I & I Editorial BoardI&I Editorial
If anyone doubts the reality of that headline, they either didn’t see the Democrats’ climate townhall, or they need to go back and watch it with an open mind. The alarmists’ objective, which fits perfectly with leftist and progressive politics, is to put themselves in charge of the world.
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.
And for what? Is our ever-changing climate an existential threat? Hardly. A slightly warmer planet “is not going to be the end of the world,” says Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization.
“The world is just becoming more challenging,” he told a Finnish magazine earlier this month. “In parts of the globe, living conditions are becoming worse, but people have survived in harsh conditions.”
While he’s neither a denier nor skeptic — he is probably best described as a “lukewarmer” — Taalas says he’s concerned about the fanatic elements that are even attacking the “climate experts” who are promoting the man-made global warming narrative. They, he says, “claim that we should be much more radical.”
“They are doomsters and extremists; they make threats,” he said.
Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore tweeted that Taalas’ statement is “biggest crack in the alarmist narrative for a long time.”
“The meteorologists are real scientists and probably fed up with Greta, Mann, Gore, & AOC catastrophists. Good on him.”
The climate townhall is not the first time those who sow fear have revealed their usually veiled, and always dark, reasons to continue to feed hysteria.
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.
“The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” Saikat Chakrabarti said, according to the Washington Post Magazine. “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti asked an aide to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee while the pair met at a Washington, D.C. coffee shop in May. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
Sam Ricketts, Gov. Inslee’s climate director, initially said “yes,” changed it to “no,” the Post reported, before finally settling on “it’s dual.” Ricketts said the other half of the GND’s objective is “building an economy” that has “more broadly shared prosperity, equitability and justice throughout.” Which of course would require a massive shakeup of private economic affairs.
Al Gore’s daughter Karenna, who established the Union Theological Seminary’s Center for Earth Ethics, apparently “isn’t so sure” our current political system can “save the climate.” According to Vox, “she sees the Center’s work as exposing ‘the deeper root cause of climate change: a value system and an economic development paradigm based on short-term economic gain.’”
Karenna Gore believes “globalized capitalism and the big corporations that drive it are ‘just draining the integrity and the meaning out of life.’” So she has a better world in mind. “I don’t think we can do all of the same stuff, with the same mentality, and just solar power it,” she says.
Stirring up public fears of an imminent environmental disaster is an old game. Armstrong Economics reminds us that “climate change has been a routine scare tactic since the 1930s.”
“It resurfaced after World War II when they were trying to stop rebuilding industry and the housing market which had been destroyed, … appeared again in the 1960s when there was a great expansion in housing,” then was “flipped upside down” in the 1970s when we were told global cooling “would destroy civilization.”
Today it “is a political issue being used to raise taxes and to regulate human activity by removing ever-greater proportions of our human rights and freedom.”
When we say “tyranny,” we’re not talking about a new reign of terror or being compelled to live under Cuba- and North Korea-like oppression. But what word best describes a government system that issues prohibitions based on whim, and would forcibly redistribute ever greater sums of wealth in the pursuit of consolidating political power?
Until someone suggests a better word than tyranny, its the one we’re going to have to use.
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Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.
So, some politicians on the left want to stop global warming, and they also want to make the USA better according to their views. This does not mean the global warming is not an important issue.
Some US politicians on the right also see global warming as a threat. In fact, most politicians and non-politicians in the rest of the world see global warming as a threat to people, the environment, and the survival of other species. It’s mostly in the USA where conservative politicians have painted themselves into a corner of denial of climate science.
I’m just assuming you don’t fly or drive or use HVAC at home or work. You’re not like Gore or Obama who own mansions on the beach. That you’re leading by example. Then I might start believing you are actually sincere.
i think the article is very even handed and fair. the socialist left, including Merkel, Macron, Obama, etc. clearly wanted to impose EU style global socialism immigration quotas on us all. If Trump hadn’t come along, O’Bamas successor would have continued the push strongly in the USA. Global warming, which ties in well as a justification for population transfer, has clearly been exaggerated (none of Gores claims even came close to happening, the hockey stick is clearly false, polar bears are thriving, etc, etc) and yet you, Glen, ignore those two truths and attack the right. sounds like hysteria to me.
Polar bears are threatened.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/02/polar-bears-starve-melting-sea-ice-global-warming-study-beaufort-sea-environment/
No they don’t. “They” can be either side of your false dichotomy. The personal behaviors of the entire “sky is falling” crowd reveal that none of them actually believe the warnings they are paid so well to issue. And “deniers” aren’t denying anything, least of all that climate is in constant, gradual change.
The climate hoaxers are facing renewed popular skepticism – suspended for a time because .. who knew that scientists would deliberately lie? – and every subsequent doubling down is recognized as a desperate attempt to stave off the total collapse of their scheme.
You think that everyone who is concerned about climate change is one of a few rich celebrities. False.
And you think that we are experiencing normal, constant gradual change. Also false. This is the fastest warming in human history, and now the we have the warmest global average temperature in human history.
AGW is real, it is now and it is the most challenging thing we have ever faced. I do not believe it, i understand it, having earned a degree in this field. A Master of Science. Want to discuss it? I would like to answer any questions you may have.
Yeah kets discuss it. Let us discuss the need for democrats to have control over the world with their socialism and the fact it always fails. How about we discuss the carbon credit trading derivatives that act like options as carbon offsets. How about we discuss that sham. Al Gore and those European bankers never got that chance on Wall Street. The sky is always falling for democrats. More CO2 is put in the atmosphere by a volcano than anything man can do. And please study the sunspot cycles going back to the 1300s to see where we are today. No one takes your degree seriously with socialist professors spewing their indoctrinations into your head.
Your sources are bad.
Human activities release more than 130 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes.
Sunspot cycles do not come close to explaining the warming we are experiencing. In fact, solar out is down over the last 30+ years, while the Earth is warming..
Yup. Let’s discuss. Start with admiring that your believe in CAGW. Next justify your blind belief in positive feedback.blink
discuss this
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2019.00223/full
don’t forget that the UN IPCC consists of PhD’s – just like the Fed. Perhaps your masters degree makes you unqualified?
AGW, Global warming, Climate change or whatever you want to call it is nothing more than the progressive movements greatest gift to themselves. Scare the masses and take control of their lives to build your vision of Utopia. Thank God that normal Americans are waking up and will refuse to go along with this charade.
Global warming/climate change did not come from the progressive movement, it came from science. Some of the scientists are conservatives.
Fortunately, you are also wrong about the trend among Americans, who are in fact waking up to the importance of addressing the climate crisis.
OK, name a set of ‘behaviors’ that the Earth’s climate system could that scientists could observe it doing that would cause you and yours to say something other the usual ‘climate is changing in a way that needs fixing and can only be fixed by giving the politicians more control over our lives and resources’. If there is none, then what you are flogging is NOT a scientific theory– i.e., there IS no observational or experimental evidence that could invalidate it.
The potential for being invalidated by making predictions that the actual measurements do not match is a key test of whether a theory is proper science. Having a track record of making predictions which match the observed behavior is a key (and therefore surviving the invalidation process) is the mark of a successful theory. If a theory does not survive, there are three options.
1) Revise it to explain the discrepancies.
2) Use it with caveats about the conditions under which it does not yield accurate results. We did this with Newtonian dynamics. That model works just fine (i.e., the errors are manageably small) so long as high velocities and large masses are not in play. Otherwise, we switch to using Einstein’s models. Effectively, Newton’s model has become a subset of Einstein’s.
3) Abandon it if the discrepancies are too large and there is no reasonable set of modifications. (Especially if someone else has a better theory.)
It doesn’t help AGW catastrophism that some of its biggest proponents have been caught falsifying data– both by ‘cherrypicking’ data and by performing unwarranted manupulations on it. The (in)famous ‘hockeystick’ chart was produced by a combination of both crooked methods.
BTW, my own opinion on the subject is that our current CO2 production is not the major driving force on the climate system. Which is not to say that it’s having no effect. We probably started having a noticeable effect 4,000 to 5,000 years ago when rice cultivation (huge methane (CH4 )emissions) ramped up in the east Asia. CH4 is a far more powerful absorber of IR radiation than CO2, BTW. My strong suspicion is that background of heavy CH4 emissions may be what has held kept the current interglacial going as long as it has. If this is, in fact, the case, then we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions at our peril. The icesheets cometh.
As problematic as a warmer Earth might be, one having major continental ice sheets again would be far worse– it couldn’t possibly support the current human population. (Of course, tyrannical socialists collectivists would see that as a feature rather than as a bug.)
It is regrettable that op-eds generally fail to make the distinction between “global warming” as would be defined by an astrophysicist or “anthropogenic global warming” as would be defined by any climate alarmist. The latter, an alarmist position is pure fantasy. and will be proven to be one of the most absurd positions ever thought of in the modern age.
Physicists and climate scientists know that the greenhouse effect warms the Earth. Without it, the Earth would be an ice ball, and we would not be here.
We have increased CO2, a critical greenhouse gas, by over 40%, which has caused, and will continue to cause, warming. There is no scientific dispute about these basic facts.
Atmospheric CO2 is a minor factor in Earth’s climate control, but its effect on plant growth makes it determinant over the survivability of species. We live in a time of scarce and small-in-stature plants and animals compared to ages when CO2 concentrations were much higher than today. More of the “fattening” gas didn’t cause Earth to burn to a crisp back then, and it certainly won’t be anything other than a boon to life on Earth today.
It was much warmer millions of years ago when CO2 levels were much higher. Today’s ecosystems can’t relocate fast enough in many cases to survive continued rapid warming.
of course there is dispute that CO2 is driving warming. the facts are, apparently, that CO2 has been grossly overestimated as a factor in global warming, and water vapor (good old clouds and fog) has been greatly underestimated as a factor. only one climate model predicts past global surface temperature correctly (IMMCM4), and it also predicts negligible future warming.
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/427906-are-climate-models-overpredicting-global-warming.
Even the Cato Institute opinion piece in The Hill does not dispute the basic facts I presented.
funds are drying up because Trump de funded geo engineering…spraying…The elite are panicked and climate yada is the crazy issue. Fake news. The real issue is normel people start using the lexicon. If I say…carbon footprint…hehe I am giving cred to the insanity…IF I talk to my kids imaginary friend, the friend will be there until I GROW UP!!! so funny it is scary as hell
So Glen will Liz & Beto & Leo & Sean & Bernie all go withou
Politicians are about persuasion-they are not experts. The sun drives our climate plus our unique topography. They talk 0% co2. Plants go down hill at 100 ppm. Greenhouses like to keep the ppm up at 1200 so plants don’t have to strain by full expansion of their leaves or using too much water. We have made progress in solar & wind but they can’t supply the whole grid. Why? It’s called storage & horsepower. Only do as supplements. Still subject to outages in severe weather. There is something strange with politicians who view the world as something they must punish or penalize all the time. Climate has changed thruout history. You would know this if you took some advanced earth science courses. While they are trying to sell their debate, MIT is busy building their nuclear fusion topomak. None of them have mentioned that. By the way those graphs you have seen have been debunked & so have the emails. Some agency heads/profs see the govt as an infinite cash cow just sending out $ with no accountability. They try to sell people that the storms have never been worse. Well humans generally don’t live for millions of years to make that kind of comparison. None of them mention any real science. And the world ending in 12 years. If people believe that then it really shows we need a real earth science curriculum in schools because anyone who has had astronomy or geology 101 would know this is not true.
No one is talking about 0% atmospheric CO2. One frequently stated goal is 350 ppm, but most people would be happy if we could stop it at current levels.
It’s not news that climate has changed in the past–all climate scientists know that. But never in human history has it warmed this much, or this fast. And sudden change is hard on humans and other species. We are headed for a mass extinction.
The UN didn’t say the world would end in 12 years. They said we need to make big changes in 12 years in order to slow the warming and avoid big problems later in the century. Some politicians misquoted that.
The Sun’s cooling for the past 30+ years is not causing the record warming we are experiencing.
Solar output has been down for the last 30+ years. I think we can agree that that is not causing the record warming we are experiencing.
This article, and the comments about it, are a pretty good demonstration that the right is politicizing climate change. Here we have people dismissing the vast majority of climate scientists, and grasping at a variety of failed explanations and dismissals of global warming.
Over 95% of climate scientists agree that human activities are causing record warming via an increase in greenhouse gases, primarily CO2. The dissenters here can’t even agree among themselves whether it is warming, whether it is natural, what the cause is, etc. They only agree that they hate liberals.
Conservatives used to accept the science. Then some conservatives politicized it, and it became unacceptable to accept the science. Now, with more evidence each year, the public believes more than ever in the science, and Republican politicians are looking for a way out of the corner they have painted themselves into.
The question is, will Republicans take a fact-based position, like almost every other conservative party in the world? And, if they don’t, what will happen to them?
the “95% of scientists” argument uses the same flawed methods and the climate models.
to whit from here:
https://cei.org/content/cei-files-formal-complaint-regarding-nasas-claim-97-climate-scientist-agreement-global
“The claim that 97% of climate scientists believe humans are the primary cause of global warming is simply false,” said CEI attorney Devin Watkins. “That figure was created only by ignoring many climate scientists’ views, including those of undecided scientists. It is time that NASA correct the record and present unbiased figures to the public.”
Under guidance released by Office of Management and Budget in April, NASA has 120 days to respond to CEI’s request for correction and its response must include a “point-by-point response to any data quality arguments” raised in the request.”
Here is a link to a seminal piece, 7 years in the making and peer reviewed that debunks the mathematics and science backing the UN IPCC’s climate modelling models, data and analysis. It basically calls out the (linear) (combined) models as false models of fraudulent science. It takes several readings to fully understand the depths of shoddy work the UN IPCC has stooped to, to perpetrate a hoax that will cost millions of lives.
please read, analyze and pass round to every politician in every country to save the panet from these climate chicken little witch doctors, shaking rattles at windmills.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2019.00223/full
Debunked on reddit:
It’s good to have papers which challenge the orthodoxy on model evaluation, but this aint it.
In short Frank takes the results of Lauer and Hamilton, 2013, which gives an average model error for longwave cloud forcing (LCF) over 20 years of RMSE = 4 W m-2. He doesn’t use this as an average over 20 years as in the reference, but converts this error to W m-2 year-1 and assumes it can be applied to a new simple linear model of temperature he has constructed. That is, he takes a long term, 20yr average error in one variable (LCF) in one set of models (CMIP) and applies it yearly to another variable (temp) in another simple linear model. He propagates that error each year out to 2100, and gets very large uncertainty range by compounding the error.
As Nick Stokes points out, if his method was valid, he could have equally used a timescale of per month and gotten a sqrt(12) larger uncertainty. If he can get wildly different results based on his chosen timescale, then clearly the method is nonsense.
his simple linear model replicates the cmip’s. so does that mean that the cmip’s are invalid also?
It’s not about his use of CMIP. It’s about inappropriately compounding the uncertainty., i.e., it’s about bad analysis.
Many observers, including heralded scientists such as Freeman Dyson, have said for many years that global warming (and environmentalism generally) is actually a religion. As Michael Crichton pointed out, “Environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.” Since I have a Master of Divinity (from the very liberal Vanderbilt University), I explained just how that is so here: “Environmentalist religion explained” (https://senseofevents.blogspot.com/2008/05/environmentalist-religion-explained.html).
I concluded, “So there you are. At bottom, modern environmentalism has discarded scientific rigor to embrace something not much different than Leninism, the desire to control the major components of the way individuals live. From there it is a short step for environmentalism to Leninism’s successor: Stalinism, the desire to control every aspect of the way we live. That’s our future, minus the gulags. We hope.
“This seems an apt time to quote the old liberals’ bumper sticker: ‘If you’re not outraged, you are not paying attention’.”