This morning in the car doing some errands I listened to an NPR broadcast regarding a NYT article claiming the Trump administration is attacking the fundamentals of climate science. Two journalists involved in the NYT article made two revealing defenses of IPCC climate ideology.
First they objected to the Geological Survey decision to limit consideration (required by US law) of climate change to impacts foreseen between now and 2040, setting aside projections out to 2100. Their reasoning: We won’t see any significant effects from our reducing (or not) CO2 emissions until the second half of this century. All of the forecasted temperature rise of 8F, along with sea level rise, storms, droughts, floods, etc. is only seen to occur after 2040. How do they know this? It is certain because it comes directly from the Oracle of Delphi the Climate Models, which have so accurately forecast the climate in the past (sic). All the pressure to unplug industrial civilization now, with results to appear many decades later.
Then they expressed shock that a Presidential Commission may be set up to review and questions climate assumptions put into agency planning. They said everyone agrees on the science of global warming, and this is not the way climate science is done. The two journalists, without a single bit of self-awareness, proceeded to discredit the possible chairman William Happer by saying he was not a “climate scientist.” Like, how would they know? He is a world expert on atmospheric gases responses to infrared radiation, which is the supposed mechanism of man made global warming, and something about which they are clueless.
In other news today, Arnold Swartzenegger was “starstruck” to meet with teen climate activist Greta Thunberg. How bad will this nightmare get before people wake up?
At least Madonna posing was entertaining, and children get to feel good about skipping school in order to stop the climate from changing. But some posturing is both vapid and damaging.
Of all New York politicians’ efforts to posture on climate change, the drive to divest public pension funds from fossil fuels may be the most deranged.
The bill from state Sen. Liz Krueger (D-Manhattan) and Assemblyman Felix Ortiz (D-B’klyn) would force state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli to sell off all the fund’s holdings in the 200 largest oil, gas and coal companies within five years.
The unions whose members’ retirements depend on the funds are against it. A union-funded report found that the fossil-fuel holdings outperform their green-energy counterparts in the long term.
Also in opposition is DiNapoli, who notes that “manipulation by legislative fiat has hurt pension funds in other states.”
The pension fund pays more than $1 billion a month in benefits. With an unaudited value of $210.2 billion, it now has about $6 billion in fossil-fuel stocks. Diversification of investments is central to fiscal prudence: Let politicians start banning any given stock, and you’re well on the road to requiring a massive taxpayer bailout — and/or huge cuts to the pensions of some classes of retirees.
Thankfully, New York courts have struck down past legislative efforts to mandate specific investment decisions: The state Constitution protects the comptroller’s discretion.
But that’s no guarantee that the principle will survive the climate-change zealots. After all, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has called on the state authorities he controls (the MTA, the New York Power Authority, the Thruway Authority) to divest from fossil fuels.
All that magical thinking about fighting climate change just might persuade state judges. And DiNapoli is surely worried that, if he goes to court over the issue, he’ll face a challenger in the next election who’ll promise to do as the green extremists demand.
Sensible lawmakers need to quash this nonsense before it goes any further.
One post-mortem on the election from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation pointed out the wealth issue thusly:
In [Warringah’s] case and in other inner-city seats, support for climate action looks broadly consistent with a “post-materialist” sensibility. … Here the emphasis on quality of life over immediate economic and physical needs encourages a focus on issues like climate change. But this is a sensibility that speaks to those in higher socio-economic brackets, and principally with higher levels of education.
Put more bluntly, climate-based politics appeal primarily to those insulated from the potential economic consequences of climate policies by their high incomes, and shielded from even seeing those effects by their urbanized lifestyles.
Those not materially blessed enough to live as “post-materialists,” however, still make their decisions based on what it takes to put food on the table, pay the rent, and provide for their families.
This sort of growing rich-poor political divide is not unique to Australia. In Israel, working-class Israelis have solidified behind Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while wealthy areas swing strongly against him.
In the United States, Donald Trump won states like Michigan and Wisconsin while some of Brooklyn’s trendiest neighborhoods elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the House.
It’s not just that the working class is drifting right. The upper classes, especially in gentrifying inner cities, are gravitating hard to a left that is increasingly focused on perceived moral issues and less interested in bread-and-butter economics.
However, there is one key difference that makes Australia unique. Perhaps more than any other nation, Australia has seen climate change loom over its politics for over a decade.
Former Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made it the signature issue of his premiership from 2007-2010, with at least one costly program literally going up in flames. Rudd’s plan to re-insulate Australian homes for energy efficiency failed to account for the flammability of the new insulation and led to the deaths of four workers.
In 2009, Rudd’s cap-and-trade proposal caused a massive split in the Liberal Party when then-party leader Malcolm Turnbull tried to force the party to support Rudd on the issue—leading the party’s legislators to remove him and replace him with anti-cap-and-trade leader Tony Abbott.
Australia has been through “climate change elections” before, and experimented with environmental policy as much as any nation on Earth. The results illustrate what happens when politics becomes centered on creating a “better world” by making life harder in the real world.
Such ideas may gain traction among those who know they can afford to weather the storm, and the rich can condemn the poor for their “materialism” in rejecting the new order, but working people (rightly) prioritize feeding their children as a higher moral goal.
Given that Australia’s ever-shifting politics has sometimes drawn comparisons to “Game of Thrones,” perhaps it’s worth noting that Australian Labor and Daenerys Targaryen learned the same lesson in their big finales this weekend: No matter how lofty your aims, there’s little morality in burning the world down in the name of building a better one.
Bill Nye has a history of pushing bad science, including but not limited to climate change/global warming. Alex Berezow explains at American Council on Science and Health Bill Nye Is A Terrible Spokesman For Science. Excerpts in italics with my bolds
When I was a kid, Bill Nye the Science Guy was a thing. I never watched his show (as I was too busy keeping up with Ren & Stimpy), but he seemed fun enough. If I could go back in time, I’d probably watch.
Some years later, Bill Nye experienced a resurgence in popularity. But instead of the old, nerdy-but-lovable Bill Nye, we got Bill Nye 2.0, a somewhat cantankerous scold who clearly knows less about science than he leads on.
It was clear that something was amiss a few years ago when, amid Nye’s renewed celebrity status, it came to light that he aired an episode of Eyes of Nye that perpetuated anti-GMO propaganda. Nye was subsequently criticized by the scientific and (especially) science writing communities. Not long thereafter, Nye had a change of heart.
Good! Better late than never. But was this “conversion” based on a new understanding of biotechnology or simply a calculated marketing move? Evidence points toward the latter. As late as 2015, Nye was still pushing anti-GMO nonsense. That year, he published a book called Undeniable, which promoted evolution over creationism. The book entirely lacked references (quite bizarre for a science book), and despite GMO technology itself being “undeniable,” Nye wrote this:
“But there is something weird and unnatural about putting fish genes in fruit, in tomatoes. Nobody wanted it, so that research was abandoned.
I’ll grant you, this could be a visceral reaction from ignorant consumers. Emotional responses do not necessarily reflect scientific reality, as is evident in everything from creationism to the anti-vaccine movement. In this case, though, I think science and emotion are on the same side. There are very valid scientific reasons to approach GMOs with caution, and those turn out to dovetail with economic reasons. So far, it’s not clear that investment in GMOs pays off. It is certainly not clear that GMO research should be funded with tax dollars.”
By 2016, however, he was singing a different tune. Call me jaded and curmudgeonly, but his newfound faith in GMOs doesn’t seem authentic.
Bill Nye, Prophet of Doom
In his latest appearance, Bill Nye had a cameo on John Oliver’s show, in which he lit a globe on fire and dropped a few F-bombs. (I guess that passes as comedy.) He also said that Earth’s temperature could rise by 4 to 8 degrees, presumably Fahrenheit, since Nye didn’t indicate which scale he was using. His projection is within the range predicted by the IPCC, so at least he got that right.
But is setting a globe on fire an appropriate analogy to get the message across? Earth’s temperature has gone up 1.4 degrees F since 1880. Undoubtedly, another 4 to 8 degrees is quite a lot in a short period of time. It doesn’t take a master prognosticator to conclude that might cause some problems. But Earth is not — nor will it ever be — a flaming ball of fire. Earth isn’t Venus.
Bill Nye 2.0
Ultimately, it seems that Bill Nye just panders to whatever he thinks the audience wants to hear. He thought (incorrectly) that they wanted to hear why GMOs were bad, so he altered his message when he got pushback. He won’t get pushback for exaggerating climate change, so it’s likely he’ll keep this up for a while.
I don’t think Nye actually believes the climate hysteria. Because if he did, Nye would support whatever means necessary to stop it, like nuclear power. After all, he’s a mechanical engineer. But lo and behold, Nye is opposed to nuclear power. Big surprise. Audiences don’t like nuclear power.
Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne once wrote of Bill Nye, “I’m not a fan of the new Science Guy, and see him as a self-aggrandizing person trying to capture his lost limelight more eagerly than he wants to promulgate science.”
Unfortunately, I think that assessment is accurate. Bring back the old Bill Nye. Version 1.0 was better.
Our nation’s capital, always in search of the latest in political progressivism, has now joined the sky-is-dying crowd by having its city council officially declare Ottawa to be in a climate emergency.
This is in the nick of time, of course, but not because of the serious flooding currently ravaging the region, but because our country’s climate conscience Environment Minister Catherine McKenna keeps telling us that the planet has only 12 years left to sustain life.
There is no doubt the outlying burbs of Ottawa are again fending off rising flood waters because of a very snowy winter followed by a very rainy spring, but that is not the big-picture stuff, although Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said last week while filling sandbags for a photo-op that the current crisis is a direct result of climate change.
So, this wasn’t just a freak year. This was the new norm.
No, the real big-picture stuff is McKenna’s doomsday scenario that has her believing and preaching we’ll all be snuffed out by 2029 unless critical changes are made to ensure our planet’s orbit continues with us still aboard.
In Ontario, the successive Liberal governments of McGuinty and Wynne bragged about how they had at least saved their own province by shutting down all coal-fired power generation, tossing $2 billion down the toilet to cancel two gas-fired power plants, and spending multi-billions more on green-energy projects backed by influential friends who saw renewable energy as their licence to print money.
And they weren’t far wrong. Lots of former backroom types got rich, but it wasn’t the beleaguered taxpayer, because it was he who found himself having to choose between feeding his family or heating his home, and not how he was going to count all the money rolling in.
Or has everyone forgotten those stories? A lot of ink was spilled to report them, and a lot of fossil-fuel petrol was burned by television outlets dashing off to Smalltown, Ont., for first-hand coverage of outraged citizens living through trying times in homes without heat or light.
So, what good has green energy done for Ontario if cities like Ottawa, Kingston and Hamilton find it necessary to declare a climate emergency?
Renewable energy, despite costing billions of taxpayer dollars, is the source of less than 10% of Ontario’s electricity. Those vast fields of solar panels tilted towards the sun? Less than 2%. Wind power, towering winged turbines that also drive countless nearby residents crazy with mysterious brain worms? Less than 8%.
A little over 90% of Ontario’s power sources — from nuclear plants to hydro dams — are environmentally friendly and without emissions.
Yet our nation’s capital has declared itself to be in the midst of a climate emergency, and spare us all if we sit idly by.
Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson was quick to point out that council’s climate emergency declaration is “no empty gesture,” although it came days prior to calling a real state of emergency over extreme flooding and getting assistance from 400 members of the armed forces to help cope with the crisis.
No, along with its specific climate emergency declaration, the city will prove it is “no empty gesture” by ponying up $250,000 out of its annual Hydro One dividend to do … what?
Why, to study the city moving to renewable energy, of course.
There is an epidemic of cities in North America declaring that the city is in a “climate emergency”. This, below, is my recent submission to Committee opposing such a motion for Canada’s capital, Ottawa. There is no evidence that supports such a declaration. We should discourage our politicians from engaging in nonsense.
[The motion in Ottawa passed: 6 (for), 2 (against). Ottawa is therefore now in the throes of a “climate emergency”? The media refused to cover my scientific arguments and did not seek the views of the other side, whatsoever, despite several neighbours and Ottawa residents who agree with me.]
Summation
In conclusion, the Committee should take notice of the following facts when it considers this Motion:
(1) There is no conclusive scientific evidence that climate change (unnatural increased extreme-weather incidence) has occurred since the surge in use of fossil fuel that started in the 1950s. There is only tenuous theoretical conjecture that such might occur.
(2) Not a single death on Earth has been scientifically attributed to “climate change”, which includes Ottawa.
(3) Not a single animal or plant species has been scientifically established to have become extinct from climate change. There is no scientific demonstration of such a thing.
(4) Weather data for Ottawa does not show increased incidence of weather extremes, or any statistically meaningful deviations from the known natural variability (ENSO).
(5) Changes in Ottawa canal skating-season schedules result from ice-management and safety protocol changes, not from (empirically known) weather data.
(6) There is no rational reason, based on empirical data, to believe that Ottawa is at risk of climate change or is susceptible to anomalous future extreme weather events.
The Motion, in my opinion, is what can be termed “goodness propaganda”, which appears intended to convince citizens of being looked after. In fact, this Motion is a waste of resources and political attention.
It is verging on the ridiculous to think that the reality that 87% of world energy from fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal) can be changed by policy statements or taxation.[4] The only significant alternative contributors, as now demonstrated by decades of publicly funded adventures, are nuclear and hydro, both requiring massive structural investments, and both having large environmental consequences.
Climate Lemmings
Footnote
The Canoe article talks about the renewables small contribution to electrical supply in Canada. The proportion of Canadian total primary energy shows wind and solar are far from being the solution.
In the Canadian Energy Fact Book, energy supply is equivalent to energy consumed, since it is calculated after adjusting for energy imports and exports. Note that 17.7% is the amount of energy from renewables, and hydro is 11.6%. Let’s see how much of renewable energy comes from wind and solar:
So Canadians actually consume 4.35% of their renewable energy from wind and solar. 92% of Canadian renewable energy comes from the traditional sources: Hydro dams and burning wood.
Combining the two tables, we see that 80% of the Other Renewables is solid biomass (wood), which leaves at most 1% of Canadian total energy supply coming from wind and solar.
In a legal proceeding, a witness can only testify to what he or she personally experienced. Anything reported to them by others is dismissed as “hearsay”, not evidence by direct observation, but rather an opinion offered by someone else.
In the current public commotion over global warming, almost all the discourse is composed of hearsay. Ross McKitrick explains that the alleged changes in temperatures are so small that no one can possibly notice. Thus, their concern over global warming can only come from repeating hearsay in the form of charts and graphs published by people with an axe to grind. His article in the Financial Post is Hold the panic: Canada just warmed 1.7 degrees and … thrived. Excerpts below in italics with my bolds.
A recent report, commissioned by Environment and Climate Change Canada (also known as the federal Department of the Environment), sparked a feverish bout of media coverage. Much of it keyed off the headline statement that Canada warmed “twice as fast” as the entire planet since 1948. If that is self-evidently a bad thing, what to make of the finding that the Canada’s Atlantic region warmed twice as fast as the Prairies? Or that Canadian winters warmed twice as fast as summers?
Saying Canada warmed twice as fast as the whole planet doesn’t prove anything
I’ll bet you didn’t know that the Maritimes warmed twice as fast as the Prairies. But now that I’ve told you, you might tell yourself it makes sense based on what you’ve seen or heard — that’s called confirmation bias.In fact, I was lying. It’s the other way around. The Prairies warmed almost three times faster than the Maritimes.
Would you have known either way? One of the psychological effects of a report like this, and the attendant media hype, is that it puts ideas in peoples’ heads. Tell everyone over and over that the climate is changing, and soon they will see proof of change everywhere. Rain, snow, wind, floods or dry spells; it will all seem to eerily confirm the theory, even though we have always had these things.
Most of what people are noticing, of course, are just natural weather events. Underneath, there are slow trends, both natural and (likely) human-caused. But they are small and hard to separate out without careful statistical analysis. A few years ago, climatologist Lennart Bengtsson remarked:
“The warming we have had over the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”
And so we get reports with charts and graphs to tell us about the changes we didn’t notice. Remember last summer when the media hyped a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warning that warming 1.5 degrees Celsius (compared to preindustrial times) was a disaster threshold we must avoid crossing at all costs? Now we learn that Canada warmed 1.7 degrees Celsius since 1948. Far from leaving the country a smoking ruin, we got wealthier and healthier, our population soared, and life improved by almost any measure of welfare you can imagine. If only every so-called catastrophe was like this.
We deal with lots of changes over time. Go back to Bengtsson’s thought experiment. Today’s 80-year-olds entered their teens in 1950. Ask them what changes they experienced over their lives and they will have plenty to say. Then ask if, where they live, the fall warmed more than spring did. Without peeking at the answer, most will have no idea. Yet, according to the federal government’s latest report, depending on the province, one likely warmed twice as fast as the other. Which one?
If you can’t tell without looking it up, that’s the point.
Alarming news headlines are always part of the ritual (though you’d have thought journalists would be a bit jaded by now, after all the hyperventilating Only-Ten-Years-Left blockbuster claims over the past 30 years). Saying Canada warmed twice as fast as the whole planet doesn’t prove anything. Pretty much any large country warmed faster than the global average, because countries are on land. Oceans cover 70 per cent of the Earth, and the way the system works, during a warming trend the land warms faster than the oceans. So the scary headline only confirms that we are on land.
The best antidote, if you find yourself alarmed by the press coverage, is to turn to chapter four of the Department of the Environment’s report and start reading. The section on the observed changes in 1948 is factual, data-focused and decidedly non-alarmist. But there are some points I would quibble about: 2016 was a strong El Niño year, so the end point of the data is artificially high.
Some of the report’s bright-red heat maps would probably look different if they stopped in, say, 2014. And most of the report’s comparisons start in 1948 to maximize data availability, but this boosts the warming rate compared to starting in the 1930s, which was a hot decade. When the authors talk about attributing changes to greenhouse gases versus natural variability, they don’t explain the deep uncertainties in such calculations. And they make projections about the century ahead without discussing how well — or how poorly — their models can long-term forecast.
If you want to learn about changes to the Canadian climate, read the report. But if you need to look at the report to know what changes you lived through, that tells you how much — or rather, how little — they mattered to you at the time.
Ross McKitrick is a professor of economics at the University of Guelph and senior fellow at the Fraser Institute.
Postscript: No one under 20 years old has experienced a trend of warming temperatures. Yet they are in the streets instead of classrooms demanding action (anything) to stop something they have never known. Think about it.
This post summarizes a useful set of categories for positions on global warming/climate change that are advocated in the public square. H/T Richard Drake for pointing me to an extensive and illuminating discussion by Edward Ring at American Greatness The Politics, Science, and Politicized Science of Climate Change. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
Climate alarm shouldn’t be a hard sell, and it isn’t. The horror inspired by natural conflagrations taps into primal, instinctual fears; when vividly imagining terrifying acts of nature, even the most hardened skeptic might have a moment of pause.
And every time there’s a hurricane, or a flood, or a wildfire, we’re reminded again by the consensus establishment; we caused this. We are to blame. And nothing, absolutely nothing, is too high a price to pay to stop it.
But rarely explored, and difficult to find, is data on how much it costs to adapt to climate change versus how much it would cost to stop climate change. Equally hard to find is information about the extent to which climate change might actually benefit humanity.
Political Categorizing of Today’s Eco Intellectuals
In 2014, Matthew Nisbet, a professor of communications at Northeastern University, in a paper titled “Disruptive ideas: public intellectuals and their arguments for action on climate change”made an interesting attempt to classify influential activists and experts on climate change into three categories: Ecological Activists, Smart Growth Reformers, and Ecomodernists. The focus of Nisbet’s analysis was how these public intellectuals “establish their authority, spread their ideas, and shape public discourse.”
While retaining Nisbet’s framework, it is useful to speculate as to how each of the mass political ideologies and major political movements in 2019 America would align with each of Nisbet’s three categories. After all, how “climate action” is implemented, now and in the future, arguably is the most significant variable determining how Americans and everyone else in the world will cope with challenges relating to energy development, economic growth, technology deployment, individual freedom, property rights, national sovereignty, international cooperation, and, of course, environmental protection.
Click on image to enlarge.
Making this leap, a plausible match for each of Nisbet’s categories would be as follows: The “Ecological Activists” are mostly socialists, the “Smart Growth Reformers” are mostly liberals, and the “Ecomodernists” are mostly libertarians. It is important to reiterate that this only roughly overlaps with the influencers Nisbet has characterized in his three groups. Moreover, there is a fourth important category that Nisbet ignored (or dismissed), which might be defined as practical skeptics. More on that later. Here is Nisbet’s chart depicting his three categories of environmental influencers:
Socialist Environmentalists
The first of Nisbet’s three categories are the Ecological Activists. Based on Nisbet’s description, their political ideology is most likely socialist. This group has the most negative perspective on climate change, seeing it as a consequence of capitalism run amok. They argue that the carrying capacity of planet earth has reached its limit and that only by radically transforming society can the planet and humanity avoid catastrophe.
This group is Malthusian in outlook,and the solutions they advocate—returning to small scale, decentralized infrastructure, “smaller scale, locally owned solar, wind and geothermal energy technologies, and organic farming”—are not practical or even internally consistent for several reasons.
“Ecological Activists argue on behalf of a fundamental reconsideration of our worldviews, aspirations, and life goals, a new consciousness spread through grassroots organizing and social protest that would dramatically re‐organize society, decentralize our politics, reverse globalization, and end our addiction to economic growth,” Nisbet writes. It must be a very selective subset of globalization the Ecological Activists wish to reverse, however, because this most radical of Nisbet’s cohorts tend to be the same people who favor open borders and the erasure of national governments. Can they truly believe small communities will constitute what remains of governance when nation-states and multinational corporations wither away?
But in their commitment to achieving 100 percent decentralized, renewable energy, the Ecological Activists make their greatest departure from reality.
Not mentioned in Nisbet’s paper, but easily fitting into the Ecological Activists category, are the “deep greens,” a group typified by the “Deep Green Resistance.” They reject “green technology and renewable energy,” both in terms of its ability to meet the total energy requirements of modern civilization, and in terms of how “green” it actually is. Their solution is to “create a life-centered resistance movement that will dismantle industrial civilization by any means necessary.”
Most Ecological Activists believe in phasing out the use of fossil fuel in a manner they perceive to be as benign as possible. But to achieve this, and unlike the Smart Growth Reformers, the Ecological Activists do not believe in market-based solutions. They support carbon rationing and carbon taxes as the means both to curtail the use of fossil fuel and to fund development and deployment of renewable energy solutions.
In Congress today, the Ecological Activists would be most represented by the Democratic Socialists, led by their media-anointed leader, Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.). The policies promoted by Ocasio-Cortez and her allies in the “Green New Deal,” in its undiluted form, read like a socialist manifesto.
It is impossible to catalog the profusion of activist groups and activist websites now promoting the Green New Deal. There are too many. But almost invariably they perceive “social justice,” socialist economics, environmentalism, and abolition of fossil fuels as interlinked goals sharing common values. One of the explicitly political online promoters of a congressional Green New Deal is the Sunrise Movement. The group claims already to have secured the endorsements of 45 members of Congress, along with hundreds of environmentalist organizations.
But how can Americans possibly expect to replace conventional energy with more expensive renewable energy, at the same time as they pay additional trillions to secure the “economic rights” for everyone living in the United States? The very idea is so preposterous it is difficult to take the socialist environmentalist movement seriously. That would be a mistake.
Liberal Environmentalists
If the Ecological Activists tend to lean socialist, the second of Nisbet’s groups, the Smart Growth Reformers, appear to be conventional liberals. They are more business-friendly, and while they agree that a climate catastrophe is inevitable without dramatic changes in policy, they believe “market forces” can be harnessed to change the energy economy of the world. Where the Ecological Activists support carbon taxes and carbon rationing, the Smart Growth Reformers support carbon trading.
The best known of the so-called Smart Growth Reformers is former Vice President Al Gore, who has enjoyed a career since 2000 that, if anything, eclipses his accomplishments as a politician. In addition to producing Oscar-winning documentaries on climate change, writing bestsellers on the topic, and receiving a Nobel Prize for his proselytizing on the issue, he has become fabulously wealthy. As a co-founder of Generation Investment Management, with over $18 billion in assets under management, and as a senior partner at the elite venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, Gore falls firmly into the pro-business political camp,along with plenty of other liberal democrats. A likely Gore ally among the Smart Growth Reformers would be U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), whose net worth is estimated at $29 million.
It isn’t hard to see why emissions trading would appeal to pro-business liberals, although embracing this terminology requires a very specific sort of definition for the phrase “pro-business.” Why enact a carbon tax, where only the government gets to be the middleman, when with emissions trading, you can engage the global financial community, and create completely new categories of economics, as armies of accountants, economists, environmental scientists, and myriad additional, highly-credentialed ancillary experts engage in cradle to cradle assessments of carbon molecules?
Emissions-trading schemes pose all kinds of problems. Think of the subjectivity inherent in measuring significant variables, the stupefying complexity, the huge, nonproductive overhead, consisting of a veritable army of bureaucrats, consultants, experts, and, of course, financial middlemen. Or consider the vast potential for corruption, or just multiplying schemes that turn out to do more harm than good, saturate the prospect of emissions trading from end to end.
A recent ignoble example would be how carbon emissions trading in the European Union funded palm oil plantations. To purchase the right to emit more CO2 than their allotment, European companies bought “carbon credits,” investing in “carbon neutral” biofuel plantations in Indonesia, Malaysia, and elsewhere in the tropics. Thousands of square miles of tropical rainforest, valuable wildlife habitat, were incinerated to accommodate the new market for biodiesel made from palm oil. By the time the Europeans realized what they were doing, it was too late. Just ask the orangutans of Borneo, if there are any left.
The “smart growth reformers” advocate more than just carbon trading, but it is difficult to overstate its centrality to their much broader agenda. And it’s important to emphasize that the scope of its implementation will go far beyond regulating energy. Because there is a “carbon footprint” to virtually every development—all housing, all infrastructure, all transportation; not just power plants, but bridges, dams, water and wastewater treatment plants, solid waste management, the energy grid, inland waterways, levees, ports, public parks, roads, rail, transit, schools, every durable good, every gadget, everything.
In the hands of a creative carbon accountant, there isn’t any human activity that might not have earnings potential, taxation potential, or become a target for regulation. Government agencies view this as a gold mine. Code enforcement departments and planning commissions will become profit centers—so long as people are forced by law and ordinance to use less and consume less. And to enable, monitor, and enforce the great ratcheting down: the internet of things.
Libertarian Environmentalists
It may not be entirely accurate to claim that most Ecomodernists are libertarians. While libertarians appear to overlap more with the Ecomodernists than with Smart Growth Reformers or Ecological Activists, there are plenty of libertarians who have been seduced by the “market-based” solutions of emissions trading. Moreover, according to Nisbet’s paradigm, Ecomodernists “argue for ‘clumsy’ policy approaches across levels of society, government investment in energy technologies and resilience strategies,” hardly something you would expect from a Libertarian. Nonetheless, many self-proclaimed Ecomodernists identify as libertarians. One of the public intellectuals who is cited by Nisbet as an Ecomodernist is Michael Shellenberger. An apt choice, as Shellenberger co-authored “An Ecomodernist Manifesto” along with 17 other notables.
The Seven Key Sections of the Ecomodernist Manifesto
(1) Humanity has flourished over the past two centuries.
(2) Even as human environmental impacts continue to grow in the aggregate, a range of long-term trends is today driving significant decoupling of human well-being from environmental impacts.
(3) The processes of decoupling described above challenge the idea that early human societies lived more lightly on the land than do modern societies.
(4) Plentiful access to modern energy is an essential prerequisite for human development and for decoupling development from nature.
(5) We write this document out of deep love and emotional connection to the natural world.
(6) We affirm the need and human capacity for accelerated, active, and conscious decoupling. Technological progress is not inevitable. Decoupling environmental impacts from economic outputs is not simply a function of market-driven innovation and efficient response to scarcity.
(7)We offer this statement in the belief that both human prosperity and an ecologically vibrant planet are not only possible but also inseparable.
Ecomodernists may not all embrace the libertarian desire to let the unfettered free market solve every challenge facing humanity (note point No. 6), but perhaps in a more important sense they are very libertarian, in their commitment to encouraging a free market of ideas.
All in all, the Ecomodernist category is an intriguing way of gathering together an eclectic group of thinkers. Also included on Nisbet’s list of Ecomodernists is Roger Pielke Jr., a political science professor at the University of Colorado and another co-author of the “Ecomodernist Manifesto.” Pielke’s situation is one that many Ecomodernists (and Practical Skeptics) face, he is condemned by the “consensus” community merely because he is occasionally willing to criticize their work.
Where Pielke is attacked for exposing politically motivated hyperbole that violates the integrity of the scientists that produce it or condone it, Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg (who is not on Nisbet’s list of Ecomodernists but perhaps should be) is attacked for exposing the deeply flawed economic logic underlying many of the most urgently promoted policies designed to mitigate climate change.
What Pielke, Lomborg, and many others have in common is their overt, unequivocal agreement with the fundamental premise—Earth is warming, and anthropogenic CO2 is the cause. And yet they are at times marginalized because they question certain critical assumptions or conclusions relating to that premise. As these two examples show, the twin hearts of the climate change movement—the science and the economics—have hardened against the voices of contrarians. Along with being eclectic, contrarian might be another widely shared quality of the Ecomodernists.
The Ecomodernist, or, if you will, the Libertarian Environmentalist, as a category, is elusive and heterogeneous. These qualities make its output less predictable, its potential greater. It is best defined simply as not belonging to the two preceding categories, nor willing to cross the red line into overtly questioning the theory of anthropogenic global warming. It has much to offer.
Practical Skeptics
The failure of Nisbet to include climate skeptics as a fourth category may be a forgivable oversight on his part, because climate skeptics almost have been erased from public dialogue. As a result, it makes sense that Nisbet would not consider the members of this group to qualify as influential public intellectuals.
Another reason Nisbet may not have included climate skeptics would be because he was analyzing differing approaches by “public intellectuals arguing for action on climate change.” It’s certainly debatable, but understandable to assert that climate skeptics are arguing for no action on climate change. Equally likely, of course, was that Nisbet chose to avoid the opprobrium he would invite if he legitimized climate skeptics by including them in his analysis.
Climate skeptics have been demonized and ostracized by the socialist and liberal environmentalists. The Ecomodernists, for the most part, scrupulously avoid allowing their laudable contrarianism to overflow into questioning the theory of anthropogenic global warming.
Practical Skeptics have a range of positions that earn them the “denier” label, and everything that comes with that: suppression of their work, savaging of their reputations, and banishment from the public square. Some of them, such as “Climate Etc.” host Judith Curry, former professor and chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, maintain that while anthropogenic CO2 is contributing to global warming, the likely amount of warming is far less than what alarmingly is being projected. Curry has also criticized the growing calls by congressional Democrats to criminalize the free speech of skeptic scientists, by attempting to expose their links, if any, to fossil fuel corporations.
One of the most distinguished, and most demonized, of living climate skeptics is Richard Lindzen, an American atmospheric physicist who is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute. Until his retirement in 2013, Lindzen was the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen was one of the early participants in the early IPCC reports on climate change, but became disillusioned because he perceived the organization had become politicized.
Lindzen’s specific criticisms of conventional climate change theories are many: He acknowledges there are moderate warming trends, but that it is merely our emergence from the “little ice age” of the 19th century. He claims that if the earth were warming significantly, extreme weather would diminish, not increase. He questions the assumptions built into the computer programs that model global climate and produce predictions. He believes predicted warming is overstated. He states that the natural feedback mechanisms governing the global climate have offsetting impacts, and that if they did not, the earth would have experienced catastrophic warming eons ago.
There are dozens of credible climate skeptics, credible enough, that is, to deserve a place on panels at climate conferences or congressional testimony, editorial pages, scientific journals, and press coverage, on what are arguably the most consequential policy decisions of modern times. Along with Curry and Lindzen, other skeptical scientists include Roy Spencer, Fred Singer, and Anastasios Tsonis along with many others who are keeping their heads down.
Lindzen has said that many climate scientists will criticize alarmist pronouncements in whatever may be their specific area of expertise. A glaciologist will challenge a press release predicting an ice-free Himalayan mountain range by 2035. A meteorologist will challenge a press release asserting an increase in extreme weather. But none of them will take the further step of criticizing the overall “consensus.”
There remains a handful of organizations that will provide equal time, or even promote, climate skeptics. They include Cato, AEI, The Heartland Institute, and the Heritage Foundation. But these scientists, these online reporters, and these nonprofit organizations are vastly outgunned by most of the political establishment (with the major exception of the Trump administration), the media and entertainment communities, prestigious scientific journals, the K-12 public education system, higher education, local, state, federal, and international government bureaucracies, virtually every major corporate or financial player, and spectacularly wealthy nonprofit educational foundations including powerful environmental pressure groups.
But scientific “consensus” does not constitute scientific truth. Just ask Galileo. And the overwhelming institutional consensus on a course of action, even if there is such a thing, does not mean that course of action is the optimal course of action.
Solutions Require Renewed Debate
Even if anthropogenic CO2 emissions are driving the planet headlong into an apocalyptic nightmare, climate skeptics should be heard. Because as it is the scope of acceptable debate is relentlessly narrowing. Should Bjorn Lomborg’s valuable economic analysis be ignored, simply because he’s willing to point out the absurdity of spending trillions for the remote possibility of slowing warming by a half-degree? Should Roger Pielke, Jr. be silenced, when the data he presents suggests extreme weather may not be the primary type of havoc for which we need to prepare?
The Heartland Institute Sent 300,000 Teachers Books and DVDs Presenting Evidence Contradicting Alarming Man-Made Climate Change
A healthy policy synthesis would be to promote and invest in projects and technologies that make sense no matter what climate outcome is destined to befall the planet. But the chances of getting that right are improved if skeptics are allowed to rejoin the conversation.
The notion that skeptics are the beneficiaries of vast sums of dark money is by now ludicrous. Every major corporation, certainly including the oil companies, has worked out their lucrative pathway into a profitable “carbon-free” future. But which set of public intellectuals, along with their powerful institutional allies and grassroots constituents, will prevail?
Will it be the Socialist Environmentalists, who are funded by a European-style leftist oligarchy, backed up by populist agitators, with growing support from the electorate? And if so, will any of the stupendous sums of new tax revenues they collect actually make it onto the ground in the form of renewable energy, and if so, will it do any good? Or will climate change just be the Trojan Horse of socialism that finally made it through the gates?
What about the Liberal Environmentalists, the “Smart Growth Reformers”? Will they win? And if so, do we want to live in their hyper-regulated world, where the “free market” survives in the form of cronyism, and every aspect of our lives is monitored in order to ensure we each maintain our “carbon neutrality”? And will that do any good? And when the predicted climate disasters don’t happen, will any of them admit those disasters weren’t going to happen anyway, or will they claim the green police state they built saved the world?
The Ecomodernists, we hope, will excuse being associated in any context with the Practical Skeptics, but here goes: in terms of divergent, undogmatic thinking, and general optimism regarding the ultimate fate of humanity, these two groups have much in common. It used to be accepted that the person holding the sign on the street corner, proclaiming the imminent doom of mankind was the crazy one, and the person suggesting that actually, mankind is probably not doomed, was the sane one. But in the crazy world of climate alarmism, those roles have been inverted.
Shock. Despair. Change everything, overnight, or else. We’ve got five years. When it comes to climate change, that is the prevailing message, and deviation from that message invites demonization, banishment, erasure.
In a recent and very typical development, the BBC, in response to pressure from activists, announced in September 2018 they would no longer cover the arguments of climate skeptics. This is a natural progression that began in 2007 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled—in an ominous endorsement of politicized science and a staggering violation of common sense—that CO2, part of our atmospheric blanket against the cold cosmic emptiness, the food of all plant life, whose rise perhaps delays the past-due next ice age, is a pollutant. Nisbet’s omission of climate skeptics from his panoply of public intellectuals driving the climate debate is just another part of this sad, possibly misanthropic, potentially tragic course.
It is unclear who is right, nor whether reason will prevail. But it would be far better if every voice was heard.
Summary
What a strange twist. Marx gave us the notion of ideology, which he understood to be the system of beliefs and values that the ruling class used to control the working class and ensure continued power and privileges. Today’s Marxist wannabes who are mostly in the entitled class are employing the ideology of environmentalism to mount an anti-capitalist crusade under the banner of Climate Change, advocating policies which will further the misery of the downtrodden.
A new study found that European colonizers who arrived in the Americas killed so many indigenous people that it caused the first major change in the Earth’s climate.
The new study, conducted by researchers at the University College London, found that by killing nearly 56 million indigenous people over the course of roughly 100 years, European settlers caused large areas of farmland to go abandoned and reforest.
The study said the new swath of vegetated land, which CNN reported was roughly the size of France at the time, caused a massive decrease of in carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere then.
Levels of carbon in the atmosphere had changed so much that it caused the planet to experience a global chill in 1610, that is now known as the Little Ice Age, researchers said.
“CO2 and climate had been relatively stable until this point,” UCL Geography Professor Mark Maslin, one of the co-authors behind the study, told CNN on Friday. “So, this is the first major change we see in the Earth’s greenhouse gases.”
Maslin told CNN that he and the team of researchers conducted the study by examining archaeological evidence, historical data and analyzing Antarctic ice, which can trap atmospheric gas and reportedly reveal the quantity of carbon dioxide that was in the atmosphere long ago.
He said a combination of all of the above showed researchers how the reforestation that was brought on by the mass slaughter of indigenous people in the Americas led to the global chill.
“The ice cores showed that there was a larger dip in CO2 (than usual) in 1610, which was caused by the land and not the oceans,” Alexander Koch, the lead author of the study, told CNN.
“For once, we’ve been able to balance all the boxes and realize that the only way the Little Ice Age was so intense is … because of the genocide of millions of people,” Maslin added.
Summary
There you have, all wrapped up with a bow on top. The Little Ice Age was caused by too little CO2, from too many trees because white men killed too many natives. Talk about connecting the dots. Did those white guys think they could get away with it? Thankfully, wildfires are solving the excessive forests problem. Oh wait.
The Little Ice Age refers to a period beginning about AD 1300 and lasting until the middle of the eighteenth century in which the average worldwide temperature may have cooled by as much as 0.1 degrees Celsius. Despite its name, this period “was far from a deep freeze,” the scholar Brian Fagan, writing in 2000, has argued. “Think instead of an irregular seesaw of rapid climatic shifts, driven by complex and still little understood interactions between the atmosphere and the ocean.” Some climate scientists contend that the term “Little Ice Age” is an exaggeration; others dispute the beginning and ending dates. (Historians have suggested that severe weather during the American Civil War may have been an effect of the Little Ice Age.) But nearly all agree that the seventeenth century—when the English founded the Virginia colony at Jamestown—was one of the coldest in the last thousand years.
The cause or causes of this cooling is subject to vigorous debate. Scientists have pointed to the Maunder Minimum, a period between 1645 and 1715 when the number of observed sunspots decreased, indicating a reduced level of solar activity; however, opponents of this theory argue that the resulting decline in solar irradiation was not sufficient to cause the Little Ice Age. During this cooling period, the tilt of the earth’s axis also changed. Such changes may profoundly affect ocean circulation, which, in turn, affects climate. Still other scientists have suggested that volcanic eruptions—such as one in the southern Philippines in 1642—may have had an impact on the cooling, causing chemical reactions in the atmosphere that blocked or redirected sunlight.
The extreme weather wreaked terrible consequences on both the Indians and Europeans in Virginia. As the Spanish Jesuit pointed out, Indian populations decreased during times of drought, likely because of the scarcity of food. Such scarcities also led to conflict—among Indian communities and between the Indians and Europeans. The English at Roanoke had neither the intention nor the ability to feed themselves off the land, and a cold winter and drought conditions led them to place pressure on the Algonquian-speaking Indians of Ossomocomuck to share their already depleted supplies. This, in turn, led to warfare. Indian towns were destroyed and a weroance, or chief, beheaded.
While the Little Ice Age affected the entire world, leaving significant numbers of people to subsist on little food, its impact on Virginia was particularly sharp. It raised the stakes for both Indians and Europeans, making survival more difficult and conflict more likely.
Conclusion: It seems once again, climatists have got cause and effect reversed.
That quote from Herodotus was put on the USPS building in Boston referring to postmen, ie postpersons today. (Are postpersons also postnormal? Just wondering). But I digress.
As bitter cold is hitting the US midwest, Trump chose to troll the warmists with a sympathetic tweet to those freezing their tails off. And now we get a deluge of articles declaring the title of this post. NOAA even drew a cartoon in response. Meanwhile some people bundled up and went to Niagara to witness the frozen falls.
In this context, the trusted couriers are the warmists swiftly making their rounds repeating their new message; “Heatwaves last summer prove global warming/climate change; Freezing cold this winter is also caused by warming.”
The evidence is in: Global warming is a religious belief, and adherents cannot be dissuaded by any fact, event or argument.
Footnote: USPS Suspended Service in 11 States Due to Record Low Temperatures.
J.B. Pritzker, the new governor of Illinois, has begun his reign with the symbolic signing of his state back on to the Paris climate agreement:
It means Illinois will abide by the Paris agreement that aims at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by up to 28 percent by 2025. Former President Barack Obama signed the U.S. onto the Paris accord in 2016 but President Donald Trump withdrew months later.
Pritzker’s order also directs the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency to monitor the Trump administration’s environmental proposals and look for ways to “protect Illinoisans from environmental harm.”
This means Illinois will be spared when the world ends in 12 years, right? Well, no, I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way. But if you do especially want Illinois to be spared for some reason, perhaps it will at least make you feel better about yourself.
Paris was a nonbinding agreement. More importantly, its terms would not be nearly ambitious enough to save the world, were its continued existence truly threatened as some contend.
The symbolic return of the Deadbeat State to the Obama administration’s climate agreement doesn’t mean anything specific. Yes, the state government might be saddling itself with further costs it cannot afford, given its fleeing population and dwindling tax base. But the climate in Illinois will not be affected by any reforms in the U.S., because our entire economy’s worth of carbon emissions is becoming a drop in the carbon ocean of China’s and India’s growing emissions. Even if we switched 100 percent to nuclear power — the secret to France’s electrical success and the only feasible way the U.S. could ever reduce emissions on such a scale — the global threat would not diminish substantially for decades given growth in India alone (not to say that a switch to nuclear isn’t a good idea anyway).
This leaves us with a sort of reverse Pascal’s Wager. If the world is truly on its way to an end, then you’re just screwed. There’s nothing you or I can do at this point, so you might as well just enjoy your last days with the air conditioner on, not off.
If, on the other hand, the conjecture-based predictions of rapid world destruction are just so much hype, then Illinoisans can safely ignore Paris and Pritzker and consider moving to neighboring Indiana where the governor limits himself to real-world problems.
Footnote:
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic theologian. He asserted that the best bet is to believe and act as though God exists even though the evidence is uncertain. The argument was based upon three premises: the first concerns the decision matrix of rewards, the second concerns the probability that you should give to God’s existence, and the third is a maxim about rational decision-making. On Pascal’s premises, the gains from wagering for God outweighed the losses the other way.
In the field of global warming/climate change, the wager is called the “Precautionary Principle” and is preoccupied with losses not gains. IPCC adherents argue that all will be lost unless we stop burning fossil fuels, despite: no reliable evidence anything unusual is happening in our climate; renewable power tech is immature, serving only to make affordable, reliable energy expensive and intermittent; no proof humans can control planetary climate changes.
Science Matters 