Via Tom Nelson:
“For “the biggest climate rally in history,” attendance was remarkably sparse. Those of us in the Light Brigade guessed 5,000”
It was really, really cold the whole time. I was surprised that everyone we ran into was wearing oil-based clothing. I figured a couple people would try to symbolically wear “natural fibers,” I didn’t see any. When I pointed out to people that their clothes were made of oil, they blamed “the system.”
…
For “the biggest climate rally in history,” attendance was remarkably sparse. Those of us in the Light Brigade guessed 5,000. We were heartened by the lack of real enthusiasm by the protesters. The Light Brigade, as our videos will show, had real passion–we love energy with conviction, while they hate it with confusion.
“Forward on climate” was personified by the shivering, emotionally muted, and fairly sparse crowd leaving early in their oil clothing to get to their coal and gas homes.
The lesson of the protest was clear: Nature, untamed by fossil fuels and other affordable, reliable energy is an often uncomfortable and dangerous place to be. That’s why the protesters left as early as they could, and why the whole production was ridiculous. Who wants to stand outside in the middle of February, freezing to “send a message” about “global warming”? Resolve faded to the point where by the 4:00 closing time, I could shoot footage right next to the stage with no one within 20 feet of me.
Stunning: 40,000+ Rally in DC for Forward on Climate | 350.org
What a day! Over 40,000 people poured into the streets of Washington, DC today to push President Obama to take our nation “Forward on Climate” and say no to the Keystone XL pipeline.
Our team here at 350.org had expected a crowd, but this was MASSIVE. Volunteers from around the country organized 130 buses to get people to the rally and it showed: there were people of all ages from Florida to Wisconsin to California here today.
Washington DC Climate Rally – February 17, 2013 « Suwannee – St. Johns Sierra Club
Contact our bus coordinators to sign up for a seat on the bus. We are asking everyone to contribute $72.74 towards the actual cost of $130. [So who paid the rest of the “actual cost” and why?]
Charter Bus Prices and Bus Options
[Typical capacity around 50 people]
It seems highly unlikely that all the buses were chock-full of people. 130 buses at 30 people per bus would be about 4,000 people. If 36,000 other people actually attended this rally, how did they get there?
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The money attached to commercial, not so much political, interests is disturbing on both sides of the story. We know of the WWF, the Sierra Club, The David Suzuki Foundation, Al Gore, and we hear of the money behind The Heartland and Competitive Tradition Institute. How are we to determine who speaks from their moral beliefs and not their pecuniary desires?
Each of us wishes to support those who share our values, our sense of fairness, justice and – less comfortably, perhaps – our way of life. Yet you can get the sense that we are manipulated all the time. Even by those who feel they are doing it for our best interests.
Why are lies so essential when you proclaim you are fighting for the truth?
The world is portrayed as black or white. This is, my opinion, the actual scourge we face. The McKibben’s see what they see as Good; all others see, by definition, is Bad. There is no sense in pulling your punch when your world is divided into those who, if not helping you, are working to harm you.
George Bush said that those who are not with us (in the Iraq I war) are against us. Love me, love my dog, as the kids on the block would say. The scary part is not that McKibben says it, or Al Gore or Marc Morano (perhaps less, because his trump card is skepticism, not force of argument), but that their strongest supporters act as though they believe it.
In this spirit of Us vs Them, it comes to the individual to do his own homework, to distrust generally, to always know that the Wizard stands behind a curtain even if we can’t see the curtain. We are in a moral universe of misinformation and private agendas that give the benefit of doubt, however slight, to the prevailing personal better interest. What a sad situation to be in!
There is a school of thought that says the more sociopathic, the less empathic members of our society rise to the highest levels. The aristocracy rules because they believe themselves a higher form of life, with an intrinsic entitlement that used to be God-derived and now is simply Darwinian: those who make the decisions are “better” in a circular way than those for whom they make the decisions. Truth or lies are simply tools to achieve what is, by the fact that it is achieved, the ultimately endorsable end.
Political spokesmen, company presidents, political leaders: the great give power to the lesser great by ambitious, all self-directed to prey on the gullible crowd, not just because great power deserves great reward, but because the weak are capable of nothing and so – Darwin again – deserve nothing. What the weak get is what the strong, in their magnanimity, provide them.
I have worked hard to educate myself to the level I have. Which has shown me that 95% certainty is nothing more than the level of emotional comfort developed around a boardroom table when a project of high visibility is being pushed onto the group that controls the purse strings, be they the directors of a company or the taxpayers of a nation. The McKibbenesque lies are not unique, just less sophisticated because he is less sophisticated. Generals in every war need foolish but fervent officers to encourage young and naive soldiers to rush the enemy.
So far widespread education hasn’t lead to widespread understanding of the difference – and importance – between what we are told and what is. If McKibben says there are 50,000 demonstrators, and the MSM repeats it because it suits they purpose or because they really don’t think critically, we come to accept the unacceptable: our own manipulation for purposes that, truth be told, we would not support.
And is that not the reason that lies, mis- and dis-information are in the common arsenal of the activist? That the truth is not sufficiently strong to drive us in the direction that the narrowly purposed, self-interest of the activists want?
So how much revenue in the form of donations to 350.org and other “organizations” has this protest generated? They do this for money. If the publicity results in more in donations than it took to ship busloads of people down from Canada, it’s a win.
4000 or 40000, what’s the difference? We already know that there is a surplus of useful idiots in the climate cult and a plethora of paid activists. Do they lie? Of course they lie, all the time. Do they repeat their lies often? Hey that’s just what propagandists do. At the end of the day, history will judge this cult for what it is. Unfortunately we are living that history now and this cult controls the legislative system.
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings.
Adam,
The CBS story you linked is from November.
November 2011. 😉
I wonder what was the percentage of attendees who went because they felt a religious need to go, versus the percentage who went because the foundations and government institutions they work for told them to go?
MostlyHarmless,
My question was a take on the article’s title.
Pull the Tides Foundation Grantee list, look for alternative energy groups. Look at their boards of directors and notice how many are executive level employees of alternative energy companies who stand to make money based on the political activism of the group of which they are a member. Al Gore has a mansion in Nashville, Tennessee and one in Santa Monica, California. He was a politician. His father was a politician. Politicians don’t make that much in salary.
“Environmentalism” at the scale of 350.org is about corruption and graft and political influence. It isn’t about “the environment” at all.
Wamron,
Where did you get your definition of “civilised” from?
I checked three different on-line dictionaries
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/civilised
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/civilised
http://www.audioenglish.net/dictionary/civilised.htm
There’s not one word about cities in any of them.
Why freeze trying to estimate crowd size by observation when you can stay warm and use a model to obtain the results you want? It also gives you the advantage of being able to adjust the number upward over time by tinkering with the model.
LOL! What do they want? Blackouts! When do they want them? Now!
I guess “Forward on Climate” wants mankind to go backward on energy, and backward on living standards.
Outtheback, you understand wrong. You refine crude into ten or more different products close to market, not close to source. Whether it is a tanker or a pipe, one product is easier to transport in bulk than ten which must be kept separate.
outtheback says:
February 18, 2013 at 10:28 am
“Does anyone know . . . ”
It is all on the web. Key words are investors, markets, efficiency, profits.
Then politics intervenes – see Obama!
Also, British Columbia wants to benefit from Alberta oil.
Consider your phrase “the options of sending”:
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2012/2012-07-23-01.html
They will get it all worked out and the oil will be used.
They rode on sheep which they sheared and hand wove on wooden looms into loose shawls tied with hemp . They slaughtered the sheep and ate the raw meat in celebration of natures bounty. Really, who needs fossil fuels.
It’s interesting that they’re protesting the keystone pipeline, wouldn’t Canadian oil lower prices in the US thus challenging OPEC? So here we have these ‘Green’ groups protesting something that OPEC do not want to happen either. You can see how the controlled opposition works.
97% of the people there felt that 97% more people attended than really did therefore making it a consensus that cannot be argued against unless you are a denier. (Cormac McCarthy would be proud of that sentence)
Has any climate scientist publicly stated that 350 ppm is the “safe” value? I want names.
Yes, but, they did extensive modelling and the models consistently confirmed that attendance was between 35,000 and 50,000.
I’ve read on this site that the year-round The heat on the Gulf Coast assists the refining process, which requires lots of heat for distillation.
Red noise.
from the link on prices:
Deluxe Motor Coach 40 – 57 [places] $875 – $1295 (full day 10-12 Hrs)
Sierra club:
“Contact our bus coordinators to sign up for a seat on the bus. We are asking everyone to contribute $72.74 towards the actual cost of $130. ”
So let’s take an average bus capacity of 50 for an average price $1000 …. ermm that’s $20 per head, not $130 or even $72. And they’re not saying “this is way over our cost price but don’t forget you are investing in your children’s future”. They’re trying to make out their doing you a favour and only charging you half what it really costs to hire a bus. Incredible.
Not only are these jerks trying to screw everyone with their phoney alarmism, they are first and foremost screwing their loyal eco-followers.
I wouldn’t be the first to see a similarity to telly-evangelists.
After the rally they got in their SUVs and drove home and turned up the heat a bit to take off the chill. Good grief, I could not be such a hypocrite.
The 350.org lobbing group is made up of green fanatics. Fanatics create their own reality complete with a flexible moral code. The flexible moral code allows fanatics to lie (for example inflating the estimated number of demonstrators at a Climate change demonstration, the climategate affair, and so on) and ignoring facts (see the list of scientific observations and logic that supports the assertion that there is no extreme AGW problem to solve) if that helps their “cause”.
I am curious how long it will take before the liberal media and the general public become aware there is no extreme AGW warming problem to solve and spending money on green scams is ludicrous.
A massive tax on energy will further reduce the US’s competiveness. Spending billions of dollars on green scams that do not significantly reduce total CO2 emissions and increase the cost of electricity and transportation fuel will increase unemployment.
The EU has provided an example of what happens economically if countries spend billions of deficit dollars on green scams.
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/10/man-made-global-warming-disproved/
Observations do not support the extreme AGW paradigm. There is not extreme AGW warming problem to solve.
1. The missing heat is not in the ocean 8 – 14
2. Satellites show a warmer Earth is releasing extra energy to space 15 -17
3. The models get core assumptions wrong – the hot spot is missing 22 – 26, 28 – 31
4. Clouds cool the planet as it warms 38 – 56
5. The models are wrong on a local, regional, or continental scale. 63- 64
6. Eight different methods suggest a climate sensitivity of 0.4°C 66
7. Has CO2 warmed the planet at all in the last 50 years? It’s harder to tell than you think. 70
8. Even if we assume it’s warmed since 1979, and assume that it was all CO2, if so, feedbacks are zero — disaster averted. 71
9. It was as warm or warmer 1000 years ago. Models can’t explain that. It wasn’t CO2. (See also failures of hockey sticks) The models can’t predict past episodes of warming, so why would they predict future ones?
http://www.johnstonanalytics.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/LindzenChoi2011.235213033.pdf
On the Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity and Its Implications
Richard S. Lindzen1 and Yong-Sang Choi2
We estimate climate sensitivity from observations, using the deseasonalized fluctuations in sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and the concurrent fluctuations in the top-of-atmosphere (TOA) outgoing radiation from the ERBE (1985-1999) and CERES (2000- 2008) satellite instruments. Distinct periods of warming and cooling in the SSTs were used to evaluate feedbacks. An earlier study (Lindzen and Choi, 2009) was subject to significant criticisms. The present paper is an expansion of the earlier paper where the various criticisms are taken into account. The present analysis accounts for the 72 day precession period for the ERBE satellite in a more appropriate manner than in the earlier paper. We develop a method to distinguish noise in the outgoing radiation as well as radiation … …we show that including all CERES data (not just from the tropics) leads to results similar to what are obtained for the tropics alone – though with more noise. We again find that the outgoing radiation resulting from SST fluctuations exceeds the zerofeedback response thus implying negative feedback. In contrast to this, the calculated TOA outgoing radiation fluxes from 11 atmospheric models forced by the observed SST are less than the zerofeedback response, consistent with the positive feedbacks that characterize these models. ….
…The heart of the global warming issue is so-called greenhouse warming. This refers to the fact that the earth balances the heat received from the sun (mostly in the visible spectrum) by radiating in the infrared portion of the spectrum back to space. … ….However, warming from a doubling of CO2 would only be about 1C (based on simple calculations where the radiation altitude and the Planck temperature depend on wavelength in accordance with the attenuation coefficients of well mixed CO2 molecules; a doubling of any concentration in ppmv produces the same warming because of the logarithmic dependence of CO2’s absorption on the amount of CO2) (IPCC, 2007). This modest warming is much less than current climate models suggest for a doubling of CO2. Models predict warming of from 1.5C to 5C and even more for a doubling of CO2. Model predictions depend on the ‘feedback’ within models from the more important greenhouse substances, water vapor and clouds. Within all current climate models, water vapor increases with increasing temperature so as to further inhibit infrared cooling.
Doug Proctor says:
February 18, 2013 at 11:09 am
“The world is portrayed as black or white. This is, my opinion, the actual scourge we face. The McKibben’s see what they see as Good; all others see, by definition, is Bad. There is no sense in pulling your punch when your world is divided into those who, if not helping you, are working to harm you.”
The world is black and white. There are the statists / collectivists /warmists who want a total state – in the case of warmism, a state that has control over EVERY ENERGY GENERATING PROCESS. They see the state as the father of all things, as the only inventor, as their protector; they often work for the state (for instance IPCC scientists). NGOs love the taxpayer money they get from the state (In the EU, the EU comission tops up the money of NGO’s; they collect 30%, the EU gives them the remaining 70%.)
This is the Hegelian all-channels-controlling dialectic bloc; the Total State is their goal, The Republic as envisioned by Plato 2,500 years ago; the destruction of the family; the molding of children by the state. ALL OF THIS.
On the other side are people who believe they are free.
There is NO compromise.