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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.
And if you truly wanna see a member of the Ludicrous left’s head explode, simply ask them to relate how much carbon dioxide is in our atmosphere?
Carbon Dioxide is the lynch pin of their theory.
Michael Crichton answers the question for us: In relation to his football field analogy, in which our earth’s atmosphere is the equivalent of a football field, carbon dioxide is a mere three eighths of an inch of the football field.
It has increased something like 15 to 20 percent over the last 75 years. But it is such a relatively small amount to begin with that it is bewildering to figure it has anything to do with Climate Change at all. (It went from 315 parts per million to something like 371 parts per million.)
I did a couple of years in research labs, in one of which I was one of two people authorized to make entries in the lab notebook. (OK, there were two of us in the lab.) I can guarantee you that if I had accidentally destroyed the original data and then said “that’s OK, look at this pretty graph I made from the data. No, I can’t tell you exactly what I did to the data to make that pretty graph because I didn’t keep records, but this pretty graph confirms your theory” I’d have been out of a job, not a respected authority in my field.
I doubt the UN is interested in the third world. They ARE interested in getting their cut as the money flows through.
There is also the fact that last December saw the most active moments of the planet’s volcanoes for many decades. All that particulate matter means that there will be more rain than ever. And that if that rain doesn’t occur, then those trails of non-dissolving vapor that my neighbors and I not only witness overhead but photograph even as they take out rain clouds – those clouds are far more important a strategy in altering our weather than carbon dioxide. (Weather Channel experts let it slip recently that if the National Weather Service predicts a rain storm there is a 90 percent chance of it occurring where it is predicted, due to advances in instrumentation and computer modeling. Yet last winter, some 45 to 55% of all predicted rain storms either fizzled out or else dissolved before occurring. Why?)
The UN is basically a Nigerian scam writ large.
Plus it is not a built-inside-cement argument that the planet will be getting warmer. So many volcanoes are either already blowing up or possibly likely to blow up. Which could knock that .4C increase in temperature flat on its butt.
Unless, of course, your job had been for any of the research labs funded by those who want the Leftist version of Climate Change to go on unimpeded. (And your graph somehow helped out their argument.)
When a person realizes that Podesta is inside the UN’s board of directors, it is not surprising. And the UN wants to have Obama as its Secretary General!
I guess we’d have to ask the lovely and talented Right Angles about that.
I don’t think the models have been able to predict the past even.
Yeah, but I had links! (-:
Sure. It’s called oil.
I got only part way through this article and was already about to say something nice about it (that it was this close to making a coveted place on “The List” for 2018).
Now, I admit I’m still not finished reading it. But I will pause to say that any Ricochet post painting the above metaphorical imagery is already on…
The List!
Congratulations, Gran.
Would that be the same Podesta that Mueller gave immunity to for failing to register as a foreign agent for decades, just to pressure Manafort into pleading guilty for financial crimes?
Or is it the one who gave the scammers the Hillary campaign email passwords?
I used to have links, but I am unwilling to brave the ricoarchives at 20 results per page to find the comment I originally posted.
I’ve always said if people really believed this, they’d sacrifice themselves so the rest of us could live our lives in peace and free of harm. It doesn’t go over well in Los Angeles.
that said the one counterargument I can’t stand is that people aren’t having kids because of climae change. It’s self-serving, for starters, but it’s also counterintuitive. Children of college educated parents are more likely to go to college than not. If we lower our supply of college educated children, we decrease the chances that someone from the group might solve this “problem”
but really, it’s just a wealth redistribution and control scam
I love this post.
Your analogy of stewardesses predicting doom but continuing to pour the coffee was excellent, and nicely encapsulates the fatal contradiction of the global warming catastrophists: If they were serious, they would back nuclear. Period. The wind/solar shtick is profoundly stupid.
So I was on a twin-prop puddle-jumper flying from Denver to Colorado Springs in the winter of ’88, on a flight back from Chicago. Just outside of the Springs, and not very high up, we hit the wake of a much larger plane. Our little commuter rolled 90 degrees, and I found myself looking across the aisle and out the window straight down at a little lake that was getting larger as I watched. We dropped like a stone for either about five seconds or an hour and a half — I’m not sure which — before rolling back into a respectable airplane orientation and continuing to our destination.
The pilot, when he came on the intercom, sounded exactly like every other pilot with his laconic Texas drawl and nothing-to-see-here tone. But as I was getting off the plane, I heard one stewardess confide to another that she “thought we were going to die.” And so I felt a little justified for my own momentary trepidations.
Or, just say, “Nice increase you had there, pal.” Remember 1800-and-froze-to-death? Remember the French Revolution? Volcanoes.
@rightangles?
The best part is that you can recycle the articles, very green and environmentally friendly.
The good news is that that gives us 11 years, 364 days, and 23 hours before anything must be done. I suggest patience, some of the best papers I wrote at university had far shorter deadlines than this.
They believe in those things, religiously. The “party of science” is a lie like “Anti-fa” being anti fascist. The global temperature for September was the same as in 1983. If the rest of century is like the last 1/3 of a century, then the global temperature in 2100 will be same as it is today.
If you’re ever in need of a stewardess metaphor for this, look no further than Lufthansa.
I’ve only flown it once (because, never again), and I’ve never seen a ruder, less competent bunch of women who, when we hit a little turbulence, literally started running up and down the aisle screaming at the passengers to fasten their seatbelts. I’ve never experienced anything like it. (They were ugly too. Not because of what they looked like, because of how they behaved.)
When we landed (Frankfort), we couldn’t go to the gate for some reason, and ended up in the middle of the runway, with the “stairs” like Casablanca. A lady who needed a wheelchair had to be carried by passengers to the exit, where she sat at the top of the steps, and then passengers inched her to the bottom, where someone from the airline had grudgingly produced a foldable wheelchair which the passengers lifted her into.
I don’t know what the usual protocol is for such things (is there a food elevator, or something similar on the plane)? But what I do know is that the
stewardessesflight attendants refused to touch, or help this lady out of the plane or down the steps. It was incredible.One of the passengers wrote a very stiff letter to the airline following her return home. A friend told me.
Here’s what you can tell your friend:
The NYT article reports that the only way to avoid catastrophe is a 45% cut in GHGs by 2030 (compared to 2010) and 100% by 2050. This is simply not going to happen. The US is only 15% (and shrinking) of global emissions and the EU around 10%. At best China, which emits more than the US and EU combined, has said it can stabilize its emissions by 2030. The math cannot be made to work and you can’t wish the technology into existence. Ask your friend to tell you how that will happen, using hard numbers.
On a related note we simply do not know how, as a matter of global policy, to reduce GHGs emission to that extent. The EU signed Kyoto, the US did not, yet both had the same % reduction during the period the agreement was in effect. It tells you that the policymakers really don’t know what they are doing.
CO2 emitted today remains in the atmosphere for decades. What will happen has already been determined by the emissions over recent decades.
Bottom line – your friend needs to hope that the IPCC models are overestimating impacts from CO2 emissions because whatever is going to happen, at least out to 2050, is going to happen regardless what anyone does.
And, if you are interested in just having some fun, point out that the single biggest reduction in GHG emissions is attributable to Ronald Reagan who destroyed the Evil Empire leading the former USSR and eastern European states to massively reduce their emissions in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Another major contributor to emissions reductions was Margaret Thatcher who pressed ahead with exploiting natural gas in the North Sea while shutting down coal mines in the UK. Of course that prompted an endless series of movies from British lefties bemoaning the end of communities based on coal mining. Make them own the contradictions!
Another fantastic post, Kate!
As always, you make it worth my while to check the notifications, late to the party as I might be.
And only the tiniest of negative effects.
I can’t help but think that the engine driving the view you’re arguing against is the radical green theory that the natural carrying capacity of the Earth is about 1 billion, and that every person above that is a threat to Gaia’s health.
Most discussion of the means involves a bit of handwaving and it’s been a while since I read this stuff, but IIRC the most ecologically safe way of getting there from where we are was deemed to be famine; the wrong plague might strike innocent animals and nuclear war makes the planet radioactive.
The proponents of such views seem divided; some are convinced that they will be among the survivors and others are willing to give up their lives for Gaia.
When every problem calls for the same solution it’s about the ‘solution’ not the’ problems’ .
FIFY.
Good analogy, wonderful graph.
One doesn’t have to be an expert in climate change to know that if it’s a serious problem the Federal government and central governments around the world, or the UN cannot fix it. They will make it worse and sooner. On that we have even better less variable data than on any climate change. Turn over energy choices to governments and it will become less efficient, more corrupt. National and global economies will become less flexible and less creative. Free and flexible is what economies must be to adjust to and solve whatever we face in the future, heat, cold, or whatever.
So far what have we done in the name of global warming? Cars for Klunkers, a net loser done to help the US auto unions at the expense of US independent mechanics and kids who lost an opportunity to have their first car; ethanol and wind which are net environmental losers; electric cars which require huge subsidies, which tells me they’re also net energy users. Solar? don’t know but it’s no substitute for gasoline or gas.
Anything that is centralized and given authorities and money will attract organized interest money and lobbying which reflect existing mature technologies probably on their way out who will grab hold of regulations to restrict emerging technologies. This is just basic political economy. No science here. But are there exceptions anywhere?