… I remember when we only had a few years to save ourselves from the next Ice Age.
Meanwhile, the UN has a new report out reminding us we have a few years (less than a decade this time, I think) to keep the world from—checks report—”catastrophic climate change.” That apparently still means global warming.
… are not only premature, they’re false prophecies.
If Net Neutrality and my gas stove can’t get me, what chance does climate change have?
Joe Biden is in the US Virgin Islands for a year end vacation, so the omnibus funding bill is being flown from DC to St. Croix so he can sign it. Several tonnes of carbon will be emitted because of his vacation schedule.
I’ll worry about the carbon footprint of my VW diesel as soon as … oh, never mind.
These thermal images taken from Neptune were taken with the VISIR instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Taken between 2006 and 2021, they show Neptune gradually cooling down, followed by a dramatic heating of its south pole in the last few years. From 2003 to 2018 Neptune’s average temperature dropped about 8 °C, and over the next three years it spiked 11 °C hotter.
Video Credit: ESO
The Gentle Reader may remember the pointage, laughery, and mockification that resulted for Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) asking an admiral if the Navy might cause the island of Guam to capsize if too many personnel were stationed there. Earlier this week, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) asked the associate deputy chief of the Forest Service a question about climate change.
I understand, from what’s been testified to the Forest Service and the BLM, you want very much to work on the issue of climate change.
I was informed by the immediate past director of NASA that they’ve found that the moon’s orbit is changing slightly and so is the Earth’s orbit around the sun. We know there’s been significant solar flare activity. And so, is there anything that the National Forest Service or BLM can do to change the course of the moon’s orbit or the Earth’s orbit around the sun? Obviously, that would have profound effects on our climate.
The usual suspects saw what they thought was an opportunity, and they pounced.
However, there is a significant difference between the two incidents. Johnson was asking his question in all seriousness. Gohmert’s question was framed to make the rhetorical point that the Sun probably has a greater effect on the Earth’s climate than anything the Forest Service might do.
Remind me. Which is the party of Science?
Noted warmmonger Gina McCarthy, who ran Obama’s EPA, has been appointed as His Fraudulency’s National Climate Advisor. She posted a video over the past weekend making the pitch that climate change is a racism/social justice issue. No verifiable facts were offered to support any of her claims.
One of the claims that she makes is that the Xiden climate program will result in the creation of good paying “union jobs.” 27 states have right-to-work laws that allow people to work without having to join a union, and very few of those states cast electoral votes for Joe Xiden. Is this “union jobs” claim a threat to shift economic activity away from those states to punish them? Would that be socially just?
Another claim is that the Xiden climate program will leverage existing technologies. OK, how will the administration deal with the problems created by those technologies? The blades from worn-out wind turbines are going into land fills because there is no economically viable way of recycling them. Solar arrays that have reached the end of their useful lives are beginning to pile up, creating a significant amount of waste that includes heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, and cadmium. Will racial and social justice require this waste to be disposed of in Palo Alto, Belle Meade, Stamford, or Bethesda?
And back to those union jobs? Where will they really be, and what will they be doing? Under the Xiden program, they won’t be for pipe fitters building pipelines in the middle of America. When Gina McCarthy was running the EPA, American labor saw a lot of “clean energy” jobs making equipment such as solar panels and wind turbines move offshore, principally to China. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, but usual the safe way to bet.
Is it 2025 yet?
“Those people don’t matter,” said Jane Fonda. She was discussing folks who criticize her Fire Drill Friday protests of climate change that she’s organizing in Washington, DC. She says she plans to get arrested every Friday until the world recognizes her relevance and ,,, and … and … um … Well, until we do something to fix climate change.
Whatever.
The only positive thing I can say about her Fire Drill from last Friday is that the pictures posted on Twitter seem to indicate that she dressed in sensibly warm clothes on that chilly day.
But of course, the problem is now climate change rather than global warming. I suppose we’re in for an interesting next 12 years.
UPDATE—I’m not sure of the percentage fossil fuels played in providing the energy for my microwave oven while I was popping this batch of popcorn I had for breakfast.
Greta Thunberg, the current poster child for the Climate Change Requires Socialism movement, made a speech at the UN. Here’s an except, presented with fisking.
My message is that we’ll be watching you.
<fisking>I’ll get back to this later.</fisking>
This is all wrong, I shouldn’t be up here, I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean.
<fisking>This is the one sensible thing she says. Of course, if the school she attended in Sweden actually teaches the distorted worldview she believes, it has done more harm than good.</fisking>
Yet, you all come to us young people for hope, how dare you.
<fisking>She’s addressing this question to the wrong people. AFAIK, the only people who look too Ms. Thunberg and her children’s crusade colleagues are leftist warmmongers (not misspelled) who are exploiting her. How dare they? Well, exploiting her is simple one of the whatever-means-necessary to advance their cause.</fisking>
You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words and yet I’m one of the lucky ones.
<fisking>Again, she address the wrong audience. The Real World isn’t the source of the empty words that have been poured into her head.<fisking>
People are suffering, people are dying.
<fisking>Where? Why do Central Americans come north rather than go south to the socialist paradise in Venezuela? Why is there no mass migration from Africa to Russia? Why aren’t people fleeing from Hong Kong to the mainland?</fisking>
Entire ecosystems are collapsing.
<fisking>Which ones? The ecosystem that supported malaria, which was on the point of collapse, is flourishing again.</fisking>
We are in the beginning of a mass extinction …
<fisking>Not every mass extinction is a bad thing. Consider, the smallpox virus …</fisking>
… and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth.
<fisking>It’s economic growth over the past centuries that has enabled the world’s poor to stop cutting down trees to stay warm in the winter. It’s economic growth over the past few decades that funded the reductions in childhood mortality. It’s the fairytale of socialist top-down planning that caused the ecological devastation of the Aral Sea.</fisking>
Now, to get back to who’s watching who … Ms. Thunberg would do well to carefully watch all of us. She should carefully note who is flying about in private jets and who has more modest carbon footprints. She should carefully watch which nations are making actual progress in cleaning up and maintain the environment and which are the major polluters. Of course, that doesn’t seem likely unless she can break away from her handlers and exploiters.
I think so, Brain … but the main disadvantage promoting global cooling had over global warming was the fear among politicians it might become so cold they’d have to keep their hands in their own pockets.
I think so, Brain … but couldn’t any problem with rising sea level be solved by breeding more sponges?
That phrase is a rule of thumb that encapsulates a Real Word limitation faced by engineers. When trying to optimize performance across multiple considerations, at least one of them will wind up having to be compromised in order to maximize the performance of the others. It’s clear that whoever wrote Democrat presidential candidate Robert O’Rourke’s climate change plan didn’t understand that Reality requires such trade offs.
Here are a couple of examples of his nonsense.
Strengthen the clean air and hazardous waste limits for power plants and fuel economy standards that save consumers money and improve public health, while setting a trajectory to rapidly accelerate the adoption of zero-emission vehicles …
If the vehicles are going to be zero-emission (tail pipe only), then that’s theoretically possible by switch to electric motors, but such a change has the possibility of creating a terrific hazmat problem related to the recycling and/or disposal of the noxious materials in worn out batteries. If the the vehicles are going to be truly zero-emission, then all forms of combustion used to provide the energy in the mining and processing of raw materials and used to build the vehicles will have to be eliminated. Given that systems such as blast furnaces for steel making run 24/7/365, wind and solar power can’t carry that load. Does this mean more nuclear plants? Higher prices? What?
Set a first-ever, net-zero emissions by 2030 carbon budget for federal lands, stopping new fossil fuel leases, changing royalties to reflect climate costs, and accelerating renewables development and forestation …
More trees is not a bad idea per se, but I wonder if whoever wrote that understands that the principal reason there are now more trees in the industrialized world than there were two centuries ago is that the economy switched from burning wood (a renewable resource) to coal and natural gas (fossil fuels).
Maybe someone who thinks carbon dioxide is a pollutant should stop wasting his breath.
… I remember when climate “scientists” were warning about a coming ice age. Over at Manhattan Contriarian Francis Menton has a post dealing with how hard it is to make climate predictions, especially about the future. (I’ll let him explain the reference).
You and I are not going to be around in 2100 to see if any of these predictions about the future have come true. But meanwhile the climate alarm crowd obliges us with shorter term predictions to help us get some handle on how reliable they are.
Menton takes a look at some recent predictions. Read the whole thing.
I think so, Brain … but the settled science of the ’70s predicted an imminent ice age, and those worries about the future are a thing of the past.
Voting for Donald Trump will cause global warming. Mother Jones says so. It has a post up titled Why a Donald Trump Victory Could Make Climate Catastrophe Inevitable.
Global geopolitics and the possible rightward lurch of many countries (including a potential deal-breaking election in the United States that could put a climate denier in the White House) spell bad news for the fate of the Earth.
Read the whole thing. It’s an interesting analysis. Wrong. But interesting.
This time last week, folks were running around buying up all the bread, milk, and toilet paper in town because of the coming Snowpocalypse. Most of this past Monday was spent digging out from a near-record snowfall.
I was reading a piece at NRO by David French that deals with the failure of the apocalyptic environmental predictions we get from the pseudoscientific left while I was drinking my coffee this morning and looking out across a lawn that still has a foot or so of global warming on it. He does a nice job of comparing the prophets of ecological doom to preachers predicting the imminence of the Rapture. The preachers come out ahead of the ecozealots, who never seem to walk the walk they’re selling.
They’re like a drunk preacher screaming about the evils of demon rum.
Read the whole thing.
As you read this, remember that Al Gore was next in line to be Commander-in-Chief for 8 years.
Assuming that Gore is not being misquoted, this represents a complete about face on global warming climate change. DEFCON 5 is the lowest state of readiness and engagement for the Armed Forces. (SAC was put on DEFCON 2 during the Cuban Missle Crisis. No other units have ever been past DEFCON 3.)
Or maybe it represents … oh, never mind.
The Sunday Express reports that the latest in climate change prediction is for a mini Ice Age with significantly colder weather for Britain. But don’t worry—since this is not a prediction of warming, the “science” isn’t settled.
However some scientists say the outcome may not be as disastrous as others fear with the outcome still uncertain.
Dr Dan Hodson, climate scientist at the University of Reading, said the colder ocean temperatures could force a positive North Atlantic Oscillation leading to milder conditions.
He said: “The current El Nino is building up to be a big one, and it is still a case of seeing what happens before we can know how it will affect things.
“There is evidence to suggest that cooling in the Atlantic can lead to a strong North Atlantic Oscillation and that would imply warmer and wetter winter weather.
“As we get closer to winter we will start to know more.”
Read the whole thing and be prepared for the need to dress warmly.
David Harsanyi has an essay over at The Federalist titled Environmentalists Will Lose, And That’s Great News For Mankind. Taking a critique of a recent piece by Jonathan Chait as his starting point, Harsanyi debunks the idea that climate change is our biggest bugaboo since the Second World War. He points out that the significant improvements in living conditions around the world had been almost completely driven by market forces bringing the benefits of technology to an increasingly greater share of the world’s people and that command economies have stunted economic progress, holding billions in poverty.
Now, unlike coal, oil, gas, and market economics, an environmentalist has never lifted anyone out of poverty. But if you’re convinced that every wildfire and tornado is the fault of Koch Brothers, Ayn Rand and a recalcitrant GOP Congress, this moral structure probably makes some sense to you. If you believe the moral magnitude of climate change falls somewhere short of the killing of 70 million people (we don’t know the exact number World War II took), but is a more a pressing problem than mass hunger or disease or war, I can understand why you think doing nearly anything to stop it is okay. Like emulating one-party authoritarianism, for instance.
Not many people are going to volunteer for a life of poverty. The numbers are not on the environmentalists’ side.
Read the whole thing.
Yet another bit a climate change fear mongering is being exposed as bogus at best. Powerline has the story. (H/T, Instapundit) Apparently, folks working in that region of pseudoscience believe that it is OK to “adjust” data that does not fit their preconceived “conclusions.”
Overheated rhetoric shouldn’t be a part of Science. It’s better to keep your stick on the ice.
Judith Curry has a post in which she makes the case that climate science isn’t pseudoscience as much as it is simply poorly done science. She concludes:
The concern that I have that insufficient attention is given to developing climate models and conducting climate model experiments to explore the other hypotheses, particularly solar variability and natural internal variability.
However, this concern only implies that climate change science is far from complete in terms of being able to understand and predict climate change on decadal to century time scales. It does not imply in any way that climate science is pseudoscience.
I’m not certain that I completely agree with her, but the post is worth reading.