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”.
If the human species were to return to a stone-age style of life, like the cult wants us to, then drawing our political boundaries based on local geography would make sense.
I live down the road from the Athabasca Glacier and have enjoyed several mountaineering trips up the Athabasca glacier and the surrounding Columbia Icefields. It’s cool to see how much it changes in your own lifetime.
That being said, the ancient, pulverized trees they find as it retreats certainly proves how much warmer it was earlier! The retreat of the glacier only seems like a novel observation if you ignore the geological and climate history that the glacier is itself revealing!
for a good discussion of recent glacier advance and retreat in this area see:
Latest Pleistocene and Holocene glacier fluctuations in western Canada Brian Menounos a, *, Gerald Osborn b, John J. Clague c, Brian H. Luckman d
Lew Skannen says:
April 20, 2014 at 11:06 pm
If only it were that, I’d be happy to donate to their Kool-Aid fund.
As a UM grad (of course I grew up in Hobbiton; and, like many, took advantage of an overseas education in Ann Arbor) I would appreciate it if you left wolverines out of this.
w/r/t Portland:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAlWrT5P2VI?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360%5D
Also, if you all don’t mind (I’m very late to the party – sorry ) w/r/t the Al Gore thread below, that mentions the place of my birth in a few of the replies, I’d like to belatedly comment, if you don’t mind. Sorry if I am replying well past the original post’s publication:
Someone posted:
>> I haven’t seen any of the films but I did read the book.
The Hobbit is in many ways superior to the trilogy, itself. (Yes, I know that is not the “consensus view.) <<
The main issue I had with the trilogy – which, contrary to common belief, I DID *NOT* approve of and REFUSED involvement in – I wanted Ken Burns to do them, for one thing – was the utter, complete fakeness of them all. Excuse me, but New Zealand is not Middle Earth. Yes, I know, I KNOW – it’s always very costly to film accurate historical documentaries on location, but if you must film a documentary, then do it right, and spare no expense. Also, dressing up humans to look like orcs, trolls, and hobbits is both laughable and insulting at the same time. There were numerous protests over here w/r/t these pathetic New Zealand “fantasy films”, and rightfully so. The few humans who came over here to do research did nothing but grab a number of seedlings of Old Toby and Longbottom Leaf and leave. I understand there are huge hidden crops of these prized natural herbs being grown illegally in California and West Virginia right now. Most of the attendees of this Al Gore speech, including Big Al himself, were given 6 oz samples, with papers, a few hours before the talk started. Also, I assume many of the attendees of this partcular conference in Portland also received many seedlings.
I really don’t mind Al – he’s one of the few humans who has visited Hobbiton , and he has done so on a number of occasions. Each time, we lit up – over and over – and had some prolonged, thought-provoking conversations. I don’t remember the exact details of anything he said, but he came across as very, very persuasive.
Well for the record, I personally hated ALL of those movies; they suck; but so do the ridiculous books they are based on. I’m not going to get sucked into any more of that nonsense. And Avatar sucked too. I was present, when the software guru of Avatar (spider man too ) received his Distinguished Alumni Award, at the University of Auckland. Nice chap; he now has a great gig at Auckland.
I’m waiting, until they dispense with movie stars altogether, and conjure them all up out of ones and zeros. Those overblown parasites, have interfered far to much in human affairs.
And no; I don’t know why it is “Alumni” award, and not “Alumnus” award. Well I guess they can give out up to five a year, indifferent categories.
“””””…..erkforby says:
April 21, 2014 at 8:32 am
For Pete Miller, ref ” the solution is a adding a small amount of copper and/or silver as alloying metals.” NoNoNo please don’t do that for tin whiskers! For instance, SAC305 solder (96.5%Sn, 3Ag, .5Cu) is a very good solder, but sometimes forms all kinds of tin whiskers. Use 3%Pb (lead) to suppress whiskers. SEE https://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/ ……”””””
Seems like lead is banned in all products sold in Euro countries. Can’t even use it in (flint) glasses.
So most PC boards these days don’t use lead tin solders; they have some Bismuth based alloys instead, I believe. In any case, space circuitry would always be gold plated wires, and not pbsn.
I once watched some marvelous whiker film structures, grow right in front of my eyes on a piece of aluminium sheet. I’m thinking I got some swimming pool acid on it (Muriatic acid, which I think is just HCl). Grew about a cm of fur in a few seconds.
For a starting point for the marmot/black death information you might start with this page – http://www.flamingnet.com/bookreviews/resources/essays_bookreviews/silk.cfm – which has a lot of references (I gave up before reaching a conclusion).
The madness of cities?
Cheifio did a great analysis of the demographics by which city voters come to impoverish and destroy their rural neighbours.
And here in Canada we see it as Toronto takes our most populous province into beggar status.
Vancouver destroys the interior economies in the name of the environment.
In the USA Detroit is about to loot state and federal taxpayers.
Maybe we need to allow the cities to enjoy the fruits of their delusions.
What if we separate the cities from the State or Province?
Once the population hits a certain level the reach of the city become injurious to the surrounding rural regions, so to check the tendency of voting yourself other peoples money, we could make large cities into new entities.
As a separate city state with x congress critters and x senators should be less powerful than the voting block of the city stealing the rest of a State naked.
Peter Burmer haughtily nitpicks:
“…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).”
Yet the flatline “pause” (more likely 60 year natural cycle *reversal*) is acknowledged even by core alarm raising scientists, and a flatline pause with no trend cannot by logic alone be unfairly amplified into anything but yet the same flatline pause. And can Peter with a straight face claim that Hide The Decline scientific presentations to this day themselves do not play fast with presentation graphs? Or that the bladeless Marcott 2013 hockey stick was in any way legitimate as being presented to the media as a “super hockey stick”?!
“The five-year mean global temperature has been flat for the last decade, which we interpret as a combination of natural variability and a slow down in the growth rate of net climate forcing.” – James Hansen et al., 2012
“The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.” – NOAA State of the Climate report, 2008
“Bottom line: the “no upward trend” has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.” – Phil Jones, 2009
A question you asked, which was, “What is it about America that produces this self-hating nonsense?”
This applies to the Western world generally – I’m in Australia. The self-haters don’t really hate themselves. This is just the way they can feel smug and morally superior. Because all their deluded compatriots all have these terrible ideas/attitudes, this self-appointed moral elite can demonstrate how enlightened they are. The fact that what they preach is so obviously detrimental to their country/civilisation is irrelevant.
The way I thing about it is that the West has lost it’s cultural mojo. China, today, is like Victorian England, or the US of the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries. They’re the ones with the drive, the vision, the self-confidence and the determination to make their world a better place. Sure, they’ll make mistakes, just like the Victorians did. But with prosperity comes the ability to fix these mistakes, like their massive problems with (real – as opposed to plant-food) air pollution. In the West, we’ve become monumentally risk-averse. The Greens, particularly, oppose any human activity that isn’t consistent with the lifestyle of a stone-age, nomadic hunter-gatherer.
Sorry for the rant – bit I’m not, really 🙂
Well it is possible that the William MacNeil book is the one I read; although it is described as a novel in current reviews.
But in any case, we have bubonic plague right here in California.
Campgrounds in Kings Canyon National park are sometimes closed, when the resident ground squirrels are found to be carrying bubonic plague.
I typically don’t read novels. Anna Karenina cured me of that. I don’t have a single novel in my library now.
Reality is far more interesting than fiction.
Rod, bravo on holding up the poster. With a group of us attending a climate alarmist presentation at the Beaverton OR library, I held up a somewhat related graph by Roy Spencer during the Q&A , blown up to poster size.
The presenter tried a dodge, claiming she didn’t know where I got the data and implying it was rigged. (I briefly mentioned Roy’s contributions to satellite measurements.) However, I was pleasantly surprised by the positive response it generated among fence sitters in the audience, who then pushed the presenter to respond to what was graphically shown as clearly counter-evidence to her talk. She refused to do so and wilted.
I encourage others to give it a try. It’s one thing to try and trade words with an alarmist at the microphone. The presumption is they are the expert, and if someone like Mann they’ve become very accustomed and slippery. A picture crystalizes the discrepancy between what they’re saving and reality.
“WMASAW says:
April 21, 2014 at 4:47 am”
and
“ossqss says:
April 21, 2014 at 8:13 am
Perhaps this can shed some light on the thought process at the heart of this meeting.
It is not fiction folks.
http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/index.php?menu=1252; ”
Good point, and scary…just look up Agenda21 and Rewilding…
http://rewilding.org/rewildit/what-is-rewilding/
Maybe all those FEMA facilities being build out in the middle of nowhere aren’t prisons for
skeptics and “politically-incorrects” after all….
Maybe they’re our new cities? (Heaven forbid!!!).
I’d imagine posters Gail Combs and Robin have more links on this…scary stuff…looks like the UN has more disasters lined up.
Here in Germany marmots are called Marders, suspiciously close to “murder”, which is what
I’d like to do to them when they start munching on the cables and hoses belonging to my car.
BUT, it’s forbidden to kill them (same thing goes for Raccoons and some other varmints too), thanks to tree-huggers inc., aka the greens. The only thing that can be done is to put ultrasound transducers in the motor compartment, or mini-electroshock pads, or both. The pads can be quite a problem if a mechanic starts work without shutting them off first….(shocking, positively shocking).