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Climate Change Apocalypse
You can’t make this stuff up. Hillary’s revelation that during her tenure as Secretary of State she ran the department as though it were an appendage of the Clinton Foundation; Republicans doing their best impression of a Common Core civics lesson to instruct the Iranian leader, when their letter should have been addressed to America’s leader; Democrats, at least many of their multicultural, morally relativistic, blame-America-first acolytes of Jeremiah Wright’s “G. D. America” diatribe, accusing Republicans of treason; and current Secretary of State, John Kerry, trying to get a deal with the Iranians to change their nuclear program timetable from apocalypse now to apocalypse later; the list goes on. The real question is, which among these events should be considered the single most important crisis facing this generation of decision makers?
The answer is, none of the above. In fact, the correct answer is not found on this list, but rather in a speech made by Secretary Kerry to the Atlantic Council on March 12, in between executive denunciations of the leader of our most important ally in the region and negotiations with the world’s most nefarious supporter of terrorism. It’s climate change; specifically, the 97-percent-of-scientists-agree variety of climate change. Indeed, in his words, if we (the world, but mostly the American government) do nothing, “future generations will judge our effort, not just as a policy failure, but as a collective, moral failure of historic consequence. And they will want to know how world leaders could possibly have been so blind, or so ignorant, or so ideological, or so dysfunctional, and, frankly, so stubborn that we failed to act on knowledge that was confirmed by so many studies over such a long period of time and documented by so much evidence.”
Whew! Where to start? In fact, Kerry is part of a lavishly government funded menagerie of what Paul Driessen refers to as the Climatist Jihadis, a fanatical sect, many of whose members are perhaps best characterized by the words President Reagan once used to describe the Soviet Union: “The only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain [their goals].” The crimes so far have not extended beyond a New York Times cartoon instructing readers to stab climate change deniers to death, but there has been enough lying and cheating by the Jihadis to fill a new Black Book of Communism for the Green movement.
Consider, for instance, the 97-percent-of-scientists-agree fiction, applied in this case to the global warming flavor of climate change. Jeff Dunetz addressed this point in an excellent essay that appeared in Hot Air last year, and is best summarized by his comment that “you are more likely to see the tooth fairy or a unicorn than a 97% consensus of scientists believing that there is man made global warming.” Of course, that does depend on the scientists you consult. As Rachelle Peterson pointed out in The Federalist recently, “Paper trails indicate that the EPA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other federal agencies solicited climate science research that supported their conclusions, cherry-picked peer reviewers known to be sympathetic to the pro-global warming cause, and overlooked conflicts of interest by assigning research papers to be reviewed by members of the same organizations that produced the research in the first place.” In other words, the fix is in; if you want lots of federal money, along with insulation from any questions about your research, be sure to toe the party line and tell the ideologues in the government and elsewhere exactly want they want to hear.
Naturally, most of us are not in a position to evaluate the results of the multitude of “scientific studies” that purport to argue the case one way or the other; likely for non-specialists much of the research has an eye-glazing quality to it. However, it’s not the science so much as it is the ideology of the global-warming, climate change elite that is so very disturbing. Indeed, for a student of politics, the gravest concern is that the world has witnessed this sort of madness in the past, and on an impressive scale. In fact, no other current political phenomenon exemplifies Hannah Arendt’s characterization of totalitarianism better than climate change ideology in all its variants, in that it reflects a “fanatical commitment to a fictitious world” propped up by a huge complex of domestic and international bureaucracy ostensibly committed, in this case, to saving the world from itself. And as we have seen, mostly based on government mandated and financed “scientific studies.”
Although this may seem like a rant, let us take two extreme cases, one of them involving what was without question one of the most advanced nations in the world, and another that was based on—guess what—“scientific” socialism. Thus, the Nazis convinced themselves and their captive populations about something they called an “international Jewish conspiracy,” while the Bolsheviks built their empire on the basis of opposition to a global capitalist plot. Both regimes constructed enormous police states based on a foundation of what each insisted was scientific evidence. The terrifying consequence of such efforts is that they forced ordinary citizens to conclude that such efforts actually existed for the purposes their leaders proclaimed, which was to ferret out what must have been unspeakably dangerous threats to their lives—like global warming or climate change ideology today.
It was all a massive fraud, of course; the global Jewish conspiracy existed only in the minds of Hitler and his demented entourage, while dissenters were dismissed as advocates of “Jewish science,” whereupon many left the country before being rounded up for the death camps. In the Soviet case, dissension was handled by confinement to a gulag or a psychiatric hospital. In both cases, politicized science backed by an ideological elite led to these countries’ ruin.
Now obviously Climatist Jihadis prefer silencing their adversaries in less brutal ways, but concern over their fanaticism remains warranted. As well as the arrogance of the true believers, who have been sending out emails for a “climate change fantasy tournament,” asking readers’ reactions to prominent “deniers’” comments. Oh, there’s a fantasy going on out there, of course. It’s called the ideology of man-made climate change. The rest of us simply call it the weather.
Published in Science & Technology
Would Iran detonating a nuclear device on Israel bring about nuclear winter? Think of the trauma to Gaia.
“In fact, no other current political phenomenon exemplifies Hannah Arendt’s characterization of totalitarianism better than climate change ideology in all its variants . .”
One keeps hoping this is all a bad dream. The next 10 years will be a turning point. If their hockey stick fails to materialize while the CO2 levels rise . . and if the sun’s reduced irradiance allows more cosmic rays to seed clouds and the planet enters a Dalton/Maunder Minimum period of cooling – well . . . I hope to witness the Climatist Jihadis’ abasement.
Or merely huge banquets of crow-eating.
I’ll believe anthropogenic “Climate Change” (vs. natural climate change that happens all the time) is a real thing when:
As far as I know AGW is real and a threat. I’ll take it seriously just as soon as President Obama and the Democrats do.
Global warming is a convenient problem to help ease the world towards the utopia of global government since only a truly global solution (implemented by a global bureaucracy) will be able to defeat this problem globally.
(apologies for the overuse of the word “global.” Just woke from my nap)
Actually, many of the youth of today are put into a version of the psychiatric hospital, to assure they hold the Party line on race, class, gender and the environment. Back in more cisnormative times, it was called “freshman orientation.” And no-one is released until they have acknowledged their false consciousness and pledge to crush all vestiges of their past sins in all those around them. R> Contributor Greg Lukianoff has been fighting this for years over at thefire.org.
Recently, Ayatollah Al has issued a fatwah indicating that it is high time to start punishing the Climate Kuffar. You certainly won’t be hired in most of academia if you hold anything other than “settled” opinion in a whole range of areas. I would be unsurprised if further fatwahs were not issued in the near future to prevent the Climate Kuffar from publicly speaking, publishing or working.
I sent this out to a couple of my family members, and here are two of their responses. Notice that neither person bothered to tell me what part of this is BS.
__________
It’s bs. It never ceases to amaze me, Kay, how you can search out exactly what you want to hear, based on what you believe, from the 0.0000001 percent of the population that does NOT believe our weather is changing!
On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 6:01 PM, Kay
I (and I suspect Dime) would be crushed if either of these was Kaylett…
There are long term corrective cycles to this madness.
People and leaders who do not follow the prescriptions of AGW will economically outpace the areas that do , rapidly leading to an insurmountable lead.
Areas where women attempt to make men the aggressor in all circumstance will eventually drive men to where there are less stupid women. Even men can learn to avoid pain.
Areas where people do not vaccinate will eventually not be able to travel to areas that do.
Countries that produce nothing of value except lawyers and ethnic grievance majors will eventually collapse.
Countries that borrow forever will be taken over by ones who grab tangible commodities as fast as possible.
Countries that do anything for the promise of peace get war , usually as a surprise.
So relax, these things work themselves out.
I worry for my grandchildren.
No, not Kaylett thank the powers that be. Both cousins one in OK and another in CA. I wrote them both back and asked why they didn’t give me a good debate rather than just dismiss me? One has a PhD in psychology and the other was a committee secretary for a senator for many, many, years, democrat of course. I reminded them of the last ice age when there weren’t very many people on this planet, and asked them what caused the ice to melt then? No answer of course.
Whew!
Answer: “But, Science!”
I’ll believe it when they get some data that shows it’s actually happening…
I remember making a similar statement about ten years ago. They changed the name from Global Warming to Climate Change and doubled-down on stupid.
I hate to be so pessimistic, but by the time every public school “educated” nitwit leaves for their Rape Center – oops, I mean college – they have had twelve years of indoctrination telling them that this is as true a fact as the earth orbiting the sun. Then they get out their little phone and play Angry Birds while leaving the details to the experts, who surely know how best to handle this.
Even if this was exposed for the fraud it is, like any good shyster, they would just move to another racket. Just let Professor Marvel change the labels on his tonic and he’ll keep right on plying his trade.
(Wow, I’m a real downer, aren’t I?)
This one from my sister, and she included the email addresses of my cousins, just to make sure they knew I visit untrustworthy sites.
LOL You are so right.
But, you know what they say about clicking on untrustworthy links.
These links are sent with the hope that you’ll read it before you realize what it is and
you will immediately lose your mind and believe everything the site says.
Fair warning. Clicking on any link from Kay may be detrimental to your blood pressure!
Kay, try these links if you dare:
http://www.conserve-energy-future.com/various-global-warming-facts.php
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/22/why-global-warming-skeptics-are-wrong/
I am a scientist, and the better correlation as to whether a person believes in catastrophic global warming or not, is political and not whether or not they are a scientist. Most scientists believe in global warming because the are left of center not because they are scientists.
Now the science behind the greenhouse effect is very well established, and increased CO2 does increase temperatures on average, the thing is that the response is logarithmic which means as the concentation of CO2 increase the effect becomes smaller and smaller. The only way that catastrophic global warming can be predicted is to assume a positive feedback mechanism where the greenhouse effect of water vapor runs out of control.
Kay, I went to your first link, and one of the first things I saw was that global warming has emerged as one of the “most biggest” environmental concerns in the last decades. High school students, I reckon.
I think future generations will look back at us (as a society) as some of the most gullible people in history. One of the links sent to Kay said that the decade of the 2000-2009 was the warmest in history. Having lived through it, I find that rather hard to believe. I was wondering the other day if there was a list of predictions made by global warming advocates that have already passed their expiration dates? In particular, Al Gore’s lovely movie, An Inconvenient Truth.
More like Jr. High. Can’t believe my sister would consider my intelligent level low enough to believe it. She really needs to do a little research on C02.
I sat here a few hours stewing, then wrote them a letter:
A response from my sister:
“You mean out of the hundreds of thousands of scientists who agree. Show me on NASA web site where their data is faulty.
Never met Al Gore. What has his footprint and income got to do with the fact of global warming?
If not caused by human activity, then what?”
My Reply:
First of all there are not hundreds of thousands of scientists who agree. Show me your data. I documented for you where 1000 didn’t agree. Forget NASA, it is a government agency and depends on the government for funding they are promoting this. Last I heard, Obama stated that NASA’s primary goal is to reach out to the Muslims and make them welcome.
You didn’t meet AL Gore, our ex-vice president? What a shame. I did, even have a photo of me with Tippy on the Capital steps in Sacramento. Al Gore’s footprints in this debate are important, because if he believed his own propaganda, don’t you think he would cut back on his use of fossils fuels? Al Gore pretty well encouraged this nonsense by his documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth” which has been debunked as he uses the Hockey Stick graph to show that the last century temperature increase is unprecedented. This is false as the graph in scientific terminology ”is severely deformed due to the use of CO2 sensitive biological proxies”. Ice cores tell a different story. We are actually at the tail end of the last Ice Age, and the global temps have not increased in 18 years. And it does seem that we may be starting back into another mini Ice Age as happened in 1810-1819 maybe caused by volcanoes.
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/06/the-year-without-summer-what-caused-the-mini-ice-age-of-the-early-1800s.html
http://www.global-warming-and-the-climate.com/al-gore-documentary.htm
_____
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/earthnews/3310137/Al-Gores-nine-Inconvenient-Untruths.html
Al Gore’s environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth contains nine key scientific errors, a High Court judge ruled yesterday.
The judge declined to ban the Academy Award-winning film from British schools, but ruled that it can only be shown with guidance notes to prevent political indoctrination.
In the documentary, directed by Davis Guggenheim, the former US vice president and environmental activist calls on people to fight global warming because “humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb”.
But Judge Michael Burton ruled yesterday that errors had arisen “in the context of alarmism and exaggeration” in order to support Mr Gore’s thesis on global warming.
Another case that has interested me is Mark Steyn I’ve been following as I read National Review Online: “…In a post at NATIONAL REVIEW’s website, I mocked Dr. Michael Mann, the celebrated global warm-monger, and his “hockey stick,” the most famous of all the late-Nineties global-warming climate models to which dull, uncooperative 21st-century reality has failed to live up. So he sued. We then filed an anti-SLAPP motion to dismiss. Our first court date was January 20th last year. That’s to say, we are now entering the second year of the anti-SLAPP phase of our case.”
http://www.steynonline.com/6017/slappstick-farce
http://www.steynonline.com/6039/the-robe-to-hell
So my best thoughts on all this is the solar activity of the sun, volcanoes world wide, and an occasional hit by meteors is what causes our climate to change, including the orbit of our planet.
Kay
Well, I’m not a scientist and probably didn’t explain it very well but darn, I get tired of being called an idiot. My whole family are all college grads but me, I didn’t get the sheepskin. However, Kaylett got hers with a summa cum laude. None of them did. So I’ll be a college educated person by osmosis. BTW, when I was at her condo in Feb, I asked for a book to read to fall asleep with. I had forgotten mine in Sacramento. She did not have a single book in her condo. She only has audio tapes. I have over a 1000 books in my apt. How can a person live without books?
A note from Paris. This evening I heard a very unusual pattern of air traffic above the city. I’m familiar with standard Saturday-night noises in Paris. It wasn’t the usual “above Paris on a Saturday evening” flight pattern. For context, I should note that recently a Germanwings pilot flew an Airbus into my local mountainside, giving many here a moment’s pause. You may have heard about that. So I thought, “An unusual flight pattern might merit more attention than I’d usually give it. Perhaps they’re doing this for a reason.”
Then I thought–no, probably not. It was earth hour in Paris. They’d pre-scheduled turning off the Eiffel Tower for five minutes. As far as I know, that was why they re-routed flights over Paris.
It’s now quiet again. Commercial air travel has returned to its regular auditory schedule. I have no special insight into the discussions today in the Elysée Palace, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn there were discussions about the awkwardness of “earth minute.” We can’t really cancel it at the last minute. Of course we don’t really wish to turn off the lights. In addition to everything else, that would be dangerous. We must go on with the show. We cannot suddenly announce that reducing carbon emissions over Paris would not at all be désirable.
Reportedly, the world found earth minute greatly moving.
I knew something was there, Kozak, I just couldn’t find it.
I don’t global warming science is rocket science. It’s basically fitting a small data set to a regression equation. Anybody with a computer could do it. That’s why they keep the data sets secret.
And don’t forget a full throated cry for nuclear power. For us that is – not the Iranians.
I suppose there are a few among the aging baby boomers who remember the Wharton Econometric Model of the US economy. It was one of several multi equation models used to forecast back in the 1970’s when Wharton was seduced by the siren call of newly cheap computing power. You may of wondered what happened to it, since it has not been heard of lately. Two things. First, it became apparent on an empirical and theoretical (rational expectations) level that it was lousy at forecasting. (Take a look at my 1997 article in Liberty for a discussion.) Second the method was adopted by the warmest cult. Epistemologically this type of model (with up to a hundred equations in a hundred unknowns) is a bust since the cross equation constraints and transformations of variables (logged etc.) that must be chosen by the “statistician” enable producing any results that appeal. The warmest cult reminds me of that old Randian villain the “physco epistemological criminal.” Never actually encountered such a creature until the warmest cult came along. Karl Popper would have popped his cork over the impossibility of falsifying warmest claptrap.
I’ve always thought of the “97% of scientists…” factoid as as meaningless and as intellectually dishonest as the “we have 4 % of the world’s population but we use 20% (or whatever) of the world’s oil resources” factoid.
I have questions, possibly stupid:
1.) Is the argument over whether the climate is changing, or whether the change is caused by human activity?
2.) One of the links sent to Kay said that the decade of the 2000-2009 was the warmest in history. Having lived through it, I find that rather hard to believe.
It’s my (vague) understanding that local weather in some places may actually get considerably colder due to global warming. E.g. if the Gulf Stream were to change its flow pattern, England and the Netherlands would have a climate more like that of Finland (with issues for agriculture, etc). So the problem isn’t that the whole world becomes the Sahara, it’s that there will be changes that are going to be difficult to adjust to and cope with. A 3 foot rise in average sea level doesn’t sound like much, but apparently it could submerge Holland, parts of Manhattan, whole Pacific atolls and, perhaps, Florida.
In fact, the argument about the venality of the academy is largely a diversion. The big money in climate change involves firms, industries, and individuals who worry that their economic interests will be harmed by policies to slow climate change.
That’s from the Nordhaus article.
Is this not a concern? As Nordhaus pointed out, cigarette companies did their best to challenge and obfuscate the science linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer, and were fairly successful for a long time. (I remember my father telling me about his outrage when reporting on that link was relegated to the back pages of the New York Times because cigarette companies were big advertisers…)
Yes it is a concern. However, it goes both ways. I am concerned that those pushing Global Warming (I will not switch to Climate Change. That only happened when it seemed like it wasn’t warming) are those that benefit from Green technologies. There are articles saying that it has not warmed in 18 years and others that say it continues to get warmer. All I know is that the predictions of what will happen seem to always be wrong, but they just move on to new predictions. My mind is not closed on it, but I am skeptical.
I think that there is debate over both (1) whether the “climate is changing” and (2) whether such change, if occurring, is caused by human activity.
You must understand that there is tremendous obfuscation in the allegations of the “pro-climate-change” side, not least in their use of the term “climate change.” What in the world is “climate change”? Do they mean locally, or globally? Do they mean rising temperatures, falling temperatures, precipitation increases, precipitation decreases, or something else? Or all of the above?
The change in term from “global warming” to “climate change” should be taken as a warning sign of deception. You don’t change from an easily understandable and quantifiable (at least in principle) idea like “global warming” to a vague, undefined term like “climate change” without good reason. The reason was that the “warming” stopped.
I’ve read the various IPCC reports in significant detail. Do you know what is missing? Any simple, straightforward predictions of anything that would occur in the relatively near future — i.e. any predictions that could actually be falsified within a reasonable time period. Providing such predictions would be simple — for example, the report could present a simple table presenting the annual projection of global temperature, together with the relevant “confidence interval.” There are no such predictions — but the reports don’t hesitate to predict temperatures and seal levels in the year 2100.
It is my understanding that if the earlier IPCC reports had included such near-term predictions, it would be obvious to all that their models were wrong. This would not be the case for the more recent IPCC reports, but not because their models are right — rather, because insufficient time has passed to evaluate whether the predictions of the temperature models were correct or not.
It is also (perhaps surprisingly) difficult to produce an accurate historical temperature record. People have been recording temperatures for a couple hundred years, but there is not much of a systematic record, and even in relatively recent times, weather statement readings include a variety of data problems (examples: readings taken at different times of day in during different periods; changes in the environment around the weather stations, such as urban growth, that affected readings; changes in equipment which appear to have changed the trends shown at a particular location). It simply isn’t easy.
On the issue of the reason for warming — if any warming is occurring — there seems to be broad agreement that increased CO2 levels ought to cause higher global temperatures, but much disagreement about the extent of the effect. The relationship is apparently logarithmic, which means that at higher CO2 levels, each incremental increase in CO2 has a smaller effect than the prior incremental increase. The predictions of catastrophic climate effects rely on assumptions regarding feedback mechanisms that greatly increase the effect of CO2 levels alone, and the evidence of such feedback mechanisms is questionable and, in fact, there may be feedback mechanisms working in the other direction.
As a very simplified example: increased CO2 would increase temperature, which would also increase water vapor in the atmosphere, and the water vapor then has its own “greenhouse” effect. This might greatly magnify the temperature rise caused by a CO2 increase. On the other hand, increased water vapor in the atmosphere might lead to both greater cloud cover and greater snowfall, which are reflective, and which tend to decrease temperature. It is not at all clear which of these possible effects of water vapor would dominate.
It is very important to understand the severe limits on “mathematical modeling.” I was once a grad student in the area, so I have much more knowledge than is typical, but that was about 25 years ago, so I’m rusty in the area. I do remember this much: if you give me data in a time series, it is very easy for me to develop a mathematical model that matches the data that I already have. For example, if all that I had was a time series of the price of a stock (say Apple), I could construct a model that would provide quite a good “fit” for the past data. But my model would not necessarily have any predictive power.
The key to mathematical modeling is to validate the model, which means to use the model to make predictions and then see if reality matches the predictions. It is here that the “global warming” models have failed.
Thank you, AP! That’s a great explanation—very helpful.
It does seem as though there’s got to be more money and more political clout on the side of oil and coal than on the side of solar panels and wind farms, though. And the IPCC scientists don’t seem to be especially vulnerable to the corruption of money.
If the modeling can’t make predictions that can be falsified within a reasonable time-frame (or, I guess, once they’ve been verified, it’s too late?) why isn’t it prudent to err on the side of caution? I realize there would be major effects on the economy if we were to adopt all the recommendations for cutting CO2 emissions, but other industries and innovations would presumably get kicked into high gear and new opportunities and niches would open up, wouldn’t they?
Mightn’t it be a good idea to try to use less fossil fuel anyway, given that it’s pretty grubby stuff in other ways, not to mention a lot of it comes from the Middle East, and funds the nut cases?
Is there a sensible, non-political case to be made for cutting CO2 emissions?