Tag: Climate Change

Climate Change Fanatics and Religion

 

In the intricate tapestry of human belief systems, climate change activism is a modern phenomenon that exhibits striking similarities to established religions. Climate change activism and organized religion share numerous traits and characteristics. From the veneration of prophets to instituting moral codes, climate change activists possess elements remarkably akin to religious practices.

Prophets and Messengers

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During his presidency, Netanyahu said there was never a better friend in the White House to the Jews than Trump.  Among many achievements, Trump moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem amidst many protests. He and his son-in-law Jared Kushner worked tirelessly to try to build bridges with The Abraham Accords.  He never received the leadership […]

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The Heat Will Kill You

 

Early in my previous career, I was assigned to do traffic direction at an intersection where a city crew was going to change out the controls on the signal lights. This was supposed to take under an hour, but because of our union contract, I would get two hours of “special” pay (not quite overtime) for the work. Bonus!

About an hour and a half in, the crew chief came over and told me that they needed to replace not only the control box but all of the lights as well.  And they left, saying they’d be back “as soon as they could.”

No to the Fake World! (and Where Are All the Sponges?)

 

I read a story today that made me want to hurl. Chicken made from a chicken cell and grown in a lab to look like a cutlet has now been approved for US consumption by the USDA (gag). This chicken “cell” has been fed “similar” nutrients that a real chicken might encounter.

The chicken lab looks similar to a beer or wine cellar according to the (not so enticing) story, grown in large vats — I guess “curing” (gag again). The chicken cell eventually ends up on a plate with a specially seasoned herb and wine sauce, and has convinced two restaurants to begin offering it. This cell allows it to be marketed as real meat.

Dominique Crenn, owner of the three-Michelin-starred restaurant Atelier Crenn, will serve UPSIDE’s cultivated chicken at her restaurant Bar Crenn in San Francisco. And GOOD Meat has partnered with celebrity chef Jose Andres, who joined GOOD Meat’s board of directors. Andres plans to serve GOOD Meat’s cultivated chicken in one of his restaurants.

Joe Selvaggi talks with climate expert Dr. Judith Curry about the insights contained in her newly released book, Climate Uncertainty and Risk: Rethinking our Response, in which she tracks the evolution of climate science from model development, to political weapon, to an emerging view that the best response to a changing climate is to build resiliency.

Guest:

Climate Change Alarmism Not Supported by the Facts

 

Environmental activists protest in Tel Aviv.

Americans are becoming neurotic worriers. Covid brought out the worst in us, as politicized medical leaders rushed us into a panic response that did far more harm than the disease itself without fundamentally affecting the net outcome of the pandemic.

But Covid is hardly the only example of Americans overestimating the dangers in their lives. We fret about everything from “Christian nationalism” arising from court decisions protecting religious freedoms to alien-bearing UFOs.

Conversations With Chat GPT, Vol. 1: Climate Change

 

What you are about to read is an actual conversation I had with the AI known as ChatGPT. Aside from the pleasantries at the beginning of the conversation, what you will read is the entire, unedited, discussion until its unfortunate conclusion. The only edits I will make will be to edit out my email address and to identify the comments made by Chat GPT. For my part, I used my phone’s voice type to ask questions or make statements. Any errors there are on the part of Android. Please note that Chat GPT still got the gist of my statements/questions despite the typos.


Talk About Anything.

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Yep, another issue of Living Bird has come in the mail! And each such arrival is an occasion. But before I get into this latest one, I’d like to mention two biological data I came across in my recent book readings. First, Donald Keene spoke of the toki, a bird that was in the very […]

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Climate Common Sense

 

What are the facts about climate change? Well, that depends on whom you ask. Meteorologists are not in total agreement about next week’s weather, much less the 50-year forecast. Similarly, scientists were not in universal agreement on how to respond to the COVID pandemic. Remember how Drs. Anthony Fauci and Frances Collins vehemently disputed the Great Barrington Declaration?

Since scientists don’t agree, one admittedly simplistic option would be to consider your own personal common sense observations about the climate. In my personal 60-year experience, the southwest U.S. does seem warmer and drier than in my youth.

Climate Reparations? Nah.

 

Protesters take part in the Walk for Your Future climate march ahead of COP27 in Brussels, Belgium, on Oct. 23.

Last month UN members met once again to live the good life for a few days and push for the unlikely elimination of climate change. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change convened COP27 in the impressive Egyptian coastal city of Sharm El-Sheik. 100 heads of state and 25,000 attendees (carbon footprint alert!) met to advocate for a “giant leap on climate ambition.”

To win “this battle for our lives,” round tables galore were held, coalitions were formed, roles for youth and even children in the crusade were created. Curiously, no actions were taken that would directly limit greenhouse gas emissions, possibly because the much-ballyhooed Paris Agreement had proved worthless, with almost no nations honoring their commitments.

This week on Hubwonk, host Joe Selvaggi talks with climate scientist and Johns Hopkins lecturer Dr. Patrick Brown about his recent paper, Human Deaths from Hot and Cold Temperatures and Implications for Climate Change, on the factors that contribute to high climate-related mortality, and those that lead to better resiliency.

Guest:

Scot Bertram is in for Jim today. Join Scot and Greg as they enjoy watching the acting director of the National Hurricane Center reject Don Lemon’s attempt to say climate change is responsible for Hurricane Ian’s strength. They also get a kick out a radio host exposing the rank hypocrisy of a teenage climate celebrity simply by asking her about her recent travel. And they cringe as President Biden asks if GOP Congresswoman Jackie Walorski was at today’s event. Walorski was killed in an accident back in August.

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   Podesta photo official portrait: Source Wikipedia According to The Hill, Biden Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy will be leaving the Biden White House on September 16th.        https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/3625866-biden-climate-adviser-gina-mccarthy-leaving-white-house-this-month/ Enter John Podesta.  This is the latest installment of someone in the Biden administration with no experience for the position, getting a new job.  If […]

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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.

Climate Change Casual Conversation

 

Have you had the Climate Change Casual Conversation? I have had it three times with three different people, involuntarily, over the last two months. And I do not have a lot of casual conversations because I generally keep to myself.

The first one happened in an AT&T phone store. I was sitting next to an elderly lady and she turned to me and declared (politely) that we are doing things to ruin the planet. She did not mention climate change but I knew what she meant. Maybe she thought I would ask her what she did mean, but I did not want to hear the boilerplate climate “emergency” garbage that is so ubiquitous today.  I did not respond though in retrospect I should have mentioned that her cell phone contained rare earth metals and that extracting them from the ground was hurting the environment. But I didn’t. It was a casual conversation after all.

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Does anyone else think that one of the forcing functions of the 100K year climate cycle is driven in part by the presence of methane hydrates.  I’m aware of the orbital dynamic explanation, but in addition to that, what if during the cooling period, sea levels recede and expose/melt enough methane hydrate to cause a […]

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“Meanwhile, the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that Biden signed into law in November includes $7.5 billion to jump start the president’s goal of having 500,000 EV charging stations nationwide by 2030. ” – Epoch Times “How many gas stations are in the United States? The figure most experts estimate is about 111,000. The […]

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This week on Hubwonk, host Joe Selvaggi talks to Prof. Roger Pielke, Jr., Professor of Climate Science at the University of Colorado, about the widening gap between the catastrophic predictions proffered at the COP26 Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, and the less dire observations contained in the UN’s own recent IPCC report.

Guest:

Ayaan speaks with Michael Shellenberger about the drug addiction crisis taking over major U.S. cities. They also discuss the results of the Virginia elections, the potential of a political realignment and the COP26 conference.

Michael Shellenberger is the founder and president of Environmental Progress and is the author of Apocalypse Never and San Fransicko.

Why Do the Maldives Still Exist?

 

Climate science has long been consumed by the politics of climate, at least as far as any work in climate change or global warming is concerned.  All control of the project at the UN’s IPCC was put into the hands of activists and administrators in the 1980s,  The lead scientist at the UN in charge of the question of carbon dioxide at the time, Tom Wigley,  maintained that there was not yet sufficient evidence to show that man-made carbon dioxide was changing the climate, and it was unlikely to show up in the foreseeable future.  Activists in third-world countries led by Brazil got tired of waiting for this evidence and so moved to proclaim the guilt of man-made carbon dioxide by fiat.  The situation is detailed by Bernie Lewin in a chapter of the book “Climate Change: The Facts”.  Those scientists who enthusiastically prostitute themselves to the climate narrative have been richly rewarded, and any scientist who failed to toe the warmist line was ejected and de-funded.  In addition, a large number of low-level functionaries from third world countries were elevated to the status of “leading climate expert” and could therefore be counted on to give their unwavering support to the project.

The ability to predict future changes in the climate is, of course, the rai·son d’ê·tre of climate science, and it is remarkable how bad climate science is at doing that.  There is a very long list of wrong predictions with the prediction of global atmospheric temperatures leading the pack.  Environment Canada publishes its predictions about the climate every year.  By law they must include their previous predictions and their performance in each report, and each report therefore includes a long list of failures, in some cases with disastrous results.  But it doesn’t seem to matter.  They go along making predictions using the same flawed methods year after year confident that nobody in authority will hold them accountable.  The facts don’t matter.  Only the thermageddonist vision as laid down by the IPCC matters.

One climate science prediction that struck me as remarkable with regard to the stubbornness of the facts was about the Maldives.  The Maldives is a nation consisting of a group of islands in the Indian Ocean remarkable for the fact that none of them has an elevation of over 8 feet above sea level, and half of the 115 square miles of dry land that makes up the island nation is no more than 1 foot above sea level.  Yet the Maldives has existed as a place of human habitation for 2500 years.