![Cartoon+-+More+GW+and+Snow[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/cartoon-moregwandsnow1.jpg?resize=500%2C325)
By Alan Caruba
In March 2009 while the Environmental Protection Agency was rushing to fulfill a presidential campaign pledge to document that carbon dioxide (CO2) and five other greenhouse gases endangered public health and the environment, a longtime employee, Alan Carlin, put out a 93-page report challenging the science being cited and the drift of the agency from its initial role to one captured by fanatical activists and alarmists, treating environmentalism more as a religion than based in science.
At the time Carlin was a 72-year-old analyst and economist who, as The New York Times put it, “had labored in obscurity in a little-known office at the Environmental Protection Agency since the Nixon administration.” His EPA career would span 38 years.
The website for his new book, “Environmentalism Gone Mad” says, “Dr. Alan Carlin is an economist and physical scientist with degrees from Caltech and MIT and publications in both economics and climate/energy, who became actively involved in the Sierra Club in the 1960s as an activist and Chapter Chairman. This led to a career as a manager and senior analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency.”
As he says in the preface “The purpose of this book is to explain why I changed from my lifelong support of the environmental movement to extreme skepticism concern their current primary objective of reducing emissions of carbon dioxide.”
“Although I and the many other climate skeptics are now referred to as ‘deniers’ by the climate alarmists, that does not change the science—and there is no valid scientific basis for the alarmists’ catastrophic climate predictions—or justify their fantastically expensive and useless ‘solution.’”
Carlin went from being a dedicated environmentalist, based on its initial philosophy of conservation, to an observer of the movement that was taken over and distorted to advocate falsehoods about global warming and a transition from fossil-fuels to “clean energy” meaning wind, solar and bio-fuels. As an economist he understood how absurd it was to suggest rejecting fossil-fuels, the key element of modern industry and society.
“The climate alarmists,” says Carlin, “have now been making their apocalyptic predictions for almost thirty years and it is now possible to compare their predictions with actual physical observations.” Suffice to say all the predictions of a significantly higher temperature—the warming—have been wrong.
In fact, the Earth has been in a natural cooling cycle since 1998 and shows no indication of warming
Predictions about the North and South Poles melting, a major rise in ocean levels, increased hurricanes and other climate events have been wrong along with countless other climate-related apocalyptic predictions.
Having observed how the EPA has functioned for more than three decades, Carlin warns that its current “environmental policy has been hijacked by radicals intent on imposing their ideology by government fiat on the rest of us whether we like it or not…If environmental policy is based on government fiat or ‘green’ policy prescriptions the results have been and are very likely to continue to be disastrous.”
At 625 pages, Carlin’s book takes the reader from his early days as a Sierra Club activist and chapter leader to being an EPA outcast, denounced for telling the truth about the false claims of global warming, climate change, and what is now being called extreme weather.
As an economist, Carlin is particularly upset that “the Obama Administration’s climate/energy policy is wasting very large sums on non-solutions to minor or non-problems.” The book has come along as President Obama has been flogging “climate change” as the greatest threat to the nation and the world.
“It has been long recognized that weather is chaotic,” says Carlin. While we operate within the four seasons, the weather that occurs can only be predicted in the most general terms. Suggesting that humans actually have any effect on the weather is absurd.
That is why the predictions made by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and all the others based on computer models are, by definition, worthless. Computer models cannot predict anything about the vast chaotic global climate system. Even today, meteorologists are mystified by the actions of clouds which can form and disappear in minutes.
It’s useful to keep in mind that climate is measured in centuries, while the weather is reported as what is occurring today and forecast, at best, for no more than a week. Weather records are maintained for purposes of comparison and within the larger context of determining the Earth’s climate cycles. Like those in the past, the present cooling cycle is based on a comparable one of the Sun that is producing lower levels of radiation. You don’t need a Ph.D. in meteorology to understand this.
Carlin does not hesitate to excoriate the blather put forth by the alarmists; particularly their claims that the weather is affected in any significant fashion by human activity and development in particular. “There is simply no evidence thus far that the normal activities of man have or will result in catastrophic outcomes for either man or nature.”
The actions the alarmists call for do nothing to enhance and benefit our lives. They drive up the cost of energy and food. They ignore how dependent modern life is on the use of fossil fuels.
“Despite all the lavish funding by liberal foundations and the federal government on their global warming doctrine-inspired programs, the radical environmental movement has long since gone so far beyond rationality that it is counter-productive in achieving its own ends.”
So long as it remains heavily funded and backed by the federal government, we must, like Carlin, speak out against environmental extremism. We must elect new people to govern in a more realistic, science-based fashion. We must urge our current legislators to rein in the rogue Environmental Protection Agency.
Rein it in….and cast off its chief Pixie, the colossally ignorant Gina McCarthy.
“…we must… speak out against environmental extremism. We must elect new people to govern in a more realistic, science-based fashion. We must urge our current legislators to rein in the rogue Environmental Protection Agency.”
Amen.
Does anyone seriously think that Obama, Inc., is going to allow his successor to reveal what has gone on in the EPA/ NSA/ IRS?
Oh, beyond a shadow of a doubt this administration will destroy documents, hide data, wail, scream and stomp their little feet (while Big Media hails them as courageous heroes!).They will do these things in an effort to obfuscate, deflect and protect their own lies, their corruption and any remaining corruptocRATs ensconced in positions within all federal bureaucracies to serve as quislings and fifth column traitors to any future non-cult administrations…
If the GOPe corruptocRATs won’t try to hold someone as guilty as Lois Lerner to account, you should fully expect them to aid and abet other libcult bureaucRATs/operatives in whatever ways they can.
Every administration does that. No surprises in store. Nor will we see any major shifts in policy on any front within the government. Just consider how much changed between Clinton and Bush the Second, and what direction it changed – i.e. not much and only for the worse concerning individual liberty and freedom of speech and travel. Democrats and Republican politicians are quite busy oiling squeaky wheels at the expense of the rest of the country (squeaky wheels includes any special interests from “neoenvironmentalists” to fundamentalist Christians and dominionists).
Obama is staying in Washington after his presidency, and my prediction is that he will become a perpetual lawsuit machine, using every shyster-lawyer trick to prevent ANYONE from daring to taper with his agenda.
Several posters here have essentially called the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “out of control”. I agree. I believe the number one thing that would restore the power of the U.S. economic engine and put people in this country back to work, while still appropriately protecting our air and water, is to replace the EPA along the lines of what Jay Lehr proposed at the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC) 9, 2014, Las Vegas, NV.
Jay Lehr is described on the ICCC9 Speakers page as follows:
“…director for The Heartland Institute and one of the nation’s most respected and widely cited experts on air and water quality, climate change, and biotechnology. He has testified before Congress dozens of times, helped write the Clean Water Act, and written 14 books and more than 500 articles on environmental science. For 25 years he headed the Association of Ground Water Scientists and Engineers.”
http://climateconferences.heartland.org/iccc9-speakers/
If you haven’t already heard this plan to replace the U.S. EPA, by one of the gentlemen who actually helped clean up our air and water (the original purpose of the Nixon-era EPA legislation), and who has subsequently seen the organization “jump the shark” under the control of environmental zealots, try the following link.
http://climateconferences.heartland.org/jay-lehr-iccc9/
I believe that the replacement of the EPA along the lines Jay Lehr describes is much more in line with the original intent of the US Constitution than what we have now (i.e. States have the power under Mr. Lehr’s proposal, which is much more resistant to hijacking by enviro-terrorists). I also believe that his proposal is the right balance of free-market vs. government regulation (which I believe should fall closer to free-market forces) to ensure that we continue to have close to the cleanest air and water on the planet for our approximately 310,000,000 citizens.
I hope that all you U.S. citizens seeing this Jay Lehr proposal talk it up with your U.S Congresspersons.
Bruce
“An Inalienable Right of Man: No Religious Coercion”
Only the weak minded can be coerced into anything.
How about physical coercion?
Really?
Here is an example pic of the “grief” shown for deceased dictator Kim Jong Il:
http://i62.tinypic.com/20z79s3.jpg
How unlikely is that?
Here is a story that provides some context:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/8975559/The-stage-management-of-the-grief-for-Kim-Jong-il.html
In fact, with sufficient political pressure, it is possible to build a durable, near unanimous “consensus” for the most amazingly unlikely contentions.
I like to think of them as climate scientists.
When Brezhnev died, I was returning home on a bus in the morning after a shift as a night-watchman. Soviet people in the bus were crying. Not the persecution, not the beatings, not the all-pervasive lies — this was the last drop. Then and there I firmly decided to leave Russia.
Unfortunately, prevalent human nature is the same everywhere. If people don’t believe in almighty Kremlin, they believe in ancient Middle-Eastern myths, in environmentalist mantras or in Spooky Intelligent Design.
In this respect, today America is not much better than any other country; its only advantage may be that people here are full of different idiocies (faiths) that contradict one another, pulling the blanket covering their minds in every which direction, thus giving a thinking person some temporary relief and leeway.
Were there one prevailing ideology, they would start bruning witches again, sure as death.
Generally, more Americans are no longer attending churches as they did decades ago, and some of these people, still feeling the need for a cause, have adopted climate change to fill that need.
Unfortunately, this “Church of Climatology” is not perceived as a religion, so it can intermesh its beliefs and ideology with government. There is no separation.
@ Tyoke:
I think you may have found a group photo of the ‘Consensus’
I’ve always found it fascinating the way atheists insist that anyone who doesn’t agree with them must be stupid.
Your myth is no more proveable than anyone else’s myth. As to killings, atheistic communism has all religions combined beat by at least an order of magnitude.
As for your history, 90% of this country self identified as Christian less than 50 years ago and there were no witch trials.
Mark W
I don’t think you actually read what Alexander wrote. Where did he say anything about Christianity? When there is only one ideology anyone outside of it is subject to persecution. He is dead on, as for atheism it can be just as much a theism as any other theism. As I have wrote a thousand times here it is only a strong belief in individual liberty that allows people to be free. Respect everyone’s rights to live their lives the way they see fit and fight against anyone who tries to impose their will and ideology on anyone for any reason good or bad.
The most important and smallest minority is the individual there will only ever be one of each of us!
The power to do good is also the power to do evil.
Bob, the claim is that whenever one religion dominates witch hunts always ensue.
I pointed out that for most of the last 2 centuries, the vast majority of the people 90% and more, self identified as Christian and such persecutions did not happen.
Your mental models need work.
Mark W
He doesn’t saying anything about religion he say ideology which is a bigger tent. As for the US yes 90% considered them selves Christians but of many different and conflicting sects, you don’t think there have been plenty of ideological conflict between Catholics and Non-Catholics? The difference maker was the belief in individual liberty , you know “I don’t agree with what you are saying but I will defend with my life your right to say it” this is what is slipping away in this world. Alexander comes from the world of people so wound up in an ideology that they are willing to persecute people who dare to dissent. He sees it here in this country with people so bent on pushing their beliefs on others that he sees what he ran away from happening here and the only thing that is stopping it is that one ideology has not managed to supplant all the others yet.
Why do you feel so strongly the need to push your belief in Christianity and put down someone who might be an atheist, it doesn’t need to be a competition between the two? I have no problem with your beliefs and don’t want you to change them, I have no problem with someone who is an atheist and I don’t want to change them either. The only people I have a problem with are the ones who try to tell me or anyone what I should believe or to tell me how to live my life.
Alexander Feht
May 27, 2015 at 8:41 pm
Indeed. The sole distinction between the US and the rest of the planet is the Bill of Rights. That provides a buffer between democracy run amok and the individual. However, try to convince your typical left or right winger that you, personally, have a right to your personal opinions and a right to express them and guess how successful that will be. The typical “-winger” believes that their opinion is the only viable one an that all others need to be suppressed. The current “climate” debate exhibits some especially virulent forms.
Let Common Sense prevail over the lies.
Unfortunately, I think it’s a bit late for that particular hero.
http://www.loriborgman.com/the-death-of-common-sense.php
“the most uncommon thing in the world is common sense”
@ Tyoke:
Is that a photo of a Greenpeace meeting where they have shown another photoshopped picture of a lonely polar bear on a melting ice flow?
Bravo Alan!
“It’s useful to keep in mind that climate is measured in centuries, while the weather is reported as what is occurring today and forecast, at best, for no more than a week.”
A wonderful reminder for all of us. The record of the centuries, such as we have, is that there is no reason to be alarmed by today’s climate. There is no reason to destroy our industrial economy and society to ‘save’ the earth.
But the point isn’t to save the Earth. It’s to control the population “for our own good”. (sarc off)
Hallelujah!
Saints, and Alan Caruba, be praised.
This why eventually AGW will die, albeit, a slow death. I am guessing that the avid warmists of today, yes even M Mann, Phil Jones ect… will in their older age, become extreme skeptics/denier types.
I don’t think so. Nothing in this is about rational thinking. They will just keep at it until the rest of us die of old age.
Right.
I predict that Mann, Jones, Hanson, and Trenbeth will admit they were wrong about CAGW on the same day that Ehrlich admits he was wrong about the Population Bomb. >¿<
It took Communism almost a century to run its course. The same may be true of AGWism.
Its not dead yet!!!
Communism took exactly a lifetime in Russia. The oppression could only be justified by first hand memory of the oppression that prevailed before the revolution.
Lord only knows how long Communism will prevail in Australia, because only the current government can save us from it. The carbon tax was the last tool the Marxists needed to complete their destruction of our capitalist system. The last election and the current government repealed the carbon tax, but the parasites are campaigning still for its reintroduction. Should they succeed, then Communism with its Central Planning we will have.
I don’t think these guys will change their direction later. That would suppose they are real scientists, rather than psuedo-scientists. Their purpose with the climate scam is to control population according to their religion of climate. They can’t change as long as that is their purpose. If they change, it will be because they have to, to save face and because their purpose in controlling us can no longer be served in that manner. The climate scam isn’t about science, it is about control. And happily, we are trying to shut it down.
Back in my reckless youth (early 1980s, underclassman at Uni) I was way more radical than Carlin. I was an Earth First! devotee, all into Deep Ecology and wanting to foment a revolution like the one described in the Ecotopia books. I nonetheless left The Church. The Church of Green is rotten to its core.
Reject the consensus/Church. Keep the [conservation] principles.
Environmentalism is designed to aid special interests and creates pressures for human population distributions. It is a socio-political movement designed to exploit conservation in order to create leverage. It is, in fact, separable from principles of conservation that recognize a rational and practical balance of human interests and ecological viability.
I liked your comment, thank you.
I would add however, that the leverage you mention is a secondary attribute of the whole. I believe it is designed for increased wealth, prestige, and power for the proponents of the belief system. They won’t want to be proved wrong either, no matter the evidence that is put in front of them, because the cognitive dissonance would be too great. What religious person likes to hear that their entire belief system is based on a myth; a hoax? And everything they have contributed to their myth has been pointless and ridiculous?
This James at 48 was too busy smoking, drinking and chasing college girls to give a second thought to a church of any kind. But I’m glad you came around.
Reblogged this on The GOLDEN RULE and commented:
This article says all that is necessary for all so-called “climate change” promoters and believers, to jolt themselves into reality. Else, they become the “deniers” themselves, denying valid science!
An extract ” “Although I and the many other climate skeptics are now referred to as ‘deniers’ by the climate alarmists, that does not change the science—and there is no valid scientific basis for the alarmists’ catastrophic climate predictions—or justify their fantastically expensive and useless ‘solution.’” “
The goal of these “environmentalists” is not reducing “climate change”. It is replacing capitalism with communism. Since capitalism is the greatest economic system in human history and communism is one of the worst, they are clearly self-destructive and insane.
The goal, as with communism, is to aid in the establishment of [authoritarian] monopolies. This does not preclude a specific class of “capitalism” (e.g. crony, public and private), but it is in stark contrast with the principles of capitalism that acknowledge individual dignity, liberty, and rights through conservation and management of personal capital. Societal policies to “promote the general Welfare” notwithstanding, that require a degree of socialistic policy to sustain human welfare.
I shake my head…
http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/television/bill-nye-explains-why-the-universe-guides-white-women-in-their-20s
Brian, thats a SPOOF (nationalpost – Bill Nye explains…). I’m not a fan of Mr. Nye, but if that actually was him on Comedy Central then at least he doesn’t take himself too seriously! I actually think he may be drawn out of the dark side of human caused ‘global warming’ belief if the universe tries…
Bill Nye is a COMEDIAN. Look up his bio. The only thing he takes seriously is the Federal Reserve Note. Did you think he was a CONVINCED warmunist? you can rent him for anything.
2:38 removes all doubt.
Coincidence? – EPA unleashes its water rule:
http://www.nossaman.com/EPA_USACE_Issue_Clean_Water_Rule
“Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (“USACE”) released the final Clean Water Rule, which is intended to clarify regulatory confusion over which streams and wetlands constitute “waters of the United States,” and are therefore subject to Clean Water Act (“CWA”) protection.”
A glimmer of hope:
“In addition to facing political opposition, it is anticipated that legal challenges to the Clean Water Rule will be filed within the next 60 days, before the rule is scheduled to take effect.
“Make sure to check back with us, as we are preparing another E-Alert that will take you through the weeds of the final rule. In the meantime, if you have any questions, we are here to answer them.”
I’m buying 3 copies of this book as soon as possible
Anthony
I agree completely with Carlin as quoted in the Caruba article.
For a complete discussion of the uselessness of the IPCC’s modeling approach to forecasting climate see Section 1 at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html
Here are the conclusions
“In summary the temperature projections of the IPCC – Met office models and all the impact studies which derive from them have no solid foundation in empirical science being derived from inherently useless and specifically structurally flawed models. They provide no basis for the discussion of future climate trends and represent an enormous waste of time and money. As a foundation for Governmental climate and energy policy their forecasts are already seen to be grossly in error and are therefore worse than useless. A new forecasting paradigm needs to be adopted.”
Some think that the IPCC reductionist approach is the only one available -that that is all we reliably have. That is patently not the case. Quasi- repetitive patterns are clearly present in the changing temperature data which we use as the symbol of climate change, We can think of these emergent patterns as the product of the real world as a virtual computer if that makes the numerical and digitally minded more comfortable. Similar patterns are seen e.g. in the solar data ,the ocean data (PDO AMO etc) and as you well know in the planetary orbits and the Milankovic cycles,. The human brain is at this time superior to computers in seeing these patterns . Think about it – computers cannot produce ( see )patterns unless they have been fed the input data and algorithms on which they run . Computer outputs at the core are always tautologous ie circular in the sense that they depend upon what was fed into them by human programmers.
I think that if we stand back and view the climate data with the right time scale perspective and have a wide knowledge of the relevant data time series so that we can judge its reliability, that patterns are clearly obvious ,that their period and amplitude ranges can be reasonably estimated and projected forward and that the relationships between the driver and temperature data may be reasonably well inferred without being necessarily precisely calculated..
The biggest and on-going mistake of the establishment is to ignore the longer term cycles and to project forward several decades of data linearly when we are obviously approaching, at or just past a peak in a millennial cycle. This is more than scientific inadequacy – it is a lack of basic common sense. It is like taking the temperature trend from say Jan – June and projecting it forward linearly for ten years or so.The modelers approach is analogous to looking at a pointillist painting from 6 inches – they simply can’t see the wood for the trees or the pattern for the dots. ( In a recent paper Mann has finally after much manipulation managed to discover the 60 +/- year cycle which any schoolboy can see by looking at Fig 15 at the linked post above).
The same post also provides estimates of the timing and amplitude of the coming cooling based on the 60 and especially the millennial quasi- periodicity so obvious in the temperature data and using the neutron count and 10 Be data as the most useful proxy for solar “activity”.
It now appears that we are just past a peak in the millennial temperature cycle and the cooling trend since the 2003 temperature trend peak is just the start of a general cooling trend towards the depths of the next LIA at about 2635. See
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1980.1/plot/rss/from:1980.1/to:2003.6/trend/plot/rss/from:2003.6/trend
It is time for the skeptical blogosphere to stop playing the game by the IPCC rules i.e. discussing climate from modified versions or a subset of the reductionist modeling approach and move on to basing discussion. argument and investigation on the timing and amplitude of the natural cycles.
Bravo for you Dr. Page, I have been monitoring it all and have come to the same conclusions that the models cannot handle change. And change the sun does in a big way. But as an technician, observer, and sceptic can see that the randomness is way beyond the scientist that are using NOAA instruments on earth. The basic data that they put out for general use is flawed in itself. They age weight and dump data using a computer model. As if they already know what is is gonna be before it gives them a reading. There is no wonder that the latest flood events we are having in Texas were hard to predict. Some of the storms start up in Mexico and move this way before the doppler even sees them.
I believe that when the general public become hurt by the non-science, ie non preparation for a cold winter, minds will change. Of course, government personel will continue to spout to the media until they all have to move south.
There is no statistically significant cooling since 1998 in any of the common global temperature series available. In fact, there is no proof of the Earth being in a natural cooling cycle (unless one thinks there is some unnatural warming compensating the natural cooling!). I’m kinda starting to be cynical when I see these unfounded optimistic claims. Claiming the temperatures have plateaued is enough; there is still not very much statistical evidence of a plateau on all temp series.
I am an optimist, which means I don’t think there will be rapid, destructive warming. CO2 causes some warming, and the natural variation dominates at least the decadal scale.
Since 1997 it is flat, since 1998 it cooled slightly.
Slightly, but the amount is still statistically insignificant. I’m hoping that it will become statistically significant in the next decade as the AMO switches and the sun continues to cool.
Allow me to revise and extend my remarks. I’m only hoping for cool weather in order to finally kill the AGW beast. I fully recognize that cold weather is bad for people, I would much rather the world continue to warm a little. However the AGW crowd is a bigger and more immediate threat to the well being of the people of the world.
This graph illustrates the end of our Modern Climate Optimum, the plateau is real and the escarpment awaits.
http://notrickszone.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Natural-cycles-and-HADCRUT4.jpg
Hugh Read the comment above yours – the key natural periodicity ( largest amplitude of human scale policy interest) is Millennial and we have just passsed a peak.
There has been no statistically significant warming since the start of the industrial revolution either.
If the author emphasizes the word ‘catastrophic’, he may be right. But keep in mind the consequences of the vast deforestation in South America, namely the Amazon river basin and the consequences of the graeco-roman rule around the then ‘mare nostrum’ which is now called the mediterranean (Italy, former Yugoslavia, Greece, the Levant, Spain and Portugal, even northern Africa. That area once was covered with trees (not the sea, daft) which were cut down to be used by the local people as firewood, shipbuilding and so forth. Reforestation in these areas turna out to be negligeable. The results were not catastrophic, but unpleasant and the climate did change. Under such circumstances, sustainability isn’t a bad idea, isn’t it?
‘The deserts of Mesopotamia are the result of 3000 years of organic farming’.
Probably not true, but its has a nice ring to it…
Non, I beg to differ, the world cooled and the entire north of Africa dried out through lack of rain, the Sahara was treed with rivers flowing before that episode. It has not warmed enough since in the global climate to reverse the situation. In that nice warm period Hippo and herding animals roamed the area, what problem do you have with global warming!! When it is cooling that is our greatest enemy.
I believe you have that backward. Those areas were wet during the last ice age, and dried out when it started to warm.
Actually the Sahara rainfall follows the 20kyr precession cycle & seems somewhat independent of glacial/interglacials. 10kyrs ago the N hemisphere was receiving max summer insolation, and the ITCZ expands somewhat north into the Sahara. As summer insolation waned, the ITCZ retreated south in the summer and by 4kyrs ago we have the deserts of today. This cycle apparently has occurred even during the glacial periods. So it’s about summer insolation in the Sahara more than avg global temps.
I agree, and the problem is that the climate scare is turning attention away from the real issues. In some cases it may even be exacerbating them, for example with biomass being so heavily promoted it is bound to reach a stage where there is not enough scrap wood to go round all those woodchip c/h systems the planners have insisted on. What happens then is not hard to figure out.
No Name – you should read Chiefio E.M. Smith on that. Nothing to do with man and a lot to do with cooling and drying. We may be seeing that now too.
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2015/05/22/more-on-middle-east-drought-cold-and-california-drought/
Thanks for the background. In my posting I did refer to the ancient greeks and romans, i.e. a period that started roughly 1200-1000 B.C. (the greeks started earlier but are broke by now) and lasted until ~ 500 A.D. The rise of the roman empire was only possible because of slave labour, sound engineering methods (some of the roman aqueducts are still standing, Pont du Gard in France is one of them) and wood in abundance. I have no reason to assume that things were different than described in your aforementioned “Chiefio” posting, but I was talking about a different era. As my schooldays are over since, well, quite a long time, I rechecked what I learned by then only to find in the omniscient waste dump aka Wikipedia more recent clues on the unchanged facts.
non nomen says:
The rise of the roman empire was only possible because of slave labour, sound engineering methods… and wood in abundance.
Didn’t the Roman legions have something to do with it?
[Oh, sorry, I just noticed that Wikipedia was your source…]
The so called deforestation of the amazon has turned out to be more myth than reality. Yes, there has been some slash and burn farming, but when those farmers move on, the forest returns ins a few years.
Unfortunately, the news media has not bothered to inform us that the farmers in the Amazon have realized the unsustainability of burning down sections of the forest for cattle grazing from an economic standpoint. The truth is that they’ve all but halted burning down the Amazon forest because they’ve learned that the soil there is way to infertile to make it economically worthwhile. The soil of tropical rain forests are simply not fertile enough to allow them graze their animals for sufficient years to make a profit. So the destruction of the Amazon has almost stopped for a few years now. As one who spent 15 years as a farmer, an orchardist, I understand soils and the entire biological processes in plants and trees. Today I’m a professional arborist, a “tree doctor”, and I use an intimate knowledge of the biological processes to treat tree diseases, infestations and nutritional issues of my client’s trees. Had those Amazonian farmers consulted and taken seriously the opinion of a competent agronomist on the viability of their venture they would probably have been told that forest soils are very INfertile and that the cost of the destruction of the Amazon forest to turn it into grazing land would likely not provide long term economic returns on their investment. So much of the slash-and-burn of the Amazon had stopped years ago for purely economic reasons. Anyway, because CO2 has reached 400 ppm the benefits of CO2 as fertilizer is showing that the earth is greening, see http://theresilientearth.com/?q=content/going-green-rising-co2 Now every HS biology class teaches that plants need CO2 just like animals and humans need oxygen. Truth is that even our 400 ppm level is on the low side as the Triassic and Jurassic Epochs had CO2 levels 4.3x that of ours and the results (along with temps that were 2-3 degrees Celsius higher) caused the forests to grow like crazy and that’s what was needed to sustain dinosaurs. For geological history shows how life on earth catapulted during those epochs when the CO2 was 1200 ppm. If you want sustainability then you should be very much in favor of humans putting more CO2 into the atmosphere and higher global temps because the biological fact is that plant life will abound and as a result animal and human life will greatly benefit. Also see http://co2science.org for the myriad of studies that demonstrate the benefits of icreased CO2 in our atmosphere. When it comes to more CO2 and GW I’m all for it! Bring it on!
There are many things that impact temperature, CO2 is one of the least significant of these.
During the era of the dinosaurs, the continent of Antarctica wasn’t at the south pole and as a result there was no polar ice cap, this meant the seas were much higher and much more of the world’s surface was under water. I’m pretty sure that this resulted in the average relative humidity being higher.
Another difference was that the north and south American continents weren’t connected, this meant ocean circulation patters were much different compared to today. This dramatically affected both temperature distribution patterns as well as the total average temperature.
The problem with all religions arises when the date of a predicted ‘second coming’ or ‘judgement day’ arrives then passes… and nothing happens. What will often result is militant activity by the most fanatical of the followers, to eradicate the ‘unbelievers’ who by their mere presence, they theorise, have prevented or delayed that joyous event from materialising
That happened with the Christian Inquisition, since it was assumed by some that Jesus would return after a thousand years. When he did not, bloodthirsty purges followed, especially of the Cathars and other sects which were Christian in nature but did not respect Rome as the authority on such matters. I am told there is also an Islamic prophecy of a similar kind which is the main driving force behind the current wave of extremism in the Middle East, where the same kind of pogrom of one Islamic sect against another supposedly-heretical Islamic sect arises.
Maybe we’re seeing a parallel in the recently increased fervour of the alarmists. With the extreme weather predictions failing to materialise, they are getting anxious about their prospects of creating a renewably-powered nirvana on earth.
I use the word nirvana euphemistically of course. It would be anything but.
This is actually a studied phenomenon and one I’ve taken a great interest in. It is called “cognitive dissonance”, a term invented by Leo Festinger, and it, along with E. T. Jaynes’ “mind projection fallacy” are major factors in the climate debate on both sides. CD is explained in great detail in a book of the same name by Joel Shore and (of course) here:
(Real property of Nature)
— 30 orders of magnitude — coarser than the scale where we might be able to solve the dynamical problem of climate out to some reasonably long time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
A nice quote: A key tenet of cognitive dissonance theory is that those who have heavily invested in a position may, when confronted with disconfirming evidence, go to greater lengths to justify their position . This describes Climate Science (on both sides) to a T.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_projection_fallacy
A quote from this as well: Once one has grasped the idea, one sees the Mind Projection Fallacy everywhere; what we have been taught as deep wisdom, is stripped of its pretensions and seen to be instead a foolish non sequitur. The error occurs in two complementary forms, which we might indicate thus: (A) (My own imagination) → (Real property of Nature), [or] (B) (My own ignorance) → (Nature is indeterminate).
We see plenty of both CD and the MPF in Climate Science, only we’ve invented a new form of the latter. Our own imaginations proved lacking, so we invented the Computer Projection Fallacy:
(Computer imagination/simulation)
Needless to say, both of these failures of the human mind are meat and drink to confidence artists and politicians and priests. I’d continue on with Korzybski’s “the map is not the territory” (and early statement of the MPF) and Lewis Carrol made a remarkably relevant observation by referring in one of his books to a fictional map that had “the scale of a mile to the mile”. A character notes some practical difficulties with such a map and states that “we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.” Deep wisdom in both directions, as the computer models are built on top of a map with a resolution of no less than 100 x 100 x 1 kilometers where the critical (Kolmogorov) scale of atmospheric dynamics is on the order of 1 x 1 x 1 millimeters. That is, the computations are done at a spatiotemporal resolution
Obviously this is impossible and is likely to remain so in the foreseeable future, as even Moore’s Law is going to have a problem with 30 orders of magnitude with its doubling time of only a couple of years. We compensate by making lots of runs at this inadequate resolution, grand averaging the chaotic and widely dispersed results and superaveraging the grand averages and asserting that this statistically unsupportable fantasy is somehow a believable prediction of the future, that we’ve built a map that reliably represents future climate territory.
Still, to quote Neil Gaiman:
This is the problem with physics itself. All of human knowledge is fundamentally the mind projection fallacy made flesh. Correlation may not be causality, the map may not be the territory, but self-consistent maps built out of experiential correlation are all we’ve got to make sense out of our sensory experience of the real world. Climate science, like all science, is a noble endeavor even if the difficulty of the problem very likely makes it unsolvable in any useful sense at this time.
rgb
RGB says
“Climate science, like all science, is a noble endeavor even if the difficulty of the problem very likely makes it unsolvable in any useful sense at this time”
Its only noble if it is “science” and not agenda disguised as science. Its only noble if the results don’t determine the compensation. Its only noble if the scientists involved can let the data take them where the data leads and not modify the data to create the result they want. Its only science when the scientist is just as happy to be surprised by the result as they are when they see the result the predicted.
If only there were a few hundred more Alan Carlin’s….
Chris
Thanks, Alan Caruba. Very good article.
Dr. Carlin seems to be right.
We are being scammed by the church of global warming.
I think the modern EPA can be characterised as taking the position: ‘Our ultimate goal is reducing the environmental impact of humans to zero. Everywhere. Always. Forever.’
Except for EPA employees who need to drive to work, of course.
Some of those who don’t like to drive to work simply claim they work for the CIA.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/22/beale-deposition-contrasts-ousting-claims-new-epa-/?page=all
The rest is just what is politically expedient, i.e. ‘What can we get away with?’
What they can get away with, seems to be a lot.
Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis and commented:
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Alan Carlin coming forward like this is equivalent to a top researcher at the Inst. for Creation Research coming forward and denouncing it and the young-earth creation movement.
Fundamentally, environmentalism has become the religious fundamentalist movement of naturalism and scientism. Global warming alarmism is the apocalypse of the Church of Green.
Humans are instinctively religious. There is no getting around it. People need faith–real faith, or they will make up faith, superstition, alarmism, or some other substitute. It is inescapable.
The financial term “Yieldco” works well to explain climate alarmism. 8 to 10 percent returns in an otherwise 2 percent at best world. And like mortgage bonds backed by taxpayers. To keep that going you need constant hype from the highest levels. Its old wine in new bottles by the same old merchants.
And how many people know about Yieldcos and renewable energy projects? And then try to convince people how Yieldcos depend on climate alarmism.
Actually Enviromentalism is just one church of the Government promoted religion of Secular Socialism(SS). Just as Christianity has Catholics,Baptists, etc the SS has the churches of Feminisim, Envirionment, Homosexuality, Various Racists(other than caucasian), Unionists-that all have the same faith in a supreme central government and a utopia on earth-rather than a supreme being and a utopia after death. The SS is more effective since the churches never have conflict with each other as the mystic religions. The SEIU never attacks the EPA for instituting job killing regulations or NOW never attacked Slick Willie for his sexual preditation.
@noaaprogrammer
May 27, 2015 at 10:13 pm
Generally, more Americans are no longer attending churches as they did decades ago, and some of these people, still feeling the need for a cause, have adopted climate change to fill that need.
Unfortunately, this “Church of Climatology” is not perceived as a religion, so it can intermesh its beliefs and ideology with government. There is no separation.
I agree 100%. People need to believe and have faith in something bigger than themselves. CAGW gives people the religious experience they crave. If they quietly belived in the comfort of their own homes I wouldn’t have a problem with it. The trouble begins when they propose to spend tax dollars and craft policies to support their religion. It’s a fundamental violation of the US Constitution and bad public policy.
I’m sure I’ll one day encounter an articulate climate skeptic who didn’t start out as an unassuming believer in all the tosh. Once you looked into it though, they’d lost you forever …
Pointman
If we could just let the eco-loons and their hijacked political agencies (EPA and FWS) have their way for just a few more years, so much sh!t would hit the fan that independent voters would wake up to the zealotry that has seeped into our government and the backlash would be enough to completely restructure these agencies.
Let’s hope he’s called to testify by congress. It would make news.
It would definitely be news worthy, but there’s is no way the gate keepers would allow it to actually make the news.
I meant newsworthy in the way that Curry’s and Legates’ testimony was newsworthy.
Reblogged this on Peddling and Scaling God and Darwin and commented:
By reblogging this, some will say that I am no environmentalist. However though I accept anthropogenic climate change as proven, I am sceptical and fed up with the green extremists who exaggerate the whole issue and reduce it to nonsense. It is because of the nonsense I am unable to join many green groups
…I accept anthropogenic climate change as proven…
It isn’t proven. No one has ever quantified AGW. It may exist, but there aren’t any measurements quantifying man-made global warming. That means it is still a conjecture.
In science a conjecture is certainly legitimate (Conjecture, Hypothesis, Theory, Law…), but that’s all it is.
The “water melons” are out in the open:
No Climate Protection without Climate Justice; No Climate Justice without Degrowth
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-05-28/no-climate-protection-without-climate-justice-no-climate-justice-without-degrowth
Absolutely frightening that these people are free to walk among us. They are pathologically insane and haven’t a clue as to their state. They have a moral certitude generating their pompous sanctimony. Funny how they always exempt themselves from the population reduction they cry is essential. It is just the rest of us who need to be depopulated. I love the bottom of the comments where a poster’s comment is deleted, and then the author of the article explains that the site is moderated and the only rules are no personal attacks and no climate denial. Too bad they don’t lead by example and show us how to put plastic bags to their proper use in walking their walk. Holy cow!
Ordered from Amazon for my Kindle; also included “Climate Change: The Facts” while I was at it.
“…A new faith, a new religion,
Out of pseudo-science born,
And to this faith’s narrative
We’re forced to conform;
An imaginary world enemy
Out of thin air created;
Dare to challenge its existence
And you’ll be segregated….”
Read more: http://wp.me/p3KQlH-JJ
“In March 2009 while the Environmental Protection Agency was rushing to fulfill a presidential campaign pledge to document that carbon dioxide (CO2) and five other greenhouse gases endangered public health and the environment…”
This is a scientific paradigm which is based on a profound paranoias, manias, phobias, and fixations with benign, neutral, and useful chemicals used to grow food and to mass manufacture goods.
It should come as no surprise that the methane from cattle, refrigerants, nitrous oxides from crops, and co2 from power generation and personal transportation would be fingered as deadly pollutants harming the atmosphere.
The Anthropocene Age is a scientific paradigm and has been in the making for the last 40 years. Now at the least, a religion does concern itself with questions of life after death. This life is very short and the body gives out, yet our spirits live on forever. The environmental scientific paradigm developed by the cannabis generation is not a religion, but a scientific world-view which assumes any human activity alters the environment for the worst.
If the warmists succeed in their goal of controlling us, there will be an AGW catastrophe. It will not be the climate that does the damage, however. It will be the insane policies implemented to prevent it. The cure will be much worse than the postulated disease.
I would like to suggest that the moderator of this site establish a policy of deleting anti-religious rants. After all these postings never have anything to do with the articles or the purpose of this website.
[Reply: The article is about an eco-religion. ~mod.]
If I had mentioned the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ you wouldn’t have understood what I was talking about. Sneer on my lad…