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Are Climate Cultists Ignoring History?
I love history and historians. Not all, but many, like my friend Dr. Alvin Felzenberg, whose classes at the University of Pennsylvania or Yale University he would occasionally invite me to guest lecture. Felzenberg is the author of many terrific books, including “The Leaders We Deserved (And A Few We Didn’t).” It is an incomparable survey and grading of US presidents from George Washington through George W. Bush.
As Secretary of the US Senate, I was also responsible for the Senate’s Historical Office, ably led during my tenure by the legendary Dr. Richard Baker and later by Dr. Don Ritchie. He gave me the best US Capitol tour I’ve tried replicating for almost 30 years. You’ve likely seen both remarkable historians on the networks.
They all have one great trait in common. They are magnificent storytellers.
But today, my friends take a back seat to Brad Belk.
So unless we go back to being hunter-gatherers, life on earth is doomed.
Even going back to that stage, what percentage would survive?
He doesn’t have actual power, but Ed Begley, Jr. seems to try to live by what he preaches.
There was an article in the early 2000s comparing George W. Bush’s Crawford home to Al Gore’s home. Bush’s home is what one should expect Gore to have. It used geothermal energy sources and other eco-friendly features that I’m forgetting. Gore’s was some sprawling house that I don’t think even had solar panels or something to “save the planet”.
this is why after laboring through the Pits I check out “Watt’s up with that?” site. Scientists who are top of all the climate emergency b.s. From ocean levels to polar bears and temps in Europe these guys and gals (especially Judith Curry) are on top of everything. Just can’t understand the math formulas.
A very small percentage, otherwise what’s the point?
I remember that article. It showed how energy efficient and ecologically sound George Bush’s house was and what a monstrously inefficient and wasteful polluter Al Gore’s house was. At that time I was living in a side-by-side duplex home. While I recycled all my metal, paper and glass items, my side-house neighbors, three college students who all were taking environmental and ecology courses and supported John Kerry for President, routinely threw out all their cases of beer bottles and cans in the trash rather than recycle them. Go figure.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tale-two-houses/
“Watts Up With That?” is one of the best Global Warming debunking sites I know of. Founder Anthony Watts is a former meteorologist. Surveys among meteorologists, the people whom you would expect to know the most about weather, routinely show that the majority don’t buy into the Global Warming hokum. Meteorologists are scrutinizedly held to their predictions just hours or days after having made them. Climatologists and Global Warming scientists by contrast, never have to worry about being held accountable for their predictions since most of theirs are either ephemeral or decades into the future.
Right Steven. To me the weirdest part of the whole climate debate, maybe my accounting major brain kicking it, is what the costs to us are of doing the stuff the climate fanatics want us to do. Not just higher electrical bills. What is the cost of getting Chinese owned cobalt from African mines with kids digging it up? Costs of burying wind solar blades in the local dump? What do we do with the solar panels when they crap out? At least the oil and gas guys move their rigs when the fields are dry.
I’m sure most of the greenie people are not even aware of the ancillary costs to the environment that things like windmills and solar panels entail. One of the benefits of being a lefty is the permission to focus in on just the specific cause that you like and ignore all the drawbacks that it has.
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I dig it.
This seems as good a place to put this as anywhere.
I’d like to suggest to @blueyeti that Ricochet try to pick up the Power Hungry Podcast by Robert Bryce.
Here’s a recent episode featuring John Constable. It’s a refreshingly intelligent and informed take on energy policy, suitably (in my opinion) caustic as regards so-called green initiatives and alternative energy, and altogether what people need to hear.
less than 1%. It would be like Mad Max + The Walking Dead + The Purge.
Good point. In the tar sands we are effectively cleaning up a huge natural oil spill. Yay for fossil fuels!
Last I read about it, solar panels are not economically recyclable in the developed world. When they start leaking often toxic chemicals, or when they are just too outdated to remain viable, a lot of them get shipped off developing countries where they leak on poor people’s property — where, presumably, toxic chemicals are no bigger a deal (to western energy activists) than is energy poverty.
Check out Steven Hayward’s comments about the late Peter Roberts, a brilliant meteorologist who wrote many articles and books about the climate hoax. On PowerLine today. Some real interesting data.
The word made sense to me………. even if it doesn’t exist!
Andrew Klavan has a recent short podcast (20 minutes) where he interview’s Barak Obama’s Under Secretary of Science at the Energy Department, Steven E. Koonan. He used to be a Global Warming believer but his government job caused him to change his whole perception of the “hoax.” He ended up writing a book called “Unsettled.”
https://ricochet.com/podcast/andrew-klavan-show/the-unsettling-truth-behind-climate-science/
Unsettled is very good. I’d include it with my favorite popular works on the topic:
Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, by Steven E. Koonin
This book provides a particularly good explanation of how UN IPCC reports are cherry-picked and distorted by the press to misrepresent the underlying science. It also explains some of the problems with complex models, and why the climate science community’s models are insufficient.
Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, by Michael Shellenberger
Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom, by Patrick Moore
Patrick Moore is one of the grand old men of the green movement, and this is a charmingly personal account of his disenchantment with climate doomsayers and eco-extremists in general.
False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet, by Bjorn Lomborg
Lomborg is perhaps the best at articulating the misguided priorities of the climate alarmism establishment. His book gives a valuable perspective on the likely true costs and impacts of climate change, and explains why future adaptation is almost certainly the better course to pursue. Bjorn Lomborg has been a giant in eco-sanity since his 2001 book The Skeptical Environmentalist.
Along with Koonin, Lomborg and Shellenberger (who will not be the next Calif. governor, unfortunately) Paul Roberts’ stuff is the best response to this political b.s.
I’ll give it a listen. Thanks for the suggestion.
There is also the The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.
Is there no conservative case for climate hysteria?
That’s an interesting question.
No.
No, there isn’t a conservative case for hysteria. There’s a conservative case for concern: there is a slim, unquantified but perhaps non-zero possibility that there could be a catastrophic positive feedback mechanism, say the release of methane from sea-bottom deposits, that could lead to runaway global warming and the death of humanity. Even conservatives might pause for a moment and consider that.
But there’s a far likelier, in my opinion, possibility that there are robust negative feedback mechanisms — let’s call them “clouds” — that would kick in to limit warming and keep the planet pretty livable. These are really hard to model, depend on poorly understood climate physics, and aren’t very sexy when the goal is to generate headlines and enhance funding.
I think the conservative case really reads as follows:
“Yes, we may be increasing warming. We probably are. But we’re coming out of an ice age, and people are better off being too warm than too cold. We also benefit from increased CO2 driving agricultural surpluses. The best way to cope with adverse weather is to be wealthy, because wealthy people don’t suffer much from adverse weather. So the most sensible thing to do is to encourage global prosperity. That means sensible but increasing fossil fuel use, hydroelectric development in Africa (sorry, pristine natural environments), and the continued development of small and safe nuclear technology. We’ll be much richer and better prepared to deal with an uncertain climate future if we lift the developing world out of poverty with sensible government and cheap energy. Let’s do that. Anyway, the climate models don’t really agree, they’re based on unreasonable and unrealistic assumptions about future energy consumption, and estimates of future impact are wildly exaggerated and should be taken with a grain of salt.”
Shoot, I guess that’s not much of a pro-alarmism case, is it? My bad.
If you look at any paleoclimatological graph you’ll see that we are in one of the coolest periods in Earth’s history, and definitely in the most CO2 starved period in history – assuming that they are correct. Why nobody seems to notice this is jaw dropping. Instead, the “experts” and their co-conspirator journalists only want to compare us to the last ice age, which is something like one ten-thousandth of earth’s history.
We really could use some more warming and CO2. 1/4 of the world is not habitable for man, beast, or flora because it is too cold and too low in CO2.
I was mostly poking fun at any article title that says, “The moral case for…” or “The conservative case for…” Whenever a headline takes that form, I hardly need to read the article to know that I disagree.
We are living in an interglacial period of an ice age. There is no reason not to expect the glaciers to return and wipe out northern cities.
There was one other time when CO2 was low (~200ppm) and that was when trees emerged, but before there was a fungus that could decompose the tree fiber. The world was chock full of dead trees (that is where coal came from). A fungus did emerge and in a miracle saved life on earth. Currently, there is no process in nature to reverse the CO2 capture of shell fish. Without human intervention, the shell fish would continue to capture CO2 in limestone until the plants began to die (about ~170ppm). The animals would die off accordingly. Humans burning coal and making cement have saved the planet in a second miracle. The answer to question of how much CO2 should be in the atmosphere is “much more”. Dr. Patrick Moore has a bunch of videos on CO2.
The trouble I have with “scrutinizedly” is that it ever passes spell check. Within a very good comment.
It exists, but it takes a free mind to conceive it.