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The End Is Nigh!
Climate change is not my issue. I don’t know enough about the science to form a solid opinion. Had I been permitted to remain within the liberal left, I’d no doubt be mindlessly backing Team Gore. That is, I would have, had Team Gore and the Democratic Party not made the mistake of amply demonstrating its cynical perfidy when it comes to issues I do know and care about.
A story for another day (or, let’s face it, for just about all my other days): at the moment, I’d like to reprise my Stewardess Metaphor for those who might have missed it.
“Stewardess” by the way, is what we called “Flight Attendants” when I was young. I did a lot of flying as a child and didn’t like it. Like Christine Blasey Ford, I don’t like it a whole lot now either. I am prone to motion sickness and, as I’ve gotten older and seen too many statistically-unlikely tragedies come to pass, the possibility that I might fall out of the sky, or die in a fiery mid-air explosion seems less remote.
To soothe my fear of flying, therefore, I’ve learned to watch the stewardess. She, after all, flies all the time. She’s accustomed to the skies, friendly and unfriendly. Okay, she isn’t actually a pilot, but she is the visible on-board expert, the Al Gore of Air Travel.
So if we encounter turbulence — if the ridiculous cigar tube we’ve all allowed ourselves to be stuffed into begins to bounce merrily amongst the clouds — I peel open my squinched-shut eyes and look to her. If the stewardess is still chatting amiably with the Disney-bound family in the third row or preparing the beverage cart even as we bump and slide, I figure all is well.
If, on the other hand, she’s strapped herself tightly into her special stewardess seat, her knuckles white as mine, her lips twitching in silent prayer, I’ll know my fear is justified. If she assumes the crash position, I’ll believe that time is running out.
Here’s my problem with climate change: everyone from “turn back the rising seas” Obama to the pastor of my local liberal church will eagerly assure me that Science has proved that the end is nigh; climate change isn’t just happening but is imminent. We or our children are about to witness the mother of all fiery crash-and-burns unless we repent and turn from our sinful ways. Time is running out. It was running out in 1989, then again in 2000, 2002, 2006, 2007, 2012, 2014, 2015…
It’s as if we’re on the plane — eating our pretzels, pecking at our laptops, trying to keep our toddlers entertained — and periodically the stewardess announces that the plane is about to tumble to the ground in flames and we’re all going to die. Then she brings the drink cart around, starts the in-flight movie, and goes back to her argument with the other stewardess about who forgot to put toilet paper in the first-class loo, or whether a businessman should be able to have three olives in his complementary martini.
This week, even as the long, national nightmare of the Kavanaugh Circus (#BelieveWomen and #Abortion) was staggering toward its conclusion, our self-designated planetary stewardess Al Gore grabbed the loudspeaker long enough to alert us all to the UN’s extra-special super-urgent report on the climate.
“Today the world’s leading scientific experts collectively reinforced what Mother Nature has made clear [presumably by throwing an earthquake in Indonesia?] – that we need to undergo an urgent and rapid transformation to a global clean energy economy,” he said. “However, time is running out, so we must capitalize and build upon the solutions available today. Solving the climate crisis requires vision and leadership,” Gore said before attacking President Donald Trump.
Got that? Time is running out. We’re all going to die! But what have those with Vision and Leadership (e.g., the men and women of Gore’s party) been soberly debating in the hallowed (and harpy-haunted) halls of Congress?
Boofing. The secret meanings of puerile scribblings in high school yearbooks. How much beer and stupidity was normal at college parties circa 1984. Whether someone relentlessly accused of ever more absurd and disgusting crimes in front of his wife, daughters and America should find the experience infuriating.
Given the Visionary Leaders habitual attitude toward inconvenient sex abuse survivors, it’s hard to believe it was about #believing women. Frankly, I doubt they #believed (or gave a damn about) Christine Blasey Ford.
So for what urgent cause was an evidently decent man insulted, his family humiliated and America’s time wasted? Was Kavanaugh the one thing standing between our doomed selves and climactic salvation?
Of course not. Long before the vaguely wounded Dr. Ford made her appearance before the Judiciary Committee to publicly insert “Brett” between the vast lacunae of her memory, frantic protesters were shrieking anathemas from the gallery, inveigling cops into “arresting” them outside, and inundating Senator Collins’s office with threats and coat hangers. Not big-eyed polar bears or simulacra of our ravaged planet. Coat hangers.
Shouldn’t those with Vision and Leadership — Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, the pathetically persistent Hillary — have been using this precious time, their precious (and dwindling) moral capital to persuade us all to support what the IPCC admitted would be the high costs of this necessary global transition from fossil fuels to wind and solar?
Why wasn’t Maxine Waters urging her followers to “create a crowd” and “push back on” oil company executives or, for that matter, Chinese, Indian, and European nationals in restaurants, departments stores, gas stations … “wherever we have to show up” and “tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere?”
Why hasn’t Jimmy Kimmel called for the castration of European coal plant managers; why doesn’t Kathy Griffin symbolically decapitate the leaders of the Energy Union, given that their own website reveals that the EU’s priories of energy security and economic competitiveness trump climate change? Why aren’t the screaming social justice warriors clawing at the locked doors of the Chinese embassy?
Whatever happened to Dr. Ford (Trauma or drama? Pathos or bathos?) and whatever might or might not happen to Roe v. Wade, how can this possibly compare with the fierce urgency of this planetary Now?
The flight crew is standing around in the galley, making nasty remarks about the passengers and taking the best snacks for themselves while the plane is about to crash into the rising, increasingly acidic, all-but-boiling sea.
Or, to put it another way, the Democrats are making it so abundantly clear that just about everything—black lives, abortion, sexual assaults on left-leaning women, transgender bathrooms, gun control, illegal immigrants — matters much, much more than climate change. When the Pew Research Organization surveyed voters before the 2016 elections, it was very clear that Clinton voters could barely bring themselves to mention “environmental issues” when abortion and the Supreme Court — presented separately by Pew though clearly linked — were on the line. NBC News offered viewers a helpful guide to The Ten Big Issues before the presidential debates: Climate change didn’t make the list.
There are subjects I know a lot about. Climate change is not one of them. But if the world is going to end, the people who do know and claim to believe need to walk the walk their talk implies. I need to see some white knuckles and mumbled prayers. I need to see Al Gore arranging teleconferences from his yurt, not luxury Davos getaways from his beachfront mansion; I need to see the Democratic Party setting aside the issues that can only be important when and if the world is not about to end.
The Climate Change deniers can go ahead and make abortion a priority. In the absence of imminent global disaster, why wouldn’t the (im)morality of deliberately killing human fetuses go to the top of the list? They are likewise free to focus on the economy, criminal justice reform, shrinking the size of government, reducing the tax burden … whatever they like, really.
But the self-anointed must make a choice. Either the plane is going down — in which case literally everything else is unimportant — or the plane is fine and flying, and Al Gore, et al., have been using climate change the way apocalyptics always do: as a means of dividing them from us, sinners from saints, those whose lives matter and those who lives don’t.
Oh, air hostesses.
All the apocalyptic prophets, whether religious, or secular, and the dates they have offered for the end of the world, have one thing in common, they have been wrong.
The alarmists, especially global warming alarmists have tried every type of dire warning to ensure that the earth will be our friend. The only thing they haven’t tried is throwing a virgin into a volcano. They do know better than to try and find a virgin in the ranks of the ACLU. It is a well known fact that ACLU lawsuits filed against municipalities for Nativity scenes on public property are motivated by jealousy, because they don’t have three wise men, or a virgin in their entire organization.
There was a time when I would’ve defended the ACLU. They used to be something.
No more.
What a fantastic post.
You’re so right. If they really believed in Global Warming, they wouldn’t be acting like this.
Whenever I hear leftist saying some crazy crap, my first thought is, “Does this idiot really believe what he is saying right now?”
My second thought is, “Well, probably not. This would make sense if it were just all about power. So it’s probably all about power.”
Whatever works.
I’ve read that in the Soviet Union, no one in the leadership of the Communist party was really a true believer in Communism. But if you were an ambitious young man, and you wanted power, that is how you got it.
I think that it’s the same thing with our global warming debate. Or white people are racist. Or #metoo. Or socialized medicine. Or whatever.
Progressives don’t believe in those things either. They’re just using them to get power.
The only other explanation is that all leftists are fools. And I think that’s clearly not true.
Granny,
(I keep remembering you ballroom dancing so I find it hard to refer to you as Granny.) The UN is a corrupt organization whose main function is to extort more and more aid from the so-called developed world to the so-called undeveloped world. Human Rights are just something that gets in the way of this gravy train. Global Warming and the IPCC’s hysterical & demonstrably phony reports are just the most convenient excuse for the UN to go on extorting money. President Trump was never so right as when he sacked the Paris accords.
Regards,
Jim
Immanentizing the eschaton is not a new thing. It really all is theater, whether tragedy or comedy depends on the day.
Brilliant analogy!
I remember a few years back, one climate-change skeptic came up with a map showing where all the gloom and doom Hollywood stars and politicians owned homes. A surprisingly large number of them lived on beaches. He pointed out if they really believed their own hyperbole about rising sea levels and super hurricanes, they wouldn’t own multi-million dollars homes which were going to be destroyed in a matter of years.
Glenn Reynolds says it best:
Bears repeating.
I was going to say this myself.
BTW did you see where the UN wants to enact a $240 per gallon gas tax?
The IPCC is a political, not a scientific organization. One of the main databases of world temperatures (HADCRUT4 (don’t ask)) has finally been audited. A summary is here – https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/07/bombshell-audit-of-global-warming-data-finds-it-riddled-with-errors/ The short version is:
A study several years of the site of the US official weather measurement stations showed that a large proportion were improperly sited (in parking lots, next to AC heat pump outlets and so on). (I can’t find the link to that now)
A final thought is how the temperature record has been ‘adjusted’. Here is a plot of adjustments, not temperature (I need to go back and learn how to size images. In the meantime, here is a link https://realclimatescience.com/all-temperature-adjustments-monotonically-increase/
As an Engineer who has done lots of modeling and depended on the quality of the data, it offends me how little quality control has gone into data used to generate the models which are being used to recommend billions of dollars in spending.
And don’t get me going on the quality of the models.
All models are wrong, some models are useful. These models aren’t useful.
I think the left doom and gloom types want us to do this:
Al Gore has to know this. Right? Hence the beachfront home…
Buuurrrrrrrn!
Five or so years ago there was a climate change meeting at a fancy hotel in D.C. right next to a Metro stop. A conservative recorded the people attending it coming via limousines.
Al Gore flew to Sweden twice. Once, just after the Peace Prize was announced. The second time when he received it. Imagine his carbon footprint from these two trips.
Freeman Dyson is unimpressed with the models.
http://blog.nj.com/njv_paul_mulshine/2013/04/climatologists_are_no_einstein.html
Exactly so. I’ll believe the seas are rising uncontrollably when the rich liberals start selling off all their coastal property and moving to Kansas. When they’re putting their money where their mouth is, I’ll listen.
Models can be interesting and sometimes useful, but it’s impossible to know their predictive power in advance. If I have a model that will predict conditions five years in the future based on the current state, I won’t know for five years if it’s right. Even then I’ll only know that it was right one time. It’ll take several decades to prove that the model works. And if I change the model, then it all starts over. The idea that we can use models to make accurate predictions a century into the future when the model is only a few years old is utter nonsense.
Do you have an example of a model that has worked, for comparison purposes? I’ve also heard that the models that predicted X ten years ago are not being validated by present conditions (which might explain why the End has not yet come)?
My favorite is “Carbon Offsets.” Rich leftists often explain away their massive “carbon footprints” by explaining that they pay for carbon offsets. You proles can’t afford those, so you can’t fly. As I have pointed out previously, these are like the corrupt indulgences from the Catholic Church prior to the enlightenment.
What chaps my [expletive] is the alarmist response when challenged on this clear evidence of shenanigans — the excuse is invariably a vague reference to Urban Heat Islands. Urban Heat Islands are a real problem in the temperature records, but corrections for UHI are uniformly downsloping, not upsloping. But to make the alarmist models work at all, an upslope is needed, so “poof”, there it is.
By the way, Andrew Klavan said something interesting today: That the fight about the consitutionality of abortion isn’t about abortion, it’s about the Constitution. It’s about who gets to tell us what to do. It’s not that they are willing to wreck the system to save Roe; it’s that they are willing to weaponize Roe to wreck the system.
I’m sure someone brighter than I has made the same point about Climate Change. It’s not about saving the planet. It’s about putting the planet under a global elite regime.
I don’t know if this is true, but it’s certainly significant that the solutions proferred by the left are nearly always international-government-y rather than, say, strategic bombing of Chinese coal-fired plants.
You must be one of those science deniers who just don’t understand math. 😜
Now, we’re talking!
Or, for that matter, “let’s create incentives for inventing cool stuff.” Even if it’s a tax and spend solution, at least it would be one that didn’t require the creation of international bodies.
Yes, it’s about controlling you. The US has reduced carbon emissions recently. This makes no difference to the AGW fanatics.
an environmentalist friend wrote me:
“Yes, a lot of good effort in the USA at the state and municipal level. And, the reduction was mostly because of the long coming shift to increased renewable generation and to natural gas from coal and other fossil fuels (which the current administration is working to reverse). So this decrease is worth celebrating even if it is under threat of reversal.
Unfortunately, the USA has per capita emissions that are still among the highest in the world, so we have great improvements/reductions still to be made. We just need to keep shifting away from fossil fuels for energy.
Sadly this BP chart also shows a net increase (if you add up all the increases they more than offset the reductions), which is not the way we need to go.
The disruption of the climate when the next generation are our age will be profound.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/climate/ipcc-climate-report-2040.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepagev
Thoughts?
Sure, there are models that work fairly well. They’re not 100% accurate and they’re just short-term models. We call them “weather forecasts.” It’s easy to test and refine a model if you’re only trying to predict a few days or weeks in advance. The problem is when you try to do a whole century. The model might be right, but you can’t have any rational proof of its accuracy until multiple centuries have passed.
If our per capita energy use and emissions are among the highest in the world, we should halt all immigration immediately, since each of those immigrants, coming from a low-emissions country, will start emitting more here in the US. It’s for the planet!
Incidentally, it’s quite possible that climate change is everything Al Gore says it is and that he is mendaciously weaponizing it for his own purposes. That is, one could—in good faith—make an argument that the disruption of the planet’s climate is going to be a really big problem unless we do something without necessarily meaning that we have to create new, powerful international entities that have control over our lives.
What makes me so suspicious—I should ask my friend about this, or forward the OP essay to him—is that he doesn’t behave as if it’s true. (Nor, if it comes to that, does my friend who regularly flies around the world to attend conferences).
Why? Extra CO2 in the atmosphere gets mitigated by extra plant growth – which sequesters the carbon. Warmer temperatures also result in extra plant growth. Also, this is not nearly the warmest the Earth has been. We are leaving an ice age for pity’s sake.
Extra plant growth also equals more food for the world’s poor. Why do environmentalists hate the poor?