A conference in Portland
Report by Rod McLaughlin
I attended the “Cascadia Confluence” on April 20th in Portland. The idea is, human beings should organize themselves into “bioregions” instead of nation states. For example, Vancouver, BC, is in the same bioregion as Seattle, WA, though they are in different nations. San Francisco, CA, is in the “Shasta bioregion”, which overlaps with the “Cascadia bioregion”, where you can find Portland, OR.
The speakers and attendees mixed sensible concern about logging, pollution, and so on, with mystical ideas about “ecology” and “the water web”. One of the speakers claimed “people of color” would suffer from “climate change” because of what “we” are doing. What is it about America that produces this self-hating nonsense?
I went to the talk on “Climate Chaos”. Much of the talk consisted of one of the two speakers asking questions like “what is your favorite place in the Willamette watershed?” and “have you ever seen a wolverine?”
The speakers made various claims about the increasing problems which would be caused by “climate change”, without saying why, or from where they got their data.
The speakers did use statistics, but only those which seemed to confirm their hypothesis. Someone mentioned the retreat of the Athabasca glacier in Canada. I’ve visited this glacier, and at the time, was convinced by the global warming hypothesis. Government signs shows how far the glacier has retreated since 1880. What it doesn’t show is where it was before then. Perhaps it was further forward in 1780, and further back in 1280. If there was a medieval warming period, whose temperature was higher than today, and it was worldwide, the argument that we are going through an exceptional warming period, caused by anthropogenic carbon dioxide, falls to the ground.
The speakers used some scientific observations: the ones which supported their alarmist claims.
I asked: “you mentioned the computerized models used by the IPCC. Are you aware of the increasing divergence between the actual measurements of temperature from weather balloons and satellites and the predictions of the IPCC’s computer models over the last 20 years?”, and held up this graph:
One of the speakers answered: “I’m intimately familiar with climate change denial – it’s not really the subject of this panel… it’s not worth wasting time with”. I responded “that doesn’t really answer my question”.
The correct response was not: ‘that really doesn’t answer my question’, rather ‘By refusing to answer a legitimate question which lies at the fundamental heart of science, i.e. the falsification of hypotheses through scientific measurement, you betray only the fact that it is YOU who is at the heart of climate denial, not those who apply scientific principles to the study of earth’s climate. Will you please engage in scientific discussion or provide categorical evidence that the datasets created using radiosonde balloons and satellites are inaccurate, fraudulent or otherwise unworthy of citation in discussions about global temperature?’…..
The problem was you stumbled into a religious cult and mistook it for a rational scientific conference.
This proves religious applications can not be applied to science, it is not interested in alternative scientific data, just their own philosophical world view. And it sounds as credible as the myths they have already tried to drum into us. If you don’t believe in my God and religion, you must believe in the devil. No Absolute in life folks.
From the link: “Judy Goldhaft co-founded Planet Drum Foundation and is its current director. She was a member of the 60’s radicals known as the San Francisco Diggers, is a performer and helped start the Frisco Bay Mussel Group, a Bioregional Committee of Correspondence in the 1970′s.”
A fossil hippie. The Diggers “sought to create a mini-society free of money and capitalism.” The truly creative hippies transformed into Silicon Valley techies. The ones who had bad paranoid trips who lacked an inventive temperament became such radicals. Happily the climate alarm movement has dragged them out from their saboteur positions in government, academia and activist organizations into the bright light of day, as the religiosity of their fanatacism gets the better of them, very much in public, loudly dismissing voices of reason.
Rhys Jaggar
A short pithy answer is always best, especially if it can raise a chuckle. How about
“Are you denying the accuracy of this graph?”
It sounds as if all this kind of eco-hippie “bioregions” drivel is the same intellectual force that is driving Obama’s Common Core educational agenda. See Master Resource’s article that was just released minutes ago: Common Core’s Climate Science Indoctrination: http://www.masterresource.org/2014/04/common-core-climate-indoctrination/
Also, it would seem that these are the same type of “flower children” that want to “put skeptics in cages” as does Adam Weinstein from Gawker, and I must recommend Rush’s coverage of this (the guy specifically said that he thinks Limbaugh should be imprisoned): http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2014/04/04/gawker_arrest_global_warming_deniers
Oh the irony and cult cracking cognitive dissonance for these literal tree huggers, that carbon dioxide is plant food. From the Planet Drum web site we hear about the web of life, but not the carbon cycle:
“The catastrophic effects on Earth’s biosphere due to human activities since the inception of the industrial era have become imperiling to all life. A transformation of fundamental aspects of consciousness is urgently required to halt and reverse this destructive process. Conservation of resources and environmentalism alone are not adequate to the task. The concept of a bioregion as the basic location where people live, and the practice of reinhabitation of that life-place by its residents, are necessary to rejoin human beings into the overall web of life.”
“One of the speakers answered: “I’m intimately familiar with climate change denial – it’s not really the subject of this panel… it’s not worth wasting time with”. ”
Now that is some very serious denial!
Such people do not live in the real world and therefore, will not listen to reasonable arguments. Truth has no place in the zealot’s world.
In many places they will also be selling home-made candles.
” intimately familiar”
oo really?
and still crys wolf?
Well it sounds from your brief report, that there were NO wolverines, at that gathering; but plenty of marmots.
And co-incidently, (why the hell does this editor insist I spell this word “co-incidentally” ?) we can thank the marmots for the great plague (The Black Death) in the middle ages.
Ancient Mongolian fur trappers trapped marmots, for their fur. The village folklore said that whenever the marmots were behaving erratically, they should pile all their furs in the middle of the villa and burn them. Then they must burn the village to the ground, and all move over to another valley. The gods would be angry, if they didn’t, so they did it without knowing why.
So the Chinese invaded Mongolia, and enslaved the Mongol trappers, and forced them to trap for them; and they shipped all the furs back to China, to trade with visiting mariners from Europe.
Well nobody thought to tell the Chinese about the village customs, so when the marmots went barmy again, they stayed clear of the furs as best they could, but let the Chinese send them home quickly, and the bubonic plague left China, for Europe along with Mongolian marmot furs.
The plague was spread by fleas, which normally died off in the winter, before the disease could spread much. But marmots hibernate, and when they got ridden with bubonic fleas, their hibernation allowed the fleas and the plague to survive the cold winters.
They never knew why they had to burn their village; they just believed evil would befall them, if they didn’t, so they did it for eons. (it’s a good book to read.)
So we’ll let those Washagonian marmots keep to themselves; I prefer the wolverines anyway; smell and all.
Rod
As regards glacier movements you might be interested in figure 5 of my article carried here last year;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/16/historic-variations-in-temperature-number-four-the-hockey-stick/
It demonstrates glacier movements over the last 5000 years and graphs it against the hockey stick and CET. Clearly climate was NOT constant until 1900 and taking paleo proxy snapshots of it does not show the astonishing annual and decadal variations we can observe.
tonyb
It will be in the next few days a lot of rain in the west of the U.S. and a strong wind.
A question you asked, which was, “What is it about America that produces this self-hating nonsense?”
The simple answer is, if it cannot be connected to sexism, racism, delnialist or any other “ism/ist” or control of the low information voter, it is not allowed in to the conversation.
Because, you have to pander to the “ism/ist” groups otherwise you are not allowed to speak in todays communist/socialist/fascist world. And lets not confuse ourselves, this is exactly what we are up against, fascists, communists and socialists. The topic is not as important as the US v THEM mentality, they need an enemy, and climate is the current train they are all on. As soon as it crashes through the barrier, and takes out everyone on board, they will simply get off wipe themselves off and get on the next “ism/ist” band wagon and harp like they do now.
The Athabasca glacier has been retreating for 250 years due to uplift.
>>One of the speakers answered: “I’m intimately familiar with climate change denial – it’s not really the subject of this panel… it’s not worth wasting time with”.<<
It can be taken for granted that such an attitude towards a legitimate question shows a deep disdain for other opinions. If someone, be it an organisation or an individual, cannot stand opposition or an antithesis, then run. They are most probably authoritarian blockheads. Even if their ideas might sound interesting, it seems to me not a good idea to deal with such harebrained individuals.
george e. smith says:
April 21, 2014 at 12:22 am
george,
I never heard that as part of the story on the bubonic plague. Not that I’m questioning you, I would just like the references. It sounds very plausible.
Thanks in advance.
Jack
I would have said “Its good to see you have an open mind” or ” I see you know how to put the pseudo in science!”
The subject of glaciers has come up in this stories comments. I just wrote a blog post on the history of the Tlingits, glaciers and modern environmental activism. http://www.mikekinville.com/?p=99
The concept of sacrifice to appease the forces behind climate change is well established in Alaska.
We have already organised ourselves into ‘bioregions’, they are called:
– cities, where there are either deepwater ports for trade and commerce, (or about junctions of rivers, or road networks, etc)
-agricultural regions, of fertile land or areas with rainfall so we can grow food,
-townships also occur where there exists minerals and energy resources to sustain technology,
-areas of natural or other beauty or value where people will pay to visit for tourism
-etc etc.
There is no need to reorganise all this when it already works, due to some kind of misconception about what is good for us or nature. The hubris of central planning lives on…
“One of the speakers answered: “I’m intimately familiar with climate change denial . . .””
When confronted with objectively verifiable facts, the speaker not only proved to be in denial, but volunteered his intimate familiarity with it? Priceless.
The people in the conference didn’t want to talk about denialism because the know your arguments are as shoddy as that graph you presented. About which:
In their opinion piece, Christy and McNider present a graph that’s supposed to prove their argument that climate models have overestimated global warming. However, rather than compare models and observations of global surface temperature, which are of the greatest importance for those of us living on the Earth’s surface, they instead show temperature data from higher up in the atmosphere, the temperature of the mid-troposphere (TMT).
The figure in the Wall Street Journal piece suffers from several problems. First, it improperly averages the data (also known as “baselining”) in a way that results in shifting the observational data downwards with respect to the model data, visually exaggerating the discrepancy. Second, it doesn’t show any error bars or uncertainty ranges, and the error bars on the TMT data are large. Third, it simply averages together two satellite TMT data sets (presumably from UAH and Remote Sensing Systems), ignoring the fact that there is a large difference in the estimated warming trends from these two data sets, and that other TMT data sets that Christy and McNider excluded show even greater TMT warming, more in line with model projections.
Well, the extraordinary thing is that if they are right, it is not ‘us’ that is doing it, it is China. To the tune of 10 billion tonnes a year, rising to 20 billion. ‘We’ are only doing 5 billion. But no-one seems to even notice that, let alone care.
Anthony,
i have lived in Portland, Oregon for the last twenty years. Welcome to my world.
I wish I had known you were going to be in town. I would have loved to have bought you a beer.
The liberal lefties here are convinced of their own righteousness — on all topics. In a group they function like a hive mind. Separate one from the group and he,she or it mentally wanders in circles.
But i sort of like the town. Here is a poem i wrote a number of years ago before THEY found out I was a conservative.
PORTLAND