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My New Favorite American President
Okay, he’s a South American president, but I’d take him or Bukele or Milei over the embarrassment we have in the White House any day. Meet President Dr. Irfaan Ali of Guyana.
His doctorate is in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of the West Indies and his party is the People’s Progressive Party/Civic — and he’s still preferable to the “progressives” in this country. Unlike Democrats, he’s dedicated to the wellbeing of his people. God bless him.
His point about biodiversity is well-taken, too. Mr. C and I just attended the Western Landscape Symposium yesterday where we heard Dr. Doug Tallamy of the Homegrown National Park movement (check it out). It’s a conservation effort dedicated to “building networks for life” — one person at a time. I’m a fan of localism, so this has great appeal to me.
I think there’s an obvious inconsistency in environmentalism calling for “carbon capture” and at the same time biologists (and entomologists like Dr. Tallamy) recognizing that plants which perform the desired “capture” depend on CO2 for photosynthesis and tissue growth, but maybe that’s just me. I say the more CO2 the better!
The BBC interviewer is so arrogant and obnoxious he can’t even see the hypocrisy of rich nations like the UK lecturing poor countries about their contribution to CO2 emissions. Energy is life (and wealth). And CO2 is necessary for the plant life that sustains the planet and all of humanity along with it. President Irfaan Ali seems to get it.
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Flanking the BBC from the left while supporting oil and gas! The interviewer doesn’t have any idea what to do with that.
Some day you should give us your reasons for saying that.
It sounds like that journalist wasn’t conducting the interview for the purpose of gathering information. But he got some anyway!
Ben just said to me, “Mom, I know where I want to move to.”
I said, “Let me guess. Guyana?”
“How did you know?”
He saw this clip about the time you did. :)
Happy Easter, Western Chauvinist. :) :)
Is Ben attracted to the biodiversity angle? I understand the appeal. Unfortunately, Guyana is preparing for an invasion by Venezuela. The world on fire under the Marxist regimes.
Happy Easter to you and yours, Marci!
I just stated my reason. CO2 is plant food. The focus should be on creating “networks for life” — particularly insect life, which is being devastated by deforestation and turning the prairies into solar and wind farms. Dr. Tallamy explained that biodiverse prairies have the same carbon capture ability as forests.
I’m focusing on making my yard a habitat for caterpillars after hearing Tallamy’s talk. I already grow milkweed (the Monarch population is in big trouble) and goldenrod. We’re up against a green space with Gambel Oak — all good for caterpillars. But, I’m going to shoot for more host plants and more diversity and I’m hoping to influence my neighbors to do the same.
Climate change is a scare hoax meant to empower Big Government and enrich “green” industries. But, that doesn’t mean we don’t have responsibility to be good stewards of the environment — especially the only one we can really affect — in our own backyards.
He likes the president. :) :) He saw the clip. He laughed when I said you had seen it too and enjoyed it. :) :) :)
Thank you. Happy Easter to you and your family too. :) :)
Life is tooo funny sometimes. :)
CO2 is a lagging indicator of warmer temperatures, not a first order cause. AGW is a just-so story for children.
BBC Presenter: “Now, wait just a minute, someone gave me this card and I have to read the points on it, President Ali!!”
Yeah, he’s a real piece of work, isn’t he? “Let me cite those activists a Greenpeace as my ‘experts.'” ‘Cause Greenpeace has the interests of the people of Guyana at heart — right?
We do a bit of regenerative ranching here on our little piece of Texas land. My b-in-law just purchased 100 acres adjacent to our 70 and he is very interested in doing the same. Wifey has a Jersey A2/A2 milk cow who gave us a nice little baby bull recently. With our +/- 30 laying hens were ready for the Apocalypse. I’ll check out the link.
I worked with a lovely Southern lady – a drilling engineer – and she had a wonderful saying when she would see a takedown like that: b!tchslap. We need more of that.
Happy Easter!
You explained why it is good and necessary. You didn’t explain why the more the better.
There is hardly anything good for which you can say the more the better. I have a wife and that is good. That doesn’t mean the more wives like her that I have, the better. This is also true for good things like water and food. You have to have pretty strong evidence and tight reasons to say the more the better.
I liked the clip, too, even though the President of Guyana might be a Marxist for all we know. He came to the interview prepared.
I hadn’t heard that term before. You’ve got me curious. It looks like Google knows about it.
Happy Easter, Scott!
The Symposium was very interesting, but Mr. C and I were both having an “uh-oh” feeling as Dr. Tallamy began his talk (not unexpected when you get a bunch of serious gardeners in a room). He accepted the premise of climate change and you got the strong sense that humans are the problem (and maybe the population needs reducing — You first, greenie!). Now, when I look around at the dead-scape lawns (and fake turf!!) and rockscapes in our area, I can’t deny he has a point. But, CO2 — or the lack of carbon capture — isn’t what concerns me. It’s the effect we have on biodiversity — the plant and animal life we’re damaging by neglecting our local environments.
But, then Dr. T started offering solutions and he was more sane about how to proceed than many people in the room might have been, if you had a chance to survey them. For instance, there was a young man in the back whose first question was about most of our farmland being dedicated growing animal feed (he neglected the massive corn production for “green” ethanol) — and you just knew where this was going (he had “vegan” written all over him). But, Dr. T had already stated that grazers were a normal part of the prairie ecosystem and produce natural fertilizer. He’s just opposed to overgrazing. So you get your wife’s milk cow and baby bull out there on the prairie!
Then the kid asked if “indigenous” people were involved in the movement, at which point I suffered severe eyeroll strain. Dr. T’s organization consists of 3 people and is coming from a scientific perspective, not some romantic vision of how indigenous people have all the answers.
You can find Dr. T on YouTube.
Oh, and Dr. T sealed the deal with me when he answered the question of how to get rid of invasive plants by recommending the judicious use of Roundup. He even said it’s really the only way. He’s my guy.
Now I have to find time to watch this tonight.
I like Roundup for invasives, especially vines. Music to my ears.
You have to look up Dr. Doug Tallamy on YouTube. He has a bunch of videos available.
The video posted above is the President of Guyana.
He may have been exaggerating a little. I use a little roundup on the 250-foot perimeter of our vegetable garden so the quack and grasses won’t grow up enough to short out the electric fence when we’re gone or I get behind on weedwhacking. It kills most of what I want killed, but it doesn’t kill things like plantain or other plants that aren’t fazed by glyphosate. That’s not a major problem, as there isn’t much of that and I can keep up with those by mechanical means. There are also herbicide treatment for them, but I haven’t found it necessary.
If so, I would consult with my son who works on invasive species control in some of our western National Parks, which involves herbicides like Roundup much of the time. I’m not sure he does any more of that in his latest job, but I think he’s still involved. He’s keeping it somewhat of a mystery to us what his new duties are, but there is a lot more desk work.
How about prosperity? How about more middleclass? How about more virtue? More stewardship?
My point is, in case I wasn’t clear enough, fossil fuels are essential to human flourishing. God’s gift to humanity. An increase in CO2 emissions would certainly be better for Guyana and other poor nations. What wealthy nations like the US (and most other first world nations) need is an increase in networks for life, not hysteria over CO2 emissions.
CO2 is a trace atmospheric gas that lags warming and has NOT been shown to adversely affect climate. Methane has a greater greenhouse forcing effect and water vapor has a dramatically greater greenhouse forcing effect — and we know very little about cloud formation. Carbon based lifeforms are dependent on CO2. When Earth Day rolls around (a commie-inspired holiday), my family turns on extra lights (while the greenies go dark) to contribute to the Earth’s wellbeing.
We DO NOT know the optimal level of atmospheric CO2. We DO KNOW that plants and the animals that depend on them use it for photosynthesis and tissue growth. CO2 is NOT a pollutant. It is essential for life on the planet.
Now, if you want to talk about adverse climate effects, consider the Maunder Minimum.
No, I wouldn’t say the more prosperity, the better. Prosperity has historically (and biblically) had a tendency to be a corrupting influence.
More middleclass? You mean more egalitarianism? I don’t know. I wouldn’t count on it always being better at every level, even though at current levels I favor more. But a society in which everyone is at the same level is likely to be much like a mesolithic or neolithic society, where there were no class distinctions. Also no prosperity, as now know it.
More virtue? Sure.
More stewardship? Stewardship covers a lot of things, not all of them good in all circumstances. It can easily mean less generosity.
My disagreement was not with your “point.” Instead, I questioned your statement that the more CO2, the better.
The president of Gayana is not claiming that more CO2 is better for Gayana. (Or if he did, I managed not to hear it.) He’s saying instead that Gayana will be net zero, even with more fossil fuel extraction. I think his claim is on a lot safer ground than yours. I don’t trust many of the predictions about the effects of increased atmospheric carbon, whether yours or the ones predicting climate apocalypse. Predicting things like that is hard.
There is nothing about CO2 being essential for life on the planet that keeps it from being a pollutant. It depends a lot on quantities and indirect effects.
I don’t want to talk about that. Instead, I would like to talk about how I wish conservatives would quit undermining their valid and useful points with wild guesses and false or illogical statements that make them easy for everyone else to ignore. If they would quit undermining themselves, maybe no Democrat would ever again get elected or be given an position of high trust. (Note: I am not going to predict that it would happen for sure. Predictions are hard.)
I’m sure the President of Guyana would have some choice words for you.
Reason with the unreasoning? Yeah, that works out.
I don’t know. It seems to me that an occasional provocative and true statement (CO2 is plant food) is more effective than such obtuseness.
I’ll turn it on its head: WE NEED MORE CO2. Low CO2 levels cause mass extinction events. And we are much closer to that low end than we are to the high end.
source
The way this pompous git tosses out the 2 billion tons of carbon number is really annoying.
First, I think it is a tad high. That would be almost double the entire carbon output of the USA in a year and almost a third of current annual global output. Second, it is not all coming up for use in combustion engines and power plants right away. Third, did he discount the amount that will be taken up by expanding plant life or dissolved in the oceans? Fourth, the “climate sensitivity” figure is increasingly unlikely to be even as high as a full 2 degrees C per doubling of atmospheric CO2, so the worst case (ballpark) is that this contribution could trigger as much as a 0.1 degree rise in 50 years. If I am a Guyanese lacking clean running water, electricity, and a steady food supply, the planetary risk of a fraction of a degree of warming a half-century or more from now is a risk I would happily take every time, especially given that my entire village’s annual current carbon footprint is less than that of the jet taking this BBC jagoff back to his posh digs in the UK.
Let’s call the variable that you have introduced—the optimal level of atmospheric CO2– “beta”, for short.
I invite anyone who accepts the above claim as true to answer this question:
How would a team of scientists go about estimating a likely range for beta, to some reasonable level of confidence? Say, 90%. Or pick some other level.
This is not an idle question: it is not “pedantic” or “too theoretical” or “too abstract” to be of any practical significance.
On the contrary, if you are one of those who is convinced that the statement is true, and you merely perform this simple bit of critical thinking, I believe that you will discover that, like the great mass of positive “green” supporters of the progressivist political movement, you have been lured into a trap of irrational thinking by its intellectual leaders.
Life survived at 1600 ppm CO2 and higher. Much below 280 ppm is fatal for many plant species. “Optimal” CO2 level is a number that can be used as a fear-inducing grant enhancer. Claiming that 500 ppm (~30 years from now) is fatal would be hard to believe so we need a “tipping point” or some other BS term to infer that an optimum did exist but we are departing from it into inexorable badness without ever having to explain why it was optimal.
What a breath of fresh air!! We need more people pushing back on the arrogance of the Global Warming Hoax.
I’m so glad you posted that! I was about to go looking for a similar graph that I stored away on my computer. We are living in a age equal to the most severe CO2 drought in earth’s known history (if you believe the paleo-climatologists). Off the top of my head, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are around 420 parts per million. If it were to drop below something like 200 parts per million, all plant life would die within days or weeks, followed shortly thereafter by all animal life.
Greenhouses keep their optimal CO2 levels at about triple the earth’s current natural level. As can be seen on iWe’s chart, the level in the past has been as much as 15 – 17 times greater than current levels, and life on earth did just fine in those periods.
I’m one of the few people who think more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a good thing. I was tickled when Rush Limbaugh said “I’m gonna go home and create the largest carbon footprint I can get away with!” By the way, if Global Warming were really happening, I think that would be a good thing, too! 1/4 or 1/3 of the planet is uninhabitable by most creatures because it is too cold.
OB,
All very good observations!
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But…better you should have made them a separate comment than a Reply to mine, to which none are relevant. Perhaps my point was unclear: the trap that WC fell into was mistakenly believing that it is possible to give a valid (“operational”) definition of “optimal CO2 level”.
It is impossible to teach anyone to see this extremely common category of critical thinking error. Each person must discover it for himself. I had hoped that someone would try the thought experiment, and fairly quickly stumble across his error on his own. )
As I understand it, one reason that CO2 is a lagging indicator rather than a cause, is that warmer oceans don’t hold as much CO2. So as temperatures rise, the oceans would RELEASE CO2, not absorb it.
kedavis,
Great point! Basic physics, long forgotten (by me, I mean ;-)
There is an excellent reminder here of why gases dissolved in bodies of water, including weak greenhouse gases like CO2, and much stronger ones like water vapor and methane, are released on net by warmer temperatures.
They show a graph of the effect for a number of gases, including methane. But oddly, not for CO2 for some reason! Not including water vapor either…I figured that one out myself. I think.