‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Climate Apocalypse’
Actually, a couple of funny things happened to global warming’s Vatican, as Bret Stephens notes in a must-read Wall Street Journal essay: ClimateGate and the world’s financial meltdown:
The U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and the EU have all but confirmed they won’t be signing on to a new Kyoto. The Chinese and Indians won’t make a move unless the West does. The notion that rich (or formerly rich) countries are going to ship $100 billion every year to the Micronesias of the world is risible, especially after they’ve spent it all on Greece.
Cap and trade is a dead letter in the U.S. Even Europe is having second thoughts about carbon-reduction targets that are decimating the continent’s heavy industries and cost an estimated $67 billion a year. “Green” technologies have all proved expensive, environmentally hazardous and wildly unpopular duds.
All this has been enough to put the Durban political agenda on hold for the time being. But religions don’t die, and often thrive, when put to the political sidelines. A religion, when not physically extinguished, only dies when it loses faith in itself.
That’s where the Climategate emails come in. First released on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit two years ago and recently updated by a fresh batch, the “hide the decline” emails were an endless source of fun and lurid fascination for those of us who had never been convinced by the global-warming thesis in the first place.
But the real reason they mattered is that they introduced a note of caution into an enterprise whose motivating appeal resided in its increasingly frantic forecasts of catastrophe. Papers were withdrawn; source material re-examined. The Himalayan glaciers, it turned out, weren’t going to melt in 30 years. Nobody can say for sure how high the seas are likely to rise—if much at all. Greenland isn’t turning green. Florida isn’t going anywhere.
The reply global warming alarmists have made to these disclosures is that they did nothing to change the underlying science, and only improved it in particulars. So what to make of the U.N.’s latest supposedly authoritative report on extreme weather events, which is tinged with admissions of doubt and uncertainty? Oddly, the report has left climate activists stuttering with rage at what they call its “watered down” predictions. If nothing else, they understand that any belief system, particularly ones as young as global warming, cannot easily survive more than a few ounces of self-doubt.
Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is ultimately about the various strains of what Richard Pipes has called “heresies of socialism” building and rebuilding counter religions to the west’s Judeo-Christian traditions. As Jonah wrote:
The notion that communism and Nazism are polar opposites stems from the deeper truth that they are in fact kindred spirits. Or, as Richard Pipes has written, “Bolshevism and Fascism were heresies of socialism.” Both ideologies are reactionary in the sense that they try to re-create tribal impulses. Communists champion class, Nazis race, fascists the nation. All such ideologies—we can call them totalitarian for now—attract the same types of people.
Today, we often use the word “holistic” as a kinder, gentler substitute for totalitarianism — particularly since the left has made not just the personal political, but everything a person does, says, eats, wears, buys, etc. And global warming is nothing if not a mechanism to politicize those aspects of an individual’s life, as well as shared experiences such as work, housing, transportation, and everything else. And in that sense, it really is a substitute religion or a core component of an larger substitute religion, which has long been a goal of the left as both Jonah’s quote above highlights, and as Umberto Eco wrote in 2005:
The ideologies such as communism that promised to supplant religion have failed in spectacular and very public fashion. So we’re all still looking for something that will reconcile each of us to the inevitability of our own death.
G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: “When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing. He believes in anything.” Whoever said it — he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.
The “death of God”, or at least the dying of the Christian God, has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. They have multiplied like bacteria on the corpse of the Christian Church — from strange pagan cults and sects to the silly, sub-Christian superstitions of The Da Vinci Code.
And this has been a leitmotif of the last 100 years or so, as well explore right after the page break.
So much of the public debate causes me to shrug my shoulders and tell the babblers, “Look, I’m going to get on with my life. Call me when you make up your minds about what I’m supposed to believe.” I’m not expecting the phone to ring any time soon.
From global warming to the cardiac benefits of baby aspirin – who the hell really knows? Why should I believe anyone?
A grownup looks around and realizes that nobody knows anything and nobody’s in charge. I think that’s why some people turn to religion.
Well, aspirin is a blood thinner, which can be useful for preventing blood clots forming. The down side is, its a blood thinner, and tends to prevent scabs from forming.
See, the blood thinner effect is testable and repeatable under reasonably controlled circumstances; you can even try it at home if you want (but be sure to bring lots of bandages if you do).
We Christians “turn to religion,” as you put it, because of what goes on inside ourselves, not because of what goes on out in the world. Once we are in Christ we are directed and empowered to be good stewards of all creation. That we have not ended world hunger rankles Liberals. That we do not schluff this off on government rankles them more. That so many in the church don’t obey God’s call to care for His creation rankles me.
No, not even close. That is, in fact, a childish viewpoint.
There are a great many things we know for a FACT.
There are a great many other things we know to a degree of certainty high enough to be indistinguishable from FACT.
There are also a great many things that we know to a high enough degree of certainty that it would be foolish to NOT treat them, provisionally, at least, as fact.
There are other things we know to a high enough degree of certainty that it would be foolish not to consider them in planning our lives.
Cynicism is intellectual laziness, disguised as sophistication. It appeals to the immature and the pseudo-intellectuals. Teenagers and baby boomers come to mind.
And, of course, there are many things we know only tentatively.
Excellent article. From it we also learn why college enrollments have skyrocketed: “…liberals have argued that the threat of catastrophe can be averted only through drastic actions in which the ordinary political mechanisms of democracy are suspended and power is turned over to a body of experts and supermen.”
Many, not all, people go to college nowadays not because they have a desire to learn, but because they want to become part of the corps of “experts and supermen” who tell all of the rest of us how to live. They are the priesthood of the new religions.
From the beginning of universities in western Europe, the product was ALWAYS people who could work for government and church. That is, as society became more complex, records of land transactions had to be kept; laws had to be written down and understood by a (very often illiterate) aristocratic class.
The idea that the joy of learning alone, existed for only some of the upper class English during the apex of the British Empire. For most, it was a time to meet others of the same class, and ‘network.’
Now, of course, the University is a portal through which you must travel in order to be ‘middle class’ and ‘network.’ “Learning” has nothing to do with this. Unfortunately for our time, there aren’t that many jobs for the clerical middle class.
“Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism.”
I remember some media-designated wise man, perhaps the late Carl Sagan, making exactly this point, that Einstein showed there were “no priviledged frames of reference” and that everybody’s viewpoint was as good as everyone else’s blah blah blah. But it’s interesting how selectively this principle is applied. When it comes to something like global warming, suddenly only the scientists who embrace the correct paradigm have opinions worthy of respect and any conflicting one is foolish and therefore, ignorable.
Well, sure. Global warming is *real*, you see. To today’s chattering classes some things are relative (e.g., culture, intelligence, morality), while others are unassailable truth precisely because the pander to the relativists. AGW (truth!) extortion payments must be made to the Third World (poor culture!), for example.
Funny thing about relativists is that they’re inevitably caught in an epistemological circle: how can they even use a concept like “relative” if, in fact, they reject actual definitions? The mental evasions required must be exhausting.
“The mental evasions required must be exhausting.”
Only if you are trying to be sensible at all. Thinking is really hard work for most folks. It is always exhausting to them. Trying to be coherent would appear to them the same as any other mental exertion. They would not recognize it as being because they are completely inconsistent. Just another day at the office for them.
Life is hard. It is even harder, if you are a blithering idiot.
Just look at the OWS crowd for confirmation of this. $150k in debt for your “excellent education” in Minority Studies, and can’t find a job? Excuse me, but you do not have an “excellent education” You have an advanced degree in blithering idiocy. Let me repeat for your specific benefit:
Life is hard. It is even harder, if you are a blithering idiot.
Only if you are trying to be sensible at all. Thinking is really hard work for most folks. It is always exhausting to them.
Which brings to mind this quote:
“Five percent of the people think;
ten percent of the people think they think;
and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.”
― Thomas A. Edison
Confusing and wrongly morphing relativity with relativism is exactly the problem with which the great historian Paul Johnson begins his seminal work “Modern Times”.
Good catch, Mr. O’Fama.
Somewhere along the line in boyhood, I came across the story of “Chicken Little”—and yes, it really is a real story.
In our world of suppositions instead of facts, we so seem to “live in an age of outrageous credulity.”; from beginning to end, “global warming” appeared as a re-hash of “Chicken Little”—you know how Hollywood will make a re-do of something which worked before, or, might have worked if, or, should have worked, or, could have worked—and with Algore as “Big Bird” playing our very own “Chicken Little”, . . . and, it could have turned out differently, too, . . . could have shot “Wise Old Owl” who knew everything about everything, or maybe, the “Columbo” “Wise Old Fox” who discovered the whole thing, . . . for everybody to see, . . .
But all that in the past, just now, what we need is the one who’ll read the child part in “THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES”, but, . . . which emperor?
Gosh, so many emperors, and so few children who can read, . . .
The key to the Left is tribalism, where by Blut und Boden, or a unity of belief.
Note that the left in the US cries diversity when really it is trying to bring forth tribal groups of one type or another.
People forget that if you live by the tribe you die by the tribe. That is not that your tribe will be worsted by another tribe but rather you have no complaint if these beliefs lead to your demise.
I would further note that it is not the best but the worst who most benefit from these identifications. Unions make their money by defending the scum who put burdens on their fellows by their bad actions. Further if you support such things you have no complaint when you are judged by your choices.
Has anyone read Ayn Rand’s “Anthem” lately?
http://www.amazon.com/Anthem-Ayn-Rand/dp/0452281253/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322742659&sr=1-1
I won’t be happy until Al Gore is going through the dumpsters at KFC for his next square meal. All religions have their gods and to the far left Gore is it. But it should taint things when you see your god riding on a private jet or has a house that’s bigger than Yankee stadium, right? Not to the true believers in climate change. They would follow this guy off of a cliff, even though he stood to make a fortune in investments if “Cap and Trade” ever became law. And let’s not forget all the money he IS making under Obama’s “Green Energy” investments, money that is literally being flushed down a green toilet.
I think the world has enough gods. All I know is, when I was a kid in high school in the 1970s Newsweek magazine ran “scientific” articles stating that we would all freeze to death in the 21st Century. Now we’re all going to burn to death. I wish these “experts” would make up their minds!
“Global Warming” aka “Anthropogwenic Global Warming” aka “Climate Change” aka “Climate Chaos” falls firmly into the “end justifying the means” category.
In the 1970s, the ecologists were screaming that we faced a New Ice Age- everything was going to freeze, unless we curbed emissions, and devolved to a Bronze Age or better yet Old Stone Age culture operating on agrarian socialist principles. Then, it was the “greenhouse gases” that were blocking the Sun and cooling the Earth.
When that didn’t come about by 1990, as predicted in the Seventies, they shifted to global warming. Again, it was “greenhouse gases”- only now they were holding solar heat in, and adding man-made heat to it, and the world was going to burn up, unless the seas rose and drowned us all first. And once more the answer was a Paleolithic socialist culture that was “sustainable”- for the roughly 5% of humanity who could survive on the products of such a culture. Of course, the deep ecology crowd reckons the “carrying capacity” of the planet in their approved non-technological Edenic style at about one million people, so I suspect that even 5% of 7 billion, or 350 million, is about 349 million too many to suit them.
What all this shows is that what the ecology crowd really wants is a socialistic, or more precisely feudalistic, primitive culture. With themselves, the “thought leaders”, as the nobility- and the rest of those they permit to survive as the serfs.
When two widely disparate results are supposed to stem from the same root cause (an impossibility in physics), and the same “solution” is demanded to “save us” from both of the two wildly disparate “dooms”, you can be sure that the “solution” is the prime desideratum of those demanding it, and that the apocalyptic predictions are simply propaganda to frighten everyone else into acceding to their demands.
In each case, the reason it becomes a cause celebre’ is that the “enlightened elite’” in politics, academia, and the media see the cause as one more lever to use to gain and use power over everyone else. They believe that they will all be part of the nobility in the Brave New (Ecologically Benign) World.
More likely, they and the ecologists will be fighting each other over who gets to live in the castle- and who ends up spreading night soil by hand in the rice paddies.
If nothing else, in such a situation we may find out how many of them know which end of a sword is which. Unless, of course, they all figure on having minions to do the sword-and-ax-swinging for them.
clear ether
eon
Richard Feynman once was at a party where the hostess asked him what he did. He replied that he did physics. She responded that that made it hard to have conversations, because nobody knew anything about physics. His answer to that was that it was hard to have conversations at parties with physics because in fact somebody {did} know something about physics.
On other matters, nobody knew anything so it was easy for all to chat away in equal ignorance.
The physics of carbon dioxide is not a matter of opinion. Not everyone’s perspective is equally valid. The emissions and absorption spectrum of CO2 is as well an established matter of fact as that the earth is round. The mathematics linking this to global warming is more solid than the Wall Street Journal cares to admit.
Nature doesn’t care. The glaciers are retreating, heat waves are becoming more common, and 500 year floods come along once every fifty years or so. And this is just, pardon the pun, the warmup.
When CO2 doubles from where it is now, as it will if the authors of this article win the public debate, further consequences will follow. Apocalypse or not, they’ll be more expensive to deal with than timely measures to move over to wind, solar, nuclear, and efficiency would have been.
Your post is a charming anecdote followed by a mass of conjecture presented as unassailable fact.
“The physics of carbon dioxide” isn’t quite as salient to the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) thesis as you might imagine. The atmosphere is a chaotic system that responds unpredictably to changes in individual elements and influences. In particular, the atmosphere’s albedo changes along with its other properties — and there’s a very good chance that those changes counterbalance increases in its greenhouse-gas aliquot. And that’s only one of the influences that the CAGW flacksters have failed to account for in their models.
I wrote some time ago that, as a high expert in simulation, I am (and remain) offended by the use of computer models to assert physical facts. We have no reason to believe, and plenty to doubt, that the CAGW models have accurately captured all the significant dynamics pertinent to the behavior of the temperature of the atmosphere. More, the models can’t even “backcast” adequately given all the available data on prior eras. Given all that, why imagine that the promoters of CAGW are anything more than a new breed of doom-shouters threatening us with a new engine of doom?
In sum, be not too sure of yourself or your chosen Cause. Quite a lot of people have such Causes shot out from under them by reality. The CAGW cause appears already to have taken “a round in the chest,” as the East Anglia data leaks suggest.
“as a high expert in simulation, I am (and remain) offended by the use of computer models to assert physical facts”
Bingo! Anyone who does any mathematical modeling – even something as relatively simplistic as a 3-year business plan – knows how assumptions determine results, how some outputs have incredible sensitivity to inputs that are nothing more than guesses, how it is usually all the stuff you left out of your model that comes back to haunt you.
For all of you believers in AGW, please learn something about modeling or simulation before you repeat the nonsense propagated by these supposed scientists. I guarantee you would never bet your livelihood on any of their projections. As it is now, you apparently have no trouble betting mine on them.
According to Phil Jones of East Anglia University and the British Royal Society, world temperatures have been relatively stable during the past 10-15 years. So how can that be while CO2 has been rising, if there is a direct relationship, as the alarmists have been telling us? And one of the knowns about CO2 is that its greenhouse effect starts to diminish and decrease after a certain point and is not linear, that its effect is much lower than either methane or water vapor, and that sun spot activity has been found to have a much larger effect than has previously been known. There are many prominent scientists, for those reasons, who are truly skeptical about AGW. Their names can be found on the web or Wikipedia. The British Royal Society, last year as a group, issued a statement that there are still many uncertainties about the science of global warming. So much for the fabled “consensus of scientists” lies. And I value their opinion much more than either yours or Al Gore’s. The original alarmists predicted catastrophes based on computer models designed to agree with past historical climate data, but they could never accurately predict future climate. Their models worked well backwards, but not forwards. Which is why they can’t predict atmospheric or ocean temperatures or ocean levels accurately. Florida is still not under water. Climate is just too complex, and their insinuation that CO2, a trace gas in the atmosphere, is driving climate is ludicrous. The alarmists have targeted CO2 because of its link to carbon-based fuels, a commodity easy to tax and control by governments.
Doug,
While the physics of CO2 are correct, it is merely one data point and is therefore a necessary but insufficient basis for the prediction you appear ready to assert. That is the fundamental problem with your religion in that no computer models have yet accounted for the independent variables that comprise and describe climate fluctuations. (Think cosmic ray variations from the sun and the impact on cloud formation.) Fudging the data as the IPCC has apparently done according to the Climategate 1 and 2 leaks does not help the cause. Fudging the models as Michael Mann apparently did to generate his hockey stick don’t help the cause either. Science is after all about what can be proven and demonstrated, not how many votes it can garner. Opinions based on fraud are not only not respectable, they are contemptible.
Magnificent piece, Ed.
Dorm room politics, dorm room theology, dorm room science and dorm room “fixes” of problems existent and non-existent…have created, since the 60′s at least, some of the most imbecilic and counter-productive “movements” in the history of mankind.
They all sort of start off with the same Kumbaya, bong-a-thon, save the world from itself, utopian, search for nirvana, premise. The theme is begun on some real or imagined social ill, …usually, with a kernel of truth…cooked, popped and expanded in the frying pan of overheated fringe therapy of radical leftism.
The dorm room theorists then take the excessive and reactionary blow up doll “problem” and start to abuse it. They round up “all the usual suspects” and start making them the “cause” of the now “horrific” problem that only they…and those who think like them…can solve. Which, if you think about it, it makes sense. Since it is mostly imaginary…and sane people can’t see the imaginary…on those who can…can “solve” the imaginary problem.
The Dorm Room theorists now must find all the “joiners”, a collective mass of marchers in lockstep to virtually every dorm room “theory” to raise the clanging of the five alarm “fire” that MUST…WE TELL YOU…MUST…be put out…”before it is too late”.
In the 70′s it was the coming Ice Age. In the 80′s …AIDS was going to wipe out the heterosexual community. Of course, Y2k was going to destroy the world economy…and then global warming had its day.
The Dorm Room theorists are constantly on a hunt for something to eradicate. Judeo-Christian beliefs are always on the menu. So is free market capitalism.
The art of sitting around in a cosmic circle jerk, coming up with new and more inane ways of screwing up the world, nation by nation…by having them fall for some of the dumbest notions in the history of mankind…is the art of BS’ing the world into one calamity after another.
Dorm Room BS, is now infecting whole nations…make that whole continents. The notion that hard work, following rules, making sacrifices and living within your means…isn’t just plain common sense and universally accepted as an unbreakable truth…is staggering. Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain…soon France, …the whole of Europe…is going to collapse rather than look the BS’ing dorm room theorists in the eye and tell them that they are one toke over the line.
Let’s not wag our fingers at the collapsing idiocy of the Euro-sinking dormers to quickly.
We have elected the first dorm room theorist, king of the united states…in a plume of Maui Wowie ourselves. We have a guy who does NOTHING but BS. He won’t lift a finger to put a budget together, doesn’t even dabble in the details, doesn’t even PRETEND to do the hard work of actually…you know…leading.
He ONLY likes the dorm room BS portion of the job. Pontificating, rounding up the usual suspects and creating false accusations against them. If navel gazing was an art form, he would be the Picasso of it.
The reason that Marxism is such a darling of the dorm room theorist crowd…is precisely because it isn’t capitalism. They have to have something to “fix”. A “catastrophe” to avert. Erupting into a paroxysm of leftist frothing and rage against the “machine”.
Great. All this dabbling and tinkering with “social betterments” has collapsed an entire continent into a heap of floundering rags…and we need to send our riches to those rags, to try to prevent the inevitable, so that they can ignore the unfathomable. Leftism sucks. It’s is mass hysteria elevated by a false utopia. It’s a voluntary hallucination. And it’s time to put down the crack pipe.
The dorm room theorists have had their last Y2k. The global warming hoax can no longer “hide the decline” of Marxist tinkerings and “redistribution” schemes. It’s time to have an adult conversation. It’s time to stop singing, “If I had a hammer”, get off your ass…and pick one up. We now have some real “fixing” to do…based on what the leftists have crashed and broken.
” If navel gazing was an art form, he would be the Picasso of it.”
cfbeachers, I tip my hat to you!
What consummate vanity…to believe that mankind can effect climate change. That lame-brain idea should be relegated to the dust bin of historically stupid ideas.
“Green” technologies have all proved expensive, environmentally hazardous and wildly unpopular duds.
Another Chevy Volt lithium battery caught fire recently after a crash test.
These battery fires may erupt days after the battery has been damaged in some way.
This is the kind of thing that happens when the state mandates what a company should produce, see decades of poorly functioning products turned out by the USSR.
I recommend this video and this article.
Dr. Vincent Courtillot describes himself as a geophysicist “too old to be bought” (by the Warming Cabal)
Climategate 2.0 is more than just hot air
Communists champion class, Nazis race, fascists the nation.
The current administration in DC (promotes class warfare, indulges in race baiting, & strives to control business & industry) has intimations of all 3.
It’s pitifully easy to make a point when the target is made of straw, and this is what you are doing. The malthusian component of the climate change argument does exist at the fringes, but it is cartoonish and non-representative.
Climate change is happening, and humans contribute. Radiative physics principles as man understands them to work in climate are correct (if they weren’t, your IR remote for your TV wouldn’t function.) Man emits CO2, changes the landscape. Man cannot help but change his environment and yes, this even includes the climate. The underlying science is clear.
Now, this is the grownup view — man is running an open ended experiment re CO2 emissions and nobody really knows how this will turn out. Those of us that are called “scientific skeptics” argue that we need to improve our understanding of it all — more studies, more data. Let’s figure out how much of the current era’s warming is purely natural recovery from the last long cold spell (little ice age) and how much, if any, is due to man. Right now the science isn’t stromng enough to tell us this. And if there is a human component, let’s get this quantified. Is it large, and if so, can anything reasonable be done about this?
At the extreme end of the scale are those who predict doom and gloom for their own political ends. These people are few but effective, e.g. The “realclimate.com” web site is operated not by concerned scientists, but rather Fenton Communications, which is an environmental advocacy agency who abuses the law to benefit of their paying clients (look up the Alar scare and then crossref with Fenton to see an example of this.)
In other words, there is no widespread religious belief system, just the same old basic money grubbing propaganda and lies. The best lies are based on the truth, and climate change is no different. In this case the malefactors are lying by taking a basic truth (science of climate change), using this as a way to derive untruthful made-up extrapolations designed to scare, and then making money on the backside of the scare. It’s the scary big macro version of walking into a huge crowded room yelling “ANTHRAX!” and selling the gas masks you conveninently have at your side.
The problem is that at the OTHER end of the scale are the imbeciles who equate climate change with religion and otherwise waste bandwidth on idiotic claims of competing religions (and Driscoll, you’re a cheerleader in this.) e.g. kids don’t go to college motivated to become the new overlords; they go to college to be qualified for work not involving french fries.
You want to take on the malthusians, great, do it with your eyes open and brain engaged. But leave your comaparative religion crap at home.
Man cannot help but change his environment and yes, this even includes the climate. The underlying science is clear.
I’ve studied the topic and the science is far from clear to me.
Let’s figure out how much of the current era’s warming is purely natural recovery from the last long cold spell (little ice age) and how much, if any, is due to man. Right now the science isn’t strong enough to tell us this. And if there is a human component, let’s get this quantified. Is it large, and if so, can anything reasonable be done about this?
This feels like a contradiction to your previous resounding yes to AGW.
No warming since 1998 (“hide the decline” wrote Michael Mann) which correlates very closely with low sunspot activity, cosmic radiation, changing cloud cover, ocean currents…et al. and etc.
Low solar activity is expected to continue for perhaps 2 decades We’ll see the direction of temperatures.
The French geophysicist I linked at #12 explains it well in video.
are you arandomengineer, or are you “aphysicist”?
My thoughts exactly. He has been known to show up under different names and attempt to contrive pseudo-conservative arguments that invariably lead to leftist/statist conclusions.
He is like a cheap salesman using round-about, disingenuous approaches because he knows if he states his position outright he will be told to sit on a sharp stick.
No, the “physicist” always strongly supports AGW, and presents it as proven fact, so clearly established that to question it is like questioning the roundness of Planet Earth.
This person is saying that it is still an open question. It’s a VERY different viewpoint.
‘Radiative physics principles as man understands them to work in climate are correct’
It’s not about the radiative principle its about the claims of forcing. Climate is regional…I suspect that decimation of forests has much more to do with regional climate change than a little extra CO2 added to the planets ‘carbon budget’. Check out Tanslaaf’s link than correlate to the known ‘largest’ carbon sinks on the planet, and you might come up with a new hypothesis or two. We have bigger issues to solve that are going unaddressed, which leads me to believe that Malthusians (by design or by accident) are a much larger group than you contend. I’m waiting with baited breath for my Utility bills to necessarily skyrocket.
“The underlying science is clear.”
No, the compiled evidence leaves one to belive that it is inconclusive if man contributes or not. Even if we do, our impact wouldn’t alter the outcome nor is there anything we could actually do to change it. Mother nature has a way of taking care of herself despite our existance. At least that what real scientists and professors I know tell me.
The rest is simply another con job involving power and control.
I think that for some folks, “environmentalism” does fulfill Man’s religious impulse. For others, deriding “deniers” and hatching conspiracy theories about “Big Carbon” are just a part of their leftist religion, whether it is the sect of Obama worshippers – “I voted for him so nothing he does can be wrong!”, or the sect of progressives – “Obama is a centrist Republican and OMIGAWD he’s nearly as bad as Bush!”. The Stephens article is childish, and I don’t think the majority of folks who believe that CO2 is the primary driver of recent warming are some kind of cult members – but they very well may be wrong. It would do the climate science community a great deal of good to denounce Michael Mann’s hockey stick as dishonest science – the Climategate emails have revealed him to be a very nasty and conspiratorially-minded man, and it really is absurd that people still defend him. I trust Charlie Martin has already seen this:
http://climateaudit.org/2011/12/01/hide-the-decline-plus/
Maybe we can get some media leftists to explain why key nations will not sign onto Kyoto protocols. Could it be because they know it’s a harmful fraud and in our case ratification would never pass the Senate. There’s a ton of destructiveness and hate in the enviro movement, a very tough thing to give up for them. Not to worry, they will always find venues for their anti-human and self hatred.
The public response to relativity was one of the principal formative influences on the course of twentieth-century history. It formed a knife, inadvertently wielded by its author, to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings in the faith and morals of Judeo-Christian culture.
This quotation paints relativity as a threat to tradition, just as Galileo’s discoveries were perceived as a threat to the church’s version of what was the center of what. I think such discoveries are exciting and expanding and shouldn’t function as cutting anyone adrift from anything.
The notion of ubiquitous poisoning appealed strongly to the same type of person who accepted conspiracy theories as the machinery of public events.
Van Jones (aka Truther Supremeo)? Occupiers ? Liberals in general ?
“….just as Galileo’s discoveries were perceived as a threat to the church’s version of what was the center of what.”
Actually, the church during those days was very liberal in scientific matters, and scholars young and old were allowed to discuss just about any theories they could think of as long as God was not mocked, denied or appeared to act without forethought. The church’s criticism of Galileo’s work was his use of two arguers regarding the composition of the solar system. The one who argued for the sun as being in the center of the universe was made to appear intelligent and logical, while the one who defended the traditional earth-as-center of the universe belief was made to appear like a buffoon, and thus cast a stigma on the church and Pope. The church had no specific benefit in supporting the earth-as-center of the universe belief, and never actively promoted it. Sort of like “randomengineer”, above, using expressions like “Now, this is the grownup view….”. Kind of irritating, “if your views aren’t like mine, you are an idiot”.
This is the version I’m familiar with, the church issuing a formal apology to Galileo in 1992, 350 years after his death.
“The pope suspected that he was the model for Simplicio. He ordered the book banned, and also ordered Galileo to appear before the Inquisition in Rome for the crime of teaching the Copernican theory after being ordered not to do so.”
“The Church eventually lifted the ban on Galileo’s Dialogue in 1822, when it was common knowledge that the Earth was not the center of the Universe. Still later, there were statements by the Vatican Council in the early 1960′s and in 1979 that implied that Galileo was pardoned, and that he had suffered at the hands of the Church. Finally, in 1992, three years after Galileo Galilei’s namesake spacecraft had been launched on its way to Jupiter, the Vatican formally and publicly cleared Galileo of any wrongdoing.”
1992: Catholic Church apologizes to Galileo, who died in 1642
Nice…too bad that the people that should read this (objectively) won’t.
AGW has been, and is, an epic disaster. The end result is wide spread distrust of science, and with good cause. Climate gate, the illegal whistle blowing of the lead environmental scientists for the UN committee has exposed a level of ethics and incompetency that would not be tolerated in any other way of life which uses numbers. There may be legitimacy somewhere in the science, but its proponents have so smeared their standing that their mothers would not believe them. They threw out the original data sheets to save money on file cabinets, but demand that the entire industrial world revamp their economies to comport with their untraceable and contested data. The very first pronouncements from each unending conference is not about science, but demands that the US give away its wealth to nations headed by liars and thieves. The US EPA is in the process of killing off America’s coal fired bases for generating electricity, almost half of our electricity. There is no economical substitute. However, their own Inspector General has found that the EPA did not follow thier required rules for policy shifts which will fundamentally change our industrial strength.
But this is not the bottom of the barrel. This struggle has been ongoing for so long that the experts, vitally needed to rebuild our creaky electrical infrastructure no longer practice. Most are dead. America has no experts who have engineered five big ones. We have not built one since the late 1970s. However China brings a new coal fired power plant on line every few days. She has experts; we have faded paper.
One, a sign over an engineering unit, in the 1980s read, “Let the B…. freeze in the dark”. It predicted our situation today, but unlike climate change, is proving to be right on the button. Do not worry about Florida drowning due to the ocean rising; worry about a two month outage in New England due to a winter blizzard.
Your furnaces will not work when the electricity goes out. I add this for the benefit of ivy league academics who left reality decades ago.
We lost power for three days after the freak nor’easter snowstorm last month. Parts of New England were without power for 5 days, if not more. We had no heat, no water or sewage, no electricity. Want a dose of reality, try that for 3 to 5 days. The EPA is bringing us closer to that kind of scenario.
Isn’t it funny how the term “Global Warming” has morfed into “Climate Change”? This odd transformation is, of course, a response to the fact that none of the dire predictions that our planet will soon become a desolate wasteland of heat due to “Man’s Activities” has actually come to pass. Sort of like the doomsayer’s 1970′s predictions that the world would be starving by the year 1980.
The fact that the available data shows that the planet’s temperature has either stayed the same, or actually dropped slightly, forced the “environmentalists” to scramble for a new term. And what term can be better than “Climate Change” since the very nature of climate is, in fact, change.
In the dim, distant past when most of us were farmers, we knew in a very personal way, that climate changes. Some changes benefited our crops — and thus our livelihoods — and some harmed then. We knew that weather prediction was a crap-shoot.
Today, as we move from our climate-controlled homes, to our climate-controlled cars, driving to our climate-controlled offices, we are shocked when our climate-controlled lives are impacted by this alien thing called “weather”.
Thus we are fair-game for the charlatans pedaling doomsday predictions that we’re living through great climate change brought on by the unbridled activities of mankind.
What these so-called “scientists” and their political enablers are really after has nothing to do with climate and everything to do with control. They want to control what we drive, what we eat, how we heat or cool our homes, how we create electricity, how we fuel our transportation….In short, they want to control every aspect of our lives.
There’s nothing new about this. Throughtout mankind’s existance there have always been those who sought control over others. Such people have long used force and fear to achieve their goals. The list of such types is as long as it is dismal, ranging from the priesthood of “Baal” presiding over the city of Ur, to the Nazis and Boshiviks of the 20th Century.
Why would anyone suppose such people have disappeared? They are still among us and they call themselves “Liberals” and “Progressives.”
good article. It’s worth pointing out though something very BIG that a lot of AGW skeptics like ourselves miss. We are really going through a massive man-made wave of extinctions of so so many species of plants and animals. Widespread deforestation, soil erosion, the collapse of fish stocks, the poisoning of seas and the way all this contributes to debilitating poverty especially in the third world, it’s a spiral. By ignoring this elephant in the room, and getting caught up in the hysterics of the apocalyptic climate religion, the destruction of very real nature across the globe continues, and humanity continues to pay the price. AGW hysterics in large part is also about ignoring the role of third world despotic regimes, their corruption and the like, very real overpopulation (there really are too many people) and its role in ecological and environmental destruction, so as to focus on the rich West, the USA in particular and the big corporation..
None of this is conscious, it is unconscious yet it is a major factor in driving the AGW religion.
Yes.
Especially to the point that environmental degradation and its real causes are overshadowed, overwhelmed even, by the (political agenda) of AGW.
Larry, the road to fixing that involves exactly the opposite tack of the AGW climate scammers. Economic development and it’s sister, technological development, lead to reductions in both birth-rates and environmental degradation. I dare say they lead to zero population growth and environmental improvement.
The other, “green revolution, based on biologically modified foods, produced a sharp increase in crop productivity.” is also failing! What was not mentioned was the introduction of irrigation and petroleum based fertilizer, both having serious drawbacks if not properly mannaged, and of course they haven’t been! World wide food production is declining. This is from National Geographic June 2009. There are more pressing real problems that need being addressed but, AGW is the nonsense of choice.
“….World wide food production is declining.”
Much of that can be alleviated by using biologically-engineered strains of crops. But those same fear-mongers that brought us AGW are inhibiting their use.
The last time I read a Nat Geo there was an article decrying the loss of traditional culture in parts of africa. In one photo of some tribe’s traditional way of life there was a small hut made of camel dung ( using traditional methods ) . There were several children peering out of the small hut’s door. I showed it to my wife and told her that the article was asserting that we should take steps to save traditional ways of life. Her eyes narrowed and she hissed ” Those children are literally living in shit!”
Yeah, Nat Geo, that is a credible source.
I never bought into the GW belief. Yet, I don’t believe in God. Go figure…
Humanity has two types of sentient mind. The first type requires external belief whether religion or AGW or whatever; those who have this type of mind are wholly unable to envision the concept of not having a belief. If you don’t believe in god, they reason, you must believe in something (e.g. the opposite.) They claim that atheism is a belief. There is no concept of non-belief.
The second type of mind is perfectly happy not subscribing to belief because how this mind works is internal. In this mind the internal world is constant nnd what one learns of the external world is then fitted to internal sense. The external mind (the common one) what internal world exists is shaped by the external stimuli.
You can read about this sort of thing re meyer briggs profiles; the NFJ type of mind is rare and what you are likely to have (the first type of mind comprises the majority of people; the “internal” or non-believer mind is comparatively rare.) It is the NFJ (or sometimes NTJ) who will not be religious NOR buy into cargo cult science belief systems. The NFJ/NTJ doesn’t buy into *any* belief system.
Sorry but you’re not going to get sympathy from the denizens at this place. There are only a couple here or there of the “internal” mind type. They simply have no comprehension of your statement, and they can’t comprehend it.
Ego is a terrible thing to waste.
I happen to be a solid atheist who has many times tried to explain that atheism is a non-beleif. You are correct that many perceive atheism as being some kind of belief system, which it is not. I think you are mistaken that very few here understand that. Honest, skeptical minds are drawn to places like PJM. Those who adopt atheism as simply a means to an end ( tossing out moral systems to justify breaking them ) are the ones drawn to the left. I find that the majority of internal minds, as you call them, are sensible, moral, conservative people who dont buy into the climate-scammers AGW crap. They dont buy into any kind of crap, that is a feature of that kind of mind.
Incentivus has many brethren here.
Your simplistic assumption that AGW skeptics are somehow associated with fundamentalist, right-wing, “God-fearing” Christainity is ludicrous, and insinuates that your learning comes from the MSM or other leftist sources. I would not be proud about making those kind of statements. But don’t worry. You’ve found a kindred spirit in “randomengineer”.
On the other hand, there is nothing wrong in religious belief. My parents, and their ancestors before them were Christians. For me to mock or demonize them is to disrespect them, which I will not do. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, “What care I whether my neighbor believes in 20 gods or none, if it doesn’t hurt me”? Some things coming out of theoretical physics seem to need lots of faith – parallel universes? But the Christians are way ahead of them with Heaven and Hell.
I believe it was in the 2nd round of Climategate emails where it came out that quite a lot of this AGW research is being funded by the United States department of energy.
It’s not just at Solyndra (and related boondoggles) that our ideologically bent, Nobel prizewinning physicist Steven Chu* throws our tax money, stimulus money, money and more money.
*the guy who came up with the idea of painting our roofs and our roads white, who wants to see gasoline in the United States at $10/gallon, the guy whose brilliance a clueless Obama kept referencing during the gulf oil mess, the guy who works for the guy who wants our energy costs to “necessarily skyrocket”…
Every since I was in grade back in the sixties, it seems we have be bombard with cryies of “the end is near, we had better change our ways” Some of these prophets of doom carried Bibles, some had crystal balls and spoke to aleins, angels spirits etc. Then there was those that wore tweed jackets or lab coats and stood behind black boards. Funny how they all were wrong.
These experts were 30 years ago claiming we where headed for a new ice age, but no money to be made so they changed their minds. They preached what the politicians and big corporations wanted them to say. Or no more of taxpayer money for them. These climate experts are nothing but intellectual leaches, they can not predict what our weather will be like in the next 30 years, unless you grease their palms with money!
I disagree about Nazis and Communists: the Nazis were a totally unique and particularly hateful animal. In any event, in a race-based hate fest, Jews couldn’t stop being Jews although non-Nazis bellied up to the Nazi bar and joined in just for appearence’s sake. In the Soviet Union every one signed up to, in effect, not be Jews.
The Nazis were not “totally unique” — elements of Weimar-era thinking, deep traces of ancient German antisemitism and socialism in general were baked into their ideology.
“In the Soviet Union every one signed up to, in effect, not be Jews.”
Tell that to the Jewish doctors Stalin plotted against in his last days.
“.the Nazis were a totally unique and particularly hateful animal.”
How so? Compared to what exactly? Over 7 million Ukranians were starved to death in 1932-33′ by the soviet communinists alone. Do you know what happened to “enemies of the state” in Russia and then later in Poland, Finland and the Baltic region as well? You’re obviously offended by the truthful comparison of a mass murdering ideology that is deeply related to national socialism. Why?
“In any event, in a race-based hate fest, Jews couldn’t stop being Jews…”
Judisasm isn’t a race.
“In the Soviet Union every one signed up to, in effect, not be Jews.”
Who they then began persecuting. I found anti-semitism runs deep in mother Russia.
No, but “Jew” is. It’s an ancient term for the descendents of Abraham, via Isaac and Jacob. It refers to a recognizable people group, commonly referred to as a “race”. Once a term for only one particular tribe (the tribe of Judah), it morphed (probably during the Babylonian captivity) into a term referring to all of Jacob’s descendants. It’s been used that way for at least 2000 years. (See the Gospel of John for many examples of this usage.)
“Judaism”, of course, is a religion. (Some might also consider it a culture.)