I’m sure that many will dismiss this because, well, ‘he’s a game show host”. But, most people don’t know this, but Pat was the TV weatherman for KNBC-TV in Los Angeles before being recruited by Merv Griffin for “Wheel of Fortune”. He also served in Vietnam, working in the Armed Forces Radio Network. So, he knows something not only about weather and climate, broadcasting, and human nature when money is involved as well. His background is not unlike mine.
Maybe he can teach these guys something?
This excerpt from Pat Sajak’s essay on Ricochet.com yesterday, h/t to Planet Gore
Manmade global warming, like so many other social and economic issues, has become hopelessly politicized. Each side has dug in its heels and has accused the other of acting irresponsibly and dishonestly. For the believers, the other side has become the equivalent of Holocaust deniers; and for the doubters, the other side has become a cult intent on manipulating mankind to remake the world in some sort of natural Utopian image.
The divide has become so great, it seems virtually impossible to bridge the gap. However, I’m not writing for Ricochet merely to outline problems; I’m here to offer real solutions. And I’m not just blowing carbon dioxide.
Let’s assume that a third of the world’s population really believes mankind has the power to adjust the Earth’s thermostat through lifestyle decisions. The percentage may be higher or lower, but, for the sake of this exercise, let’s put it at one-third. Now it seems to me these people have a special obligation to change their lives dramatically because they truly believe catastrophe lies ahead if they don’t. The other two-thirds are merely ignorant, so they can hardly be blamed for their actions.
Now, if those True Believers would give up their cars and big homes and truly change the way they live, I can’t imagine that there wouldn’t be some measurable impact on the Earth in just a few short years. I’m not talking about recycling Evian bottles, but truly simplifying their lives. Even if you were, say, a former Vice President, you would give up extra homes and jets and limos. I see communes with organic farms and lives freed from polluting technology.
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I agree totally – I’ve said this all along. Al Gore could be a true prophet! (…no Al – not profit, prophet…)
Pat’s ‘Modest Solution’
I had no idea he was so sharp.
🙂
(You run an excellent site, Mr. Watts)
If politicians want us to give up our lifestyles, they can come out and say that instead of dressing it up in fraudulent science and hysterical predictions about what will happen if we don’t give it up. They can also start by living the “green” lifestyles they are advocating for everyone else, themselves. I’m not holding my breath.
With a more frugal lifestyle Al Gore would lose weight and live longer. This would be good for him personally. The extra time on this green Earth would give him opportunity to gather wisdom. And that would be good for the rest of us.
At face value this tongue in cheek proposition (presumably that’s what it is) sounds reasonable, but where would it lead if the believers were to luck-in, and we happened to be on the threshold of the next downward perturbation in planetary temperature?
If our governments in the west keep mismanaging our energy policy as badly as they have over the last 20 years, we will soon be joining the great experiment Pat proposes whether we want to or not…
The idea that the champagne socialists who represent the major support for warmism would give up their champagne just because it contains CO2 is surely as fanciful as the idea that pigs might fly. Still, I guess it tests their ideas to destruction!
Good plan, but the hypocrisy of the ‘warmers’ means that it won’t work. They want to control the world and ‘do as I say, not do as I do’ is their watchword. The CAGW scam was never about science, rather just another attempt by the elite to enslave mankind.
Works for me
Problem is I think we’re in for a cold snap that could go on for decades, anyway. If the greenies gave it all up it might well become colder . . . and then we’d be obliged to go along. I think I’d rather just sit tight and then say, “Tolja so.”
Reducing CO2 output by 1/3 would still mean increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, and therefore supposedly increasing temperatures. Since they don’t claim to know the effect of CO2 within 30%, there would be no way to know if the 1/3 reduction did any good or not, even by their estimate, and therefore they would claim correctly that there is no justification to carry out Pat’s experiment. Furthermore, they probably wouldn’t want to do it because the economies of scale would make it much less burdensome if everyone switched together rather than them trying to go it alone. And besides, quite a few of them are reducing their consumption already. Some credit would have to be given to them for what they’ve already done, and that would mean that even if they did everything they should, the reduction would not be as high as the reduction that would come from the non-conservationists doing what they should.
Gnomish: July 26, 2010 at 11:34 pm
Pat’s ‘Modest Solution’
I had no idea he was so sharp.
He’s funny, too. Pat used to include a “weather report” for us every so often: “And for those of you flying in the Saigon area, ceiling is 5,000 feet, visibility 5 miles, ground fire is light to moderate…”
If there was ever a photo that couldn’t better illustrate the downfall of academia, that’s it.
It is this grotesque hypocrisy of the leaders of the “green” movement, or environmentalists, that really annoys me the most.
When they are flying around the world and being chauffeur driven in huge limousines to lecture me to reduce my already minuscule carbon footprint or face greater taxation, bureaucracy and will-sapping hassles I get really pissed off.
I see Al Gore buying sea-front property when claiming that the sea WILL rise 20 feet or more, up to 20 meters.
I see these experts flying private jets to copenhagen, only for those jets to fly out and park in another country, before flying back to pick these experts up again.
I see Hollywood celebrities driving a prius and spouting “holier than thou” platitudes, then flying around the world and turning up to awards shows in stretch Humvees!
And they have the gall to lecture and harass me about MY pathetic carbon footprint? When even if I cut MY footprint to absolute zero, their lifestyle in ONE YEAR would offset my lifetime reductions completely.
So, WHAT IS THE PRACTICAL POINT OF ME MAKING ANY MORE REDUCTIONS?
To Al Gore, and all his celebrity acolytes… LEAD BY EXAMPLE OR GET THE HELL OFF THE STAGE!
Sorry for shouting, but this really gets me steamed!!!
Leading by example is the best policy. So when the warmists stop flying thousands of miles to far off exotic places by the thousands, then we know they really mean business. However, as they don’t, & won’t, as said on a previous post, the new Fuedal system is in the wings, with the “Champagne Socialists” (haven’t heard that expression for a long time) lording it over everyone, in a Do As I Say Not As I Do, kind of way. Will they ban said Champagne, beer, sparkling wine, cola, 7-Up, etc etc. I think not somehow,I mean to say, just look at Al Gore’s lifestyle, & that of Tony Blair, another great profit! (That’s not a spelling mistake.) That surely must be the greatest get-out-of-jail-free story of all time, “I genuinely believed I was doing the right thing!”
I would be more than happy to give up my champagne, jetset lifestyle…and I’m not an AGW believer.
Bob of Castlemaine says:
yes Bob – it could be worse couldn’t it 🙂
The effete elite surrender their lifestyles?
Are you kidding?!?!
Will the Queen of England, her consort, and her son Chaaaaaaahles, be surrendering their ‘humble’ digs anytime soon to live like the lowly commoners?
What about the Dutch Royal family?
How about that bunch of UN snobs, or the U.S. Congress?
Will the Rockefellers, the Rothchilds, Maurice Strong, George Soros, Al Gore, and a the rest of that cadre of insiders be setting the example?
Surely you jest!!!
It is THEY who mean to drive the rest of US into rank poverty, so that THEY may lord it over us, rubbing our respective noses into the dirt.
Excellent, I have often said the same thing myself, unfortunetly those soooo concerned about AGW seem to do less than most sceptics I know!
My power is from hydro, I copice trees for fire wood, I grow my own veggies, dont eat meat etc… I dont see any outspoken alarmist doing even that much – Some go flying around in private jets to tell us to cut our emissions! Most wait for the Govt to come up with schemes that wont work that redistribute wealth from the poor low co2 producers and move it to the wealthy high co2 producers. Its all nutz! Lead by example, dont tell us what WE should do.
To be fair, most foaming at the mouth eco type AGW proponents I’ve actually met do make energy reduction/low impact lifestyle choices. This is probably because most I’ve met are within the Permaculture scene.
It doesn’t stop some them being hypocritical, or pious, in relation to their own ethics though. I was recently dragged into an AGW punchup on a permaculture forum because I expressed a position taught by their founder Bill Mollison in 1981.
“The effects of this [deforestation] on world climate are becoming apparent both in the composition of the atmosphere and in the inability of the atmosphere to buffer changes. In any month now, we wil break the world weather records in some way. In my home town, we are very isolated and buffered by ocean and forest. But we had in succession the windiest, the driest, and the wettest month in history, in two hundred years of recording. So really what’s happening in the world climate is not that it is tending toward the greenhouse effect; it is not that it is tending toward the ice age; it is starting now to fluctuate so wildly that it is totally unpredictable as to which heat barrier you will crack. But when you crack it, you will crack it an an extreme and you will crack it very suddenly. It will be a sudden change. Until then, we will experience immense variability in climate”
You might think 1981 is a bit dated in relation to current propaganda, so I went looking for the most up-to-date presentation, which was from an online PDC course presented by Geoff Lawton (Permaculture Research Institute of Aus) in 2008 and I quote:
“Erm, Climate Change, yeah right, yeah, you know climate could change, it has changed before, if you go back to the 500million yr climate graph, and all the ice core studies they’ve done, yes it’s been warmer than this, in fact the sea level has been 4 to 6 meters higher than it is now, and 140 meters lower than it is now, and it’s been that quite a few times. At the bottom of the ice age, or at the biggest freeze, your ocean is 140 meters lower than it is now. That makes quite a different global map, and 4 to 6 meters higher it makes quite a different map, especially when you look where a lot of our cities are. Erm.. yeah right… OK… those are issues of course. Erm… there are interesting things if you look at the carbon graph [shown on screen] and the carbon graph over 500 million yrs follows the temperature graph quite, almost like a mirror. And right now it seems that the carbon graph, in other words the carbon that’s in our atmosphere, is separated quite radically away from the temperature graph, and if you take an analysis on that it doesn’t look like a warm-up coming, it looks like an Ice Age, with a vertical shaft coming, it looks like a vertical drop into an Ice Age. If you look at the 500million yr climate and carbon graph, that we say we can prove, I don’t know, it doesn’t really matter to me. I’m a farmer. I’m inherently a farmer. I love to farm. I cannot live without it. I apply design to the ground. I teach people from the ground. I don’t care what you say about the world being round and the Sun going… us going round the Sun. I teach the way you see it… from the ground. It doesn’t matter to me that the Earth goes round the Sun. I can see the Sun from wherever I am, wherever I am on the Earth, and I can see the way it behaves in relation to a 12 yr cycle. I can teach from that. That’s what applies to me, what actually happens is a result on the ground. ”
Smart guy that Geoff Lawton. Apparently I’m a Big Oil propagandist with questionable character because I mentioned it. :/
Mindbuilder,
You’re joking, right?
Yes, the ‘weather’ has sadly become a political, destructive and often vociferous fight between two sides – and I’m not alone in wishing we could all reach a more amicable solution than (looking at some of the last few days of WUWT comments) the slanging match its become. Although hypothetical figures, Pat Sajak’s bridging the gap between the 33% warmist believer camp & the 66% of us who simply want to know the truth may provide a sound and constructive answer. Let them get on with it.
It’s a bit like letting 10% of the people who still enjoy cigarettes to continue smoking in complete freedom until they can statistically prove that they died earlier than they would normally have done of lung cancer – a fact that still has yet to be proved as smokers have more chance of dying a premature death for all sorts of other non-smoking related reasons (including influenze as they now stand outside). And one day, when it’s proved that smoking was not as harmful as we were originally told, that the penalties, taxation and duty levied on smokers was politically immoral, we can all start puffing away again. Now where’s that ashtray?
evanmjones says:
July 27, 2010 at 12:13 am
Problem is I think we’re in for a cold snap that could go on for decades, anyway. If the greenies gave it all up it might well become colder . . . and then we’d be obliged to go along. I think I’d rather just sit tight and then say, “Tolja so.”
——————————————————————–
Nahhh… We can just tell ’em, “Ya’ll can go back to SUVs and fizzy drinks now. It’s cold enough, thank ya’.”
A couple of decades ago when I was a young man in my 20’s, I was on a domestic flight when whom should I see but one of the two co-leaders of the NZ Green party, at the time I was (and still am) a voter for the minor far right party in parliament. Naturally my thoughts on seeing him on a jet, burning kerosene through the stratosphere, were along the lines of “bloody Greenie, what a hypocrite, should be riding his bike from his constituency to the capital”.
Fortunately I’ve grown up a little since then, even if Mr Sajak hasn’t. Few people who worry about CAGW actually advocate everyone abandoning cars (or jets) and living of veggie gardens in their backyards, and as Mindbuilder suggests above, most have at least switched to less carbon intensive options where they can, but whatever they do, if other people are (and people often do claim they are on blog comments) switching to SUV’s or other gas guzzlers just to make a point that they don’t accept AGW, there probably isn’t much difference that the average greenie can make with their own personal contribution to carbon emissions reductions.
etoiledunord (and others) Right On!
WUWT has wide readership. Please be aware that we are in the dawn of the Nuclear age. The old U-233 stored at Oak Ridge (and billed to be ‘diluted’ for $475.000.000 by the gooblement) can be used as a nuclear trigger to ignite Thorium in a safe, proliferation-proof Molten Salt Reactor, as already proven many years ago. No CO2, reduced fissionables storage cost, CHEAP energy.
Get with it!