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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.
Published in Environment
This is a good point. The elites don’t act as if it’s a crisis, but the crowds they whip up into a frenzy do.
And these idiots vote . . .
CO2 is Plant Food.
The more we produce, the better off life on this planet is.
And that is (one reason) why I drive V8s. Because I care.
If Liberals really believed the seas were going to swamp lowland, they could sell Florida and the Outer Banks short, with delivery in 10 or 50 years. And make a killing.
But they don’t do this, because they do not believe themselves. They are gossiping in the galley.
They don’t – as long as they vote for Democrats.
But what you described prior is a negative feedback loop. This is a where a change in one variable (such as a CO2 production increase raising the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere) is mitigated by something else (increased CO2 absorption by growing plants, which lowers the otherwise unopposed increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration).
Properly designed nuclear reactors have the same thing. We call them the negative temperature coefficient of reactivity, and delayed neutron precursors.
You have got to be kidding . . .
A major reason I do not take seriously the climate alarmists is that I am old enough to remember when the same category of people was certain in the 1970’s that we were going to freeze in a new ice age.
That second one. That’s the one.
Also, increasing the cost of energy (which is the Greenists’ usual policy prescription) disproportionately affects the poor. High gas prices disproportionately affect the poor. Taxing everything that produces evil carbon disproportionately affects the poor. ‘
Greenists hate the poor.
This is the argument I’ve always used. It’s never landed in a Greenists’ brain pan. Their logic shields are impervious to economic realities.
I’ve always said every religion has an “end-times” scenario to get the faithless to repent or keep the faithful in line. The environmentalist religion is no different. But for some reason, environmentalist high priests live extremely “sinful” lifestyles and none of their disciples seem to care. It’s like they’re all in on the scam from the highest to the lowest levels.
I meant a model of any system, not weather specifically! That is, are there models that successfully predicted otherwise unpredictable phenomena? Human behavior, say? (Seriously inexpert at all things statistical, physical or mathematical, so it’s a real question not a rhetorical one.)
Wasn’t it Time magazine? In a few months, they went from us freezing to death to us burning to death. Just pick a temperature, and we’ll deal with it . . .
Well I suppose the first thing we should do is stop using fossil fuels to fuel aircraft and ships that are used to bring relief supplies to disaster scenes. Farm equipment should be next on the list, as well as trucks that burn fossil fuels to deliver food to supermarkets, medicine, and whatever else that might bring products to the masses.
I do have some reservations about converting corn to fuel. I’m pretty sure that we could find something that’s not edible to convert into fuel.
You need to have a brain in the first place to have a pan . . .
I think it’s because they don’t actually ask anything of the low-levels. Okay, maybe a fluorescent lightbulb, or the hair-shirt exercise of separating recyclables, but otherwise its all talk (and vote) no walk.
I do too. It raises food prices because a major food source is going into producing something other than food. It sticks in my craw because taxpayers are paying subsidies for farmers to grow corn for fuel instead of food, and both food and gas prices go up as a result.
I can’t blame farmers for wanting to get more money for their product, but for crying out loud. Can’t you at least rip the “Farmers feed the country” bumper sticker off your truck?
I have just enough of a science background to be dangerous, so take that into consideration when I say the following: AGW is crap science with crap models based on crap data. There is simply no evidence that we’re in a human-induced warming period. Period.
We’re in an inter-glacial period (and probably headed for another cold spell given the sun’s quiescence), and we should wake up everyday thanking God for it! Cold is much harder on humanity than warmth, even if we are making a significant contribution, of which I’m extremely dubious, if I hadn’t made clear.
Models are only useful if they demonstrate predictive ability. All of AGW is premised on models which have demonstrated over the last two decades their wild inaccuracy. The time span is a problem for verifying the models, as noted above, but early returns are poor. Climate is a massively complex system with many moving parts. It’s sheer arrogance to suggest we know what’s going on and why.
And, yes, you should be suspicious that all the “consensus” science leads to policies which, magically, align with the progressive agenda. This is about power alright. Just not the kind produced by fossil fuels or renewables.
It’s worth noting that, generally speaking, civilization advanced during the earth’s warm periods. This advancement came to a stand-still or reversed during the earth’s cooling periods.
We want warm.
Wrong thread!
I believe in climate change. I’m just not sold that mankind caused it, nor that we could do anything to stop it even if we all agreed to try.
Here is a chart of the temperature of the planet over a series of Ice Ages in the past 500,000 years that I snapped while visiting a museum:
It doesn’t take a math whiz to spot the general pattern: temperature shoots up relatively quickly, then peaks and starts gradually cooling again over thousands of years. We appear to be living near one of the peaks, which means our grandchildren may well live on a hotter planet, regardless of how much carbon we add to the atmosphere. This may be inconvenient, but humans are remarkably adaptable.
At some point the cooling trend will kick in again, unless you believe that the “greenhouse effect” caused by carbon emissions are so powerful as to fundamentally alter this cycle and prevent any further Ice Ages from occuring.
In the sense of building a model to simulate the real world and plugging in input conditions? Not that I can think of, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Of course if you want to broaden the definition of “model” then you could say theories like the Standard Model for quantum mechanics have successfully predicted what was previously unpredictable. But even so there are predictions made that haven’t been (and will probably never be) proved because the time scale is so long. Proton decay for example.
Any model complex enough to perfectly simulate the real world is the real world.
Newtonian physics works pretty well. It is a model and you could not engineer things on earth without it. It works until you get to tiny things like electrons or photons. Or spectacularly big things like universes.
It is on Drudge. But the link is to a Daily Caller article. Here you go.
See, it’s stuff like this that drives me nuts. We have 12 years before the earth is irreversibly doomed!
Anyone remember “88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Happen in ’88?” This is the same sort of thing. The environmental doomsday has been scheduled and rescheduled more times now than I can count.
I love how every time there’s a Climate Change summit scheduled somewhere, it gets snowed under. God has a sense of humor.
The problem with the graph is that things are drawn in nice smooth lines. The basic problem with prediction of long term weather patterns and climate is that chaos theory is governing. While chaos theory is deterministic (as opposed to stochastic), it is extremely sensitive to initial conditions and measurement accuracy becomes crucial. And the problem with those measurements is that they will contain some error that is probably stochastic.
True. The climate is remarkably insensitive to human activity. That means that huge changes in human activity result in little to no changes in climate.
When AGW people say that the earth has cooled recently – they are referencing temperatures in the mid 1800’s as their baseline.
The claim is that the earth has warmed 1.9 degrees centigrade since then and that about 20-25% (0.4C) of that change is due to “human activity”.
So, how much has human activity changed since 1860 ish?
Well from 1860 to 2000 the population of the planet went from 1B to 6B. So 6x the population.
Humans used about 100KG of coal equivalent per capita per year for their energy needs in 1860.
In 2000 that number was 2000KG of coal equivalent. A factor of 20X
The factors compound so there has been at least a 120X increase in human activity since 1860.
That 120X increase in human activity resulted in a 0.4C increase in temperature. (Remember, leaving 1.5C temperature increase unexplained.)
Any system where a 120x increase in input results in a 20% increase in output means that the system is insensitive to the input.
Plus, does anyone believe there will be a similar 120X increase in human activity between now and 2100? Even the UN believes that the population will only increase to 11.2B people (a factor of 1.8 over the population of 2000). So no – we aren’t going to experience the dramatic increase in human activity we have already witnessed.
Like was said earlier – warmer is better – for all of us.
What are the chances I had just seen this picture today? Pretty neat:
Sorry I can’t seem to make it bigger on my phone.
Start here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/05/international-panel-calls-for-end-to-global-war-on-fossil-fuels/
Then follow the comments here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/08/the-new-ipcc-sr15-report-is-out/
TL/DR: Climate alarmism is bogus. Climate change is real, but with only the tiniest of identifiable human causes.
Like I said
Nice turn of phrase.
A book that you might enjoy is “The whole story of climate: What Science reveals about the nature of Endless change” by E. Kirsten Peters.
There are several interesting things about the cycles. The first is an analogy of climate to a football field.
….
We are in one of the half yard eras.
The second is how quickly some changes came about. In many cases, in as little as several years. And usually within one generation. I had never heard that – I thought there would be time to adapt.