Climate Ideology

How to Break the Climate Spell

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Getty Images

Mark Imisides advises climate skeptics to reconsider how to dispute claims from climate believers in his Spectator Australia article Changing climate change: debunking the global colossus.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

How is it that despite the scientific case for a climate apocalypse comprehensively collapsing some 20 years ago, we have seen a 16-year-old girl (at the time) being invited to address the United Nations, weeping children marching in our streets, and a federal election outcome in which this issue dominated the political landscape?

Where did we go wrong? And by ‘we’ I’m referring to those of us termed sceptics – people who understand the science, and the house of cards that comprises the notion of Anthropogenic Climate Change.

Put simply, we must learn the art of the polemic. The art of rhetoric. We must recognise that there’s no point in having evidence on our side if we don’t know how to use it.

We begin with this proposition. There is no case for reducing our carbon footprint unless all four of these statements are true:

  1. The world is warming.
  2. We are causing it.
  3. It’s a bad thing.
  4. We can do something about it.

No rational person can have any problem with this, and if they do, we need to find out why.

Here’s where we have to decide which of these points we want to contest. Remember, you only have to falsify one of them for the whole thing to collapse like a house of cards.

Most sceptics, in my view, pick the wrong fight. They do this by attempting to prosecute the case based on one of the first two points. This is a mistake.

Here’s why.

Arguments about whether the world is warming revolve around competing graphs: ‘My graph shows it’s warming. If your graph shows it isn’t, then it’s wrong – no it isn’t – yes it is – no it isn’t…’  This argument also looks at Urban Heat Island Effects, and examines manipulation of data by government agencies.  This is a poor approach to take because:

  • You’re never going to prove your graph is right.
  • You can be very easily and quickly discredited as a conspiracy theorist (Brian Cox did this to Malcolm Roberts on Q&A a few years ago). People just do not believe that government agencies would manipulate data.
  • We should not fear a warming world. Records began at the end of the last ice age, so it’s only natural that the world is warming. And the current temperatures are well within historical averages.

Source: Syun-Ichi Akasofu, Two Natural Components of the Recent Climate Change: (1) The Recovery from the Little Ice Age (A Possible Cause of Global Warming) and (2) The Multi-decadal Oscillation (The Recent Halting of the Warming):

As for arguments about whether we are causing the warming, this is even more problematic. The various contributions to global temperatures are extremely complex, involving a deep understanding of atmospheric physics and thermodynamics. With a PhD in Chemistry, this is much closer to my area of expertise than Joe Public, but I am very quickly out of my depth. I recognise most of the terms and concepts involved, but know just enough to know how little I know.

Sadly, many people on both sides of the debate don’t understand how little they know, nor how complex the subject of atmospheric physics is, and it is nothing short of comical seeing two people debating about a subject of which both of them are blissfully ignorant.

The bottom line is this – they simply don’t change anyone’s minds – ever.

Having seen these arguments used for years, and having used them myself, I cannot point to a single person that has said, ‘Oh yes! I see it now…’ The whole point of arguing, or debating, is to change someone’s mind (including, at times, your own). If that isn’t happening, then it’s futile to continue with the same approach.

I think the reason both these approaches fail that most people do not believe that all these experts, and the government, can be wrong. You say the world isn’t warming? Oh, I’m sure you have the wrong graph. You say that CO2 is not responsible? Oh, I’m sure the government scientists know more than you do.

This then brings us to the third point. Why is a warmer world a bad thing?

This is even more tempting than the first two points, as it’s so easy to prove that a warming world, so far from being a crisis, is actually a good thing. The reason for this is that, unlike with the first two points, they don’t have to look at a complex scientific argument. They just have to look at the weather. Are cyclones and hurricanes increasing? Are droughts increasing? Are flooding events increasing?

Regretfully, it is impossible to get people to even look at this. Even worse, they seem oblivious to the simple concept of cause and effect. We see this in that they simply can’t see that droughts and floods are opposites, and the same cause cannot produce exactly opposite effects. Astonishingly, they somehow think that charts that plot these extreme events are somehow manipulated, even when they come from a primary source such as the BOM, and that there really is a ‘climate crisis’.

Where does that leave us? Well, before we adopt Catweazle’s mantra of ‘nothing works’, there is one more point – point 4 (can we do anything about it?).

Most people will have seen the address of Konstantin Kisin at an Oxford Union debate, where he prosecuted this case to great effect. He pointed out, in simple terms, that as the UK only contributes 2 per cent to the global CO2 budget, anything they did will have negligible effect, and that global CO2 levels will be determined by people in Africa and Asia. He then pointed out that people in these countries ‘didn’t give a sh*t’ about climate change, as all they want to do is feed and clothe their children, and they don’t care how much CO2 that produces.

Finally, he pointed out that Xi Jinping knows that the way to ensure that he isn’t rolled in a revolution, as happened to so many other leaders in former communist regimes, is to ensure prosperity for the Chinese people. And indispensable to that goal is cheap, reliable, power, which is the reason that China is now building lots more coal-fired power plants – in 2021 alone they built 25 GW of capacity – equivalent to 25 x 1000MW plants.

By all accounts, his speech was well-received, with many people turning to his side. The beauty of prosecuting this case, as opposed to the other three, is that people don’t have to look at any evidence. They don’t even have to look at the weather.

The argument is at the same time simple, compelling, and irresistible. The question is this: will we see a major political party with the courage to take it on?

That part remains to be seen. But what is certain is this – the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different outcomes. If, for twenty years we’ve been telling people either that the world isn’t warming, or if it is we aren’t causing it, or if it is warmer but there’s no climate crisis, and not a single person has been persuaded by our arguments, then we have the brains of a tomato if we think anything is going to change.

Konstantin Kisin’s talk, and in particular the way it was received, fill me with hope that I haven’t had in years. It fills me with hope that if the case is prosecuted wisely, the climate change colossus can be brought to a grinding halt, politicians will unashamedly take on energy security as a political mantra, and the notion of climate change will at last be exposed as the unscientific, anti-human, regressive, apocalyptic cult that it is.

 

 

Save the Children and Us All from Climate Grooming

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Conclusion from Ben Pile’s Climate Resistance Video above:

Experts have used the authority of institutional science and medicine to convince people that a climate crisis is happening despite there being no scientific observational evidence for it. And this misuse of institutional authority has in turn been used to close down public democratic debate about far-reaching policy and to silence critics of the Green agenda. But computer simulations and hypothetical worlds are not reality and not evidence. They are science fiction and they are used to mislead people into believing that there is a climate crisis so that they may support radical climate policies.

(Question to then IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri) “What do you see as the next tools you could utilize to create change?
(Pachuri Response) “Children. I think we have to sensitize the young and tell them how their future is going to be affected if we don’t take action today. I think if we can get them to understand the seriousness of the problem they would probably shame adults into taking the right steps.”

Global warming and climate change are real, but climate policy is the far more real and more dangerous threat than climate change. The world has seen unprecedented progress in recent decades and much more needs to be done to eliminate problems such as poverty and disease. But by failing to confront green scare mongering, Global agencies, world leaders, politicians, scientists and the media have allowed a dark and dangerous ideology to fester. By causing a widespread ignorance of this progress which it now threatens to reverse, green scare mongering will turn the clock back for Humanity and civilization.

Ben Pile exposes how climate radicals are using media messaging to advance the climate crisis mass delusion in his substack article Behind the ‘climate crisis’ myth: green ideology.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The world is healthier, wealthier, and safer than it ever has been.
And most of this progress has been achieved in the era of global warming.
The green story does not add up.

In the eighties and nineties, Adherents of the precautionary principle argued that a hypothesis of a potentially civilisation-ending catastrophe merely needs to be plausible to be sufficient to compel action, and that the world cannot afford to wait for scientific knowledge to verify the threat with any certainty. This urgency was the basis of the Montreal Protocol on limiting ozone-depleting substances, and it was the hope of many greens that the same formulation could be used again to drive global agreements on climate change.

The problem for adherents of the precautionary principle is that, as is the case with all green ideologues’ prognostications, too much time passed without the events they were sure would befall us, undermining the original hypothesis. In the 1970s, before global warming had been invented, environmentalists proclaimed that civilisation stood on the brink of collapse. Limits to Growth and The Population Bomb were global best sellers, putting green politics at the top of the global political agenda, and cementing the end of post-war optimism with a terminally negative outlook that the West has not shaken off, despite the books’ manifest failures.

The precautionary principle (and many $billions of ersatz ‘philanthropic’ generosity) saved the greens and their ideological project the humiliation they deserved by adding an unending not-if-but-when caveat to their soothsaying. . . The precautionary principle is an article of faith, and work both ways when fully considered. Progress towards a global climate lockdown agreement has been slow in significant part because many countries have been unwilling to undermine the certain benefits of economic growth on the basis of uncertain speculation. The precautionary principle, has thus been of decreasing value towards advancing the climate agenda as time has passed.

There are only so many times even the most faithful are willing to climb the mountain
to wait for salvation from doom before doubt creeps in.

The new claim, intended to overcome the global climate policy agendas’ inertia, is that certainty has been achieved by science, and that scientists have shown that the world is in the grip of the very catastrophe that environmentalists had predicted: people are starving, diseases are rampant, storms, floods, wildfires and heatwaves kill thousands by the day, forcing millions from their homes and into poverty.

The problem, of course, is that it is not true. In every region of the world, and at every level of economic development, people are living healthier, wealthier, longer, and safer lives. In the few places where this trend of continued progress does not hold, other reasons better account for the failure than slightly different weather: failed states, corruption and conflict.

The problem for the green narrative then, as now, is that deaths from these diseases of poverty were falling, and have continued to fall, radically.

Between 2000 and 2019, the number of deaths from malaria in the world fell from 900 thousand to 560 thousand – given the world’s population increase, this is equivalent to a halving of the mortality rate. Over the same time, the number of deaths caused by diarrheal diseases fell from 2.4 million to 1.5 million. And deaths from malnutrition fell from 506 thousand to 212 thousand. What this means is not merely that there is no evidence of a climate crisis, there extremely good evidence of the opposite: humanity is thriving.

Many other metrics of human welfare bear out the same picture of reality. But try to explain this indubitable progress to the protestors who, on the words of UN chiefs, nonagenarian BBC voice-over artists and degenerate green ideologues of the Guardian and green blob, block roads and demand nothing less than the cancellation of industry and the economy and the immiseration of the entire world, to make certain that all of humanity’s development is undone. The good news provokes an angry and uncomprehending rage in green activists.

To compare the story of the climate crisis with the facts is
to betray one’s own children, country and world,
and to condemn future generations to an ‘unliveable planet’.

The facts and stats of the world are in contradiction to the ideological conception of nature held by the global green Great and Good and by the street-level environmentalists, but not the broader public. So what is this ideology, and how does it overwhelm its victims’ capacity for reason and facts?

As David Attenborough explains, it,

Our economies and political systems are unconsciously predicated on the belief that nature will continue to be a benign and regular provider of the conditions we need to thrive. […] Our stable and reliable planet no longer exists. The impacts of this destabilisation will profoundly impact every country on Earth.

We can know that this is a false belief, because it is a myth that nature has ever been anything but extremely hostile, rather than a benign ‘provider’. Hence, until the end of the 1880s, a quarter of all British children died before reaching their fifth birthday. In Germany, half of children did not survive that long. Globally, infant mortality was 22.4 per cent in 1950. In 2021, it was 3.7 per cent. The ‘planet’ is manifestly far less hostile to humanity than it was just a lifetime ago. And this is thanks to industries, to expanding access to markets, and to technological and scientific development – sheer artifice – not to Natural Providence. David Attenborough is as misled and misleading as he is a ‘national treasure’.

My Mind is Made Up, Don’t Confuse Me with the Facts. H/T Bjorn Lomborg, WUWT

“There’s only one world”, a girl explains to the interviewer. “If we destroy it all, then we have no other place to live”. “Right now, we are not acting”, adds her little friend. “We should act now.”

If the words of global climate technocrats, so earnestly spoken by such innocent faces
is not an abomination, then nothing is.

Tiny children’s view of the world and their own futures have been poisoned by an ideology that has no care for facts, much less the children and their prosperity. Their heads have been deliberately filled by the false idea of a ‘climate crisis’ in order to make them instruments of a political agenda, against their own interests, far before they are equipped to understand the claims they reproduce.

Society needs to confront green ideology urgently.
It is the greatest threat to our safety and prosperity.

Please watch and share our film: Why There Is No Climate Crisis (and why people believe that there is)

Reuters Editor Comes Clean About CO2 Hysteria

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Neil Winton disavows his uncritically adopting global warming belief in his Daily Skeptic article:  Covering Climate Change for Reuters, I Thought CO2 to Blame for Rising Temperatures. I Was Wrong. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

If you wonder why much of the mainstream media seem united in accepting that the world will soon die unless humans don hair shirts, freeze in winter and walk instead of driving, you need to know about websites like Covering Climate Now (CCN).

Reuters and some of the biggest names in the news like Bloomberg, Agence France Presse, CBS News, and ABC News have signed up to support CCN, which brags that it is an unbiased seeker after the truth. But this claim won’t last long if you peer behind the façade. CCN may claim to be fair and balanced, but it not only won’t tolerate criticism, it brandishes the unethical ‘denier’ weapon with its nasty holocaust denier echoes. This seeks to demonise those who disagree with it by savaging personalities and denying a hearing, rather than using debate to establish its case.

CCN advises journalists to routinely add to stories about bad weather and flooding to suggest climate change is making these events more intense.

This is not an established fact, as a simple routine check would show.

I have a particular interest in Reuters’ attitude because I spent 32 years there as a reporter and editor. The global news agency’s traditional insistence on high standards in reporting makes this liaison with CCN seem questionable.

When Reuters announced its tie-up with CCN in 2019 it said this, among other things.

The (CCN) coalition, which includes more than 350 organisations [there are many more now] has no agenda beyond embracing science and fair coverage and publishing more climate change content.

That is clearly not true. It has a partisan agenda and encourages reporters
to dismiss those with contrary opinions as ‘deniers’.   

The involvement of Reuters in CCN seems to me to be in direct contradiction to three of its 10 Hallmarks of Reuters Journalism – Hold Accuracy Sacrosanct, Seek Fair Comment, Strive For Balance and Freedom From Bias.

When I became Reuters global Science and Technology Correspondent in the mid-1990s, the global warming story was top of my agenda. Already by then the BBC was scaring us saying we would all die unless humankind mended its selfish ways.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) was the culprit and had to be tamed, then eliminated.
I had no reason to think this wasn’t established fact. I was wrong.

My Reuters credentials meant that I had easy access to the world’s finest climate scientists. To my amazement, none of these would say categorically that the link between CO2 and global warming, now known as climate change, was a proven scientific fact. Some said human production of CO2 was a probable cause, others that it might make some contribution; some said CO2 had no role at all. Everybody agreed that the climate had warmed over the last 10,000 years as the ice age retreated, but most weren’t really sure why. The sun’s radiation, which changes over time, was a favoured culprit.

My reporting reflected the wide range of views, with Reuters typical “on the one hand this, on the other, that” style. But even then, the mainstream media seem to have run out of the energy required, and often lazily went along with the BBC’s faulty, opinionated thesis. It was too much trouble to make the point that the BBC’s conclusion was challenged by many impressive scientists.

Fast forward 20 years and firm proof CO2 was warming the climate still hasn’t been established, but politics has taken over. Sure, there are plenty of computer models with their hidden assumptions ‘proving’ man is guilty as charged, and the assumption that we had the power and knowledge to change the climate became embedded.

The Left had lost all of the economic arguments by the 1990s, and its activists eagerly grabbed the chance to say free markets and small government couldn’t save us from climate change; only government intervention could do that. Letting capitalism run free was a certain way to ensure the end of the planet; smart Lefties should take charge and save us from ourselves.

The debate about climate change is far from over. I’m not a scientist so I don’t know enough to say it’s all man-made or not. But politicians and lobbyists have decided that we are all guilty.

They are in the process of dismantling our way of life, ordering us to comply because it’s all for the future and our children. If we are going to give up our civilization, at the very least we ought to have an open debate. Journalists need to stand up and be counted. The trouble is that requires bravery and energy, and an urge to question conventional wisdom.

Reuters should be leading this movement. All it has to do is stand by its 10 Hallmarks. And maybe tell CCN thanks but no thanks; it needs to apply Reuters principles to its climate reporting.

See Also Global Warming Theory and the Tests It Fails

Bypass Contrived Catastrophes

Posted on by Ron Clutz

“Nothing so focuses the mind as the sight of the gallows.” wrote Samuel Johnson.  He went on to say,

“Executions are intended to draw spectators. If they don’t draw spectators, they don’t answer their purpose”,  Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

Terrence Keeley discusses how to resist our current crop of elites who govern by declaring emergencies instead of solving problems. His insights are timely since this week PM Trudeau was given a free pass by a Canada Appeals court judge to repeat his emergency sanctions against protesting truckers should anyone else object to his policies. The article at Real Clear Wire is Navigating Contrived Catastrophes Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Perhaps this explains why political leaders repeatedly fabricate existential crises in lieu of governing responsibly. Without the sword of Damocles overhead, policymakers just can’t seem to get the adulation they so desperately crave.

Take the fake debt ceiling crisis. The U.S. federal debt cap was first enacted in 1917 when our national debt stood at $5.7 billion. Congress has since raised it more than 90 times with broad bipartisan support. There is ZERO chance they won’t do so again, yet we are told we must quiver and quake until they do. For some reason, a $31.4 trillion limit just isn’t enough to run the greatest country on earth properly.

Or better yet, consider the much-ballyhooed “Net Zero by 2050” time bomb. There was no science behind its selection of the 1.5 degree above pre-industrial temperature target. It was intentionally contrived so politicians and pundits could insist we spend hundreds of trillions of dollars reconfiguring every personal and industrial process to mute it, possibly by a degree or two. Anthropogenic activities are clearly taxing our air, water, and lands. Depending upon tradeoffs like affordability and reliability (and what China, India, and Russia decide to do), less carbon-intensive energy sources may well be preferable, too. Convincing our younger generation they will all die unless the globe urgently reduces its net carbon footprint to zero is another matter altogether. Being more mindful about our consumption patterns while preparing our communities for the probability of more violent weather would be too simple. Better to scare everyone out of their wits so we can get on with doing witless things.

Great societies thrive on consistent policy competence. Failing ones lurch
from crisis to crisis. Contriving catastrophic scenarios all but ensures
hysteria will supplant sober, reasoned analysis.

Some will argue extreme threats are needed to force modest, salutary changes. After all, a handful of U.S. debt ceiling votes brought about useful policy changes, like the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings breakthrough and the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Similarly, threats of impending climate doom have led many individuals and corporations to examine their energy use, seek cleaner alternatives, and eliminate unnecessary waste.

But have these modest advances been worth the price of the abject delirium
that has accompanied them? And are recurrent, contrived catastrophes
somehow producing better policy outcomes?

Evidently not. Three essential U.S. social programs – Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid – are barreling along towards insolvency. Just as the retirement age in France must rise to reflect longer life expectancies and taxation tipping points, so too must U.S. retirement programs respect demographic realities. Maintaining peace through strength in an increasingly dangerous world requires that the U.S. spend more on defense, not less. Unless the current debt ceiling crisis leads to an honest rUeckoning about our most urgent tax and spending priorities, heightened hysteria serves no useful end. Worse, all the faux debt ceiling dynamics convince politicians they’ve somehow done their jobs when instead, they’ve abrogated them entirely.

Similarly, we speak about an “energy transition,” but no realistic projection of future fossil fuel consumption shows any meaningful decline in the century to come. Rising populations, improved living standards, reliability needs for the three billion humans who are still energy insecure, and the first order demands of national security reveal oil and gas will remain crucial sources of our energy mix for as far as the eye can see. The most logical response would be to prioritize energy reliability while recalibrating our emissions mitigation spending towards more climate adaptation priorities. Why spend $100 trillion or more on something that has been entirely contrived and is all but certain to fail when you can spend $50 trillion or less on something that would demonstrably save human lives while improving their livelihoods?

History is festooned with countless ruses about the end of time, some more disruptive than others. They include those of French Bishop Martin of Tours in 375 A.D., and Jim Jones in 1967. Many thousands believed the so-called Y2K cliff would crash every computer, triggering global economic ruin and the rise of the Antichrist. Yet, remarkably, here we all still are, higher in number than ever.

In time, trillions of dollars of investment products now priced against
Net Zero 2050 deadlines will need to be abandoned.

Similarly, the U.S. debt ceiling will be lifted multiple times before responsible members of both parties finally put our tax and spending trajectories into sustainable balance. Panic, like blackmail, compromises sensible thinking. Calm acceptance of measurable risks and their reasonable mitigation are the essence of wise decision-making.

The next time a politician tells you Armageddon is nigh, remind them it’s their only job to make sure it isn’t. If you’ve got the patience for it, you can also show them how easy it would be to avoid.

 

Curing Radiation Myopia Regarding Climate

Posted on by Ron Clutz

E.M. Smith provides an helpful critique of a recent incomplete theory of earth’s climate functioning in his Chiefio blog post So Close–Missing Convection and Homeostasis. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

It is Soooo easy to get things just a little bit off and miss reality. Especially in complex systems and even more so when folks raking in $Millions are interested in misleading for profit. Sigh.

Sabine Hosenfelder does a wonderful series of videos ‘explaining’ all sorts of interesting things in and about actual science and how the universe works. She is quite smart and generally “knows her stuff”. But… It looks like she has gotten trapped into the Radiative Model of Globull Warming.

The whole mythology of Global Warming depends on having you NOT think about anything but radiative processes and physics. To trap you into the Radiative Model. But the Earth is more complex than that. Much more complex. Then there’s the fact that you DO have some essential Radiative Physics to deal with, so the bait is there.   However…

It is absolutely essential to pay attention to convection in the lower atmosphere
and to the “feedback loops” or homeostasis in the system.

The system acts to restore its original state. There is NO “runaway greenhouse” or we would have never evolved into being since the early earth had astoundingly high levels of CO2 and we would have baked to death before getting out of our slime beds as microbes.

Figure 16. The geological history of CO2 level and temperature proxy for the past 400 million years. CO2 levels now are ~ 400ppm. Source: Davis, W. J. (2017).

OK, I’ll show you her video. It is quite good even with the “swing and a miss” at the end. She does 3 levels of The Greenhouse Gas Mythology so you can see the process evolving from grammar school to high school to college level of mythology. But then she doesn’t quite make it to Post-Doc Reality.

Where’s she wrong? (Well, not really wrong, but lacking…)

I see 2 major issues. First off, she talks about the “lower atmosphere warming”. Well, yes and no. It doesn’t “warm” in the sense of getting hotter, but it does speed up convection to move the added heat flow.

In English “heating” has 2 different meanings. Increasing temperature.
Increasing heat flow at a temperature.

We see this in “warm up the TV dinner in the microwave” meaning to heat it up from frozen to edible; and in the part where the frozen dinner is defrosting at a constant temperature as it absorbs heat but turns it into the heat of fusion of water. So you can “warm it up” by melting at a constant temperature of frozen water (but adding a LOT of thermal energy – “heat”) then later as increasing temperature once the ice is melted. It is very important to keep in mind that there are 2 kinds of “heating”. NOT just “increasing temperature”.

In the lower atmosphere, the CO2 window / Infrared Window is already firmly slammed shut. Sabine “gets that”. Yay! One BIG point for her! No amount of “greenhouse gas” is going to shut that IR window any more. As she points out, you get about 20 meters of transmission and then it is back to molecular vibrations (aka “heat”).

So what’s an atmosphere to do? It has heat to move! Well, it convects. It evaporates water.

Those 2 things dominate by orders of magnitude any sort of Radiative Model Physics. Yes, you have radiation of light bringing energy in, but then it goes into the ocean and into the dirt and the plants and even warms your skin on a sunny day. And it sits there. It does NOT re-radiate to any significant degree. Once “warmed” by absorption, heat trying to leave as IR hits a slammed shut window.

The hydrological cycle. Estimates of the observed main water reservoirs (black numbers in 10^3 km3 ) and the flow of moisture through the system (red numbers, in 10^3 km3 yr À1 ). Adjusted from Trenberth et al. [2007a] for the period 2002-2008 as in Trenberth et al. [2011].

So what does happen? Look around, what do you see? Clouds. Rain. Snow. (sleet hail fog etc. etc.)

Our planet is a Water Planet. It moves that energy (vibrations of atoms, NOT radiation) by having water evaporate into the atmosphere. (Yes, there are a few very dry deserts where you get some radiative effects and can get quite cold at night via radiation through very dry air, but our planet is 70% or so oceans, so those areas are minor side bars on the dominant processes). This water vapor makes the IR window even more closed (less distance to absorption). It isn’t CO2 that matters, it is the global water vapor.

What happens next?

Well, water holds a LOT of heat (vibration of atoms and NOT “temperature”) as the heat of vaporization. About 540 calories per gram (compared to 80 for melting “heat of fusion” and 1 for specific heat of a gram of water). Compare those numbers again. 1 for a gram of water. 80 for melting a gram of ice. 540 for evaporating a gram of water. It’s dramatically the case that evaporation of water matters a lot more than melting ice, and both of them make “warming water” look like an irrelevant thing.

Warming water is 1/80 as important as melting ice, and it is 1/540 th as important as evaporation of the surface of the water. Warming air is another order of magnitude less important to heat content.

So to have clue, one MUST look at the evaporation of water from the oceans as everything else is in the small change.

Look at any photo of the Earth from space. The Blue Marble covered in clouds. Water and clouds. The product of evaporation, convection, and condensation. Physical flows carrying all that heat (“vibration of atoms” and NOT temperature, remember). IF you add more heat energy, you can speed up the flows, but it will not cause a huge increase in temperature (and mostly none at all). It is mass flow that changes. The number of vibrating molecules at a temperature, not the temperature of each.

In the end, a lot of mass flow happens, lofting all that water vapor with all that heat of vaporization way up toward the Stratosphere. This is why we have a troposphere, a tropopause (where it runs out of steam… literally…) and a stratosphere.

What happens when it gets to the stratosphere boundary? Well, along the way that water vapor turns into water liquid very tiny drops (clouds) and eventually condenses to big drops of water (rain) and some of it even freezes (hail, snow, etc.). Now think about that for a minute. That’s 540 calories per gram of heat (molecular vibration NOT temperature, remember) being “dumped” way up high in the top of the troposphere as it condenses, and another 80 / gram if if freezes. 620 total. That’s just huge.

This is WHY we have a globe covered with rain, snow, hail, etc. etc. THAT is all that heat moving. NOT any IR Radiation from the surface. Let that sink in a minute. Fix it in your mind. WATER and ICE and Water Vapor are what moves the heat, not radiation. We ski on it, swim in it, have it water our crops and flood the land. That’s huge and it is ALL evidence of heat flows via heat of vaporization and fusion of water.

It is all those giga-tons of water cycling to snow, ice and rain, then falling back to be lofted again as evaporation in the next cycle. That’s what moves the heat to the stratosphere where CO2 then radiates it to space (after all, radiation toward the surface hits that closed IR window and stops.) At most, more CO2 can let the Stratosphere radiate (and “cool”) better. It can not make the Troposphere any less convective and non-radiative.

Then any more energy “trapped” at the surface would just run the mass transport water cycle faster. It would not increase the temperature.

More molecules would move, but at a limit on temperature. Homeostasis wins. We can see this already in the Sub-Tropics. As the seasons move to fall and winter, water flows slow dramatically. I have to water my Florida lawn and garden. As the seasons move to spring and summer, the mass flow picks up dramatically. Eventually reaching hurricane size. Dumping up to FEET of condensed water (that all started as warm water vapor evaporating from the ocean). It is presently headed for about 72 F today (and no rain). At the peak of hurricane season, we get to about 84 or 85 F ocean surface temperature as the water vapor cycle is running full blast and we get “frog strangler” levels of rain. That’s the difference. Slow water cycle or fast.

IF (and it is only an “if”, not a when) you could manage to increase the heat at the surface of the planet in, say, Alaska: At most you would get a bit more rain in summer, a bit more snow in winter, and MAYBE only a slight possible, of one or two days that are rain which could have been snow or sleet.

Then there’s the fact that natural cycles swamp all of that CO2 fantasy anyway. The Sun, as just one example, had a large change of IR / UV levels with both the Great Pacific Climate Shift (about 1975) and then back again in about 2000. Planetary tilt, wobble, eccentricity of the orbit and more put us in ice ages (as we ARE right now, but in an “interglacial” in this ice age… a nice period of warmth that WILL end) and pulls us out of them. Glacials and interglacials come and go on various cycles (100,000 years, 40,000 years, and 12,000 year interglacials – ours ending now, but slowly). The simple fact is that Nature Dominates, and we are just not relevant. To think we are is hubris of the highest order.

See Also  Bill Gray: H20 is Climate Control Knob, not CO2

Figure 9: Two contrasting views of the effects of how the continuous intensification of deep cumulus convection would act to alter radiation flux to space. The top (bottom) diagram represents a net increase (decrease) in radiation to space

Footnote

There are two main reasons why investigators are skeptical of AGW (anthropogenic global warming) alarm. This post intends to be an antidote to myopic and lop-sided understandings of our climate system.

  1. CO2 Alarm is Myopic: Claiming CO2 causes dangerous global warming is too simplistic. CO2 is but one factor among many other forces and processes interacting to make weather and climate.

Myopia is a failure of perception by focusing on one near thing to the exclusion of the other realities present, thus missing the big picture. For example: “Not seeing the forest for the trees.”  AKA “tunnel vision.”

2. CO2 Alarm is Lopsided: CO2 forcing is too small to have the overblown effect claimed for it. Other factors are orders of magnitude larger than the potential of CO2 to influence the climate system.

Lopsided

Lop-sided refers to a failure in judging values, whereby someone lacking in sense of proportion, places great weight on a factor which actually has a minor influence compared to other forces. For example: “Making a mountain out of a mole hill.”

 

 

Intellect Applied to Climate Change

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Rex Murphy writes at  National Post  If CBC cared about diversity, it would host Jordan Peterson global warming talk Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

There is no other issue over the past 20 and probably 30 years that has more obtained the attention of the world’s press than global warming.

I know there have been others. But none has had such a continuous and insistent presence.

No other issue has had the sweet, soft, giddy support of the big networks, the great corporations, the trendy school boards, every mad virtue-signalling politician (the chieftain of which is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau), and the whole wide and multitudinous, amoeba-replicative (and dreadful) NGOS — think of the various foundations, of which I nominate the Suzuki Foundation as the Canadian prince of these dull harrying grouplets — as global warming.

I am aware I am using the old and opportunistically discarded
brand-name here: global warming.

Global warming was the term du jour when the thesis was we were heading into thermal crisis, the snow caps were to disappear, glaciers would go all water in the next 30 years or so, skiers would stare down snow-clean slopes, the seas would swamp New York and Tokyo, and children would weep at bared un-snowed hill-slides.

Alas. Snow kept falling. Seas refused to swell to city-destroying levels. Some winters remained … cold. Ski slopes had snow. And children still in all their sweet joy sledded down the still snow-blanketed hills.

Imagine — the planet’s weather refused to follow Greenpeace’s furious warnings.

Elizabeth May’s hothouse weepings, the latest bulletins from various second-tier folk singers, and people who slept on multimillion-dollar yachts on the French Riviera who deplored those who drove pickup trucks in Northern Alberta.

It was for naught. The Earth has its own ideas. And may probably continue to have them. Presuming the cosmos itself doesn’t go woke.

So it was obvious that “global warming,” the doomster’s environmental tagline required what the communication shops call a “re-branding.” And there being no set more adjusted to the miracles of communications management than the herd of apocalyptic global warming warriors, they — perhaps with much polling, and certainly with much cuteness — changed the brand to “climate change.”

Climate change. There’s a conceptual “get out of jail” brand.

A useful digression: I come from dear, sweet Newfoundland. And I know this will not mean much for you who are not from my province — but I grew up in Placentia Bay.

In Placentia Bay the climate changes every six minutes. And on rough days, every four. Climate change is a beautiful redundancy. It always changes. And if it didn’t … well, it wouldn’t be climate.

So the new brand of “climate change” had this going for it — it gave a blanket rationale for every twitch and tingle or every “weather event” of any kind, wet or cold, hot or dry, a justification under its pure and infinitely elastic designation.

And every TV station, every “weather specialist” was on board with pointing
to “climate change” as the universal cause.

CBC and TV Ontario kept up the silly surmise, having aired Al Gore’s ridiculous, abysmally ignorant An Inconvenient Truth as if it was a script from Sinai, not on stone tablets of course, but “verified” by the “scientists” at the Academy Awards.

Climate change as a brand and a switch-name has gone unchallenged by the main media. Most of them have endorsed a silence on respectable, authoritative, independent and resolute minds who offer more than a different view, but a neutral, rational, and science-based contesting opinion on what has become more of a doxology than matter for exchange, debate, and informed challenge.

Consider Dr. Richard Lindzen. His qualifications on atmospheric science are superb. He is not a “culture warrior.” He is not “political.” He is a great thinking mind — that last term is a very high compliment.

He recently gave a long — nearly two hours — interview with Jordan Peterson, on “climate change,” all conducted with great calm and a backand-forth that followed no script. It was, to my view, one of the cleanest discussions of this issue I have seen.

Dr. Lindzen has the authority of real knowledge on this topic, and therefore his reasonings are worth full and wide attention.

The interview is a model of intellectual exchange, something long lost on our big networks with their fixed views and hollow coverage.

Dr. Lindzen is a font of clear thought, non-agenda-driven deliberation, and direct statement.

It would be a wild wish to see Peterson’s interview with Dr. Lindzen on CBC or TVO. It would break the hearts of their morning agenda meeting attendees. And would threaten their “diversity” and climate change mandates, which are, apparently, whatever the Suzuki foundation and Steven Guilbeault think are correct must be correct.

Watch this interview, even if you are committed to “global warming” theorizations.

And, to Ms. Catherine Tait, CBC president currently wandering the great Canadian landscape arguing CBC’S relevance and point. Here’s a thought: diversity is a quality of mind and intellect. It is not a submission to current faddishness.

Try airing the interview with Dr. Lindzen as an experiment with diversity of thought.

It may be a strange thing to say, but a broadcaster, subsidized and leaning on past glories, should earn its present-day respect by looking around and giving a glimpse at opinions and perspectives outside the glass case of its own treasured ever-so-correct eidolons of virtue-speak.

The Gas Stove Gambit

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Remembering that natural gas is a fossil fuel, there must be more than meets the eye in the media firestorm over banning gas stoves for safety reasons.  Could it be that the regime along with the media are gaslighting us regarding this maneuver?  Kit Knightly thinks so and explains the gambit in his off-guardian article What is the US “Gas Stove Ban” REALLY about?  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.  H/Y Tyler Durden

What sounds like overreach in itself, is actually a cover
for something potentially far, far worse.

The Biden administration is apparently looking to ban gas stoves, calling them a “hidden danger”. But while that sounds bad enough, a deeper dive shows – as usual – it’s not really about what they say it’s about.

Talk of banning gas stoves and “unregulated indoor air quality” could be a Trojan horse designed to get even more “smart” monitoring technology into your home.

Let’s jump in.

Are Gas Stoves Dangerous?

Well, according to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the New Scientist and million other outlets and pundits who started talking about it in the last two days, yes.

Earlier this week near-identical articles from the National Review, Bloomberg and CNN detail how the US Consumer Product Safety Commission will be opening “public comment on the dangers of gas stoves sometime this winter”.

The articles claim:

The emissions have been linked to illness, cardiovascular problems, cancer, and other health conditions. More than 12 percent of current childhood asthma cases are linked to gas stove use, according to peer-reviewed research published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health last month.

Now would be a good time to talk about the phrase “linked to”. It’s always a good one to look out for in any mainstream publication. Journalists love it because it implies causation without stating it.

Consider, one hundred per cent of serial killers have been linked to the ingestion of water and the wearing of shoes.

If this manipulative use of language were not evidence enough of an agenda, the rather premature deployment of the race card proves it:

Senator Cory Booker (D., N.J.) and Representative Don Beyer (D., Va.) wrote a letter to the agency last month urging the commission to address the issue and calling the harmful emissions a “cumulative burden” on black, Latino and low-income households.

So, Will They Ban Them?

Actually, probably not.

Considering that, according to Bloomberg, some 40% of US homes use gas stoves to cook, an outright ban would be impractical to the point of madness. You can’t criminalise 40% of the country. It would be almost unenforceable.

Perhaps they might try a “phasing out”, as they plan for petrol cars in California.

But most likely of all is that this was never really about banning stoves in the first place.

OK, So What’s IT Really About?

What we’re seeing here looks to be your classic bait-and-switch. Having established a “problem”, the powers that be suggest a solution they have no intention of ever carrying out (the more unreasonable the better).

When this measure is inevitably rejected by the public, the government will then proceed to suggest – or pay an NGO to suggest to them – a “compromise” measure.

The compromise is no compromise at all, of course, but actually what they wanted to do from the beginning. Nevertheless, the whole process is sold in the media as a victory for whichever party happens to be in opposition, and cited as evidence that “the system works”.

Tellingly, as I am writing this, Biden has already “ruled out a ban due to backlash”, and Vox were already using the “compromise” a lot in an article they published yesterday.

However, what that “compromise” would be in this case isn’t clear at first, you have to do a little digging.

One clue is present in the National Review article [emphasis added]:

The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers argues that cooking produces harmful emissions regardless of the kind of stove used. “Ventilation is really where this discussion should be, rather than banning one particular type of technology,” Jill Notini, a vice president at the association, told Bloomberg. “Banning one type of a cooking appliance is not going to address the concerns about overall indoor air quality. We may need some behavior change, we may need [people] to turn on their hoods when cooking.”

And you’ll find another in the abstract of the original report on “Cooking With Gas, Household Air Pollution, and Asthma: Little Recognized Risk for Children”, published in the Journal of Environmental Science in April 2021:

The impact [of gas stove cooking] on children can be substantial because […] indoor air is unregulated.

“Ventilation is where this discussion should be”, after all “cooking produces harmful emissions regardless of the kind of stove” and a ban wouldn’t address “concerns about overall indoor air quality” which is currently “unregulated”.

Do you see where this is going?

It’s not about gas stoves, and it’s not about asthma – it’s about “indoor air pollution”, and more importantly how they plan on “regulating” it.

In one of those startling coincidences we’ve all got so used to witnessing in modern geopolitics, just as the US is talking about indoor air quality because of gas stoves, other countries around the world are doing the same thing for totally different reasons.

Singapore is considering new regulations on indoor air quality too, but because of formaldahyde.

Last month The Conversation was running articles claiming “indoor air pollution kills”, while Sir Chris Whitty, the UK’s chief medical officer, was “demanding action on indoor air pollution”.

On Monday, in a Guardian lifestyle piece purportedly about scented candles, Svetlana Stevanovic calls indoor air quality a “going concern”.

Two days ago The Tyee, an “independent” Canadian magazine which receives some funding from the Canadian government, ran an op-ed headlined:

We Need a Revolution in Clean Indoor Air

Which attempts to link improving indoor air quality to “ending Covid” (whilst making sure to sufficiently fluff the vaccines, of course).

Just yesterday the Irish Times published an article about the dangers of poor indoor air quality.

In a rather interesting piece of timing, the air hygiene technology company AeroClean and Molekule, a market leader for air purifiers, finalised a public stock merger…also just yesterday.

Two days ago it was announced IKEA would be selling their own smart air monitors, the same day Samsung announced their new “smart air purifier”.

Earlier today Chinese tech giant Xiaomi issued a media release about their new smart air monitoring technology.

A recent report expects the global air monitor technology market to swell to nearly 6 billion dollars in the next three years.

But I’m sure this is all just a coincidence.

Where Does This Lead?

Well, if I had to guess I would suggest some new “smart” technology is coming that will monitor air quality and indoor C02 emissions. Like smart electricity and water meters, but for your air.

Interestingly, the World Economic Forum agrees with me, publishing an article on their website last July headlined “Indoor air pollution: What causes it and how to tackle it”, which claims:

indoor air pollutants can now be detected with more precise, efficient, and compact sensors thanks to advances in environmental sensing technology. As a result, intelligent home systems may soon use sensors like these to keep track of indoor air quality and notify the ventilation system before dangerous levels are reached.

As part of “backing down” from the stove ban, they will introduce a new bill which sees “smart air monitors” become mandatory in all new-build houses, hotels and rented accommodation.

Just like smart electricity meters, smart air monitors would almost certainly be used to harvest huge amounts of data and give states or corporations the ability to control your home.

If your “indoor air” isn’t “clean” enough; if you use your stove too much, burn too many scented candles or emit too much co2, expect to get penalized  in some fashion until you learn how to be more responsible.

More smart technology, more monitoring, and ultimately more control.

So, while it’s possible the gas stove ban talk will resolve itself into the cliche new tax or fines or some other petty scheme for bilking the many out of their wages, the signs are certainly there it might be something more sinister.

Meanwhile, expect to keep seeing reports on gas stoves damaging the climate, or stories about poor indoor air quality making covid worse.

The usual bought-and-paid-for columns that support every new normal narrative.

Manheimer Steamrolls Net Zero Claims

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Accomplished and distinguished physicist Wallace Manheimer published a crushing argument against the rationale for Net Zero claims and policies.  His paper is While the Climate Always Has and Always Will Change, There Is no Climate Crisis. published in the Journal of Sustainable Development.  In italics with my bolds.

Abstract

The emphasis on a false climate crisis is becoming a tragedy for modern civilization, which depends on relible, economic, and environmentally viable energy. The windmills, solar panels and backup batteries have none if these qualities.

This falsehood is pushed by a powerful lobby which Bjorn Lomborg has called a climate industrial complex, comprising some scientists, most media, industrialists, and legislators. It has somehow managed to convince many that CO2 in the atmosphere, a gas necessary for life on earth, one which we exhale with every breath, is an environmental poison.

Multiple scientific theories and measurements show that there is no climate crisis. Radiation forcing calculations by both skeptics and believers show that the carbon dioxide radiation forcicng is about 0.3% of the incident radiation, far less than other effects on climate. Over the period of human civilization, the temperature has oscillated between quite a few warm and cold periods, with many of the warm periods being warmer than today. During geological times, it and the carbon dioxide level have been all over the place with no correlation between them.

A useful synopsis is written by Chris Morrison at the Daily Sceptic  Net Zero Will Lead to the End of Modern Civilisation, Says Top Scientist.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

A damning indictment of the Net Zero political project has been made by one of the world’s leading nuclear physicists. In a recently published science paper, Dr. Wallace Manheimer said it would be the end of modern civilisation. Writing about wind and solar power he argued it would be especially tragic “when not only will this new infrastructure fail, but will cost trillions, trash large portions of the environment, and be entirely unnecessary”. The stakes, he added, “are enormous”.

Dr. Manheimer holds a physics PhD from MIT and has had a 50-year career in nuclear research, including work at the Plasma Physics Division at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. He has published over 150 science papers. In his view, there is “certainly no scientific basis” for expecting a climate crisis from too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the next century or so. He argues that there is no reason why civilisation cannot advance using both fossil fuel power and nuclear power, gradually shifting to more nuclear power.

There is of course a growing body of opinion that points out that the Emperor has no clothes when it comes to all the fashionable green technologies. Electric cars, wind and solar power, hydrogen, battery storage, heat pumps – all have massive disadvantages, and are incapable of replacing existing systems without devastating consequences.

Manheimer points out that before fossil fuel became widely used, energy was provided by people and animals. Because so little energy was produced, “civilisation was a thin veneer atop a vast mountain of human squalor and misery, a veneer maintained by such institutions as slavery, colonialism and tyranny”.

This argument hints at why so many rich, virtue-signalling celebrities argue not just for Net Zero but ‘Real’ Zero, with the banning of all fossil fuel use.

King Charles said in 2009 that the age of consumerism and convenience was over, although the multi-mansion owning monarch presumably doesn’t think such desperate restrictions apply to himself. Manheimer notes that fossil fuel has extended the benefits of civilisation to billions, but its job is not yet complete. “To spread the benefits of modern civilisation to the entire human family would require much more energy, as well as newer sources,” he adds.

In Manheimer’s view, the partnership among self-interested businesses, grandstanding politicians and alarmist campaigners, “truly is an unholy alliance”. The climate industrial complex does not promote discussion on how to overcome this challenge in a way that will be best for everyone. “We should not be surprised or impressed that those who stand to make a profit are among the loudest calling for politicians to act,” he added.

Perhaps one of the best voices to cast doubt on an approaching climate crisis, suggests the author, is Professor Emeritus Richard Lindzen of MIT, one of the world’s leading authorities on geological fluid motions:

“What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that CO2 from human industry was a dangerous planet-destroying toxin. It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world – that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison.”

Figure 16. The geological history of CO2 level and temperature proxy for the past 400 million years. CO2 levels now are ~ 400ppm

Much of Dr. Manheimer’s interesting paper debunks many of the fashionable nostrums surrounding politicised ‘settled’ climate science. It is an excellent read. Discussing some of the contrary opinions that debunk obviously false claims, he says it is “particularly disheartening” to see learned societies make definitive claims when so much contrary information is readily available. He points out that over the last 10,000 years, the Earth has almost certainly been warmer. There have been warmer and colder periods, just like today.

To find the off-narrative information, even Google can be used, Manheimer says – though he does note that the company warns it will not provide information on “claims denying that long-term trends show that the global climate is warming”.

Figure 18. Per capita food production in kcal/(per-capita per day) from 1961 to 2009. Notice that there is a steadily increasing production, with no sign of any ‘slowly escalating but long-enduring global threat to food supplies.’

 

 

 

 

From Nature Conservation to Climate Calamity

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Ruy Teixeira writes at his substack blog From Environmentalism to Climate Catastrophism: A Democratic Story (Part 1 of 3).  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Conservation, the Environmental Apocalypse, and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism

The beginnings of the environment as an issue can be traced to the conservation movement of the late 19th and early 20th century associated with figures like Gifford Pinchot, head of the Forest Service under Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club. They were Republicans but many Democrats also embraced the movement; Woodrow Wilson created the National Park Service in 1916. And the New Deal in the 1930’s had a prominent place for conservation activities, most famously in the creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) where young men were employed to improve forests and national parks. Trail systems and lodges from that era are still widely used today.

With varying degrees of strictness the conservation movement’s guiding principle was to insulate unspoiled parts of nature from development by market forces, thereby preserving them for healthy leisure and recreation. The movement, like all future iterations of the environmental movement, assumed an unending conflict between man and nature that required good people to take the side of nature.

As development proceeded over the course of the 20th century, the stresses on nature became ever larger and more obvious, leading to the emergence after World War II of an apocalyptic strain in the conservation movement. The argument gained traction that economic and population growth would, if unchecked, destroy the environment and lead to civilizational collapse. Accompanying that strain was a milder version of the idea that directly challenged the old conservation ethos: simply conserving what was left of nature was not enough. The reality of the interdependent natural world meant that man’s activities were having dire effects everywhere on the planet—where people lived and where they didn’t. These activities were upsetting a finely balanced system, resulting in the degradation of both nature, as conventionally understood, and people’s lives.

Restoring and preserving that balance was what it meant to be an environmentalist.

The movement proved enormously effective as a reform movement. Carson’s book veered toward the apocalyptic, but the movement she inspired was laser-focused on practical reforms that would immediately reduce pollution and safeguard the environment. A raft of legislation in the Johnson administration followed like the Clean Air and Water Quality Acts and, in the Nixon administration, the creation of the Environmental Protection Act and the promulgation of the NEPA (National Environmental Protection Act) standards. This legislation and subsequent action was directly responsible for a radical reduction in pollution of all kinds in the next decades.

But the apocalyptic strain of environmentalism, which saw industrial society as an imminent threat to human life and to the planet, was not eliminated by these reforming successes. Instead a closer relationship evolved between mainstream environmentalism and a radical view of the fundamental dangers of industrial society. The first manifestation of this was the anti-nuclear power movement which arose in the 1970’s and was turbo-charged by the 1979 Three Mile Island incident, Building on public fears of nuclear meltdowns and radiation poisoning, the movement was successful in stopping the build-out of nuclear power in the United States.

In the 1990’s, as a scientific consensus emerged that greenhouse gases were steadily warming the earth, this movement was superseded by the climate movement. Here was clear proof that industrial society and human civilization were counterposed. Initially meliorist in orientation, the movement has become more radical as it has gathered strength.

The quest to eliminate the possibility of dire scenarios has met the reality
that industrial societies built on fossil fuels are likely to change only slowly,
for both political and technical reasons.

This has promoted a sense that radical action to transform industrial society must be taken as fast as possible. That view has gained hegemony within the Democratic party infrastructure, supporting activist groups and associated cultural elites. Practical objections about the speed with which a “clean energy transition” can be pursued and concerns about effects on jobs and prices are now outweighed for most Democrats by the perceived urgency of the mission. That has set the Democrats apart from the working class voters they aspire to represent for whom these practical objections and concerns loom large.

It has become a significant factor in the Great Divide that has opened between postindustrial metros and the rural areas, towns and small cities of middle America.

See World of Energy Infographics

After World War II the movement took a different turn. The devastation of the war, combined with the breakneck pace of economic development, fed a sense that industrial civilization was out of control and threatened the entire planet. The key figures promulgating this view were Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr. (Our Plundered Planet, 1948) and especially William Vogt, whose Road to Survival was also published in 1948. Vogt was an ornithologist and ecologist whose experiences in the developing world had convinced him that economic growth and overpopulation would inevitably lead to civilizational collapse unless both growth and population were radically curtailed.

Vogt argued that beliefs in progress were weighing humanity down and were actually “idiotic in an overpeopled, atomic age, with much of the world a shambles.” He concluded that the road to survival could only lie in maximizing use of renewable resources and accepting lower living standards or reduced population.

In his language and outlook, one can see all the strands of apocalyptic environmentalism (now focused on climate change) that we see today. This especially applies to his description of the United States and its economic system.

More benignly, Vogt’s (and Osborn’s) books marked the evolution of conservationism into environmentalism. Stripped of the apocalyptic verbiage, they were arguing that conservation of nature was not enough. The interdependence of man and nature meant that human activities could not be isolated and instead were having negative effects on the entire planet—wilderness, settled areas, oceans, everywhere. The balance of nature was being destroyed, dragging down the natural world and humanity with it. Restoring that balance, not merely conserving parts of the ecosystem, was the new meaning of being an environmentalist.

Also key to Vogt’s analysis was the concept of “carrying capacity”—how much the environment/planet could sustainably bear of a species’ imprint before disaster ensued. This was not precisely defined but it is easy to see the relationship of this idea to how climate change is conventionally thought of today.

The burgeoning strength of the environmental movement started what became a blizzard of legislative action to protect the environment and roll back pollution. That began under LBJ with the Clean Air Act, Solid Waste Disposal Act, Water Quality Act and Air Quality Act. Then under Nixon there was the National Environmental Policy Act, proximate to the Santa Barbara oil spill and widely-publicized Cayahoga River fire, establishing the (NEPA) environmental standards and reviews that are still with us today. Also under Nixon, the Environmental Protection Agency was established, the Clean Water and Endangered Species Acts passed and the Clean Air act strengthened. The first Earth Day was on April 22, 1970, clearly marking the environmental issue as a mass cause for those on the left of the political spectrum.

An interesting aspect of all this activity is that it was meliorist and profoundly reformist. That is, despite its origins in the Vogtian Silent Spring, with its apocalyptic overtones, the drive to clean up the environment was pursued through a steady accumulation of legislation and consciousness-raising about the issue. There was a sense that the problem was solvable through such activities and did not require the massive changes in economic activity and human behavior that an advocate like Vogt would have called for. Of course, there was always a radical fringe of the environmental movement, typified by Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, and the Earth First! group, formed in 1980, but they were a small and not particularly influential part of the overall movement.

Not only was environmentalism of this era reformist but it was very successful reformism. Consider: Because we are now so used to having a fairly clean environment in terms of air and water quality, it is easy to forget just how far we have come since the early 1960’s. Rivers and lakes back then were far more likely to be polluted and essentially unsafe for human activity than not; the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland famously caught fire in 1969. But since that era, water quality has improved dramatically; the number of water bodies meeting standard quality criteria has roughly doubled. Such icons of pollution as Boston Harbor have been cleaned up. And everywhere towns and cities are investing in waterfront leisure developments that would have been a tasteless joke a generation ago.

Air quality has increased dramatically as well. Between 1970 and 2021, emissions of the six key air pollutants that impact public health—ozone, particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide and lead—were cut by 78 percent, even as GNP has increased increased by nearly 400 percent. Acid rain has declined by two-thirds and smog is down by about a third. These trends are truly amazing and would have been considered scarcely believable back in 1970. They underscore the tremendous success of modern reformist environmentalism.

See also Progressively Scaring the World (Lewin book synopsis)

 

Eco-Terrorists Suspected Vandals of Tacoma Power Stations

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

Gateway Pundit’s report was Thousands Lose Power After Three Substations Sabotaged in Tacoma, Included were quotes from Seattle Times.

Deputies arrived on scene and saw there was forced entry into the fenced area. Nothing had been taken from the substation, but the suspect vandalized the equipment causing a power outage in the area. 

Deputies were notified of a second burglary to the TPU substation at 8820 224th St E which also had forced entry with damage to the equipment. Nothing was taken from this site either.

At 11:25 we were notified by Puget Sound Energy that they too had a power outage this morning at 02:39 am. Deputies are currently on scene at this facility where the fenced area was broken into and the equipment vandalized.

At this time deputies are conducting the initial investigation. We do not have any suspects in custody. It is unknown if there are any motives or if this was a coordinated attack on the power systems.

In total, three sites were vandalized, two TPU and one PSE, with more than 14K customers effected

One tweet said: “Not yet clear who did this, but there have been a lot of attacks on the power grid lately and it is something domestic terrorists, especially white supremacists eco-terrorists,  are obsessed with (and several have been convicted in connection with recent attacks/plots).”

I applied the correction based on the consensus of commenters who suspect eco-terrorists of a new tactic replacing their previous valve-turning exploits.