society at large. They must be criticised and ridiculed out of existence... Extinction Rebellion is a reactionary, regressive and elitist movement whose aim is to impose the most disturbing form of austerity imaginable on people across the world. One of the great ironies of ‘progressive’ politics today is that people of a leftist persuasion will say it is borderline fascism if the Tory government closes down a library in Wolverhampton, but then they will cheer this eco-death cult when it demands a virtual halt to economic growth with not a single thought for the devastating, immiserating and outright lethal impact such a course of action would have on the working and struggling peoples of the world... Progressive movements, as the name suggests, used to be about pursuing progress, pushing mankind forwards, creating a better, wealthier world for all. Extinction Rebellion wants the precise opposite. It wants to propel us backwards, to the Stone Age. It wants to reverse the most important moment in human history – the Industrial Revolution"
Extinction Rebellion protester, 20, lives with his parents in emission-spewing five-bedroom mansion - "Extinction Rebellion protester Eric Serge Herbert has been arrested five times for his demonstrations, which included blocking the entrance to the Brisbane Magistrates Court and stopping traffic with a canoe on a road.The former school captain was living in Sydney and studying nanoscience at the University of New South Wales before he dropped out and returned to his family home."
Extinction Rebellion: Blind Paralympian climbs on top of plane as arrests pass 1,100 - "A blind Paralympian climbed onto the roof of a plane preparing for take-off in a dramatic protest as hundreds of climate change activists tried to shut down an airport... Activists including an 83-year-old man were arrested after lying or sitting in the main entrance to block access to London City airport, some glueing themselves to the ground.Dozens of other protesters glued themselves to the floor inside the airport lounge and at the nearby DLR station, stopping trains... A flight from the airport to Dublin was delayed when one protester on the plane stood up just before take-off and began talking about climate change."
Extinction Rebellion’s war on the working class - "We need to talk about the class dynamic in Extinction Rebellion. Surely everyone can see it. This eco-alarmist cult includes in its ranks a Belgian princess, the granddaughter of a baronet, and a public-school Guardianista descended of aristocracy... From its invasion of meat and fish markets to its blockage of airport entrances to its hectoring of everyday commuters who apparently aren’t paying enough attention to the ‘climate emergency’, this eco-aristocracy constantly attacks ordinary people. It openly calls for their lives to be made harder. XR’s demand that carbon emissions be cut to ‘net zero’ by 2025 would lead to untold job losses, an end to driving, and virtually no more flying. Indeed, XR types call for massive taxes on flying, which would have the impact of pricing the non-rich out of the skies. Stowe’s star green activist George Monbiot put it best in his old book Heat. Environmentalism, he said, is ‘a campaign not for abundance but austerity, not for more freedom but less…’. It is a campaign ‘against other people’... We shouldn’t be surprised. Environmentalism has long had a strong streak of class hatred. From the filthy rich David de Rothschild’s 2007 guide to living more austerely to Jonathon Porritt (the Eton-educated son of Lord Porritt) heading up Friends of the Earth; from Prince Charles’ demand that we all live more eco-meekly to Prince Harry’s shameless moaning about flying even as he takes a private jet to Elton John’s swanky pad; from Plane Stupid’s posh protests against plebs flying out of Stansted Airport to the sirs and ladies who head up the various efforts to curb population growth (shudder) – green politics has always been led by the posh, and has always been targeted at the lower orders."
Hands off Smithfield Market! - "‘Privileged’ is an overused word these days. White privilege, male privilege, cis privilege, yada yada. But if you want to see real privilege, look no further than the smug, whiffy occupation of Smithfield meat market in London by middle-class vegans from the Extinction Rebellion cult. This is privilege in action. This is time-rich, well-connected green activists sneering at working people and preventing them from doing their jobs. It sums up the elitism inherent in environmentalism. Smithfield has been trading in meat for 800 years. It has long attracted the ire of middle-class moaners. In the Victoria era, posh people frequently complained about the Smithfield traders’ treatment of animals and, even worse, their use of foul language... Today’s equivalent of Victorian moralists – the eco-puritans of the green movement – have descended on the ‘horrid abomination’ that is Smithfield Market and effectively shut it down. Calling themselves Animal Rebellion (God help us), they’re part of Extinction Rebellion"
Extinction Rebellion: Police ban London protests - "The Met said there had been 1,445 arrests by 14:00 on Monday, with 76 people charged with offences including criminal damage and obstruction of a highway... Green Party MEP Ellie Chowns said she had been arrested after "standing in solidarity" with protesters in Trafalgar Square.She said in a video posted on Twitter that there was "no justification" for the ban on the protests."The rules have been changed," she said. "No longer is any space in London allowable for peaceful democratic protest. This is intolerable.""
Given how deluded they are about climate change, it's no surprise they are equally deluded about what protest means
Climate change: Going vegetarian won't truly help our carbon footprint - "It’s interesting to note that even environmentalists themselves are loathe to make the major lifestyle changes that would be required to avoid all meat products. A recent survey found that most of the UK Green Party’s elected representatives are in fact meat-eaters... But the environmentalists calling on us to go vegan seem to somehow get the most airtime. Perhaps it’s the extreme things they say: The former head of the United Nations’ climate change organization, for example, suggested that meat-eaters should be made to feel like pariahs. “How about restaurants in 10-15 years start treating carnivores in the same way that smokers are treated?” ... We’re often told that going vegetarian is the biggest thing that any of us could do, with headlines telling us: "Cut your carbon footprint in half by going vegetarian." Statements like that are misleading for two reasons.First, that cut isn’t to our entire emissions — just those from food. That means Four-fifths of emissions are ignored, according to an analysis of emission from the European Union, which means the impact is actually five-times lower. Second, the more optimistic figures about how much of your emissions you can cut are based not just on a vegetarian diet, but on an entirely vegan one where we avoid every single animal product altogether.A systematic peer-review of studies of going vegetarian shows that a non-meat diet will likely reduce an individual’s emissions by the equivalent of nearly 1,200 lbs carbon dioxide. For the average person in the industrialized world, that means an emissions cut of just 4.3%. This still overstates the effect, because it ignores the well-established "rebound effect." Vegetarian diets are slightly cheaper, and saved money will likely be spent on other goods and services that cause extra greenhouse gas emissions. In the U.S., vegetarians save at least $750 on their food budgets every year. That extra spending will cause more carbon dioxide emissions, cancelling about half the saved carbon emissions from going vegetarian."... To put this into context: either you could go vegetarian for the rest of your life, or you could reduce your emissions by the exact same amount by spending a little more than $3 a year using the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the first mandatory market-based program in the United States covering several states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."
Vegetarian diets not always the most climate-friendly, researchers say - "diets in which meat, fish or dairy products were consumed only once a day would leave less of a footprint on climate change and water supplies than a vegetarian diet including milk and eggs, in 95% of countries they analysed. That is partly because raising dairy cows for milk, butter and cheese requires large amounts of energy and land, as well as fertilisers and pesticides to grow fodder, emitting greenhouse gases that are heating up the planet, the study said.Diets that contain insects, small fish and molluscs, meanwhile, have as similarly small an environmental impact as plant-based vegan diets but are generally more nutritious... there is no one-size-fits-all solution, said Keeve Nachman, assistant professor at the Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who led the study on diets.In low- and middle-income countries such as Indonesia, citizens on average need to eat more animal protein for adequate nutrition... producing a pound of beef in Paraguay contributes nearly 17 times more greenhouse gases than in Denmark, partly because in Latin America, it often involves cutting down forests to clear land for cattle grazing.A typical diet in Niger has the highest water footprint, researchers noted, mainly due to millet production and crop residues that cannot be consumed."
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Extinction Rebellion start new protests - "‘We heard at the City of London Magistrate's Court that a policeman had given evidence that ambulances couldn't move freely, NHS operations have been canceled’...
‘XR nationally liaised with the police, told them exactly where we’d be, how long we’d be there and organized routes that the ambulances could use.’
‘I'm at the City of London magistrate’s court where for the last two months between 30 and 50 extinction rebellion protesters have been appearing here every Friday, charged under the Public Order Act for their part in the protests last April. It's not unusual for there to be mass arrests at protests. But it is unusual that so many have been charged - 500 people so far’
‘John and Suzanne, from the Top Ness [sp?] group have just emerged from the magistrate's court where they pleaded not guilty. That means they'll have another hearing later this month.’ ‘What was that like?’
‘Well, it was relatively straightforward, but it still feels to me like a real waste of the state's time. We’ve got a climate crisis, the climate emergency, the ecological abuse, emergency *something*, the news is pouring out every day. And we have to go through this.’
‘The criminal justice system is under a huge amount of pressure at the moment. Aren't you just adding to that pressure, clogging up the system? You could plead guilty and reduce the number of hours the criminal justice system spend on your case?’
‘There is that argument, but the fact is that unless we clog up systems everywhere, no one is taking any notice of what the problem is.’...
'I do think we need different laws. I think that the protest laws are too weak. They're largely made up of a lot of common laws and test cases in the courts. And I think that there needs to be some moderation on this. I think that there is of course a right to, for people to protest. But there are other rights too and people have a right to go about their business in London today without being obstructed, without people not be able to reach hospitals. You know, there was an element of harm that people are underestimating with this, this obstruction if you like of normal living, and people are harmed, people are injured and people can't get to hospitals and can't go about their business. Businesses are losing 10s of millions of pounds. So we need to, we need to, you know, judge the protest against that benchmark.'...
‘They say you [Policy Exchange] don't say who funds you and they suspect that you might be funded, that your report into them might be funded by groups that oppose them, like fossil fuel extractors, etc. What do you say to that? It is true, isn't it that you don't say who funds you?’
‘Our policy *something* doesn't say who, but none of the think tanks in London go into detail about their funding. But I mean, I can just let, reassure your listeners. I did this piece of work of essentially because I was intrigued by what they believed as an organization, we started to look into what they were saying and what they were espousing on their YouTube posts, and we were rather shocked, to be honest. We were expecting to find, you know, moderation and actually, we found extremism. I mean, so Robert Roger Hallam, one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion said, we're going to force the governments to act and if they don't, we will bring them down and create a democracy fit for purpose. And yes, some may die in the process. This is not a you know, a normal law abiding protest group unfortunately’"
It's no surprise that people who are taken in by climate change hysteria are also ignorant of the realities of traffic planning, or the fact that they are breaking the law. Then again, their avowed aim is to destroy modern society, so
Presumably Extinction Rebellion not disclosing their funding wasn't a problem, because they were on The Right Side. And climate change activists being funded by people with conflicts of interest isn't a problem for the same reason too
Was this zoologist punished for telling school kids politically incorrect facts about polar bears? - "A world-renowned expert in animal bone identification has lost her position at the University of Victoria (UVic), she believes for telling school kids politically incorrect facts about polar bears... Crockford is the author of a popular blog, polarbearscience.com, as well as five books about these animals. Polar Bear Facts and Myths has been translated into four languages. She says that, contrary to the claims of environmental activists, polar bears are currently thriving and are at no risk of extinction from climate change. Informing the public of these plain facts now appears to be unacceptable to UVic... G. Cornelis van Kooten, a UVic professor of economics who also holds a Canada Research Chair in environmental studies, says he is “appalled and distressed” by the Crockford removal. When, he asks, did “universities turn against open debate? There’s now a climate of fear on campus.” Academia is a “publish or perish” workplace, and Crockford is an accomplished scholar. Last year, she was co-author of a paper published in Science, one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals. On any campus, the number of professors whose recent work appears in that journal is small... Crockford says she isn’t entirely surprised by her expulsion, given her previous ban from the UVic Speakers Bureau. For the better part of a decade, that entity had arranged for her to deliver unpaid lectures to elementary and high school students, as well as to adult community groups. One talk concerned the early origins of domestic dogs. The other was titled Polar Bears: Outstanding Survivors of Climate Change.There is every indication she was a popular speaker. But in 2017, UVic Speakers Bureau co-ordinator Mandy Crocker advised her of a policy change. The chair of the Anthropology Department now needed to confirm that Crockford was “able to represent the university” when discussing these topics... Crockford’s talks at schools had “generated concern among parents regarding balance” and that this concern had “been shared with various levels of the university.”... Dwight Owens, an employee of Ocean Networks Canada, an entity affiliated with UVic, has no scientific training. His BA is in Chinese language and literature. His MA is in educational technology. Nevertheless, under the auspices of the UVic Speakers Bureau, he has been giving talks about ocean chemistry and climate change for years... Current and former UVic faculty members contacted by the National Post aren’t aware of any vetting process. Currently, therefore, there is no evidence that even inexperienced graduate students need permission to “represent the university.” That requirement appears to have been invented solely as a means of silencing the eminently qualified, highly experienced Crockford. Because her polar bear message conflicts with activist rhetoric, and because activists apparently complained to administrators, her career as an academic researcher has come to an abrupt end. Jeffrey Foss, a former chair of UVic’s philosophy department, says Crockford has been punished for speaking her own mind about matters of fact, which means she has been denied academic freedom and free speech. “I’m beginning to lose faith and hope in the university system”... During the time she delivered lectures to elementary school students, Crockford says she was continually “astonished to learn that every single teacher believed that only a few hundred to a few thousand polar bears were left.” She feels duty bound as a scientist to speak up, to point out that the global population is officially estimated to be in the range of 22,000 to 31,000 and may be much higher. “I talk to groups about the adaptive features of polar bears that allow them to survive changes in their Arctic habitat”"
So much for listening to scientists
"Balance" means you can't disagree with the liberal consensus
Expensive Climate Policies Sparked Chile Riots, Just Like France’s Yellow Vest Protests - "Chile, which will host a major U.N. climate conference in December, earned praise from climate activists for recently imposing a carbon dioxide tax on conventional energy sources and switching the Santiago Metro system to renewable power. Now, the people of Chile are rising up and firing a shot across the bow of other nations considering similar energy taxes and expensive renewable energy programs. On Oct. 25, protestors took to the streets throughout Santiago in response to Metro fare hikes. The protests soon spread to other cities and led to rioting and at least five reported deaths. The Chilean government and the legacy media blamed the fare hikes on rising oil prices. But that isn’t true.Oil prices aren’t rising. Global oil prices are currently 25 percent lower than they were a year ago and 37 percent lower than they were five years ago. In Chile, gasoline prices reflect the lower oil prices... Santiago Metro fares are rising, amid falling oil and gasoline prices, because government officials in 2018 traded out most of the Metro’s energy sources to wind and solar power from conventional sources. The Chilean government also hit the portion of conventional power that remains with new carbon dioxide taxes. As a result, Chileans are now burdened by higher Metro fares reflecting unnecessary energy price increases. As Chileans protest, climate activists and their media allies want people to believe oil is to blame, rather than government climate programs that raise energy prices and impoverish people. Unlike speculative climate change woes that never seem to materialize, carbon dioxide taxes and renewable energy mandates immediately and measurably raise living costs and reduce living standards. In the United States, people may have some concern about climate change, but polling shows most Americans aren’t willing to pay $2 per month to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. In Chile, where per-capita income is merely one-quarter of U.S. per-capita income, people are understandably even less willing to pay for carbon dioxide reduction... For United Nations officials planning the 25th Conference of the Parties (COP25) climate conference, scheduled for the first two weeks of December in Santiago, the protests are especially embarrassing. Last year’s U.N. conference took place in Poland, where government officials and the prominent Solidarity labor union have criticized costly U.N. climate programs. Solidarity even held a press conference at the U.N. event and issued a joint statement criticizing U.N. climate activism. The December U.N. conference was originally scheduled for Brazil, but the Brazilian government strongly criticized U.N. climate activism and told the United Nations it no longer desired to serve as host. The Chilean government offered to host in Brazil’s place, touting its carbon dioxide taxes, renewable-powered metro, and other activist climate programs. Yet, the world is seeing the Chilean population rioting in the streets as a result of those taxes and climate programs. This is the third major black eye for the U.N. Conference of the Parties in less than a year."
Climate change hysteria has very real harms
Chile climate summit canceled four weeks into activists' transatlantic voyage - "A group of climate activists crossing the Atlantic by sailboat to a UN summit in Chile were shocked to learn the event was canceled -- four weeks into their grueling voyage.The 36 young environmentalists set off from Amsterdam on October 2, using a sailboat in order to highlight the impact of flying on greenhouse gas emissions. They had completed more than half of their seven-week journey to the UN Climate Conference (COP25) in Santiago, Chile, which was scheduled to take place in early December... With Costa Rica and the city of Bonn, Germany, floated as potential alternative sites for COP25, the activists say that sailing to Brazil means they will be able to attend the eventual summit."If the COP would be in Bonn in early 2020 we can still be on time and meanwhile learn from sustainable travel ideas in South America," the group said. If it takes place in Costa Rica they could change course and head to Central America, added the statement."
You must have a lot of free time to be an activist - this might be one of the best manifestations of "Late Capitalism"
4 Catastrophic Climate Predictions That Never Came True - "If you’re under 50, there’s a good chance you’re expecting to see climate change create chaos and death in your lifetime. Scientists and pundits seem so certain we’re headed for global collapse and their predictions can be terrifying—especially if you’re young enough not to remember the last dozen times they predicted imminent collapse and were wrong. In each case, claims of impending environmental disaster were backed by allegedly irrefutable data and policymakers were encouraged to act before it was too late
Global Cooling...
The Great Die-Off... Ehrlich predicted that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.” This would lead to “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”...
Pollution Particle Clouds... Ecologists and environmentalists claimed that the buildup of nitrogen, dust, fumes, and other forms of pollution would make the air unbreathable by the mid-1980s. They predicted all urban dwellers would have to don gas masks to survive, that particle clouds would block the majority of sunlight from reaching earth, and that farm yields would drop as dust blotted out the sun...
75 Percent of Species Will Go Extinct... Alleged experts in biology and zoology predicted that of all species of animals alive in 1970, at least 75 percent would be extinct by 1995. They blamed human activities like hunting and farming for shrinking wild habitats and cited pollution and climate change as key drivers of the new extinctions... 99 percent of all species that have ever existed are already extinct, and natural rates of extinction predict we might lose anywhere from 200 to 2,000 species per year without any human intervention. Since 2000, we’ve identified fewer than 20."
Apparently when it comes to environmental science, the predictive power of models is not how you should evaluate it
Climate Change Is “My Religion and My Dharma.” - "Rajendra Pachauri, head of the the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) since 2002, has stepped down amidst a sexual harassment scandal... In Hinduism dharma is the path of righteousness. Pachauri has been criticized by many for righteously confusing climate change science with climate policy advocacy. For example, in its 2010 review of IPCC processes, the InterAcademy Council observed:
IPCC leaders have been criticized for making public statements that were perceived as advocating specific climate policies. Straying into advocacy can only hurt IPCC's credibility."
The ‘climate emergency’ no one is talking about - "Just look at the impact it will have on the UK. Tens of thousands of people will die. Infectious disease will skyrocket, sometimes with lethal consequences. The sun will disappear from the sky for large chunks of the day – some northern parts of the UK will soon have less than six hours of daylight per day. Crop production will fall dramatically. Travel will at times be difficult, even impossible. People will flock to shops to purchase protective clothing. We will need to produce and use copious amounts of additional energy, meaning household energy bills will shoot up... This climate event is, of course, winter. It seems ludicrous to describe winter in the terms above, even though everything I have written is true... the reason most people have no reason to fear winter is down to economic development and human adaptation... Adaptation and development is how we have always overcome the harshness of nature. And this is worth thinking about in the context of the panic about climate change. Extinction Rebellion founder Roger Hallam warns of ‘the slow and agonising suffering and death of billions of people’ that will apparently result from climate change. But global deaths from natural disasters have plummeted over the past century. And global population is booming, despite declining fertility rates, because almost everyone is living longer than before. There is no reason to expect these trends to go into reverse."
Climate change activists are focused on all the wrong solutions - "Even if all 4.5 billion flights this year were stopped from taking off, and the same happened every year until 2100, temperatures would be reduced by just 0.054 degrees, using mainstream climate models — equivalent to delaying climate change by less than one year by 2100... The Paris treaty cannot do much — just like the Rio and Kyoto pacts mostly failed before it — because this approach requires rich countries to promise future economic hardship to achieve very little.The real reason for this: Most of the 21st century emissions are not being emitted by the rich world. Indeed, if every single rich country stopped all CO₂ emissions today and for the rest of the century — no plane trips, no meat consumption, no gasoline-powered cars, no heating or cooling with fossil fuels, no artificial fertilizer — the difference would be just 0.72 degrees°F by end-of-century. Solving climate change, in fact, requires getting China, India and all the other developing countries on board to cut emissions. But of course, their goal is to lift their populations out of poverty with cheap and reliable energy... Nobel laureate climate economist William Nordhaus has shown that implementing a small but rising global carbon tax will realistically cut some of the most damaging climate impacts at rather low costs.This, however, will not solve most of the climate challenge. We must look at how we solved past major challenges — through innovation. The starvation catastrophes in developing nations in the 1960s to ’80s weren’t fixed by asking people to consume less food but through the Green Revolution in which innovation developed higher-yielding varieties that produced more plentiful food... The Copenhagen Consensus Center asked 27 of the world’s top climate economists to examine policy options for responding to climate change. This analysis showed that the best investment is in green-energy R&D. For every dollar spent, $11 of climate damages would be avoided... Right now, despite all the rhetoric about the importance of global warming, we are not ramping up this spending. On the sidelines of the 2015 Paris climate summit, more than 20 world leaders made a promise to double green-energy research and development by 2020. But spending has only inched up from $16 billion in 2015 to $17 billion in 2018. This is a broken promise that matters."
Gingerswappingresponse - Posts - "Rapture anxiety is real. It's the fear created by being conditioned into believing the end of the world could begin at any moment. Only people right with God will disappear. It fucks kids up. And is nothing but a ridiculous boogie man tactic. We deserved better from our adults."
"I’m sure telling them Climate Change is going to kill everyone every other 12 years doesn’t have the same effect on kids, right?"
Bjørn Lomborg - Posts - "Germany's government wants to spend €40bn over next 4 years to cut CO₂. This will cut global temps by 0.00018°CThe same money spent on tuberculosis could save more than 10 million lives What is best?"
China going big on coal guarantees the world won’t meet its carbon-cutting goals - "Pretty much everything the rest of the world is doing to reduce carbon emissions is being neutralized by a single big, bad actor — and it’s not the United States under President Trump, but the People’s Republic of China.Many countries are falling short of the decarbonization goals hammered out at the 2016 Paris climate convention. But Beijing — already the world’s No. 1 carbon emitter, producing more than a quarter of global CO2 exhausts — stands out. With its economy slowed to a rate not seen since the early ’90s, it’s re-embracing the dirtiest fossil fuel... “China’s proposed coal expansion is so far out of alignment with the Paris Agreement that it would put the necessary reductions in coal power out of reach, even if every other country were to completely eliminate its coal fleet.”... The US switch from coal to natural gas leaves it, as of 2018, with “the largest absolute decline [in carbon emissions] among all countries since 2000,” according to the IEA. Call it the difference between talking and actually walking green."
But since words matter more than actions, the US is still bashed for pulling out of the Paris accord
Climate Models Botch Another Prediction - "Presently, the best climate models fall many orders of magnitude short of the power and intricacy needed to effectively predict the long-term climate patterns that emerge from the interactions of all these planetary systems. And that's not a failure of science; it's just the reality of how tough the problem is... there is a major failure of science going on.The failure is the lack of transparency and honesty about how feeble these models are and how much we should stake on their all-too-fallible forecasts. Thus the same problem continues: climate science has once again botched a prediction that its models were underequipped to make.It seems that there can be no moderate and honest discussion of this issue. Skeptics are singled out in creepy enemies lists. Actually, we're now supposed to call them deniers, as though they were disputing the existence of HIV or the holocaust. Numerous scientists, as well as senators, anti-vaccination Kennedys, and clickbait purveyors have even called for the imprisonment and legal prosecution of those who disagree with them. Climate science acts like it is fighting a holy war. There are only those who are just and those who must be silenced and stopped at all costs. Anyone who mounts reasonable logical, empirical, or skeptical challenges to the orthodoxy must be ruined, not by counterfactual evidence, but by vicious attack.Weekly, we're bombarded with doom-and-gloom future scenarios spit out of these models. The public is supposed to quiver in fear and to disregard and forget the many times that these predictions have failed.Models told us that the years of 1998-2013 were supposed to show ever-increasing runaway warming. And yet, these years actually exhibited the famous "global warming hiatus." An article published in Nature says that zero models predicted this. Numerous modelers have told us that the Arctic polar ice would be completely gone by now. It's still there. Many models now seem to skew in the opposite direction, predicting more ice than we see today.Modeler Kerry Emanuel's widely reported initial correlation of global warming with dramatically worse hurricane seasons has been strongly rebutted by multiple groups, leading him to reconsider. The scientific failure here isn't that models are inaccurate -- it's that the models are presented as undebatable apocalyptic predictors, harbingers of certain future catastrophe. Omens that compel us to rethink our lives. If we take issue with that, we're heretics.Given how fallible climate models are, why shouldn't we be skeptical of the scary headlines? How good can your science be if you try to prove your point by ruining your detractors rather than through empirical success?... The crusader mentality of climate researchers leads them away from the factual debate and empirical accounting of sound science. We really deserve more from our publicly funded scientific establishments."
Ryan Fournier on Twitter - "Michael Bloomberg owns 3 planes,
2 helicopters,
6 boats,
11 houses,
42 cars,
And says that you should take the bus to help fight climate change.
These candidates are all jokes."
Hollywood Celeb Emma Thompson: Eat Your Pets To Survive 'Climate Crisis'
An0maly on Twitter - "Scientists have discovered a black hole that's twice as massive as what they'd thought was possible"
"Wait, scientists can be wrong? The science isn’t settled? Holy smokes. Stop the press."
Steven Pinker on Twitter - "Climate is too serious to indulge in apocalyptic exaggeration, which only leads to paralysis and helplessness."
Projections and Uncertainties about Climate Change in an Era of Minimal Climate Policies
This shows that the cost of doing too much to combat climate change (2.5 degree celsius rise) is greater than the cost of not doing anything to combat climate change (4.1 degree celsius rise).
The World Is Not Going To Halve Carbon Emissions By 2030, So Now What? - "Discussions of climate policy often center on the deployment of carbon-free energy supply, but rarely discussed is the corresponding requirement for the decommissioning of fossil fuel energy. As I have argued in a previous column, the magnitude of the net-zero by 2050 challenge is equivalent to the deployment of a new nuclear plant every day for the next 30 years, while retiring an equivalent amount of fossil fuel energy every day. Emissions reductions for 2030 consistent with the IPCC view of the 1.5°C temperature target require a much great rate of deployment than one nuclear power plant worth of carbon-free energy deployment every day, because about half of the required emissions reductions are squeezed into the next 10 years.The bottom line of this analysis should be undeniable: There is simply no evidence that the world is, or is on the brink of, making “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” that would be required for the deep decarbonization associated with a 1.5°C temperature target. Anyone advocating a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030 is engaging in a form of climate theater, full of drama but not much suspense... Despite the overwhelming evidence on the unlikelihood of meeting the 2030 target, such realism has yet to take hold in climate policy discussions. Some even go so far as to claim that presentation of this type of analysis amounts to climate denial."
Climate change hysteria is theatre in the first place
Orwell & Goode -">work aimless service job with high risk of redundancy
>commute 3 hours a day in sardine-like cattle cars
>eat bug-based meat replacements for every meal
>come home to relax in your cramped pod/repurposed sewage pipe
>consume
>repeat"
DYSTOPIA: Elites Push 100 Square Foot 'Parasite Pods' As Housing Of The Future - "National File has previously reported on the vision of the future gleefully propagated by the media and large corporations, from entomophagy and cannibalism to beer made from feces-filled sewer water.We’ve now gotten a glimpse at the domiciles where future humans will be indulging in their cockroach steak and toilet beer: a new type of housing called ‘parasite pods.’... These concepts may seem far-fetched, but they are rooted in postmodern design philosophies that are already in practice today, as architects struggle with the issue of overpopulation. Many are also terrified by the myriad proclamations that the Earth is being ravaged by man-made climate change."
Do environmentalists care about human life? - "“More poor people are eating meat around the world. That means they will live longer, healthier lives, but it is bad news for the environment,” read a tweet from The Economist’s official account... yes, The Economist concedes that increased meat consumption will make people healthier. Whereas “Many African children are stunted” due to a lack of micronutrients such as Vitamin A; “iron deficiency is startlingly common”; and studies have found significant levels of anemia in women and children, “Animal products are excellent sources of essential vitamins and minerals” that are otherwise lacking in African diets.But, you see, “On a planetary scale, the rise of meat- and dairy-eating is a giant environmental problem.” Increased meat consumption “will raise Africans’ collective contribution to global climate change,” ergo, bad. Which raises the question of what, exactly, environmentalism is for. As Karol Markowicz asked, “Why are we saving the environment if not to help people live longer, healthier lives?” If someone can look at improved health, wealth, and community capital in developing countries and walk away with the conclusion “This is a giant problem because the environment,” then environmentalism has ceased to be concerned with human welfare at all. It’s nothing more than a pseudo-religious dogma whose operating logic holds that “It is better that a few million living Africans go sick, poor, and malnourished than risk the possibility that the Earth’s temperature rises a few degrees by 2100.” Not to be outdone, on Tuesday, Newsweek published an op-ed by two psychology lecturers from the U.K. casually wondering just why is it humans are so darn set against cannibalism... Maintaining “a ranch that raises plump babies for human consumption,” as one philosopher cited in the Newsweek article hypothesizes, would reduce the carbon-producing human population as well, even further aiding the environment"
Given how so many people gush about how humans deserve to go extinct and how happy that will make them...
Environmentalists make good movie villains because they want to make your real life worse - The Washington Post - "frustratingly for the doomsayers, life on Earth keeps getting better despite the “overpopulation” our precious blue orb continues to shoulder... Environmentalists make a useful villain because their malevolence can be obscured by a patina of reasonableness. Global warming and other manmade problems are going to end the world if we don’t do something — so just about anything is justified! But their villainy resonates with the masses because they actually do want to make life worse for people, for the most part. There’s a reason France convulsed in recent weeks, as middle-class protesters angered by taxes pushed for by environmentalists took to the streets. Environmentalists want to increase the costs of everyday goods and services by taxing carbon. They want you to fly less and to pay more, via offsets, when you do fly. They want you to stop eating meat. They want you to stop having kids. They want to deprive you of disabled-friendly plastic straws — and they’re coming for your delightful balloons next. They want to turn your corpse into food for plants because even the sweet release of death cannot save you from the environmentalist menace. There is no aspect of your life that environmentalists don’t want to tinker with, no realm immune from their meddling: just think of those poor small-businessmen whose livelihoods were destroyed by a deranged EPA bureaucrat in the 1984 classic “Ghostbusters.”"
2019: the year of peak green bullsh*t - "2019 was the most extraordinary year of green bullshit yet. Despite the planet being a wealthier, healthier and safer place than it was when fears of global warming first appeared on the political agenda in the 1980s – and despite the failure of more than half a century of green prognostications – crazy and destructive green ideas still dominate politics... There could be no doubting the sincerity of the teen who bore the emotional scars inflicted on [Greta] by the movement that she was to lead – she had been so traumatised by green propaganda that she had not spoken, not eaten and had refused to go to school. Environmentalism is nothing if not a cult of self-harm... The most useless parliament in British history asked itself this year whether the goal of reducing CO2 emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 went far enough. The figure should be 100 per cent, said MPs, who then instructed the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) to investigate the possibility of ‘Net Zero’ emissions. It could be done, said the CCC, for the bargain price of £50.8 billion in 2050... I asked the CCC in a freedom-of-information request how much these policies would cost between now and then. The answer is that the CCC does not know – it was only asked to calculate how much Net Zero would cost in 2050 – in the year it had already been achieved, not how much it would cost to achieve. Nonetheless, MPs didn’t even need to vote on making Net Zero the law – the statutory instrument that will consign much of the UK to ecological austerity was passed with barely any scrutiny."
Roger Hallam’s insult to Holocaust victims - "No doubt many people were appalled when they heard that Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, had told the German weekly die Zeit that there was nothing special about the Holocaust. He said genocides happen all the time. ‘In fact’, he said, ‘you might say it is like a regular event’... Hallam is by no means the first political activist to usurp the memory of the Holocaust for the purpose of promoting vile propaganda. Animal-rights activists in Canada refer have talked about a holocaust of seals. Anti-abortion campaigners in the US have denounced a holocaust of fetuses. In Australia, there is talk about a holocaust against Aborigines. The word ‘holocaust’ has been appropriated and manipulated to attack just about any target, from the erosion of biodiversity to the loss of jobs. When the Holocaust becomes an overused metaphor for evil, it starts to get detached from its historical significance. Far too often the Holocaust has become Disneyfied, turned into an entertainment spectacle... his contempt for the memory of the Holocaust is underpinned by today’s broader anti-humanist sensibility and sense of loathing for the legacy of human achievement. Its youthful and idealistic image notwithstanding, Extinction Rebellion is fuelled by an age-old misanthropic impulse. If you genuinely believe that the generations of the past have systematically destroyed the planet, then it makes a warped kind of sense to portray the Holocaust as just a footnote to thousands of years of ceaseless human depravity and ecocide. The ideology of Extinction Rebellion is founded on the conviction that the development of human civilisation, particularly the advance of science and technology and the subordination of the natural order to the needs of human society, is the source of all of today’s problems. The idea that civilisation bears responsibility for the perils of extinction implicitly assigns a low status to the human species. In fact, it expresses a sense of loathing for the human species. In numerous ecological treatises, people are regularly portrayed as loathsome parasites who threaten the existence of the Earth. That kind of sentiment is not a million miles away from the way the Nazis regarded the Jews"
ZUBY: on Twitter - "Unpopular opinion: For as long as 'climate change' is used as a Trojan horse for socialism and anti-natalism, there will be very little bipartisan progress on the issue."
The science is settled? I’m an engineer, and I’m not | The Spectator Australia - "Climate change, it seems, is a pill that has to be swallowed whole or not at all. Swallowing this pill means believing in all of the following propositions: the climate is warming, it will keep warming, the consequences will be catastrophic, it is caused by mankind’s releasing of the earth’s buried carbon stores, our only response must be to reduce our emissions immediately, it’s the government’s job to fix it and currently our irresponsible leaders are doing nothing... Climate change predictions do not have equivalent certainty to the theory of gravity, because climate change hypotheses can’t be tested in a lab. And without testing, science is just not that good at getting things right. The only way we can test this theory is to wait. And the problem of testability indicates that predictions are more likely to be wrong the further they are from current experience. Predicting that the average temperature of the earth will increase, or that the climate will change, is one thing. If I was allowed to just nibble the edge of the climate change biscuit, that’s the only part I might swallow. There’s no doubt the climate can change; we’ve had ice ages before.But no, I have to believe the whole lot. It’s an impending catastrophe. According to Greta, people are dying and her future is callously being stolen. Predicting that the consequences of this would be catastrophic, with mass extinction events, fires, extreme weather, global social collapse, eventually leaving behind a desert wasteland the likes of which a Martian would baulk at? That extends way beyond the reasonable predictive capability of science.Until it has been tested, it’s just a hypothesis and it is very likely to be wrong due to any number of ‘unknown unknowns’. Exhibit ‘A’ is the list of wrong hypotheses that have been discarded in the lead up to the current one. I am not willing to give these science sages anything like the status of infallibility... The claim is made that if we don’t stop using fossil fuels, everyone will die in a few (ten? twelve? twenty?) years. But if we stopped using them today, then everyone would die in a few weeks... I saw the following posted on Facebook last week:
Two premises of the drawing are quite intriguing.
The first premise is that there is a list of things that we could do, that have been proposed at the climate summit, which would achieve “a better world”. As many people have pointed out, however, it’s contestable whether the left-wing solutions proposed would actually make the world better. Consider the phrase “climate justice”. If you can parse this hatchet job of a phrase, you’ll see that it’s based on the belief that inequality is injustice. This is a fundamental tenet of the far left, and an extremely dangerous idea. “Climate Justice” says it’s not fair that one country should be disproportionately affected by climate change over another. Hence…
Wealth redistribution. It’s always part of the package...
The second premise of the illustration is that these world-improving things are not being done. That pesky climate-change sceptics are standing in the way of progress.
Look at that list again. I don’t know where the illustrator lives, but in Adelaide we already enjoy a liveable city with clean air and water. Sure, our children may not all be healthy, but obesity is not exactly climate-related. We also have a lot of ‘renewables’ and ‘sustainability’. In South Australia, we lead the way in bottle recycling and haven’t had plastic bags in shops for several years. Nationwide, Australia’s government has provided heavy subsidies of rooftop solar, ARENA throw money at all sorts of projects, and our government co-funds research into all facets of sustainability. Wind-turbines have been sprinkled on our continent from coast to coast.So as you can see, we’re doing nothing. David Attenborough said so. How dare we... I watched a climate scientist interviewed on the BBC say with a straight face that ‘we may have to consider more autocratic forms of government’. Seriously? Solving climate change is so important that we need to throw democracy away, hand ourselves over in vassalage to the dictates of a climate summit, because they have the infallible blueprints for a “better world” (which look alarmingly similar to the sort of blueprints that Karl Marx would have drawn up, and look what they achieved!)"
Strange how in philosophy of science we are told that science doesn't give us unimpeachable truths, and that hypotheses are always subject to revision - or even being dumped
The Incredible Story Of How Climate Change Became Apocalyptic - "apocalyptic narratives have always had a place in discussions of climate. In 1989 the United Nations warned that the world had “a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.” But the escalation of apocalyptic climate rhetoric in recent years is unprecedented. The drumbeat of doom has led some prominent figures to turn on the mainstream climate community, complaining that “climate scientists have been underestimating the rate of climate change and the severity of its effects.” In reality, climate science has not just accurately anticipated unfolding climate change, but has done so consistently for the past 50 years.There is thus an inconsistency here. Discussions of climate change have become more apocalyptic, but climate science has not. I have been working hard to understand this inconsistency, and while I don’t yet have all the answers, I have identified a big part of the puzzle, which I can report here for the first time... The decision by the IPCC to center its fifth assessment report on its most extreme scenario has been incredibly consequential. Thousands of academic studies of the future impacts of climate change followed the lead of the IPCC, and have emphasized the most extreme scenario as “business as usual” which is often interpreted and promoted as where the world is heading... Journalists promote these sensationalist findings, which are amplified by activists and politicians and as a consequence climate change becomes viewed as being more and more apocalyptic. The problem with the extreme “business as usual” scenario of the IPCC’s fifth assessment report is that it is already out of date. For 2020 the scenario wildly overstates emissions, and has been critiqued in the academic literature as a highly unlikely if not impossible future. The International Energy Agency has proposed scenarios for the next several decades that diverge greatly from the favored scenario of the IPCC... Remarkably, the IPCC is set to repeat its reliance on extreme scenarios as “business as usual” in its forthcoming sixth assessment report, even though these scenarios are already out of date."
Why Apocalyptic Claims About Climate Change Are Wrong - "no credible scientific body has ever said climate change threatens the collapse of civilization much less the extinction of the human species. “‘Our children are going to die in the next 10 to 20 years.’ What’s the scientific basis for these claims?” BBC’s Andrew Neil asked a visibly uncomfortable XR spokesperson last month.“These claims have been disputed, admittedly,” she said. “There are some scientists who are agreeing and some who are saying it’s not true. But the overall issue is that these deaths are going to happen.”“But most scientists don’t agree with this,” said Neil. “I looked through IPCC reports and see no reference to billions of people going to die, or children in 20 years. How would they die?”... “There is robust evidence of disasters displacing people worldwide,” notes IPCC, “but limited evidence that climate change or sea-level rise is the direct cause”What about “mass migration”? “The majority of resultant population movements tend to occur within the borders of affected countries," says IPCC.It’s not like climate doesn’t matter. It’s that climate change is outweighed by other factors. Earlier this year, researchers found that climate “has affected organized armed conflict within countries. However, other drivers, such as low socioeconomic development and low capabilities of the state, are judged to be substantially more influential.”Last January, after climate scientists criticized Rep. Ocasio-Cortez for saying the world would end in 12 years, her spokesperson said "We can quibble about the phraseology, whether it's existential or cataclysmic.” He added, “We're seeing lots of [climate change-related] problems that are already impacting lives."That last part may be true, but it’s also true that economic development has made us less vulnerable, which is why there was a 99.7% decline in the death toll from natural disasters since its peak in 1931.In 1931, 3.7 million people died from natural disasters. In 2018, just 11,000 did. And that decline occurred over a period when the global population quadrupled. What about sea level rise? IPCC estimates sea level could rise two feet (0.6 meters) by 2100. Does that sound apocalyptic or even “unmanageable”?Consider that one-third of the Netherlands is below sea level, and some areas are seven meters below sea level. You might object that Netherlands is rich while Bangladesh is poor. But the Netherlands adapted to living below sea level 400 years ago. Technology has improved a bit since then.What about claims of crop failure, famine, and mass death? That’s science fiction, not science. Humans today produce enough food for 10 billion people, or 25% more than we need, and scientific bodies predict increases in that share, not declines... Wheat yields increased 100 to 300% around the world since the 1960s, while a study of 30 models found that yields would decline by 6% for every one degree Celsius increase in temperature. Rates of future yield growth depend far more on whether poor nations get access to tractors, irrigation, and fertilizer than on climate change, says FAO. All of this helps explain why IPCC anticipates climate change will have a modest impact on economic growth... it’s not the case that “we’re putting our own survival in danger” through extinctions, as Elizabeth Kolbert claimed in her book, Sixth Extinction. As tragic as animal extinctions are, they do not threaten human civilization. If we want to save endangered species, we need to do so because we care about wildlife for spiritual, ethical, or aesthetic reasons, not survival ones. And exaggerating the risk, and suggesting climate change is more important than things like habitat destruction, are counterproductive.For example, Australia’s fires are not driving koalas extinct, as Bill McKibben suggested. The main scientific body that tracks the species, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, labels the koala “vulnerable,” which is one level less threatened than “endangered,” two levels less than “critically endangered,” and three less than “extinct” in the wild... for fires in the United States. In 2017, scientists modeled 37 different regions and found “humans may not only influence fire regimes but their presence can actually override, or swamp out, the effects of climate.” Of the 10 variables that influence fire, “none were as significant… as the anthropogenic variables,” such as building homes near, and managing fires and wood fuel growth within, forests... Climate scientists are starting to push back against exaggerations by activists, journalists, and other scientists.“While many species are threatened with extinction,” said Stanford’s Ken Caldeira, “climate change does not threaten human extinction... I would not like to see us motivating people to do the right thing by making them believe something that is false.”I asked the Australian climate scientist Tom Wigley what he thought of the claim that climate change threatens civilization. “It really does bother me because it’s wrong,” he said. “All these young people have been misinformed. And partly it’s Greta Thunberg’s fault. Not deliberately. But she’s wrong.”"... “If you want to minimize carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2070 you might want to accelerate the burning of coal in India today,” MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel said.“It doesn’t sound like it makes sense. Coal is terrible for carbon. But it’s by burning a lot of coal that they make themselves wealthier, and by making themselves wealthier they have fewer children, and you don’t have as many people burning carbon, you might be better off in 2070.” Emanuel and Wigley say the extreme rhetoric is making political agreement on climate change harder."
Why Climate Alarmism Hurts Us All - "I wanted to know what Extinction Rebellion was basing its apocalyptic claims upon, and so I interviewed its main spokesperson, Sarah Lunnon.“It’s not Sarah Lunnon saying billions of people are going to die,” Lunnon told me. ”The science is saying we’re headed to 4 degrees warming and people like Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Center and Johan Rockström from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research are saying that such a temperature rise is incompatible with civilized life. Johan said he could not see how an Earth at 4 degrees (Celsius) warming could support a billion or even half-billion people.”... there is nothing in any of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that has ever suggested anything like what she is attributing to Anderson and Rockström. Why should we rely on the speculations of two scientists over the IPCC?... To get to the bottom of the “billions will die” claim, I interviewed Rockström by phone.He told me that the Guardian reporter had misunderstood him... is there IPCC science showing that food production would actually decline? “As far as I know they don’t say anything about the potential population that can be fed at different degrees of warming,” he said.Has anyone, I asked, done a study of what happens to food production at 4 degrees warming? “That’s a good question,” said Rockström, who is an agronomist. “I must admit I have not seen a study. It seems like such an interesting and important question.”In fact, scientists, including two of Rockström’s colleagues at the Potsdam Institute, recently modeled food production.Their main finding was that climate change policies are more likely to hurt food production and worsen rural poverty than climate change itself, even at 4 to 5 degrees warming. The “climate policies” the authors refer to are ones that would make energy more expensive and result in more bioenergy (the burning of biofuels and biomass), which would increase land scarcity and drive up food costs... Similarly, UN Food and Agriculture concludes in its report, “The Future of Food and Agriculture” that food production will rise 30% by 2050 unless “sustainable practices” are adopted in which case it would rise just 10% to 20%... technological change significantly outweighs climate change in every single one of FAOs scenarios... the problems from sea level rise that Oppenheimer is calling “unmanageable” are situations like the ones that already occur, such as in the days following Hurricane Katrina... If the Greenland ice sheet were to completely disintegrate, sea levels would rise by seven meters, but over a 1,000-year period. Even if temperatures rose 6° Celsius, the Greenland ice sheet would lose just 10% of its volume over 400 to 500 years.The Nobel-winning economist, William Nordhaus, calculates that the total loss of the Greenland ice sheet would increase the optimal cost of carbon by just 5%... student climate activist Greta Thunberg warns of “unforeseen tipping points and feedback loops, like the extremely powerful methane gas escaping from rapidly thawing Arctic permafrost.”But if methane gas escaping the permafrost were “unforeseen,” then Thunberg wouldn’t have forseen it.In reality, climate scientists closely monitor the release of gases from the permafrost and take the additional warming from them into account in estimating temperature rises.Last week, a group of scientists including Rockström argued in an opinion “Comment” at the journal Nature that “evidence is mounting” that the loss of the Amazon rainforest and West Antarctic ice sheet “could be more likely than was thought.”What they described, however, would take place over hundreds and perhaps thousands of years. At no point do they predict “billions will die.”... I wasn’t the only person who felt confused by the multiple “ifs” and “coulds” in the commentary. “The paper has a strange array of rising risks lumped as ‘tipping points,’” noted Columbia University Earth Institute’s Andy Revkin.Justin Ritchie, a researcher at the University of British Columbia, highlighted 11 conditional statements in the four paragraphs summarizing the complicated causality for a “global cascade” of tipping points.“I might be the only one,” writes Ritchie, “but after reading it I’m actually less convinced about imminent climate tipping points... "a majority of the climate models predicted the Amazon getting wetter,” Lenton said, “but the observations are showing a drying trend, particularly in the key seasons.”... I was surprised to be asked whether some amount of exaggeration about climate change wasn’t necessary to grab people’s attention. My response was, “Not if journalists and scientists hope for any trust with the public.”... The good news is that mainstream climate scientists are starting to push back against the fear-mongering... Dr. Jo House, a Bristol University climate scientist, tweeted at Read, “you spoke at our Net Zero conference in Oxford, you disagreed with the scientists while you made up untrue stuff, and said it was ok that [Extinction Rebellion] XR ‘stretched the truth’.”On the same thread, a young man replied, “Thank you for speaking out against this. I am a young person and one of Read’s talks last year made my mental health spiral and I almost made some awful life decisions.”Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide among teenagers are at their highest levels in two decades in Britain and the United States."
Of course, climate change hystericists just claim that the scientific consensus is wrong - because the IPCC is too conservative
We must listen to scientists when we can twist their words to support our apocalyptic fantasies - but ignore them when they complain we misrepresent the science
We are throwing money at the wrong solutions to climate change - "you need to dramatically increase investment in research and development into green energy"
Strange how Bjorn Lomborg doesn't know about nuclear?
Why Everything They Say About California Fires — Including That Climate Matters Most — Is Wrong - "I asked Dr. Jon Keeley, a US Geological Survey scientist who has researched the topic for 40 years, if he thought the 2018 Paradise fire could be attributed to climate change.“It’s almost certainly not climate change,” he said. “We’ve looked at the history of climate and fire throughout the whole state, and through much of the state, particularly the western half of the state, we don’t see any relationship between past climates and the amount of area burned in any given year.”... All of the scientists I interviewed expressed frustration that journalists have failed to distinguish between two distinct types of fires... Mountain ecosystems have the opposite problem from coastal ones. There are too many fires in the shrublands and too few prescribed burns in the Sierras.Keeley refers to the Sierra fires as “fuel-dominated” and the shrubland fires as “wind-dominated.”The on solution to fires in the shrubland is to prevent them and/or harden homes and buildings to them.Before Europeans arrived, fires burned up woody biomass in forests every 10 to 20 years, preventing the accumulation of (wood) fuel, and burned in the shrublands every 50 to 120 years.But for the last 100 years, the US Forest Service (USFS) and other agencies put out most fires, resulting in the accumulation of wood fuel. “It’s like the forests have become a really tall version of chaparral,” said Safford... In 2006, scientists predicted climate change would increase the east-to-west blowing winds, worsening these coastal fires, but in 2011 and again in 2019 scientists predicted they would decrease.“Some will argue that it’s climate change but there is no evidence that it is,” said Keeley. “It’s the fact that somebody ignites a fire during an extreme [wind] event.”... “Some people would say, ‘Well, that’s associated with climate change.’ But there’s no relationship between climate and these big fire events.” What then is driving the increase in fires? “If you recognize that 100% of these [shrubland] fires are started by people, and you add 6 million people [since 2000], that’s a good explanation for why we’re getting more and more of these fires,” said Keeley... In 2017, Keeley and a team of scientists modeled 37 different regions across the US and found “humans may not only influence fire regimes but their presence can actually override, or swamp out, the effects of climate.”Of the 10 variables, the scientists explored, “none were as significantly significant… as the anthropogenic variables.”"
The Real Reason They Behave Hypocritically On Climate Change Is Because They Want To - "Leonardo DiCaprio, Katy Perry, Chris Martin, Harry Styles, Nick Jonas, Priyanka Chopra, and Orlando Bloom flew by private jet to an elite Google conference to discuss new ways to moralize about climate change. (Prince Harry lectured the crowd in bare feet.)And Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is currently sailing on a yacht from Monaco to New York to set an example of how to live without emitting carbon when in reality her trip will emit four times more emissions than flying would have because her crew is jetting back home afterward... it’s inconceivable that the celebrities don’t know they are behaving hypocritically. It’s common knowledge that flying by jet results in significant carbon emissions. If it weren’t, then Harry and Meghan wouldn’t have triggered such an intense reaction.Indeed, they implicitly acknowledged their hypocrisy. Elton John bought carbon offsets to supposedly cancel out Harry and Meghan’s emissions, while a spokesperson for Thunberg acknowledged, "It would have been less greenhouse gas emissions if we had not made this departure."A simpler explanation for the hypocrisy of celebrities who moralize about climate change is that it is a way of flaunting their special status. Hypocrisy is the ultimate power move. It is a way of demonstrating that one plays by a different set of rules from the ones adhered to by common people. Hypocrisy demonstrates how unaccountable one is to conventional morality.Such displays work because, unlike wealth, status is inherently subjective. The more of it you are perceived to have, the more of it you actually have... The problem for Greta, Harry, and Gore is that moralizing isn’t incidental to their climate advocacy but rather central to it. They are famous not simply for sounding the alarm but for claiming to be morally superior and setting an example . But all three show that it is impossible for even the most committed people to live “morally” if “morally” is defined as living without using fossil fuels, which are nearly 90% of our primary energy."
Bruges Group 🇬🇧 on Twitter - "Climate Protest Bingo:
- “Tories Out!”
- “Stop Boris!”
- “Stop the Coup!”
- “Decolonise Education!”
- “Socialist Worker.”
- “Oooh! Jeremy Corbyn!”
- EU Flags.
Is it really just about Climate Change?"
Young climate activist wants to phase out fossil fuels, move to cleaner energy, but is realistic - "If environmentalist Ho Xiang Tian had his way, the lights on Jurong Island would be permanently turned off... The 23-year-old student acknowledged in an interview with TODAY on Wednesday (Sept 25) that shutting down the man-made industrial island would have enormous economic implications — but he stressed that failing to act decisively on climate change would have similar results... Mr Ho generally avoided reading comments online, knowing that they would be unpleasant... Some critics of the climate action movement have argued that proposed solutions to tackle climate change may impact Singapore’s economy and affect the livelihoods of some. Doing away with the fossil fuel industry could result in massive job losses, for instance.But Mr Ho countered that climate change will impact the economy regardless. “These people don’t want to impact the economy now. They just want to let the economy in the future suffer. Maybe they won’t be around then, but people who will be around would have something to say about that.”... Mr Ho also cautioned against anyone thumbing their noses at individual action, thinking that it will have no impact.Using figures that were used in a survey conducted by Energy Efficient Singapore, he calculated that if every household in Singapore stops using air-conditioning and water heaters, carbon emissions from Singapore could be cut by 3 per cent."
The climate activist echo chamber!
Since he rather suffer now rather than later, he should give me his life savings and I will return them to him in 40 years
Apparently radical degradation of quality of life resulting in a 3% cut in emissions is having an impact
𝐓𝐚𝐲𝐥𝐨𝐫 𝐃𝐚𝐲 on Twitter - "450 B.C.: Let's kill your babies to change the weather!
2019 A.D.: Let's kill your babies to change the weather!"
Climate change and bushfires - you're missing the point! - "Climate change has yet again been blamed for another natural disaster, this time the recent bushfires in NSW. But much more important is the role of poor land-use planning decisions that are increasing our nation’s vulnerability to fire, and other natural perils... Prime Minister Tony Abbott was correct to assert that bushfires are a fact of life in Australia... Bushfire losses can therefore be explained by the increasing exposure of dwellings to fire-prone bushlands. No other influences need be invoked. So even if climate change had played some small role in modulating recent bushfires, and we cannot rule this out, any such effects on risk to property are clearly swamped by the changes in exposure. The result is unsurprising given that it has been a consistent conclusion from many other studies in different countries and across many different hazards, in fact some 30-odd different peer-reviewed studies to date. And the IPCC (2012) underscored this conclusion"
More than climate change driving Queensland fires, explain climatologists - ""Climate change is playing its role here, but it's not the cause of these fires," Dr Thornton said."
Green Tape Prevents Volunteer Rural Firefighters from Reducing Bushfire Risk - "The Volunteer Firefighters Association (VFFA), the body representing the Voice of Volunteer Rural Firefighters in NSW refutes the claim by green alarmists that climate change is the cause of the recent bushfires in New South Wales.It’s ridiculous to blame climate change when we know there has been far worse bushfires stretching back to the earliest days of European settlement in Australia including the Black Saturday Victoria 2009, NSW Bushfires 1994, Ash Wednesday Victoria 1983, Blue Mountains NSW 1968, Black Tuesday Hobart 1967 and Black Friday Victoria 1939, said Peter Cannon, President of the VFFA.The VFFA is angered by comments from the green lobby groups that tackling climate change was more important than prescribed burning of forest fuels to reduce bushfire risk. The real blame rests with the greens and their ideology as they continue to oppose and undermine our efforts to conduct hazard reduction in the cooler months and to prevent private landowners from clearing their lands to reduce bushfire risk."
Bjørn Lomborg - Posts - "The Australian wildfires are tragic.But exploiting them for 'proving' climate change is confirmation bias... the climate models predict not just temperate forests to see their burnt area increase. They predict almost *all* biomes to see their burnt area increase.So, if people *only* look at temperate forests this year, show that they burnt more and conclude ‘see, climate change’ it is confirmation bias.You can’t take a result *after* it has happened and decide only to test the part that fits your theory.Global warming should increase *all* burnt area in Australia, and it should increase burnt area in Australia minus NT (avoiding a lot of the tropical savanna) even more.The fact that burnt area for both Australia and Australia minus NT has declined is inconvenient for the claim that global warming increases burnt area.Here I show the likely *annual* burnt area for all of Australia from 1900 to 2020... The data shows two things.First, climate models would expect the burnt area of Australia to be increasing. It is not.Second, the current Australian fire season is in terms of area burnt not unprecedented compared to the past."
Nick on Twitter - "Of course it easier for Greenies to blame 'Climate Change' than their own bureaucratic nonsense. A volunteer firefighter was fined $100,000 & treated as criminal for creating a firebreak on his property. His house was only one not burnt down in his area."
'We saw this coming for years': Farmers take legal action after fires - "Six farmers are preparing to take legal action against the state government, arguing a massive bushfire in northern NSW could have been prevented if more hazard reduction had been allowed... Beef farmer Tony Brazier, who lives just outside Guyra, said fuel loads in the park had been allowed to reach dangerous levels because "everyone is too scared to burn anything"... "My clients have been fighting fires for decades but they say they have never seen anything like it," Mr Jackson said."They want to protect the biodiversity of the national park and certainly don't want to destroy it but since the park has been locked up, the fuel loads have increased significantly.""
The Inconvenient Facts On Australian Bushfires - "We live in a time where every extreme weather or climate-related event is immediately associated with human caused climate change. Such associations are often not really about the science of climate, but rather a symbol used to exhort in the political battle over climate change. For instance, on one extreme there is Michael Mann, of Penn State University, who is spending an academic sabbatical in Sydney. He claims that “The brown skies I observed in the Blue Mountains this week are a product of human-caused climate change… it’s not complicated.” Mann frequently uses the climate issue as the basis for electoral politicking – he calls for Australians to remove their Prime Minister: Australians are going “to have to vote out climate change deniers like [Scott] Morrison.” In contrast, the Australian Academy of Science says that the causes of bushfires are actually extremely complicated... rather than calling for changing out individual politicians, the Academy calls for improved policies: “Everything, including urban planning; building standards; habitat restoration; biodiversity and species preservation; and land, water and wildlife management will need careful and measured consideration.”... In the Abatzoglou study, the 22% of the burnable land area where detection of the role of human-caused climate change has been achieved includes the Amazon, Mediterranean, Scandinavia and Western North America. It does not include Siberia or Australia.That’s right, according to the latest research looking at the issue, the role of human-caused climate change in Australian bushfires has not yet been detected. It remains to be seen if the fires of 2019/2020 will alter that conclusion, but according to the Abatzoglou study, such detection is not expected until the 2040s. And that conclusion depends upon projections based on an extreme (and implausible) scenario for future emissions (RCP8.5), so detection may take a bit longer, assuming the projections are correct."
Fire-ravaged Mallacoota to receive beer delivery from Navy ship - "A pub with no beer is the last thing people need in the bushfire-stricken Victorian town of Mallacoota... Mallacoota Hotel Motel arranged a last-minute delivery of 3000 litres of beer with Carlton & United Breweries - to be delivered on the Navy ship HMAS Choules."
Anthony on Twitter - "A climate activist on radio with @TomElliott3AW admitted she would be happy to see PM Scott Morrison’s house burn down with his family in it. And we are supposed to take our social cues from them?"
Why I Quit Being a Climate Activist - "Anti-racism and anti-capitalism need to be made part of organizing. If “Green” policies fail to consider anti-racism and migrant rights, how is any person of colour supposed to feel voting for them or organizing in the same spaces?"
I guess it's not such a big problem after all since she can afford to quit
Eating out, ice cream and booze may be worse for climate change than meat - "Meat has earned a bad reputation as an environmentally damaging food, in part because beef production is known to emit 20 times more greenhouse gases than bean production for the same protein benefit.But is meat getting too much of the blame?A Japan-based study, widely regarded as reflective of most wealthy nations, found that the consumption of sweets, alcohol and restaurant food adds to families’ carbon footprints in a larger capacity than other food and drink choices... Findings from scientists at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health found that diets in which meat, fish or dairy products were consumed only once a day have a smaller negative impact on emissions and water supplies than exclusively vegetarian diets of three meals a day, including milk and eggs, in 95% of countries analyzed."
How Billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg Corrupted Climate Science - "This is a story of American democracy. In one sense, it’s a noble story. People with shared values have come together to petition the government and the public on their political aims, just as envisioned by James Madison in Federalist 10.In another sense it’s a story of privilege and conceit – the privilege in American democracy that accompanies being mindbogglingly wealthy and the conceit that climate politics could be best pursued by corrupting the scientific literature on climate change... At the center of the corruption of climate science discussed here a highly technical scenario of the future (called Representation Concentration Pathway 8.5 or RCP8.5). Over the past decade this particular scenario has moved from an extreme outlier to the center of climate policy discussions... Dodgy science published by climate advocacy groups is certainly not uncommon and it is usually not that interesting. But the genius of the Risky Business project was that it did not stop with a flashy report aimed at the daily news cycle. It undertook a far more sophisticated campaign focused on introducing its methods into the mainstream scientific literature, where they could take on a life of their own... Imagine the reaction if a lead author of the U.S. National Climate Assessment with funding from a Republican billionaire and working with consultants opposed to climate action had their research, that of their funder and their colleagues cited some 200 times in the NCA – and that research was fatally flawed and the researcher’s financial connections with the consultants was undisclosed. I’d wager that it would receive some attention."
Kathy Castor, House climate chair, slammed for urging Google to squelch 'climate misinformation' - "The chair of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis was accused Wednesday of censorship after calling on Google to take action against YouTube videos that promote “climate denial and climate misinformation.”Rep. Kathy Castor, Florida Democrat, asked Google in a Monday letter to remove “climate disinformation videos” from YouTube’s “recommendation algorithm,” demonetize videos that promote “harmful misinformation,” and correct the record for those exposed to such “misinformation.”... “Obviously, the MIT professor of atmospheric physics should not be allowed to run amok on Youtube. People might learn something,” cracked Australian climate blogger Joanne Nova."
‘Alarmism enforcement’ on hurricanes and global warming - "I used to be concerned about ‘consensus enforcement’ on the topic of climate change. Now I am concerned about ‘alarmism enforcement.’Ever since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, any hurricane causing catastrophic damage has been seized upon by climate alarmists as evidence of the horrors of global warming.As if the record-holding hurricanes from the 1920’s through the 1950’s never happened... In the old days, we had to rely on computer hackers (e.g. ClimateGate) and FOIA requests to provide insights into the back-channel thuggery of these activist climate scientists. Now this thuggish behavior has been normalized, and we can see it all on twitter (that is, if you aren’t blocked)...
Your behavior is violating the norms of science, and in my opinion is unethical:
failure to acknowledge uncertainty and low levels of confidence in much of the research surrounding hurricanes and climate change.
cherry picking research that supports your personal narrative of alarm, without acknowledging disagreement among scientists and other research and assessment reports that do not support your narrative of alarm.
misleading the public and policy makers as a result of the above two practices
and last but not least, bullying other respected scientists who have different perspectives on evaluating the evidence."
Leading Meteorologist Slams Climate Alarmists As 'Desperate' - "High-profile Swiss meteorologist Jörg Kachelmann has penned a stinging commentary in the online Bayerischer Kurier concerning all the climate doomsday hysteria sweeping across Europe and warns history tells us such hysteria has never turned out well... the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) is promoting “silly” science and “view themselves as the prophets of the imminent end of the world.”One problem with all the über-alarmism, Kachelmann sees, is a tendency of people simply resigning because they’ve come to believe that nothing can be done to stop the coming doomsday, and so why bother trying.He also sharply criticizes green activists who blame every extreme weather event on man-made climate change, writing that it is “desperate and scientifically completely wrong”. One reason the activists have become so shrill, Kachelmann believes, is due in large part to the media’s willingness to run with every sensational story without an inkling of background checking... Another hot issue in Germany is fine particle pollution. Here Kachelmann also sees policymakers stampeding down the wrong solution path, and are falsely putting most of the blame on automobiles:“The exceedance of fine particles and other pollutants is almost exclusively due not to traffic, but to wood-burning stoves, which have recently multiplied in densely populated areas, because insane people claim that they are “ecological.”Over recent years, the German government has been turning a blind eye to dirty wood-burning stoves – even supporting their use. Now towns and villages across Germany are filled with choking smoke from the supposedly climate-friendly burning of wood."
Spring in Greenland interpreted as climate change: »This is completely normal« - "CNN has presented a photo as evidence of the devastating impact of a warming planet, but that is not necessarily what the photo shows. Scientists say this is a typical and damaging climate doomsday story... a photo of a dog sled moving through melt water in a fjord near Thule in north-west Greenland went global.The picture was taken by a scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) and appears ominous. As if the ice is melting fast under the feet of the dogs and might at any moment crack and pull the sled down into the deep water. As if the very foundation of humanity is melting before the camera.The photo has been shared by CNN, the BBC and several of the world's leading papers, and even the former U.S. Vice President and one-time presidential candidate Al Gore, who joined the fight against climate change in 2001, has asked the DMI for permission to use the picture in his efforts to convince the world that action is urgently needed to prevent a looming climate disaster.In Denmark, too, politicians have linked the photo to climate change. Pia Olsen Dyhr, leader of the Socialist People's Party (SF), has used the picture to promote one initial result of ongoing negotiations to form a new Danish government – a 70 percent reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030... »This always happens,« says Apollo Mathiassen, a hunter and local councillor for the Siumut Party in the municipality of Avannaata. »This happens particularly up there at Thule where the picture was taken. It just depends on how thick the ice is. This doesn't happen with thin ice. It's because the ice is so thick that there aren't any holes for the water from the melting snow to pass through, so the water gathers on top,« Apollo Mathiassen explains. In north-west Greenland hunters call this »imaq«, meaning something along the lines of »everything is water«.»I was probably about five years old when I first saw this in the early 1970s. It's completely normal. Actually, it has become a bit rarer because the climate is warmer now, and if the ice doesn't thicken enough over the winter, the water will push through,« the 51-year-old hunter explains.In other words – according to him – the picture does not show the impact of climate change but rather a phenomenon that will gradually disappear as our climate warms... He suggests that social media are the reason why the world has suddenly discovered what spring in north-west Greenland looks like and is now interpreting it as a looming disaster... Finn Bo Madsen, head of DTU Space, the department for space research at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), has set up GPS stations across Greenland and has been visiting the area around Qaanaaq – Thule – since the 1980s. He too does not see anything unusual in the now world-famous photo. »I've seen it with my own eyes and driving through half a meter of water in spring is widely described in the logs of the old expeditions. So, the photo looks good, but the hunters are right. It doesn't show climate change,« Finn Bo Madsen says. Jason Box, a professor of glaciology, the science of naturally occurring ice, at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), says he understands why hunters are surprised to see a photo of a common phenomenon in the month of June be misinterpreted as evidence of a climate disaster.»This photo is being abused by alarmists«... Jørgen Peder Steffenson, a professor of glaciology at the University of Copenhagen, has spent his summers in north-west Greenland since the early 1980s and is clearly frustrated with the way the photo is being used.»It's a great photo, but the situation is completely normal. In itself, the picture is pretty innocent, but it's being abused. It's like a nude photo being shared online... »The world is so caught up in getting the next doomsday story that anything goes, and so climate activists are pulling out one circus horse after another. Here we have a photo of an annually occurring phenomenon around Qaanaaq in Greenland,« he says.»We have an entire movement which has mounted a little Swedish girl in front of the climate wagon, and she (Greta Thunberg, ed.) has been fed with fear and doomsday stories through all of her childhood. To us scientists it's inherently frustrating that everything is exaggerated and presented as doomsday stories, but these doomsday stories are also radicalising our youths«"
Meet the 19-year-old 'anti-Greta', who warns Thunberg's 'alarmism' must be stopped - "With her slight frame, long blonde hair and converse trainers, German teenager Naomi Seibt might not seem the most obvious candidate to front the growing climate scepticism movement... When we meet at CPAC, it’s clear there is no love lost between Seibt and Thunberg, nor does the German teen crave the same level of fame Thunberg had garnered. In fact, she says, Greta’s cult-like status is problematic. “I think it’s wrong we let people like Greta Thunberg - who is a young girl, who has no scientific or economic experience - or politicians or celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, talk about a scientific topic,” she says.Couldn’t the same criticism be levelled against her?“I don’t want people to follow me unconditionally, as many do with Greta,” she says. “My message is: start thinking instead.”... “I don’t want you to panic. I want you to think.”... But though Greta has been hailed a hero, Seibt’s new-found platform has come at a heavy cost. “In my hometown, even in my extended family, I have lost friends because of this”... When she gave a speech in Münster recently, thousands showed up to protest. “It’s very strange to think there are people protesting against me,” she says, “I wish they had just listened to what I had to say, but they don’t want to talk”. She says she has also become a target for Antifa, the anti-fascist group, and regularly receives rape and death threats over the phone... Seibt insists she will not be cowed into silence (“That’s more terrifying to me”). After all, she says, she is used to sticking out from the crowd. A gifted student, she was fast-tracked through high school, graduating when she was just 16. She went on to start an economics degree at the University of Mannheim, but dropped out after one semester because she felt she had already done enough reading on the subject... Seibt agrees that human activity is a factor in global warming, but believes that impact has been overstated. She rejects the notion that she’s a climate change denier, saying critics use the label as “a way to shut down people on the other side”. She even goes as far as to suggest that many of those promoting fears over climate change are in fact using it as a way to “control our lives”... “I think we’ll look back in 12 years and either smile or be mortified by how much we’ve spent, on how we destroyed lots of society and dropped people into poverty because of these drastic measures that turned out to be so wrong”... she does draw a contrast between her own views and those of Thunberg, saying she “really hates” seeing Greta so fearful about the future. “She says that she wants people to panic, I really don’t want people to panic.’’Her only agenda, then, is free speech. “I always tell people - please, question me, do your own research. And if you come to a different conclusion? Then that’s awesome.”"
Apparently it's dangerous to ask people to think for themselves
First-ever compendium of indigenous technologies provides a powerful toolkit for climate-resilient design
Given that environmental activists want to destroy modernity, this is telling