I&I Editorial
A CNN producer recently wrote an opinion piece headlined “Climate politics are tearing the West apart.” He got it about half right. They are tearing us apart but not for the reasons he thinks.
Johan Bader, an associate producer for “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” is in agreement with The Economist, which has declared: “environmentalism is emerging as Europe’s new culture war.” We’re seeing much the same in the U.S.
But the cultural divide is not simply “concerned citizens” who “are pouring into the streets to lambaste feckless politicians for failing to protect the planet” against neighbors who “inveigh against out-of-touch politicians for instituting environmental policies that fail to protect them.”
The schism has been caused by a coalition of anti-capitalists, arrogant academics, authoritarians who have a need to dictate to others, know-it-alls, those who relish the status of their imagined moral superiority, and inveterate virtue-signalers who have “othered” global warming skeptics as well as the agnostics who have legitimate concerns about how the policy solutions forced on them will change their lives.
The first group, the aggressors, believe that anyone who doesn’t believe what they believe is beneath them. These elitist bullies consider a conflicting opinion an indication of low intellect, or criminality, or both. That’s why they can so easily define skeptics as rubes and outlaws who should be caged.
The cultural gap has been made obvious by the Extinction Rebellion. In one of its more infamous tantrums, the “painfully middle-class agitators” went “to a working-class part of East London early in the morning to lecture and inconvenience people who just wanted to get to work,” British columnist Brendan O’Neill recently wrote in Spiked.
The tension is not produced so much by one group being more well off than the other as it is one group thinking it is smarter than the other, and is therefore justified in hectoring and obstructing the othered group, and stealing its time. This plays out in the many efforts of true believers to “educate” their inferiors.
There is of course a religious element to the global warming scare, as well.
Just this week U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii urged those at a prayer breakfast to “believe in climate change as though it’s a religion, it’s not a science.”
Not a science? For three decades the alarmists have been saying it’s all about science, and that the science is settled, that doubters are anti-science, anti-intellectual.
Sharp observers have noted that the global warming narrative has a religious hierarchy. There is sin (man burning fossil fuels which emit carbon dioxide, his gluttonous consumption habits); absolution (carbon offsets, carbon fasts); evangelism (that neighbor with the electric vehicle, the empty head from Hollywood desperate to prove his or her relevance); prophecy (predictions that we have only a short time before the climate kills us); and salvation (believing the narrative).
Again, it’s the forces of good, those true believers, opposing the forces of evil, those depraved skeptics. And the church is the United Nations, the sacred an infallible text: the assessment reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Never do these smug and self-assured believers think for a moment that the U.N. and the IPCC are political bodies with agendas. But they inarguably are. New Zealand’s Vincent Gray, who has a doctorate in physical chemistry from Cambridge University and has been an expert reviewer of IPCC reports, told Forbes some years ago the panel “found that the public will believe almost anything that is represented as being agreed by ‘scientists,’ provided that you have enough of them and they are backed up by the requisite number of celebrities and public figures.” Therefore it’s necessary for the IPCC to “use spin, distortion, deception and even fabrication to cover up this absence of evidence.”
The IPCC’s distortions were enough to make Chris Landsea, a meteorologist who specializes in hurricane studies, quit. He stopped participating in the IPCC assessment reports in 2005 because it had become “politicized.” He was critical of colleagues for using “the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming.”
The IPCC has also intentionally misled about glaciers. In 2010, one report author admitted the claim that Himalayan glaciers would be melted by 2035 was included purely “to put political pressure on world leaders,” the Daily Mail reported, and was not properly vetted.
The IPCC has, as well, manipulated the findings in its summaries for policymakers, the shortened, politicized versions of the longer reports. Richard Tol, a climate economist from Sussex University who co-authored a chapter in the Fifth Assessment, found “the summary focused on ‘scare stories’ and suggestions the world faced ‘the four horsemen of the apocalypse,'” according to the Daily Mail, and “did not want his name associated with it because he felt ‘uncomfortable’ with the way the summary exaggerated the economic impact of global warming.”
It’s astonishing that the West is filled with people, many of them quite bright, who simply have to believe unquestioningly in the global warming narrative. Every storm, every heavy rain, every drought, every extreme low temperature, every extreme high temperature is proof to them of man-made global warming. It’s as if their lives depend on the narrative being true. They have to have it.
And not only do they have to believe, others have to believe, too. If it requires lying and cheating to pull in new disciples, then that’s what they’ll do — and have done.
Deep down, though, the zealots know they can’t convert everyone. If they did, there would be no one left to look down on from their lofty perch.
— Written by J. Frank Bullitt
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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.
The real scientific disconnect is that Newtonian physics do not apply to the global warming narrative. Quantum mechanics is the driver. Given that reality, the contention that we must do something reduces to an absurdity. What state do we want to the climate to be? Does there exist a mechanism to drive such a change? What should be done about entropy? When faced with a very simple equation G = H – TS, 97% of AGW adherents crumble. If you put a Delta insignia in front of the appropriate operators, then it’s all greek to them (pun intended). People refuse to accept the idea of irreducible complexity. The IPCC bowed to that concept with the terms chaotic and coupled. The wailing and gnashing of teeth simply amplifies human anxiety and promotes “otherness”. Lifes intersections are explained by the concepts of surface chemistry. Interfacial tension rules the nexus. The human dimension is irreducibly complex and therefore ripe for a wedge.
And put in plain English, “climate change”/”global warming”, yada, yada…whatever they’re calling it now, is a hoax. It’s been outted long ago when proponents admitted they cooked the books. And it never was about “weather” – it’s an elaborate international wealth redistribution scheme.
Another denier?
I want to discuss the science with you smart folk. Are you concerned about the vast amounts of carbon dioxide going into the oceans?
“Climate Science” is as much science as The Church of Scientology.
The past climate change is prologue to future climate change. The AGW prophecies have not come to pass.
There are those who believe a Grand Solar Minimum (GSM) or the equivalent of the Little Ice Age is beginning (late 2019) based on past observations. There have been crop failures due to late rains and early frosts that fit that pattern. There are those who propose upticks of disease and plague during GSMs. The African Swine Fever is projected to wipe out at least 25% of Earth’s pig population.
The GSM is projected to become severe from 2028 to 2032 with the possibility of major food shortages projected by scientists and others reviewing Ms. Zharkova’s data.
I supposing observing and comparing Greenland and Northern hemisphere ice accumulation this winter as well as the weather in lower latitudes will give us more data to evaluate whether the AGW or the GSM proponents are more accurate, reliable, and better scientists.
I find it shocking that, after all these years, folks still believe the nonsense peddled by the Global Warming horde. Every set of “facts” that prove Global Warming (or, in today’s constantly-edited Leftist parlance, “man-made climate change”) are pretty quickly (or in rare cases, only eventually) proven to be contrived by the Left to cover the fact they are (still) wrong about the entire topic! Wake up, folks!
This is the kind of stuff I would expect from grade-schoolers. Wild and silly statements have no credibility.
I had to take calculus and thermodynamics and other subjects for my Master of Science. I want to debate the issue with you. Do not go away and hide, please.
Most of the Carbon Dioxide you emit goes into the oceans where they are making more acidic. That affects the bottom of the food chain. If we lose it, we lose us.
Why are you not concerned?
“This is the kind of stuff I would expect from grade-schoolers. Wild and silly statements have no credibility.”
Your own statement falls into that category. This article is about precisely the kind of reductio ad absurdum that you just engaged in.
Oh, good! Are you ready to discuss the science?
Uneducated opinions do not count.
Personal attacks do not work.
I’m not concerned because your “climate change” is non-existent. It’s called weather. And plants can’t survive without CO2. That’s why I’m not concerned.
I think you are unconcerned because you are uneducated in the field.
Stop assuming you know what you are talking about and just go look at the IPCC Summary which has graphs of conditions. You can make up your own mind with facts instead of political prejudice.
That is just wrong. The information from oceanographers is that the oceans are not getting more acidic at all, although the wacko environmentalists would have you believe it is a dire emergency.
george227, just a reminder that renewable energy is not energy in its totality, but just “electricity”. Industrial wind and Industrial solar can only produce electricity, and even that is intermittent. Wind and solar are unable to make any of the 6,000 products that come from crude oil, thus without fossil fuels, there would be major social changes that would take us back to medieval times.
Electricity alone, especially intermittent electricity from renewables, has not, and will not, run the economies of the world, as electricity alone is unable to support the energy demands of the military, airlines, cruise ships, supertankers, container shipping, and trucking infrastructures. Getting off fossil fuels would virtually negatively impact all the industries and infrastructures that are driven by the energy density of oil, coal, and natural gas:
Of course, and that petroleum is better used as feedstocks for other products rather than burning it for fuel value alone. That is one of my points.
With electric transportation (don’t laugh), we can do almost all of that. Really. Electric trucks are here now, and being tested. My own household and two electric cars are powered by the PV system on our roof. The reason everything is not powered by it is the fact it is new, it is infrastructure, and the time required to change it is long, as it upsets other major investments..
Well, you’re already wrong by saying the ocean is getting more acidic. Ocean pH is about 8.1, which is alkaline, not acidic. If you want to phrase it scientifically, (which you should since you claim a degree in the science), then you would say the oceans are becoming less alkaline.
I am using the scientific name for the phenomenon.
Look up ocean acidification in your browser, then come back and tell us what you learned.
Respectfully, George 227, you know that Ralph Keeling’s recent peer reviewed and much ballyhooed report on ocean warming (trapped CO2) was walked back because he and his collaborators got the math wrong. To his credit, he had the grace and humility to admit the error. Interesting that the flawed math was caught by a self professed skeptic and not the “peers” who rubber stamped the report. So much for the peer review process. Before you challenge the intellect of others, please check your own hat size. Respectfully.
Yes, science is self-correcting, which is why I like it. It is truth as far as we can find it.
I did not challenge your intellect, I showed you where to find real information.
… Just this week U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii urged those at a prayer breakfast to “believe in climate change as though it’s a religion, it’s not a science.”
That’s clearly not what she said. If you follow the link you can hear her say “believe in climate change as though it’s a religion, it’s not, it’s science.”
Interesting. So I went to the link, and that was an article about the ambiguity of what she said. The actual quote is this (which is different to yours):
“…believe in climate change as though it’s a religion, it’s not a science…”
However, the context (ah, the context!) begins:
“These are times that call for us to do those things that we believe in, and to march, and not just to march…”
I think the article is correct – she is calling for people to march in support of agw policy with a religeous conviction.
These are the same egg-heads who are trying to bring down Trump. The State Department types, who believe they run foreign policy (hint:they don’t), think they are the chosen ones, the “ones we have been waiting for.” They aren’t the ones and they are no smarter than the rest of us, especially when it comes to real atmospheric science.
From CNN
Veneto regional council, which is located on Venice’s Grand Canal, was flooded for the first time in its history on Tuesday night — just after it rejected measures to combat climate change.
The historic Italian city has been brought to its knees this week by the worst flooding there in more than 50 years. And the council chamber in Ferro Fini Palace started to take in water around 10 p.m. local time, as councilors were debating the 2020 regional budget, Democratic Party councilor Andrea Zanoni said in a long Facebook post.
“Ironically, the chamber was flooded two minutes after the majority League, Brothers of Italy, and Forza Italia parties rejected our amendments to tackle climate change,” Zanoni, who is deputy chairman of the environment committee, said in the post, which also has photographs of the room under water.
Venice is built on piles of logs & mud intertwined & has been subsiding for years. It periodically floods, this is not new. I have walked in St. Marks Square when it was flooded. That being said it would be a vulnerable city due to the Greenland melt.
This is a concept of science, not politics. The reason I am here is not to argue with you, but to tell you it was the vested interests who politicized science. I am liberal in my 76th year, but this has nothing to do with politics, . . it is science!
We have different views. Mine come from the science. Let me show you how it works for all of us. The cheapest and cleanest and most easily-built power systems for utilities are now renewables plus battery storage. Really.
Why dig up pollutants which make our kids dumb when we can power our cities with renewables, which do not pollute, and whose fuel is free?
Nuclear is too expensive and coal is dirty, and gas is temporary. By actual study 74%of our coal plants can be torn down right now and replaced with renewables and get cheaper power without letting them age out like the bean-counters want.
Having lived and worked in pretty much most of California all my life (currently 80YO) I believe I know my state quite well. I regularly volunteer with the US Forest Service and work in teams doing historic structures restoration…..4 or 5 two and three weeks projects every summer.
Two years ago just before the infamous Campfire fire my team was taking a lunch break. The ranger in charge of our project commented that, “The Forest Service does a really poor job of caring for our forests. Environmentaliists and lack of funds prevent us from clearing the huge amounts of ultra-dry fuel piling up in our forests. There’s trouble coming!”
Two weeks later in early October, after we had departed, the huge Campfire fire started…..came within two miles of burning down our recent work.
Predictably the climate change folks crawled out from their cesspit and blamed it on global warming……excess temperatures caused the ignition. Really? Truth is that California climate in the fall is and always has been hot and dry with Santa Ana winds. The temperatures then were hot, as usual, but no different from every fall in California.
But……some kind of imagined increase in atmospheric temperature ignited the fire with the devastation we all know about.
Pathetic, dishonest, ignorant, devoid of anything resembling actual science.
Regardless of what the cause is, American citizens are still continuously being exposed to natural disasters like hurricanes and wildfires, and government is failing to protect their lives and property. Do you have any suggestions about what can be done to solve this problem?
Americans and in fact, the entire civilized population of the world, are exposed to natural disasters like tornadoes, hurricanes and wild fires. Not much can be done about the tornadoes and hurricanes, except to build better buildings constructed to withstand the power of these storms.
Wild fires, on the other hand, can be mitigated by better forest management. Because of the environmentalists in California, the timber industry is almost non existent and the forest floor is littered with dead wood and undergrowth that makes a fire a lot worse. In my state, for instance, every few years, the forest service goes through and burns off the undergrowth with controlled burns. Plus the loggers clean it up as a matter of course to make their work easier.
I might be more concerned about gorebull warming except that the “solution” is the same stupid wishlist liberals have failed at for decades: super high taxes, punish achievers, massively expand gvt, force you to change your diet and lifestyle, give up several freedoms, act like countries that are inferior to our own. It’s a power thing, not an environmental thing.
Wrong. It is not to divide us: it is to loot the US Treasury.
This is my standard package on global warming: Global warming is pure
fraud. If anyone is truly interested, simply go to YouTube and start
watching global warming videos. Those videos are overwhelmingly
negative towards climate change. Here are three videos to get you
started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo7U_yfCyeU&t=146s ,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbalx6UyAXY and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke26J0N74YI&t=14s The global warming
fraud has cost the US Treasury on the order of $500 billion over
thirty years for unnecessary alternative energy subsidies. For
example, the Arctic is not melting, watch the second video. The
problem is the corruption of the data. Almost ALL of the warming is
adjusted data. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgk3xFHvWLE&t=59s
Also try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krrimqxDBMI and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YMttEhtgpk An early video to frame
the problem is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQPGU85cm4A One
other point: most of the pro-climate change articles are published in
publications that do not allow general comments. the result is climate
claims that have no basis in fact are allowed to stand unchallenged.
The definitive video of why we have this problem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj43O98HL5c I have many more videos like
Please stop this ridiculous attempt to demonize those with better educations in science than you have.
If you think you are correct, go read the IPCC Summary and see the actual conditions for yourself. No models needed, just your own eyes.
The fourth paragraph of this article should be chiseled in granite somewhere very prominent.
It is called science, Ed.
You ought to get some and see how the world works.
What are your credentials George, besides “I took some science in college?”
You have solar panels on your roof. How long have you had them and how much did the purchase and installation cost? I’m betting in the range of 30K+. Do you really think they will pay for themselves in their limited lifespan before you have to replace them, as well as the battery banks you use for storing the”power.” Did you pay for the entire setup out of pocket, or did you get a substantial government subsidy…or as they call it, a rebate?
And your EVs…how about when you have to replace the batteries in those vehicles. Very cost prohibitive and also bad for the environment when they are disposed of. Not everyone can afford a 40K vehicle that only gets around a hundred miles a charge in optimal conditions.
I must have really gotten to you. Here is my story.
Being a former engineer for a large power company and having earned a Master of Science in Energy and the Environment, I had PV panels installed four years ago, with my estimated payback of 15-17 years, . . the right thing for an eco-freak to do. Before they could be installed, we acquired a VW e-Golf electric car. The savings in gasoline alone took the solar system payback down to 3 1/2 years. So, we added a used Tesla Model S, P85, and that took the payback down to less than three years, which means we now get free power for household and transportation.
But that is not all: We do not need to go to gas stations, we fuel up at home at night with cheap baseload power. During the daytime, the PV system turns our meter backwards powering the neighborhood with clean local power, which we trade for the stuff to be used that night. If we paid for transportation fuel, the VW would cost us 4 cents/mile to drive, and the Tesla would cost 5 cents/mile at California off-peak power prices.
No oil changes are a real treat along with no leaks. And since it has an electric motor, it needs NO ENGINE MAINTENANCE at all. We do not go “gas up”, or get tune-ups or emissions checks, have no transmission about which to worry, no complicated machined parts needing care.
Do you still go gas up? What does that cost?
The issue has more to do about wealth redistribution by penalizing some aspect of industry. The stuff of climate is just too complex a phenomenon to be driven by a specific gas. In response to a comment on co2 in the ocean, the ocean & other water reservoirs, represent the largest sink for carbon absorption, not to mention the plankton, algae, shellfish, & corals that absorb it. This is a natural process. The formation of carbonic acid is a normal process as well. This acid is a weak acid but it does facilitate coral bleaching. The creatures of the ocean are not our key to the food chain. In fact, those in fisheries science argue that the oceans are overfished.
Some of these graphs that have shown were modified & made to look like a mathematical trend of some kind. Nature does not necessarily follow a mathematical trend. Hell in my state we had a hurricane hit on a Friday & a day later it became a blizzard.
What many in the crowd don’t understand is that the electricity cycle will be impacted if everything went totally renewable. This is because people fail to realize that solar & wind are not continuous. On top of that, they currently can’t be stored. So that translates to real-world problems. E.g. the recent California fires, those who bought electric cars could not recharge them during the electricity shut-off. That is a real problem. That same event repeats itself like this: let’s say your state has a really huge bad blizzard & the guv shuts the state down & tells all businesses & municipalities to close & send people home from work. So we all get in our electric cars & drive very cautiously on the roads. But the snow is so bad the congestion worsens & the cars run out of charge in 5 degree blizzard conditions. Now tell me, who is going to rescue these people from the roads & then who is going to rescue the cars later?
Oh, my,. . where to start? If the power is off, no station gasoline pumps will work. Second, we have 24-hour continuous power now available from PV plus utility-scale batteries. Yup, batteries big enough for cities.
Third, you are not going to stop this transition because it gives us cheaper and cleaner power.
My own electric car is powered by the Sun. Is that okay?
In Feb. 2015, Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted publicly that the goal of environmental activists was not to save the world from ecological calamity, — but to destroy capitalism. She said:”This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, withing a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution.” So there you go.
I did not see any facts in this article, only opinions. I thought this was “fact based” reporting. Can you show me the numbers that global climate change isn’t happening?