How about the whole thing is based on one damned great lie? There is no climate crisis, CO2 levels do not control the temperature of the atmosphere. CO2 is a trace gas which is highly beneficial to life. No CO2, no life; less CO2 means less life.
Climate changes, it always has and always will and it is entirely natural. Mankind can do nothing about it except adapt if necessary. There are a host of scientists who broadly agree but their opinions are suppressed.
Therefore why argue about policy details when the whole damned political project needs to be brought down.
I think it's very important to identify points of internal incoherence, where the policies don't even work on their own terms. This tells us something about their nature and the people promoting them.
Internal incoherence exists on multiple levels - scientistific, economic and empirical.
1) atmospheric CO2 concentration has never historically driven long term “global climate” (ice core data from Antarctica & Greenland demonstrate clearly that the temperature changes precipitate the CO2 concentration changes, generally by several hundred years, nota bene both on the upslope and the downslope); the premise that atmospheric CO2 concentration is driving “global climate change” in the present it pure conjecture (and ideological belief in so-called Climate Models).
2) Despite rapid increase in CO2 emissions worldwide post WWII, the global mean surface temperature declined between 1940 & 1975.
3) There is no long-term increase in the global mean sea level rise rate (i.e., no sea level acceleration signal) which would be a necessary requirement for the theory of enhanced global warming caused by human GHG emissions to have merit.
4) The stated goal of “net zero CO2 emissions” is un-achievable absent a breakthrough technology not in existence today.
5) The proposed alternate sources of producing electricity, enabling transportation and providing heat for industry depend fundamentally on fossil fuels and/or are economically unsustainable (in some cases even laughably so) on an economic basis.
6) To date there is zero evidence that the collective efforts to “steer” the global climate to a “benign future” is having a detectable effect on global climate trends, despite loud proclamations to the contrary.
You're basically trying to plot the lowest-effort path to: how people should come to understand it's a massive grift.
The solution to plotting that path is: when the policy should be obviously self-defeating to a person with an attention span and IQ beyond that of a hamster.
Unfortunately, we will all likely be crying in the wilderness until "the lights have gone out in Rome"
Take a look at land transport. Clean air by bans, or clean air by expensive technologies which reduce traffic with the same end result - bans for the masses, tiny number of 'special' vehicles for the self-important elite. Air and sea is now infected by the very same thinking. It reveals how the elite think......
Empty lives, dissatisfaction, boredom, and the love of any cause that lets these people browbeat those more content than themselves who don't depend on them to have a nice day.
I can't discount that the rise in atmospheric CO2 and Methane may have some effect on surface temperatures, but whether the observed changes are due to this, or whether changes in solar irradiance, the magnetosphere or cloud albedo feedback effects do or do not predominate, I think it's really hard to say. But like you, I'm sceptical.
My scepticism comes from the fact that we live in a strange post-modernist era, in which people (including The Scientists) are prone to believe that humans control reality (this is the essence of postmodernism). In such a belief system, anthropogenic climate change seems like a more appealing theory than say, changes due to the great glowing ball of energy in the sky.
They play tricks to convince people precision is synonymous with accuracy.
3.0000001 + 3.0000001 = 5.0000001 is precise but inaccurate.
3 + 3 = 6 is accurate but less precise.
Computer models can convince people of inaccuracies because the models are complex and precise, while direct observation, paradoxically, seems less convincing, because it's simple and obvious.
Egomaniacal technocrats seem to prefer complicated b.s. to straightforward observation -- "salvation" via elaborate rituals and "modeling" gurus over empirical evidence.
The basic equations do lead to the conclusion that doubling CO2 will have some effect on temperatures (see article by Will Happer in the Independent Review, I think it's this year, for a nice review). Recently, Christy and Spencer at University of Alabama did a new analysis, coming up with a value of 1.9 degrees per doubling, but I suspect that's too high by a factor of 2. There's a great video by Paul Driesen [sic?] that goes through the derivation; he comes up with a value of 2/3 of a degree. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to locate it again since I first saw it.
According to Driesen, to make this a crisis, alarmists bring in "positive feedbacks" of various kinds, especially an increase in water vapor which is supposed to set off a chain reaction. But as far as I can tell there is nothing like this in the paleoclimatological record. Note that these feedback effects have nothing to do with CO2 per se, only with temperature. But where are such effects in the ice core records, which do show appreciable rises in temperature always followed by falls?
Ask these people if there is a single ecosystem in the universe that's "sustainable". We're just phlegm (earth and humans) coughed up by the sun.
These so-called scientists forgot chemistry and physics....yah know because of the The First Sciency Commandment : Thou shalt have no other gods before me, for I am the great "CONSENSUS".
I could go on forever; but just think how sneaky they are when talking about the properties of CO2. There may be a warming trend (so what?). The great CO2 myth has little to do with it, as each additional greenhouse gas molecule has less and less of an effect.
None of it checks out.
My favorite Climate DENIER is Ian Plimer:
"The Earth is an evolving dynamic system. Current changes in climate, sea level and ice are within variability. Atmospheric CO2 is the lowest for 500 million years. Climate has always been driven by the Sun, the Earth’s orbit and plate tectonics and the oceans, atmosphere and life respond.
Humans have made their mark on the planet, thrived in warm times and struggled in cool times. The hypothesis that humans can actually change climate is unsupported by evidence from geology, archaeology, history and astronomy.
A new ignorance fills the yawning spiritual gap in Western society. Climate change politics is religious fundamentalism masquerading as science. Its triumph is computer models unrelated to observations in nature. There has been no critical due diligence of the science of climate change, dogma dominates, sceptics are pilloried and 17th Century thinking promotes prophets of doom, guilt and penance.
When plate tectonics ceases and the world runs out of new rocks, there will be a tipping point and irreversible climate change. Don’t wait up."
Well, I hope your wrong, because I have the view that humans are the heroes of the environment by putting enough CO2 in the atmosphere to accelerate & expand the greening of the planet and to prevent the terrible eco-disaster of another ice age or even a bad bout of global cooling like the little Ice Age (1350-1850). Don't want any more of those. Yeah, humans!!
Nothing wrong with appealing to authority. This is not Pure Logic. You are doing far worse, your argument is "because I say so". Why should anyone believe anything you say, with no qualifications in the subject?
I'm skeptical of authority, in particular, I look at alternative authorities, and prefer to see them debate the issue. In this case the spectrum of knowledgeable beliefs make it highly likely that we can predict we are past the ice age danger with the current level of CO2.
Of course, it has always been a lie...The Earth's temperature several thousand years ago was much higher than today, at least 3*, when there were few humans and hardly. any fossil fuel consumption...Their "model" doesn't work...
It's all a nice scam to extract even more monetary "ownership" from the herds of modern moron slaves to the Owners of the MONETARY SYSTEM and their friends the Billionaires.
Oh those wind mills ,I hate them about as much as the snout pouches ,that are coming back ,together with the cooler weather , . I don't live near any wind mills ,but the ones who do live near them must get their brain scrambled ,from the never ending spin of the monstrous contraptions ,when stepping outside .I think it is an invention to drive us crazy together with the Whyrusses that fill the entire atmosphere of the planet ,halfway to the moon .
My theory is a combination of your 5 great points. A sociopathic, greedy, power-hungry elite is weaponizing fear to convince useful idiots to support policies that enrich them but impoverish all of us.
"...Net-zero policies are promoted by bad people with nefarious motives and stopping global warming is a mere pretence. ..." totally agree with you both. Perfect example is Bill Gates-of-Hell plan to buy forest land, chop down the trees and bury them so they decay slowly. No matter that you lose the oxygen from growing trees, no matter that trees sequester more CO2 the larger they get. No, he can sell his crime against nature for carbon credits.
I don't think it will be long until Bill Gates buys all of Greenland and then sells building lots to the global warming migrants ,escaping overheating and to plant palm trees .
Some billionaires have been buying up Greenland. That Swiss Australian billionaire by the name of Ivan Glasenberg being one of them. I expect they think that the ice is going to melt.
The 1.5 deg warming target is reminiscent in obvious ways of the 6 foot social distancing mandate. No connection whatsoever with empirical reality, but a nice easily remembered metric around which the bureaucracy can organize as it pretends to be doing something.
I think a lot of this comes down to European political leaders assuming that they have some sort of globally recognized moral leadership. Sure, destroying their economies won't do anything to stop climate change on its own ... but the whole world is watching! Europe's self-immolation will inspire China and India to follow along! Conversations with Swedes when I was living there suggest that the Swedes, at least, have a powerfully warped sense of their own moral importance on the world stage. The sad reality is that most of the human population is only vaguely aware that Sweden exists. Likewise, Europe's suicide is of no interest to the teeming masses of the global south, save insofar as it offers an opportunity to them.
Remember the Hunga Tonga volcano last year? It threw up so much sea water all the way to the mesosphere that it is estimated that single eruption will raise the global temps by the 1.5 "crisis" number. There is nothing effective we can do against such overwhelming forces of nature.
That opportunity exists as long as the original Europeans exist ,to feed and take care of the teeming masses now invading the northern countries .If the original people in the north cease to exist ,than the migrants are toast ,because no one is feeding housing and looking after them .It will be the new hell hole ,the same they came from . .
The 1.5 degree came into existence after policymakers were fooled by Nordhaus into thinking the world can cope with 2 degree of global warming, only for people to discover that the impacts were kicking in much earlier than they had expected.
All paradoxes are resolved on the understanding that we are merely dealing with a grift the scale of which has never been seen before in all human history. Nations which have no intention of complying (whether speaking of their populaces or their ruling classes), such as India and China, happily go along with all the BS because it (a) reduces competition for fossil fuels and the relative price they pay for energy; (b) in the case of China, weakens the ability of states they view as enemies, such as the US, to wage war; (c) they benefit from "developed world" deindustrialization because much of that production may relocate inside their borders (d) in the case of China, they control most of the current production/logistics in respect of minerals and other inputs required for "green" solutions (other than nuclear); and (e) in the case of China, creates new opportunities for alliances whilst simultaneously weakening American/NATO alliances which were a threat to China's ambitions.
All true and in addition they get to milk the Net Zero Carbon Trading scam by setting up phony low carbon credit scams like forest preserves or solar farms, another good way to steal money from the Western middle class. And also they demand subsidies from Western countries based on the old dodge that Western countries caused most of the emissions so they have a responsibility to subsidize the Developing nations.
Basic economics is not necessarily accepted, even by today's economists. That is not because they are unable to grasp the concept, but because they are caught in a narrative.
Even in my own field of economics, I was shocked when, in April 2020, cascades of high-ranking economists all threw their unmitigated support behind lockdowns. Virtually none argued for a careful balancing of benefits and risks. They simply panicked - or else were too morally cowardly to stand in the way of the panicked masses rushing for their tripled masked confinement. The narrative was stronger than the analytical skills of even the best experts.
It's the same for climate gobbledygook. When I sit down with friends of mine who espouse the alarmist agenda and go through it point by point, they invariably agree that none of this stuff makes much sense. But the next day, they will sit in a meeting or in a group of their peers and praise the High Gods of Climate like the Pharisees of old.
And actually, if you work with, and socialise with, and depend for your network on, Alarmists, then that strategy is the rational one to employ.
"When I sit down with friends of mine who espouse the alarmist agenda and go through it point by point, they invariably agree that none of this stuff makes much sense. But the next day, they will sit in a meeting or in a group of their peers and praise the High Gods of Climate like the Pharisees of old."
Exactly what I experience in our university in Vienna, Austria, day after day!
Both sides are being played. The University side more by peer pressure I think rather than money but it's all in favour of the likes of WEF. On the other side of the issue you have the Kochs spending large amounts via their Heartland Institute to mold the issues to continued extraction at rates that are to their benefit.
Probably we should be limiting the use of oil so as we don't run out completely in 10 or 100 years and as a result collapse in a heap.
Most applications for research funding MUST include a text to show that the proposed research is "sustainable". "Sustainable" in this context is a synonym for "I believe in global warming.... " . In short: To get funding you have to agree.
Climate policies are not being put in place to solve any "problem". They are being put in place to divert money from the working masses to rich political cronies to make them richer. That is all this is about. And of course the politicians are "repaid" after they leave office. That is how the system works these days. Nobody in their right minds can think that cutting down millions trees and putting up solar fields and windmill fields in their place can be good for the environment. These guys aren't stupid, but they are evil and greedy. Very greedy.
That's the money side of things. But it is all about Money AND Power. They are also using climate policies to seize power from national democracies to vest it into supranational organizations like the UN, WHO etc, of which they control.
reducing the wealth and population of global middle classes is a vital part of their plan, under the auspices of 'they use too many resources', when the true reasons may be racial and to reduce political blowback.
Occam, again. These are actual eugenicists. The mind reels from that realisation, I know. The original name of the Bill G foundation was The Bill and Melinda Gates Population Control Institute. Smoke filled rooms in Davos and superyachts off Monaco, where eugenics magnates plot their next hysterias for fun and profit. Lots of people die. And that's the point.
I have spent a considerable amount of time pondering this over the last years, and only a few months ago I 'snapped' at the ridiculousness of the discourse and the contorted attempts to defend the 'CO2 creates global boiling' nonsense. There followed several articles on the matter:
The whole grift is based around a single - flawed - assumption (namely that 'excessive' CO2 released by man is somehow causing 'global warming', no, climate change, no, global boiling!) and this assumption has been taken on blind faith. to the faithful, this assumption is akin to a sacrament of a cult. "Precisely how climate alarmists have managed to get away with the canonisation of their beliefs – such that they were excused from scientific cross-examination and are now consensus – is a debate for another day. One thing is for sure, the planet’s future shouldn’t be left to the catastrophist prophets of doom".
To which one just needs to be reminded that "By their fruits you shall know them".
So in answer to your question as to why this is happening, a sickly Occident has been tricked by an unholy alliance of grifters & vested interests who are selfishly working - possibly unwittingly - in cahoots with nefarious factions (not Blofeld masterminds, just standard espionage / dirty tricks campaigns) from non-Western nations. See also: woke idealogy, trans agenda, the Zero Covid crowd.
fanatical magic cures for the never-ending challenges of life are a basic byproduct of the slightly-too-smart to be useful type.
i lived for 18 months two decades ago in the dreadful house without fireplaces my idiot then-father-in-law built in a place that saw hours of power outages, summer and winter. we had propane canisters for cooking but for the rest everything was electric.
sometimes, in winter, when i couldn't stand freezing any longer, i'd walk down the street to the home of a relative by marriage and enjoy the heat from a bucket of coal sitting on her bedroom hearth.
fyi my then-father-in-law was a very highly educated university professor and civil servant but may best be described as a wretched idiot in all things.
I left academia after 10 years because it was almost exclusively populated with these wretched idiots. They were OK to work with, but in any social interaction I had to listen to almost non-stop intellectual idiocy. If they were going to give their opinions on things they knew nothing about, they could have talked about football. A least the conversations would have been more tolerable.
The 1.5 degree number is pulled out of thin air just like the covid “mitigation” decree of standing 6 feet apart. Who came up with that? And why wasn’t it 5, 10 or 15 feet? These control freaks simply pull numbers out of their asses while telling us all to “trust the science”. No thanks…
What I really like about this CO2 paranoia-hysteria, is that China has dropped out of the infamous 2017 Paris Climate agreement. In so many words the CCP said, "We will provide electricity and energy for our population, as we see fit" "We will no longer be bound by Paris" __________ (Same as C19 paranoia-hysteria) (Both WEF endorsed)
China Abandons Paris Agreement, Making U.S. Efforts Painful and pointless
WebJul 25, 2023 · This contradicts Xi’s 2015 Paris Agreement pledges to reduce its carbon emissions at the latest after 2030. Xi’s remarks came while climate envoy and former …
We continue in the west to shoot ourselves in both feet while the East (especially China, India and Indonesia) sprint ahead because they have common sense.
Some real world pollution (not CO2 myths) is all the plastic bags dumped into rivers, that dump them into our oceans. The top two plastic bag polluters are Indonesia (I saw was #1) and China
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In Indonesia’s coastal villages, the plastic crisis is both …
Explore this image
WebSep 9, 2020 · JAKARTA — Proper management of plastic waste is lacking in coastal communities in Indonesia, the No. 2 contributor to the ocean plastic crisis. That’s the conclusion of a recently published study, which …
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Rivers are the primary conduits for plastic waste to the seas. In 2017, two separate groups of scientists concluded that 90 percent of river-borne plastic waste that flushes into the oceans is conveyed by just a handful of large, continental rivers, including the Nile, Amazon, and Yangtze, the world’s three longest rivers.
Plastic gets to the oceans through over 1,000 rivers - National Ge…
the easiest recycling for it comes from an Australia researcher who throws every type of plastic together in a vat of water and boils it under pressure, which renders it down to a substitute for fuel oil. Which can also be used for subsequent batches in a virtuous circle, using no new power inputs for the process. And produces a surplus for many uses.
That makes a lot more sense than large scale carbon sequestration. Done by pumping CO2 underground. My vote for the most hare brained "climate" scheme. And being funded into the tens of millions via "The Anti-Inflation Act". Being funded to Biden Admin crony capitalists for their destined to fail, demonstration projects. There is agitation, and a resistance by rural people, to build large diameter pipelines from CO2 sources, to where the CO2 can be pumped underground.
I think they might be building those CO2 storage areas near places Gates bought farmland. All the land he bought has aquifer water, which has no atmospheric contaminants. He may be planning on building greenhouses, fertilizing with the stored CO2 and watered with his own aquifer water. Nice clean food for the elitists.
we now have micro and nano sized plastic everywhere, even our own bodies. Plastic is an artificial molecule that will not degrade under normal circumstances. It will continue to get smaller and more pervasive. This is our real ecological emergency. Too bad Gates didn't think of making money on plastic mitigation, rather than CO2.
the US is the global leader in oil and gas production, and probably near the top 5 of coal. I'm sure Biden's policies are far from optimal (I don't know too much about them), but I can't see that the US is restricting supply in any meaningful way.
Biden has unilaterally cancelled existing oil and gas leases that companies have already paid for, for one thing. He (or his administration, at least) has also essentially simply *not* offered more leases in the Gulf of Mexico this year. We might still be among the top producers, but we're certainly not producing up to capacity, and not at the levels one would expect given prices.
Look at current production rates: 13.2M barrels a day. We are almost back to the production peak under Trump. I believe that this was allowed to happen in order to keep prices low to placate our allies and the American public. America's foreign wars are unpopular, but high oil prices are usually even more politically toxic. Think what would happen if a major Middle Eastern war broke out and its oil, along with Russian oil, were no longer available.
I would say that "almost doing as well as four years ago when prices are 50% higher" isn't a strong counter to "we aren't producing as much as we could ", though. It could certainly be worse, but it could also definitely be better. (Where, to be clear, in that statement "better" means "more oil and gas production".)
It isn't meant to be a counter. The comment was meant to show that despite the Biden administration's claims to be reducing dependence on fossil fuels, we are producing as much as ever. Of course their own personal actions hint at their true beliefs about climate change, but the oil production data proves that our leaders really don't believe their own message (big suprise, right). When the chips are down, political expediency trumps all.
He also cancelled the Keystone pipeline which supplied the heavy oil that US refineries really need to complement the light Tight Oil they mostly get. Heavy oil distillates are the backbone of the economy, without them you don't get food.
Strange you should say that. When I got to the part about "the only real way to reduce pollution is to reduce production, and nobody is interested in doing that," my mind immediately leapt to Biden. On his very first day in office, he cancelled the Keystone Pipeline -- and since then has been cancelling, preventing, and damaging every possibility of our nation producing more of its own energy. He's even sequestered great tracts of land as meaningless "national monuments" that would otherwise be exploited commercially to mine the energy contained there. Could it possibly be that Biden (more accurately his puppeteers) champions this principle and is busily cutting production, regardless of the living hell to which is is consigning his own citizens?
"1) The catastrophising rhetoric is a tool of manipulation and the policymakers themselves don’t believe we’re facing disaster.”
They don’t, and they also realize that fear sells to the intellectually lazy, and is a great motivator.
“2) ….If we posit that politicians have to work with the political energy available to them, this could clarify many things.”
Spot-on. The enviro movement already had momentum, and the pols accelerated it through fear-mongering.
“3) The basic structure of climate policy emerged after the Cold War in 1990.”
Also spot-on. My take on this is that the communists fell out of favor with the fall of the Soviet version, but they didn’t all just vanish.
They instead saw an opening, created by Dr. James Hansen here in the US in his 1988 Congressional testimony demonizing Co2 for (basically) the first time, and they saw this as a means of returning themselves to power and control over others.
“4) Restrictions targeting supply were always considered politically unworkable,…”
Indeed, as they still need the votes of the proles, at least for now.
“5) Net-zero policies are promoted by bad people with nefarious motives and stopping global warming is a mere pretence.”
Yes, Yes, YES!!! Look at how they’re going after every single thing they’ve ever hated: Eating meat, travelling about freely, leisure activities, farming, large homes, individual liberties, freedom of thought/expression, living in a world of HVAC, literally everything the left loves to hate.
And just wait until they unleash the “Endangered Species” habitat, migration and procreation restrictions on humanity. That’s where they’ll get their favored “15 Minute Cities” from, as they’ll find a creature to champion on every square centimeter of arable land across the globe.
I’ve seen that in action here in the US in our National Parks to a limited degree, but it’s a hard sell as Americans are still too stubbornly freedom-loving to stand for it.
Another generation or two, though? They might just push it through successfully.
It's a real eye-opener that a devoted socialist, when faced with incontrovertible evidence that socialism cannot create prosperity, immediately came to the conclusion that... *we need another excuse for toppling capitalism!!!*
How about the whole thing is based on one damned great lie? There is no climate crisis, CO2 levels do not control the temperature of the atmosphere. CO2 is a trace gas which is highly beneficial to life. No CO2, no life; less CO2 means less life.
Climate changes, it always has and always will and it is entirely natural. Mankind can do nothing about it except adapt if necessary. There are a host of scientists who broadly agree but their opinions are suppressed.
Therefore why argue about policy details when the whole damned political project needs to be brought down.
I think it's very important to identify points of internal incoherence, where the policies don't even work on their own terms. This tells us something about their nature and the people promoting them.
Certainly they can be used to point out the idiocies but the attack should be on the basis of it all. I call it Rockefeller Climate.
excellent name Iain.
Internal incoherence exists on multiple levels - scientistific, economic and empirical.
1) atmospheric CO2 concentration has never historically driven long term “global climate” (ice core data from Antarctica & Greenland demonstrate clearly that the temperature changes precipitate the CO2 concentration changes, generally by several hundred years, nota bene both on the upslope and the downslope); the premise that atmospheric CO2 concentration is driving “global climate change” in the present it pure conjecture (and ideological belief in so-called Climate Models).
2) Despite rapid increase in CO2 emissions worldwide post WWII, the global mean surface temperature declined between 1940 & 1975.
3) There is no long-term increase in the global mean sea level rise rate (i.e., no sea level acceleration signal) which would be a necessary requirement for the theory of enhanced global warming caused by human GHG emissions to have merit.
4) The stated goal of “net zero CO2 emissions” is un-achievable absent a breakthrough technology not in existence today.
5) The proposed alternate sources of producing electricity, enabling transportation and providing heat for industry depend fundamentally on fossil fuels and/or are economically unsustainable (in some cases even laughably so) on an economic basis.
6) To date there is zero evidence that the collective efforts to “steer” the global climate to a “benign future” is having a detectable effect on global climate trends, despite loud proclamations to the contrary.
...
...
You're basically trying to plot the lowest-effort path to: how people should come to understand it's a massive grift.
The solution to plotting that path is: when the policy should be obviously self-defeating to a person with an attention span and IQ beyond that of a hamster.
Unfortunately, we will all likely be crying in the wilderness until "the lights have gone out in Rome"
You’re denigrating hamsters!
Cursed rodents, they have it coming!
Arguably smarter than some humans. I never see a hamster with a mask on.
Add to the internal incoherence: volcanoes.
Never mind cow farts, why haven't we accounted for beetle farts?
Take a look at land transport. Clean air by bans, or clean air by expensive technologies which reduce traffic with the same end result - bans for the masses, tiny number of 'special' vehicles for the self-important elite. Air and sea is now infected by the very same thinking. It reveals how the elite think......
Empty lives, dissatisfaction, boredom, and the love of any cause that lets these people browbeat those more content than themselves who don't depend on them to have a nice day.
I can't discount that the rise in atmospheric CO2 and Methane may have some effect on surface temperatures, but whether the observed changes are due to this, or whether changes in solar irradiance, the magnetosphere or cloud albedo feedback effects do or do not predominate, I think it's really hard to say. But like you, I'm sceptical.
My scepticism comes from the fact that we live in a strange post-modernist era, in which people (including The Scientists) are prone to believe that humans control reality (this is the essence of postmodernism). In such a belief system, anthropogenic climate change seems like a more appealing theory than say, changes due to the great glowing ball of energy in the sky.
Yup.
They play tricks to convince people precision is synonymous with accuracy.
3.0000001 + 3.0000001 = 5.0000001 is precise but inaccurate.
3 + 3 = 6 is accurate but less precise.
Computer models can convince people of inaccuracies because the models are complex and precise, while direct observation, paradoxically, seems less convincing, because it's simple and obvious.
Egomaniacal technocrats seem to prefer complicated b.s. to straightforward observation -- "salvation" via elaborate rituals and "modeling" gurus over empirical evidence.
Anthropocentrism is a curse.
Well you would say that.
I meant in the sense that humans think they can control everything.
Unlike water bears, which adapt to everything :)
The basic equations do lead to the conclusion that doubling CO2 will have some effect on temperatures (see article by Will Happer in the Independent Review, I think it's this year, for a nice review). Recently, Christy and Spencer at University of Alabama did a new analysis, coming up with a value of 1.9 degrees per doubling, but I suspect that's too high by a factor of 2. There's a great video by Paul Driesen [sic?] that goes through the derivation; he comes up with a value of 2/3 of a degree. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to locate it again since I first saw it.
According to Driesen, to make this a crisis, alarmists bring in "positive feedbacks" of various kinds, especially an increase in water vapor which is supposed to set off a chain reaction. But as far as I can tell there is nothing like this in the paleoclimatological record. Note that these feedback effects have nothing to do with CO2 per se, only with temperature. But where are such effects in the ice core records, which do show appreciable rises in temperature always followed by falls?
Exactly!
Ask these people if there is a single ecosystem in the universe that's "sustainable". We're just phlegm (earth and humans) coughed up by the sun.
These so-called scientists forgot chemistry and physics....yah know because of the The First Sciency Commandment : Thou shalt have no other gods before me, for I am the great "CONSENSUS".
I could go on forever; but just think how sneaky they are when talking about the properties of CO2. There may be a warming trend (so what?). The great CO2 myth has little to do with it, as each additional greenhouse gas molecule has less and less of an effect.
None of it checks out.
My favorite Climate DENIER is Ian Plimer:
"The Earth is an evolving dynamic system. Current changes in climate, sea level and ice are within variability. Atmospheric CO2 is the lowest for 500 million years. Climate has always been driven by the Sun, the Earth’s orbit and plate tectonics and the oceans, atmosphere and life respond.
Humans have made their mark on the planet, thrived in warm times and struggled in cool times. The hypothesis that humans can actually change climate is unsupported by evidence from geology, archaeology, history and astronomy.
A new ignorance fills the yawning spiritual gap in Western society. Climate change politics is religious fundamentalism masquerading as science. Its triumph is computer models unrelated to observations in nature. There has been no critical due diligence of the science of climate change, dogma dominates, sceptics are pilloried and 17th Century thinking promotes prophets of doom, guilt and penance.
When plate tectonics ceases and the world runs out of new rocks, there will be a tipping point and irreversible climate change. Don’t wait up."
Well, I hope your wrong, because I have the view that humans are the heroes of the environment by putting enough CO2 in the atmosphere to accelerate & expand the greening of the planet and to prevent the terrible eco-disaster of another ice age or even a bad bout of global cooling like the little Ice Age (1350-1850). Don't want any more of those. Yeah, humans!!
What happened to the little ice age we were all supposed to be scared about in the 70's?
We heroic humans, kicked its ass back to the waste bin of history where it belongs.
We're not putting anywhere near enough CO2 into the atmosphere to do that.
That's not what the experts are saying. They're saying we're putting way more than enough to do that. I would go with we're putting enough.
So we're appealing to authority again? I thought we had our fill of that after March 2020.
Nothing wrong with appealing to authority. This is not Pure Logic. You are doing far worse, your argument is "because I say so". Why should anyone believe anything you say, with no qualifications in the subject?
I'm skeptical of authority, in particular, I look at alternative authorities, and prefer to see them debate the issue. In this case the spectrum of knowledgeable beliefs make it highly likely that we can predict we are past the ice age danger with the current level of CO2.
Couldn't have said it better!
Whenever we have an anomalous weather event, there's always a bandwagon cheer: Climate Change!
To which I respond: "It's the weather, stupid".
Of course, it has always been a lie...The Earth's temperature several thousand years ago was much higher than today, at least 3*, when there were few humans and hardly. any fossil fuel consumption...Their "model" doesn't work...
How do we even know the theory of fossil fuels is correct?
It's all a nice scam to extract even more monetary "ownership" from the herds of modern moron slaves to the Owners of the MONETARY SYSTEM and their friends the Billionaires.
50,000 upticks Iain!!!
Oh those wind mills ,I hate them about as much as the snout pouches ,that are coming back ,together with the cooler weather , . I don't live near any wind mills ,but the ones who do live near them must get their brain scrambled ,from the never ending spin of the monstrous contraptions ,when stepping outside .I think it is an invention to drive us crazy together with the Whyrusses that fill the entire atmosphere of the planet ,halfway to the moon .
My theory is a combination of your 5 great points. A sociopathic, greedy, power-hungry elite is weaponizing fear to convince useful idiots to support policies that enrich them but impoverish all of us.
ESG is antithetical to democracy and capitalism. It must be stopped: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-raise-your-esg-score
"...Net-zero policies are promoted by bad people with nefarious motives and stopping global warming is a mere pretence. ..." totally agree with you both. Perfect example is Bill Gates-of-Hell plan to buy forest land, chop down the trees and bury them so they decay slowly. No matter that you lose the oxygen from growing trees, no matter that trees sequester more CO2 the larger they get. No, he can sell his crime against nature for carbon credits.
I don't think it will be long until Bill Gates buys all of Greenland and then sells building lots to the global warming migrants ,escaping overheating and to plant palm trees .
Some billionaires have been buying up Greenland. That Swiss Australian billionaire by the name of Ivan Glasenberg being one of them. I expect they think that the ice is going to melt.
Obviously.
The 1.5 deg warming target is reminiscent in obvious ways of the 6 foot social distancing mandate. No connection whatsoever with empirical reality, but a nice easily remembered metric around which the bureaucracy can organize as it pretends to be doing something.
I think a lot of this comes down to European political leaders assuming that they have some sort of globally recognized moral leadership. Sure, destroying their economies won't do anything to stop climate change on its own ... but the whole world is watching! Europe's self-immolation will inspire China and India to follow along! Conversations with Swedes when I was living there suggest that the Swedes, at least, have a powerfully warped sense of their own moral importance on the world stage. The sad reality is that most of the human population is only vaguely aware that Sweden exists. Likewise, Europe's suicide is of no interest to the teeming masses of the global south, save insofar as it offers an opportunity to them.
Remember the Hunga Tonga volcano last year? It threw up so much sea water all the way to the mesosphere that it is estimated that single eruption will raise the global temps by the 1.5 "crisis" number. There is nothing effective we can do against such overwhelming forces of nature.
That opportunity exists as long as the original Europeans exist ,to feed and take care of the teeming masses now invading the northern countries .If the original people in the north cease to exist ,than the migrants are toast ,because no one is feeding housing and looking after them .It will be the new hell hole ,the same they came from . .
The 1.5 degree came into existence after policymakers were fooled by Nordhaus into thinking the world can cope with 2 degree of global warming, only for people to discover that the impacts were kicking in much earlier than they had expected.
It's not based on climate science.
All paradoxes are resolved on the understanding that we are merely dealing with a grift the scale of which has never been seen before in all human history. Nations which have no intention of complying (whether speaking of their populaces or their ruling classes), such as India and China, happily go along with all the BS because it (a) reduces competition for fossil fuels and the relative price they pay for energy; (b) in the case of China, weakens the ability of states they view as enemies, such as the US, to wage war; (c) they benefit from "developed world" deindustrialization because much of that production may relocate inside their borders (d) in the case of China, they control most of the current production/logistics in respect of minerals and other inputs required for "green" solutions (other than nuclear); and (e) in the case of China, creates new opportunities for alliances whilst simultaneously weakening American/NATO alliances which were a threat to China's ambitions.
All true and in addition they get to milk the Net Zero Carbon Trading scam by setting up phony low carbon credit scams like forest preserves or solar farms, another good way to steal money from the Western middle class. And also they demand subsidies from Western countries based on the old dodge that Western countries caused most of the emissions so they have a responsibility to subsidize the Developing nations.
Basic economics is not necessarily accepted, even by today's economists. That is not because they are unable to grasp the concept, but because they are caught in a narrative.
Even in my own field of economics, I was shocked when, in April 2020, cascades of high-ranking economists all threw their unmitigated support behind lockdowns. Virtually none argued for a careful balancing of benefits and risks. They simply panicked - or else were too morally cowardly to stand in the way of the panicked masses rushing for their tripled masked confinement. The narrative was stronger than the analytical skills of even the best experts.
It's the same for climate gobbledygook. When I sit down with friends of mine who espouse the alarmist agenda and go through it point by point, they invariably agree that none of this stuff makes much sense. But the next day, they will sit in a meeting or in a group of their peers and praise the High Gods of Climate like the Pharisees of old.
And actually, if you work with, and socialise with, and depend for your network on, Alarmists, then that strategy is the rational one to employ.
"When I sit down with friends of mine who espouse the alarmist agenda and go through it point by point, they invariably agree that none of this stuff makes much sense. But the next day, they will sit in a meeting or in a group of their peers and praise the High Gods of Climate like the Pharisees of old."
Exactly what I experience in our university in Vienna, Austria, day after day!
would be interested in knowing if faculty has received or applied for research grants for this.
Both sides are being played. The University side more by peer pressure I think rather than money but it's all in favour of the likes of WEF. On the other side of the issue you have the Kochs spending large amounts via their Heartland Institute to mold the issues to continued extraction at rates that are to their benefit.
Probably we should be limiting the use of oil so as we don't run out completely in 10 or 100 years and as a result collapse in a heap.
Most applications for research funding MUST include a text to show that the proposed research is "sustainable". "Sustainable" in this context is a synonym for "I believe in global warming.... " . In short: To get funding you have to agree.
More likely they were all bought or warned that opposition will result in repercussions for them. Maybe even a visit from Antifa.
Very well put.
Climate policies are not being put in place to solve any "problem". They are being put in place to divert money from the working masses to rich political cronies to make them richer. That is all this is about. And of course the politicians are "repaid" after they leave office. That is how the system works these days. Nobody in their right minds can think that cutting down millions trees and putting up solar fields and windmill fields in their place can be good for the environment. These guys aren't stupid, but they are evil and greedy. Very greedy.
That's the money side of things. But it is all about Money AND Power. They are also using climate policies to seize power from national democracies to vest it into supranational organizations like the UN, WHO etc, of which they control.
reducing the wealth and population of global middle classes is a vital part of their plan, under the auspices of 'they use too many resources', when the true reasons may be racial and to reduce political blowback.
Occam, again. These are actual eugenicists. The mind reels from that realisation, I know. The original name of the Bill G foundation was The Bill and Melinda Gates Population Control Institute. Smoke filled rooms in Davos and superyachts off Monaco, where eugenics magnates plot their next hysterias for fun and profit. Lots of people die. And that's the point.
Dear Eugyppius,
I have spent a considerable amount of time pondering this over the last years, and only a few months ago I 'snapped' at the ridiculousness of the discourse and the contorted attempts to defend the 'CO2 creates global boiling' nonsense. There followed several articles on the matter:
https://reaction.life/author/alex-starling/
The whole grift is based around a single - flawed - assumption (namely that 'excessive' CO2 released by man is somehow causing 'global warming', no, climate change, no, global boiling!) and this assumption has been taken on blind faith. to the faithful, this assumption is akin to a sacrament of a cult. "Precisely how climate alarmists have managed to get away with the canonisation of their beliefs – such that they were excused from scientific cross-examination and are now consensus – is a debate for another day. One thing is for sure, the planet’s future shouldn’t be left to the catastrophist prophets of doom".
But associating CO2 reduction to cool the planet is a McNamaran fallacy of the highest order. It creates the most ridiculous contradictions, such as environmentalists promoting the clubbing of koalas (https://x.com/ElanderNews/status/1722714137782788354) and the extermination of whales (https://twitter.com/AlexStarling77/status/1693670005349437574).
To which one just needs to be reminded that "By their fruits you shall know them".
So in answer to your question as to why this is happening, a sickly Occident has been tricked by an unholy alliance of grifters & vested interests who are selfishly working - possibly unwittingly - in cahoots with nefarious factions (not Blofeld masterminds, just standard espionage / dirty tricks campaigns) from non-Western nations. See also: woke idealogy, trans agenda, the Zero Covid crowd.
The narrative of man-made climate change simply is a trojan horse for socialism. It really is as simple as that.
More like Feudalism. Socialism is just not extreme enough for their tastes. A techno-Feudal Malthusian Totalitarian World Tyranny is what they seek.
And the associated population reduction.
Here here!
Excellent essay!
This has nothing to do with GCC.
It is for the elites to control all of the world's energy, thereby giving them the power to dictate whether you can bring life into this world.
Seems straightforward and...potentially EVIL.
The zealots are just stooges
fanatical magic cures for the never-ending challenges of life are a basic byproduct of the slightly-too-smart to be useful type.
i lived for 18 months two decades ago in the dreadful house without fireplaces my idiot then-father-in-law built in a place that saw hours of power outages, summer and winter. we had propane canisters for cooking but for the rest everything was electric.
sometimes, in winter, when i couldn't stand freezing any longer, i'd walk down the street to the home of a relative by marriage and enjoy the heat from a bucket of coal sitting on her bedroom hearth.
fyi my then-father-in-law was a very highly educated university professor and civil servant but may best be described as a wretched idiot in all things.
I left academia after 10 years because it was almost exclusively populated with these wretched idiots. They were OK to work with, but in any social interaction I had to listen to almost non-stop intellectual idiocy. If they were going to give their opinions on things they knew nothing about, they could have talked about football. A least the conversations would have been more tolerable.
cult thinking is natural to the human temperament.
The 1.5 degree number is pulled out of thin air just like the covid “mitigation” decree of standing 6 feet apart. Who came up with that? And why wasn’t it 5, 10 or 15 feet? These control freaks simply pull numbers out of their asses while telling us all to “trust the science”. No thanks…
The baseline was also pulled out of their asses. They picked the baseline during the Little Ice Age when temperatures were already 2 degC below avg.
and their numbers are grossly distorted by the fact they pulled most of them from urban heat islands
Here is Mexico we were supposed to stand 2 meters apart, so more than 6 feet. Where is the rhyme or reason? Why not 1.8 meters?? 🤡
I remember at that time there was a great shortage of measuring tapes and many arrests for being only fife foot eleven inches apart
The six feet did not apply if you where in honeymoon ,you could apply to have it reduced to five feet .
What I really like about this CO2 paranoia-hysteria, is that China has dropped out of the infamous 2017 Paris Climate agreement. In so many words the CCP said, "We will provide electricity and energy for our population, as we see fit" "We will no longer be bound by Paris" __________ (Same as C19 paranoia-hysteria) (Both WEF endorsed)
_____________
https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/07/china-abandons-paris-agreement-making-u-s-efforts-painful-and-pointless/
China Abandons Paris Agreement, Making U.S. Efforts Painful and pointless
WebJul 25, 2023 · This contradicts Xi’s 2015 Paris Agreement pledges to reduce its carbon emissions at the latest after 2030. Xi’s remarks came while climate envoy and former …
When will we ever educate ourselves about CO2.
It’s not cause and it’s not the enemy.
We continue in the west to shoot ourselves in both feet while the East (especially China, India and Indonesia) sprint ahead because they have common sense.
Some real world pollution (not CO2 myths) is all the plastic bags dumped into rivers, that dump them into our oceans. The top two plastic bag polluters are Indonesia (I saw was #1) and China
_______________________________
In Indonesia’s coastal villages, the plastic crisis is both …
Explore this image
WebSep 9, 2020 · JAKARTA — Proper management of plastic waste is lacking in coastal communities in Indonesia, the No. 2 contributor to the ocean plastic crisis. That’s the conclusion of a recently published study, which …
_______________________________
Rivers are the primary conduits for plastic waste to the seas. In 2017, two separate groups of scientists concluded that 90 percent of river-borne plastic waste that flushes into the oceans is conveyed by just a handful of large, continental rivers, including the Nile, Amazon, and Yangtze, the world’s three longest rivers.
Plastic gets to the oceans through over 1,000 rivers - National Ge…
www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/plastic-gets-to-oceans-through-over-1000-rivers
My feeling is now: pollution control Good. Climate control Bad, i.e. fruitless.
the easiest recycling for it comes from an Australia researcher who throws every type of plastic together in a vat of water and boils it under pressure, which renders it down to a substitute for fuel oil. Which can also be used for subsequent batches in a virtuous circle, using no new power inputs for the process. And produces a surplus for many uses.
That makes a lot more sense than large scale carbon sequestration. Done by pumping CO2 underground. My vote for the most hare brained "climate" scheme. And being funded into the tens of millions via "The Anti-Inflation Act". Being funded to Biden Admin crony capitalists for their destined to fail, demonstration projects. There is agitation, and a resistance by rural people, to build large diameter pipelines from CO2 sources, to where the CO2 can be pumped underground.
I think they might be building those CO2 storage areas near places Gates bought farmland. All the land he bought has aquifer water, which has no atmospheric contaminants. He may be planning on building greenhouses, fertilizing with the stored CO2 and watered with his own aquifer water. Nice clean food for the elitists.
Soros bought huge farms after the flooding on the upper Mississippi several years ago
This, at scale, seems like a worthwhile endeavor/investment
we now have micro and nano sized plastic everywhere, even our own bodies. Plastic is an artificial molecule that will not degrade under normal circumstances. It will continue to get smaller and more pervasive. This is our real ecological emergency. Too bad Gates didn't think of making money on plastic mitigation, rather than CO2.
Plastic is inert, like sand or rocks. Probably harmless, I hope.
hopium
In short, we destroy our economies so the Chinese can burn more fossil fuels. Brilliant.
> While the climateers persist in their mad drive to restrict consumer behaviour, they address fossil fuel production not at all.
I don't know that's accurate. Certainly, Puddin' Joe has done what he can to screw US oil and gas production.
the US is the global leader in oil and gas production, and probably near the top 5 of coal. I'm sure Biden's policies are far from optimal (I don't know too much about them), but I can't see that the US is restricting supply in any meaningful way.
Biden has unilaterally cancelled existing oil and gas leases that companies have already paid for, for one thing. He (or his administration, at least) has also essentially simply *not* offered more leases in the Gulf of Mexico this year. We might still be among the top producers, but we're certainly not producing up to capacity, and not at the levels one would expect given prices.
Look at current production rates: 13.2M barrels a day. We are almost back to the production peak under Trump. I believe that this was allowed to happen in order to keep prices low to placate our allies and the American public. America's foreign wars are unpopular, but high oil prices are usually even more politically toxic. Think what would happen if a major Middle Eastern war broke out and its oil, along with Russian oil, were no longer available.
I would say that "almost doing as well as four years ago when prices are 50% higher" isn't a strong counter to "we aren't producing as much as we could ", though. It could certainly be worse, but it could also definitely be better. (Where, to be clear, in that statement "better" means "more oil and gas production".)
It isn't meant to be a counter. The comment was meant to show that despite the Biden administration's claims to be reducing dependence on fossil fuels, we are producing as much as ever. Of course their own personal actions hint at their true beliefs about climate change, but the oil production data proves that our leaders really don't believe their own message (big suprise, right). When the chips are down, political expediency trumps all.
Ah, fair enough, I read your comment incorrectly, then.
He also cancelled the Keystone pipeline which supplied the heavy oil that US refineries really need to complement the light Tight Oil they mostly get. Heavy oil distillates are the backbone of the economy, without them you don't get food.
Strange you should say that. When I got to the part about "the only real way to reduce pollution is to reduce production, and nobody is interested in doing that," my mind immediately leapt to Biden. On his very first day in office, he cancelled the Keystone Pipeline -- and since then has been cancelling, preventing, and damaging every possibility of our nation producing more of its own energy. He's even sequestered great tracts of land as meaningless "national monuments" that would otherwise be exploited commercially to mine the energy contained there. Could it possibly be that Biden (more accurately his puppeteers) champions this principle and is busily cutting production, regardless of the living hell to which is is consigning his own citizens?
"1) The catastrophising rhetoric is a tool of manipulation and the policymakers themselves don’t believe we’re facing disaster.”
They don’t, and they also realize that fear sells to the intellectually lazy, and is a great motivator.
“2) ….If we posit that politicians have to work with the political energy available to them, this could clarify many things.”
Spot-on. The enviro movement already had momentum, and the pols accelerated it through fear-mongering.
“3) The basic structure of climate policy emerged after the Cold War in 1990.”
Also spot-on. My take on this is that the communists fell out of favor with the fall of the Soviet version, but they didn’t all just vanish.
They instead saw an opening, created by Dr. James Hansen here in the US in his 1988 Congressional testimony demonizing Co2 for (basically) the first time, and they saw this as a means of returning themselves to power and control over others.
“4) Restrictions targeting supply were always considered politically unworkable,…”
Indeed, as they still need the votes of the proles, at least for now.
“5) Net-zero policies are promoted by bad people with nefarious motives and stopping global warming is a mere pretence.”
Yes, Yes, YES!!! Look at how they’re going after every single thing they’ve ever hated: Eating meat, travelling about freely, leisure activities, farming, large homes, individual liberties, freedom of thought/expression, living in a world of HVAC, literally everything the left loves to hate.
And just wait until they unleash the “Endangered Species” habitat, migration and procreation restrictions on humanity. That’s where they’ll get their favored “15 Minute Cities” from, as they’ll find a creature to champion on every square centimeter of arable land across the globe.
I’ve seen that in action here in the US in our National Parks to a limited degree, but it’s a hard sell as Americans are still too stubbornly freedom-loving to stand for it.
Another generation or two, though? They might just push it through successfully.
Re. the pivoting of commies everywhere from "capitalism is bad for the poor" to "capitalism is bad for the planet" when the Soviet Union crumbled, I would encourage you to read this: https://mises.org/wire/socialist-robert-heilbroners-confession-1990-mises-was-right
It's a real eye-opener that a devoted socialist, when faced with incontrovertible evidence that socialism cannot create prosperity, immediately came to the conclusion that... *we need another excuse for toppling capitalism!!!*