From the American Council on Science and Health comes this interesting but awkward moment in science communications.
By Alex Berezow
Recently, I gave a seminar on “fake news” to professors and grad students at a large public university. Early in my talk, I polled the audience: “How many of you believe climate change is the world’s #1 threat?”
Silence. Not a single person raised his or her hand.
Was I speaking in front of a group of science deniers? The College Republicans? Some fringe libertarian club? No, it was a room full of microbiologists.
How could so many incredibly intelligent people overwhelmingly reject what THE SCIENCE says about climate change? Well, they don’t. They just don’t see it as big of a threat to the world as other things. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of them felt that antibiotic resistance and pandemic disease were the biggest global threats. One person thought geopolitical instability was the biggest concern.
I told them that I believed poverty was the world’s biggest threat. The reason is poverty is the underlying condition that causes so much misery in the world. Consider that 1.3 billion people don’t have electricity. And then consider how the lack of that basic necessity — what the rest of us take completely for granted — hinders their ability to develop economically and to succeed, let alone to have access to adequate healthcare. If we fix poverty, we could stop easily preventable health problems, such as infectious disease and malnutrition.
Was I booed out of the room? No, the audience understood why I believed what I did. But woe unto you who try to have a similar conversation with climate warriors.
Woe Unto You, Bret Stephens
Conservative columnist Bret Stephens, formerly of the Wall Street Journal, landed a new gig at the New York Times. His very first column, “Climate of Complete Certainty,” caused much weeping and gnashing of teeth. And probably the rending of garments. What did he say that caused so much outrage?
In a nutshell, his thesis was that certainty often backfires. He used the Hillary Clinton campaign as an example; in his view, certainty of victory was one factor in her defeat. Next, Mr. Stephens drew an analogy with climate science, worrying that the certainty expressed by the most vocal proponents of major climate policy reforms are speaking with a sense of certainty that is not well-founded. He warned against taking imperfect models too seriously and the dangers of hyperbolic doom-mongering.
It often irks me when political commentators write about science, usually because they haven’t the foggiest clue what they’re talking about. But Mr. Stephens’ article used reasonable and cautious language, and to my knowledge, he didn’t write anything that was factually incorrect. He simply concluded, as I myself have, that doomsday prophesying is wrong — and even if it was right, it convinces few people, anyway. (Do the antics of the Westboro Baptist Church change anyone’s mind?)
Yet, the reaction was swift and entirely predictable. Vox, whose stated mission is to “explain the news,” called Mr. Stephens a “bullshitter.” GQ ran the headline, “Bret Stephens Is Why Liberals Have Every Right to Be Dicks.” And Wikipedia (whose founder is going to try to solve the problem of fake news) labeled him a “contrarian.”
All that because Mr. Stephens warned against speaking hyperbolically. The concept of irony appears to be lost on his critics.
Can Smart People Disagree About the Threat of Climate Change?
What so many in the media (and apparently the climate science community) fail to understand is that people have different values and priorities. Foreign policy analysts are terrified of North Korea. Economists fear Brexit and a Eurozone collapse. Geologists, especially those in the Pacific Northwest, fear a huge earthquake. Experts across the spectrum perceive threats differently, usually magnifying those with which they are most familiar.
That means smart people can accept a common core of facts (such as the reality of anthropogenic global warming) without agreeing on a policy response.
Yet instead of being a place to debate a policy response for complex science issues, the media have chosen to be an extension of the militant Twitterverse. Even if you are just discussing courses of action, you are not allowed to deviate from climate orthodoxy lest you be labeled a science-denying heretic.
Perhaps journalists should spend more time talking to microbiologists.
Partially disagree. Tyranny is the world’s #1 threat. Which in turn is the #1 cause of poverty.
I sort of agree. Fanaticism, which often leads to tyranny, is the largest threat. A good number of fanatics are not yet in power.
It’s all about the Benjamins (money).
No matter if malignant or benign, EVERYTHING is all about the Benjamins.
There are a fair number of historical figures who were evil and not primarily money-hungry. Torquemada as an offhand example. Other members of the Inquisition were rather mercenary, though.
And tyranny, based on fanaticism, is what we would have if the alarmists get all the power they crave.
I sort of agree. Fanaticism, which often leads to tyranny, is the largest threat. ”
A meaningless claim, to me, Tom. Who decides what is, and is not “fanaticism”, for instance . . to me, your statement seems fanatic, expressing some sort of fear toward those who feel strongly about something, anything . . and that’s a recipe for all manner of bullying and oppression, it seems to me.
The “establishment media” can simply label anyone a fanatic/extremist (as they routinely do) and drive the “narrative” toward stuff like attacking those who don’t tow the “establishment media” line, such as we can see with “antifa” thugs literally attacking people they declare “Fascist”. (And this works with so called “homophobe”, “zenophobes”, “misogynist, Islamophobe, “climate denyier” etc, etc.).
Try reading Eric Hoffer “The True Believer” on what definition I am using. Hoffer was a philosopher, not a psychologist, but pretty much most psychology does not get beyond the level of describing a syndrome. Not all adherents of a cause are fanatics, but sometimes the influential persons are. Theodore Roosevelt coined the term “lunatic fringe” to describe some of his own supporters.
The major difference between the American Revolution and the Russian and French Revolutions is that the fanatics did not get control of the American Revolution.
I am fairly religious, but also fairly relaxed about it as an adult. It is a subject people can discuss indefinitely, and never reach any conclusion. In the religion I was brought up in, Opus Dei is comprised of fanatics by my definition, but most Catholics in the US are not.
PS ~ And those who don’t toe the establishment line too ; )
Tom,
If you hold a gun to my head and tell me you will pull the trigger if I deny Christ, I’ll tell you to to go to hell. And, I’m fanatical about preserving our Constitutional Republic, and the rights it enshrines.
Am I a fanatic according to your man-god Hoffer?
John, try reading what you criticize. You do definitely have a great deal of emotional attachment to your particular faith in creationism, which seems immune to argument. You do seem to fit the definitions of a heretic, a person who takes part of a religion and runs with it to the point of absurdity. Christianity, or the Abrahamic religions in general, are much more than creation stories, which you sometimes neglect.
My personal opinion is that both you and Chimp have a bug up your butts on the subject of ID, and should back off. You, Chimp, and I mostly agree on other scientific issues, ethics and politics in general, and should accept that.
Oops, I meant if you tell me you will pull the trigger if I don’t deny Christ . .
Fanaticism is certainty.
Like lot of things, the story of Torquemada gets exaggerated. The number of people executed during Isabella’s reign (for all crimes) was about 2000. Torquemada died before half her reign was over but was supposedly responsible for 9000. A lot of deaths occurred before the Inquisition because of mobs of Christians believing that the Jewish population was protecting criminals. Contrary to many accounts Jewish communities were doing well after Muslims rulers were ejected from Spain until confrontations started. Without the inquisition, it might have been uglier.
Are you certain about certainty being fanatical? Is Hoffer? Logical first principles and epistemology permit and, indeed, necessitate certainty on subjects within which one can and must be certain to even move forward in thought. Certainty based upon failed GCMs is fanaticism and scientism. The scientific method and abductive historical science are firmly grounded in philosophy…a philosophy that presupposes many certainties of physical law, of logic, of empirical reliability, of ordered causality, of anthropic comprehensibility…all of which are casually absent from much of modern “science.”
No, it is not about certainty. Fanaticism is a description of how people can make a cause, a mass movement, out of a good many different subjects.
Religion is the classic example, but so diffuse a topic it gets very unclear as to what one considers religion. Dietary habits, sexual practices, and ethnicity all have been and are topics of religion.
The Marxist Communists combined an economic model with heavy presumptions about social class being determined by economics into a mass movement. The Environmentalists combined concerns about nature with distrust of technology and socialist economics into yet another orthodoxy.
EVERYTHING is all about the Benjamins.
Ben, the two of us need look no more
We both found what we were looking for
Tom,
Fanaticism, as bad as that can be, does not always lead to tyranny. Tyranny always leads to poverty, misery, and mass suffering. Are all tyrants fanatics? Probably, but not all fanatics are tyrants. So I have to agree with Eustace on this one.
Tom Halla May 9, 2017 at 9:31 am
Of course fundamentalists are fanatics, since they must d@ny objective reality to hold their false beliefs.
Does it require a bug to defend science on a supposedly scientific blog against the attacks upon it by adherents of false religion? ID is not science but blind religious faith, and those who imagine it is need to know that fact.
True Christians, who love their neighbors as themselves, are vanishingly rare. Fundamentalist creationists not only oppose science and reason, but their own professed religion, since their false doctrine requires that they lie against their God.
If scientists here allow creationists to spew their lies unchallenged, then the Carbonaris’ charge that climate skeptics are against all science would appear valid.
In your exchanges with Johnknight, I mostly agree with you. But it has gone on a bit long, as neither is moving the other off their position.
I’m an atheist, Chimp. But I question the utility of attacking someone over benign (here) religious beliefs. It is bad form to hector others needlessly. I always bow my head for others’ prayers; outward respect for others’ beliefs does not imply agreement. Chill, Chimp.
Tom,
That’s because a fanatic is impervious to evidence and reason.
John also believes in the myth of “flood geology” rather than real geology. Why does he comment on a science site, when he rejects not just bogus “climate science”, but all science, to include not just biology and geology, but physics, chemistry, astronomy and meteorology, all of which are antibiblical?
Tom,
“John, try reading what you criticize.”
How the hell could you know what I read? . . You a heart-knower?
“You do definitely have a great deal of emotional attachment to your particular faith in creationism, which seems immune to argument.”
Judgmental word salad from a pretend heart-knower . . Yum ; )
“You do seem to fit the definitions of a heretic, a person who takes part of a religion and runs with it to the point of absurdity.”
Definition of heretic (Webster)
1 – religion : a person who differs in opinion from established religious dogma (see dogma 2); especially : a baptized member of the Roman Catholic Church who refuses to acknowledge or accept a revealed truth The church regards them as heretics.
2 – : one who differs in opinion from an accepted belief or doctrine : nonconformist
Looks to me like you dreamed that up, Tom . . Could be you definitely have a great deal of emotional attachment to your particular faith in your imagination ; )
“Christianity, or the Abrahamic religions in general, are much more than creation stories, which you sometimes neglect.”
When I’m discussing origins and such, yeah . . ?
“My personal opinion is that both you and Chimp have a bug up your butts on the subject of ID, and should back off.”
Well, I’ve rarely brought the matter up . . so what you’re really telling me, in effect, is say nothing when I see someone who is (to me) fanatical about Evolution, push their take on things as a scientific fact (literally at times) . . while declaring that those who don’t accept it as a scientific fact are ignorant dopes, to put it mildly. You never saw me fanatically pushing creationism like that, with Chimp trying to tone the absolute certainty down . . and I’ve on more than one occasion said I don’t completely rule out the possibility of Evolution being true . .
But hey, I’ve got a competing theory for you to ponder . . I’ve studied the matter some, and can see a distinct pattern throughout history; Virtually all wars and atrocities and destruction of every sort is perpetrated by people with two legs . . Bipedalism is the “largest threat” we face!!
John,
I’ve repeatedly showed you that evolution is literally a scientific fact, ie an observation repeatedly confirmed. That new species and genera arise from existing species and genera has been directly observed in the wild and in the lab. New species and genera have been created in the lab.
Your persistence in d@nying these facts amounts to fanatical attachment to objective falsehood.
How can evolution not occur, given the facts of reproduction and genetics, the observation of so many different kinds of mutations from so many sources, of endosymbiosis and of horizontal gene transfer? So the fact that it has been observed over and over again, repeatedly, should come as no surprise.
Creationism, OTOH, has not only never been observed, but as spontaneous generation, has been shown not to occur. Nor is there any possible scientific explanation for how a new species would be “poofed” into existence. Science requires natural explanations, not supernatural. If it’s supernatural, it’s not science, by definition.
I’d like to differ, Chimp, but I’m already being accused by some dude who considers responding to your absolutism, fanatical, by default no less. Perhaps another time . .
John,
You are a fanatic. No amount of reality can penetrate your blinkered blind faith barriers.
Don’t take my word and mountainous evidence for the fact of evolution. Just read the Dover trial transcript, in which your hero Behe, the guy who cooked up the antiscientific ID sc@m, ie “irreducible complexity”, to try to get around the constitutional prohibition of teaching creationism, ie false religion, in public school science classes, was forced under cross-ex to admit that evolution is indeed a scientific fact.
As I said; a recipe for all manner of bullying and oppression . .
Fanaticism is a product of societies that teach their members to follow leaders and to avoid critical or creative thinking. This encouragement of mental laziness permits dogmatic hierarchies to flourish, and dogma, regardless of where on the political spectrum it erupts from is a hazard to liberty. It doesn’t matter whether the dogma is left or right.
John,
What you call bullying and oppression is simply applying the scientific method.
Creationism fails miserably. It is not science. No matter how much you want to imagine that it is, it isn’t. Not even close. Indeed, it’s the diametric opposite of science. Your mindset is that against which the scientific revolution revolted.
Not through lack of trying.
Chimp,
“What you call bullying and oppression is simply applying the scientific method.”
Sure, you’re applying the scientific method to me . . the new fanatic scientific method, ever so popular in climate science these days ; )
Dave Fair May 9, 2017 at 11:17 pm
What I’m attacking is John’s false belief that his faith is scientific. It isn’t.
I also pointed out that his religious belief, ie blind faith that every word of his version of the Bible is literally “true”, such that the discoveries of astronomy, biology, geology and every other science must be wrong, is also opposed to Protestant, Roman and Orthodox Catholic doctrine.
It’s still none of your business, Chimp. Truth wills out in the end, without vituperation.
Dave,
It’s my business when a commenter tries to inject religion into a supposedly scientific site. John gives ammunition to the CACA charge that “climate change” skeptics oppose all science, which is true in his case.
Since I care about the real science behind “climate change” and its policy implications, it is my business. He can believe whatever rot he wants, but don’t bring blind faith to a science fight.
Chimp, it may be beneficial to the overall flavor of web argumentation to refer to the science you care about and leave the conclusions to the readers. Warmistas will troll no matter what you say.
Dave,
But why prove their contentions valid by attacking the fact of evolution on this supposedly scientific, skeptical blog?
CACA commentators frequently lump skeptics in with evolution d@niers, and are sadly justified in doing so. Their argument fails if other commenters on WUWT point out the utter, complete, total lack of science in creationism, indeed that ID is profoundly anti-scientific, like consensus “climate science”, only more so.
“I sort of agree. Fanaticism, which often leads to tyranny, is the largest threat. A good number of fanatics are not yet in power.”
If you’re going to keep stepping down the ladder, you’ll just end up at “Humans are the #1 threat”. Congrats! You’re now an extreme lefty! Yay!
It is the fact that the country with the 2nd largest oil reserves in the world is poor, because it lacks a reasonably honest democracy and the rule of law. VZ is a great example of why Western Demi ocarcy with its tastefully concealed and legalised representative corrutpion, is a better way to be than Tyrants and African elected dictators and their rule of fear through the appartatus of the state.
Those of us in Western “democracies” are now allowed to keep just enough of the products of our labour by our elites, even receive reasonable basic services so that we don’t revolt, are a lot better off than the 3rd Word. But that took pervasive use of intense energy sources from Watt’s steam engine invention onwards for 100 years of decarbohydratisation to accumulate enough wealth from Empire that our own Tyrants of the 18th Century were prepared to share enough of it to make everyone’s life tolerable, in the face of serious threat’s of revolt even in the 19th Century. IMO
Like most commenting on Venezuela you show your ignorance. The US since Chavez was elected had been trying to unseat him covertly and overtly supporting a coup in 2002 which angered may Venezuelans. After the death of Chavez your pal Obama put drastic sanctions on Venezuela calling them “a danger to US security.” Really, Venezuela a danger to US security. Now they are considering even more drastic sanctions to make a situation they had a huge hand in causing even worse. When the current crisis erupted in Venezuela the US should have been down there with a helping hand instead of trying to bury these poor people for the US political agenda. We must also admit that Venezuela has been mismanaged for quite awhile but there is no excuse for the US to kick them repeatedly when they are down. We must also admit Chavez lowered the poverty rate and greatly increased education and literacy.
I don’t know if socialism is good or bad but explain to us why the US overthrows or punishes every 3rd world country that ELECTS a socialist government. Chile in 1972 which ended in a 25 year brutal dictatorship. Or Afghanistan in 1979 where the US created Al Qaeda to overthrow the elected socialist government. Or Guatemala in 1953 which has one brutal government after another since then with hundreds of thousands of innocent people killed. In all south of it’s borders the US has overthrow governments in all but 2 countries. Honduras in 2009 another US “success” with lots of dead innocent people. Hows that thing in Afghanistan working out?
If the US had really cared about the people in those countries south of their borders they would have been down their helping those people get educated and prosper instead of supporting or putting in place brutal dictators who could rape and pillage their people with impunity as long as they danced to the US and it’s corporations tune. The Monroe Doctrine was not the freeing of the Americas from the rest of the world but the US declaring that it would be the sole source to exploit these countries for it’s advantage at the expense of those countries. If the US had helped and guided those countries instead of exploiting them there would be no illegal immigrant problem in the US. They would have all stayed home in their prosperous and successful countries and great trading partners with the US creating jobs in all countries.
Your first sentence describes your view of the country well. You have no clue about Venezuela. But you love to wear tin foil hats.
Obama was not trying to over throw Chavez or Maduro! He loved them both. Had you claimed Bush was, you might have had at least some believing you, but Bush did not care. No president has since Chavez was elected. Because they are no longer relevant (when oil was precious and we wanted it, yes they were).
Venezuela shot themselves. No one did it to them. They ate their seed corn and thought they had found a money tree. That is the way it always is with socialism. As they strip their capital in the first years to make everyone “richer”, they think the horn of plenty will never stop giving. But without capital, production dries up, wealth dissipates, and starvation sets in. It is always thus. Not from any mal-intentions by anyone, but due to simple economics.
Perhaps had you even bothered to actually talk to any Venezuelans, you would understand what is going on. But like so many with their canned propaganda, you have no clue, just mindless talking points.
I have skin in the game. So BS me, because I know it is BS.
No more Kool-Aid for you!
Chavez hugely increased the poverty rate in Venezuela by impoverishing the majority. Inflation robs everyone, rich and poor alike.
He did nothing for literacy, which was already high. In the 1970s, when Venezuela was experiencing huge growth from oil sales, the literacy rate soared from 77 to 93%, and continued gaining in the ’80s and ’90s. You regurgitate the same lies told by Castro’s backers. Cuba was already literate in the 1950s. Only a few rural old people were illiterate, so the rate would have soon reached the high ’90s in any case.
Resource-rich countries like Venezuela shouldn’t need handouts from the rest of the world. Only socialism can produce such humanitarian calamities.
snedly, really?
It’s the job of the US to prop up failed socialist states, and the fact that we haven’t means that we are responsible for all the problems caused by Chavez?
PS: The most brutal south American dictators have been 100% anti-American.
Tell me again how the US has been busy installing anti-american dictators?
snedly arkus wrote: “I don’t know if socialism is good or bad…”
It’s sort of like a bell curve, a little is okay or even good, but then as you achieve the pinnacle of the curve, it turns bad fast. As you begin to get more socialism, and the purer and more all-encompassing it becomes, the worse it is. In it’s purest forms, humans become meaningless fodder, dying in huge numbers for the greater good, and tyrannical, ultra-wealthy, ultra-powerful despots rule over them with authoritarian hubris. You can look it up.
Venezuela cannot blame the US for it’s horrendous mess. Utopians who think they know what an economy “needs” better be taking notes. But of course, they’re not, and they’ll misdirect and obfuscate the true nature of this relatively wealthy nation stepping on it’s own d i c k and killing the golden goose, even of it’s own nationalized oil industry. Do you know that oil tankers carrying Venezuelan crude need to have service boats go out in the harbor to clean the hulls of the exporting ships, because oil is leaking out of the underwater piping in the harbors and making the tankers so filthy that foreign ports won’t let them in? The big S Socialist government cannot even manage to maintain its most valuable infrastructure, the one bringing in the most money. How’s that for stupid.
Sned,
Nor did Allende replace a “brutal dictatorship”, as should be obvious, since he was elected in a long-functioning democracy.
However he won only 36% of the vote, amid claims of rampant fraud, vs 35 and 28% for the other candidates. Following the then current constitution, the Chilean congress accepted him as the winner, rather than ordering a runoff election.
The Chileans themselves would have overthrown Allende, with or without US involvement. He was an unmitigated disaster. Housewives took to the streets, clashing pots and pans in the traditional protest against a regime destroying the economy. Castro came to visit and stayed too long. The USSR sent an entire brigade of Warsaw Pact troops to act as his palace guard. He would not have allowed another election.
I nominate Snedly Arkus’s misinformed rant for the award for writing the biggest and steamiest pile of pure bullshit to appear on these pages in this decade.
Me,
May I second that nomination. Not that there hasn’t been stiff competition. Griff however rarely comments at such length. It is indeed an achievement to maintain utter cant and drivel for so long.
Yes, there are several candidates in the running for honorary lifetime achievement awards, for sure.
In defense of snedly arkus, I suggest that those who believe he/she? is full of hot air purchase a tiny book called “The Devil’s Chessboard,” and then read it. And as an aside, I don’t think the climate science fraud, as exposed on this website, is necessarily a “socialist” agenda, and I once again refer you to that small tome that I think a few of you would find extremely interesting. http://tinyurl.com/n9ylrew
Mickey, on a personal/family level, socialism can be good. Once you take it beyond that it goes bad fast.
The reason why is choice. Socialism can be good when it is voluntary. Socialism is never good when it isn’t voluntary.
And by voluntary I mean personal choice. 51% of the people voting to force socialism on 100% of the population is not voluntary.
And you get to vote, MarkW! Once.
@snedley . . which Americans stole the toilet paper?
All you are saying is that the Socialists in Venezuela are utterly useless and unable to run their own affairs. You try and put it one move away from the incompetent Chavez and Maduro but ultimately they are responsible for keeping Venezuelans safe no matter what and they have failed.
Don132 May 9, 2017 at 5:38 am
The CIA is not responsible for Chavez. Venezuelans have only themselves to blame for ruining their country.
The best thing that could happen to them now would be for Colombia to invade and kick out the socialists. Bogota would be justified because of Chavez’ support for the FARC narcoguerrillas.
Hayek made a valid distinction between socialism and a welfare state. But you need capitalism in order to afford a welfare state. Chavez didn’t understand that. He bought votes of the poor with social programs financed by the oil industry, but neglected to maintain the goose laying the golden egg. For that, he needed oil companies, but he kicked them out.
+1
odd how ‘socialists paradises ‘ are all due to the left wing ideology right up until it becomes clear they are no such thing and then the left claims its all the fault of the USA .
Meanwhile care to show us a ‘successful’ left wing Latin American country you could start with Bolivia but that has gone to pot to . As for Chile , odd the very same people that where happy praise sing for Castro’s dictatorship for over 50 years and are still happy to ‘celebrate ‘ the lack of freedom for the people of Cuba today , have a hard on of hate for Pinochet who in the end actual give up power before he died and not held onto it to pass it ‘down the family’ in the Castro manner .
Chile was wise to keep Pinochet’s reforms, which have been the capitalist goose laying the golden egg from which the country finances its socialist features today.
Chile’s prosperity is thanks to Milton Friedman’s conservative Chicago Boys, who designed its economy and social welfare programs. Chile is the only Latin American country considered a First World state by the OECD, which is why Chileans can participate in the US visa waiver program.
Compare what Pinochet did for Chile was what Chavez did to Venezuela, a country much richer in natural resources, although Chile does have copper and lithium. Pinochet did kill up to 3000 communists and other opponents, but how many people have died under the Chavez regime? The murder rate there soared under Chavez, both directly from his goon squads and as a result of the breakdown of basic law and order.
From no less a “reliable” source than the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/12/violent-crime-makes-venezuela-dangerous
Last year Venezuela was branded the most dangerous country in Latin America. A 2010 UN report places it among the top four most murderous countries in the world. While the government has refused to release its own statistics for years, a recent report by an NGO, the Venezuelan Observatory on Violence, estimates that 24,000 people were murdered in 2013 alone, a 14% rise on 2012, with nine out of 10 homicides going unsolved.
Socialists turned Venezuela from paradise into hell on earth.
It’s even better when they begin their drooling lectures by calling the person they are responding to “ignorant”, or something similar.
Makes me smile.
Thanks Menicholas thanks for calling BS as BS.
Pinochet is an example of the left demanding that anyone they disagree with must be perfect, while their own heros are allowed to get away with much worse.
Was Pinochet perfect? No. He did lots of very bad things.
However he was a saint compared to the people who opposed him.
Mark,
Yup. Without Pinochet, Chile would have ended up like Venezuela, only worse. Instead, it’s the richest country in Latin America, per capita.
Because of lax law enforcement under its socialist presidenta, however, there is a lot of street crime and Mapuche militants can murder farmers and forest fire fighters with impunity.
I disagree with the whole premise that humans and/or society is “the world”.
-I disagree with the whole premise that humans and/or society is “the world”.-
Ok, but then who is the world?
My horses disagree too. I am quite secondary here to the Equine Nation, relegated to the role of materials handler, feed division! 😉
Goldrider, add scooping up the output of the Equine Nation denizens.
Having said that, however, I don’t give them the vote.
“I am also the World”
-Prince
@ Goldrider , I think I may print, frame and hang your quote, being of the equine materials handler genre myself. 😉
And Eustace, CAGW is their illegitimate weapon of choice. Ergo, climate zealots are retarding solutions to world poverty. It also makes these Malthusian Nouveau Monde тотаl¿тая¿аи§ totally uncaring for world poverty. Famine, disease, genocides… actually fits with elitist “population bomb” concerns.
I would say corruption, which of course also means enforcing fair laws equally. There are many countries with much wealth and lots of poor due to corruption. Look at Venz(people starving despite producing 2.7 million B of oil a day) also many African countries etc etc…
Rhodesia was the bread basket of Africa before the communists took it over. Now there is wide spread starvation.
the tyranny of the bureaucrat is the greatest threat to freedom for all people … be they living under a democracy or dictator … the masterminds are always in search of the perfect omelet and we are just the eggs they need to accomplish it …
tyranny is often caused by certainty. Would Stalin or Hitler or Polk Pot have killed their millions if they weren’t certain they were right?
Eustace writes —
In that case, what causes poverty in America?
To my eyes, poverty in the USA is like middle class in the Third World.
Poverty in the USA includes TV sets, free school lunches, EBT cards, public housing, etc.
Third world poverty is cooking food, if one can find some, on a dung fire in a self-made shanty with no clean water or electricity. Much worse.
It’s a relative thing.
USA poverty is not a threat as much as a discomfort.
( I grew up poor in the USA. I never suffered malnutrition or lack of shelter.)
For the most part, bad choices.
Regardless, there is no true poverty in the US.
There is no poverty in the U.S., lorcanbonda; at least not in the manner it is experienced in the Third World.
Most of what we have that passes for poverty occurs in the inner cities. They have been run by Democratic Party machines for many decades. I guess one could say poverty in the U.S. is caused by the Democratic Party.
What poverty in America? You men the poor that have cable TV, cars, AC and cell phones?
philjourdan: “What poverty in America? ” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/nov/12/beattyville-kentucky-and-americas-poorest-towns
Michael – I said poverty, not poor or poorest. So I ask again, what poverty in America?
Michael,
The poorest Americans are rich by global standards. Poverty in America is only relative to the even greater wealth of the top 90%.
Chimp, contrary to the dream world you are living in, there actually are some very poor people living among us. I suggest you take a stroll in a large American urban area, and contact some of the homeless…..you’ve seen them, the ones that cart all their possessions around in shopping cart. They aren’t even counted when the Census is done every decade.
..
..
PS, don’t forget to visit the prisons, where a lot of the poor live.
Michael, most of those you refer to belong in mental institutions. Progressive thought let them all out on the streets decades ago.
Every study shows they are on the street by choice.
Treating drugs as crimes instead of mental health issues doesn’t help. Then, again, when has reality (Prohibition, anyone?) interfered with progressive thought. Let’s just spend more trillions on the police state.
By the way, Michael, get your facts straight before commenting.
The Census sends people out on the street to count people. Some of them hide, but that just helps bolster my point that extreme poverty in the U.S. is a mental health problem.
Michael darby
Many observers believe that, to the contrary, the “homeless” – who used to be called bums, hobos, vagrants, and the even less politically correct “crazy people” and “madmen”- are indeed counted very accurately every census cycle. Every census cycle by census takers who are obeying their political interests by counting every homeless person and vacant house and vacant apartment room every time. Every time time they walk by a vacant house, homeless person, and burned out apartment complex.
No one has said otherwise. The question is not about poor. It is about poverty. Stop moving the football lucy.
Homeless Americans are richer than billions of other people.
I suggest you visit the Third World.
The “homeless’ problem is largely a product of deinstitutionalization of mental cases, which is an old policy dispute. There were enough problems with the former policy as far as civil liberties, with something of an overreaction resulting in involuntary commitment being made very difficult.
Dave and Tom,
Yes, the homeless are there by choice, but many if not most are mentally ill.
Even those who advocated deinstitutionalization of the mentaly ill in the 1960s and ’70s, thanks to new drugs, now realize that it was a mistake, unless there are friends or family willing to make sure that the freed inmates take their anti-psychotic medicines. Those living on an defecating in the streets now can’t legally be committed, or even arrested for their own good in many cases.
It is not poverty but freedom in America that accounts for most of the homeless.
That same freedom allows low-born to achieve the heights in academia, politics, and business.
LOL @ Chimp. A lot of the “poor” in the third world are subsistence farmers. They have land to till, and eke out a living from their crops. The homeless in America subsist by begging. The homeless in America can’t even plant a garden. I see you are unable to tell the difference between an apple and an orange.
Chimp, your problem is what happens when you “average” the people in America, versus the “average” of the people in the third world. The bazillionaires at the top of the heap in America lifts the “average” of the people on the bottom rung of the ladder. A person in America with zero income is exactly the same as a person in the Sudan with zero income. Please don’t tell me the zero in Sudan is less than the zero in America. Both have zero income!!!!!!
Michael, I assume others will beat me to this, but you apparently give little thought (or are abysmally ignorant) concerning, at least, poverty.
Listing non-cash support for U.S. poor, including the “homeless,” would be a tedious exercise. I suggest you look them up on your own.
Michael darby
Last I read, a person with “zero income” in America AVERAGES two cell phones, heating, freehousing, no taxes (plus a “tax rebate” of some 3000.00 to 6000.00 per year), plus food stamps, health care, free school, free child care, and the immense benefits of good water, good sewage and free police, fire, and emergency services (all paid for by other “rich” Americans who actually work for their living AND the living of the 47% who don’t pay taxes. All comes to some $26,000.00 per year. Tax-free. Now, admittedly, corrupt (liberal democrat) politicians and bureaucrats and corrupt (liberal democrat – but I repeat myself) liberal civil service unions DO cheat the systems and steal, lie, and fraud themselves into wealth at the expense of taxpayers. And at the expense of the people who elect corrupt and inept (democrat, but again I repeat myself) liberals to run such as the Detroit (Flint Michigan) water systems. But to those examples, I repeat that the victims were the ones electing corrupt, inept liberal socialists to be in charge.
Big cities, in the main, have been run for decades by “progressive” Democrat Party machines. The bosses and their cronys get rich while the underclass gets welfare, violence and propaganda. Were do you thing the votes for Hillary came from?
Except there are none in America with “zero” income except by choice due to the welfare systems. But even that is a non sequitur as we are talking P-O-V-E-R-T-Y, not poor.
So once again, I ask, without expecting an answer on topic, what poverty in America?
Michael.
About a billion of the world’s poor are urban, living in slums worse than Dickensian London, except for somewhat less cholera.
There are essentially no poor in America. They beg because they want to, not because they have to. No one in America need starve. If they’re hungry, it’s because they or their parents are too out of it to access free food, clothing, medicine and shelter.
Michael,
I’m not averaging at all. I’m saying that the very poorest person in the US is better off than at least a billion other people.
Due to social services, you can live in the US without any income. Not so much in the slums of Mumbai.
Chimp says: “It is not poverty but freedom in America that accounts for most of the homeless.”
…
I call BS on that.
..
If what Chimp says is true, then Egypt must have more “freedom” than America, because 18% of their population is homeless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_population
Md, you are not paying attention. Deliberately, I think.
Michael, you need to learn to read. He said “in America”. Egypt is not in America.
Chimp says: ” you can live in the US without any income.”
…
I laugh at you Chimp. You are clueless.
He is correct. That is why it is called “welfare”. They have MONEY, but as they did not “earn” it, it is not income in the traditional sense.
Michael,
Can you really be this obtuse?
What part of “in America” don’t you get?
Homelessness in Africa, Asia and other Third World cities is due to poverty. In the US, it’s due primarily to craziness tolerated by liberal authorities.
Michael darby May 11, 2017 at 1:55 pm
If you truly believe that people in the US can’t live without a job, you really need to get out more.
Tens of millions do so.
Chimp says: ” it’s due primarily to craziness tolerated by liberal authorities.”
…
You really are clueless.
Hey, folks! Ever notice that Michael has no facts?
Well, m’boy, there are places in the U.S. with over one-third of the working age on “disability” payments.
Michael darby May 11, 2017 at 2:00 pm
You are sadly ill-informed and inexperienced.
https://mentalillnesspolicy.org/consequences/homeless-mentally-ill.html
Chimp, the study indicated that 25% of the homeless are chronically homeless. That means that 75% of the homeless manage to better themselves over time. That seems to comport with the upward mobility offered in our society; most people don’t stay homeless, they manage to improve their lot in life.
The study indicated that 33% of the homeless have a serious mental illness. Without giving a number, the study indicated that the percentage of people with serious mental illness is higher among the chronically homeless than the 25% overall number. How much higher they didn’t say.
The study reinforces my prior understanding that chronic homelessness, in the main, is a mental health problem.
Mr. “craziness tolerated by liberal authorities.” AKA “Chimp”
..
..
Please get educated: craziness tolerated by liberal authorities.
Chimp says: “Tens of millions do so.”
..
..
Correct, my 92 year old mother doesn’t have a job. She’s retired.
Michael.
Apparently you are too young to remember or too uneducated to have read that crazy people used to be institutionalized. Then new classes of drugs came along which gave authorities the hope that insane asylums could be shut down. But it didn’t work out as planned, because crazy people living on the streets don’t take their meds.
You could look it up. That is, if you really want to be educated in a subject on which you want to comment.
Chimp says: ” Tens of millions do so.”
.
.
Melania Trump doesn’t have a job.
You just won the male chauvinist pig of the year award. Please go tell every mother that.
MD,
Are you really unaware that millions of people of working age subsist on welfare and disability payments?
Chimp must not know the difference between “income” and “job”
Yes Chimp, there are many quadriplegics of working age that are unemployed today in America.
Chimp has no conception of the term “working poor.” I don’t think any of the contestants on “Apprentice” fell into this category.
“Working poor” is NOT poverty. So once again, where is the “POVERTY” in America?
Michael darby May 11, 2017 at 2:11 pm
Only a Progressive would consider unearned “income” the same as income from a job. Welfare is a handout, not income.
Michael darby May 11, 2017 at 2:14 pm
The vast majority of working age layabouts are able-bodied. They don’t work not because they can’t, but because they don’t want to and in our system, don’t need to do so.
As I said, you really do need to get out more.
RACookPE1978 says: “Last I read, a person with “zero income” in America AVERAGES two cell phones, heating, freehousing, ”
…
…
Please explain to me how come if they get free housing, they are homeless?
Chimp explained it to you. It is called “choice”. You are merely confirming you cannot read.
Chimp tells me: “As I said, you really do need to get out more.”
…
You are funny. I suggest you come visit me, here in the inner city. I’ll show you “entrepreneurship” where the able-bodied layabouts are engaged in serious business ventures, abet they might be illegal. They’d laugh at you…cause they make more money selling illicit substances than anything the “system” provides. Your bovine excrement is funny, because it smells of an old white guy that lurks on right-wing propaganda sites on the Internet.
Michael wants us to think he is an urban hipster.
Dave Fair: “Well, m’boy, there are places in the U.S. with over one-third of the working age on “disability” payments.
.
.
Being from Missouri, I say: “SHOW ME”
Michael, you just have to keep up with the news as it happens. They don’t teach reading skills in Missouri, Troll?
Dave Fair May 11, 2017 at 3:02 pm
That’s right. The temporary homeless are in shelters, and tend to be families, or at least not crazy people.
The chronic homeless are mainly mentally ill to one extent or another. Some are old-fashioned hobos, who seek shelter when it’s too cold, or gravitate toward liberal, warmer cities. The less crazy augment their social service payments with pan-handling and theft.
To my public health nurse GF in the ’80s in Portland, OR, the problem was already evident, despite her being a liberal Democrat, now Sanders voter.
Michael darby May 11, 2017 at 2:31 pm
Junior, I lived and worked in inner cities back when the streets really were mean, to include Chicago and NYC in the ’70s and LA in the ’80s and ’90s. As well as the Third World in every decade since the 1960s.
You are a clueless troll. Last reply to you.
Chimp, I see your problem. You post: “To my public health nurse GF in the ’80s ”
…
Lets do some math
…
2017 -1985 = 32
…
Yup…. you are living in the past. Just so you know, the “Great Recession” that happened in 2008+ made a lot of people “homeless” due to circumstances beyond their control ( i.e. CDO’s that went south & foreclosure.)
Chimp says: ” I lived and worked in inner cities back when the streets really were mean, to include Chicago and NYC in the ’70s and LA in the ’80s and ’90s”
…
Obviously you are lying….because if you did, you wouldn’t be posting the bovine excrement you’ve written.
Because I tend to be antithetical, I believe the solution to the world’s #1 threat (whatever it might be) is cheap, available electricity: Volts for the masses! Watts for the downtrodden!!
A man working hard for an hour (say on a treadmill or bicycle hooked to a generator) produces ~100 Watts; in 10 hours he produces 1,000 Watts, or one kilowatt-hour. That can be purchased for as little as 7.41 cents in Washington State, or as high as 26.17 cents in Hawaii (the national average for the US is 10.42 cents).
Source: http://www.neo.ne.gov/statshtml/204.htm
I don’t know of any clear-thinking man that will work for mere pennies per hour, but think what that same man could do with cheap electricity!
Again, Volts for the masses; Watts for the downtrodden!
RockyRoad, Donald Trump donates his entire salary, so he is working for zero pennies per hour. Does that make him not clear thinking?
Yeah, Chimp; I’m with you. No more time on trolling Michael. He’s got enough “man-goo” on his keyboard as is.
Dave Fair, do you need lessons in how to click on the proper “Reply” button to get your comment in the proper place?
@MD – why are you calling Rocky Road, Dave. Apparently you do not know the correct reply to button either.
Over population is easily the #1 problem.
But the Left refuses to acknowledge it because it’s the 3rd worlders who are the culprits.
Inconvenient Fact.
Not to mention the evidence supports the skeptics.
The differences highlight the contrast between religion and science. Scientists try to avoid hyperbole because they understand they know how little they know. Religious know it all because their faith tells them what is the truth and what is not.
don’t know many religious people do you …:( … ignorance is the one thing we all can cure ourselves …
philjourdan. I doubt if any of the social sciences meet your definition of science. And the climate sceanceers do not either.
See my piece at https://www.evolutionnews.org/2016/06/theres_no_grand/
Science is an approach to learning about reality and it has to be “tailored” to the kind of phenomena being addressed by the inquiry. At root, it is more an ethos than any specific method. The commonality between sciences is the demand for empirical relevance, agreement with real, experiential reality at some level.
Where politics and religion are “top down” approaches to “how things work,” sciences ideally approach such questions from “the ground up.”
Individuals who purport to be “scientists” however, often fail to share that ethos. You can look at activities from astrophysics and cosmology, climate science to medical science and encounter a vast number of people who indulge in ritual that vaguely resembles scientific research, but are not capable of accepting what reality has to tell them. Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” is an excellent example. It “denies” reality and the actual evidence in order to support Mann’s faith that he isn’t really that stupid.
Social science is no different. It is, like weather, a profoundly complex, difficult science. The only hard science that can compare is quantum mechanics. It can and has been able to make accurate, predictive generalizations about some aspects of social phenomena for decades, but neither the religious nor the atheists, the left or the right want to hear what actually can be scientifically said about social phenomena. People really don’t want to believe that they really are predictable. The common response is eyes squeezed tightly closed, ears plugged and a loud “la-la-la-la-la…”
The left for instance doesn’t want to hear that no “gun control” law has ever worked, anywhere. The right doesn’t want to be told that increasing the disparity between rich and poor causes crime, or that the poor can’t generally become “unpoor” by working harder. The left doesn’t want to hear that the ultra rich aren’t inherently evil, and the right doesn’t want to hear that those same ultra-rich ought to taxed massively – but only because they simply can’t spend money fast enough to off set the problems such concentrations of wealth cause economically. Well they can, sometimes, but very few are Elon Musks. The left would cheer the idea of such taxes, but would cry at the idea of forgiving taxes for spent money on a dollar for dollar basis as long as it is not spent on an “investment” or charity or any “social cause” with no direct effect on the velocity of money where it counts (gas, cars, carpentry, pizzas, plumbing, wages (that need to be spent), etc.). Nobody wants to hear that their idea of what is “right” and “true” and “good” is humbug.
Duster,
The scientific method applies equally to all fields of scientific study.
Leonard,
I do not subscribe to a blanket “any of the…”, as there is some empirical evidence in all sciences. However, when those practicing them abandon empirical evidence for “feelings”, they have left science and embraced religion.
Great perspective… adding logic and balance to the man-made global warming debate.
30.7% are ‘afraid’ of GW but if you ask these same people to part with $100 per week of their hard earned money to save the world, something tells me this number would drop significantly. It is all about perspective.
I think the drop-off is at $10/yr.
David you are probably correct, any more these same people could not afford to fuel their cars.
https://www.engadget.com/2016/09/15/climate-change-money-survey/
42% wouldn’t be willing to spend $1/mo.
29% would be willing to pay $20/mo.
20% would be willing to pay $50/mo.
I wouldn’t be willing to spend 2¢/mo.
Not that I support it, but $10 per month could get you star travel.
Not for certain, but more certain than doing anything significant about “global warming”.
$1 a month could get you lunar exploration and then Mars exploration which in turn could lead to getting solar energy from Space in about +50 years.
But I favor doing such exploration without adding to NASA budget- NASA gets enough, it simply needs the leadership to do it.
Many of the 30.7%’s jobs and wealth depend on keeping the narrative alive. Politicians love it, they say how much they care about the enviroment, say they need to raise taxes, and if you do not agree you are evil. Dont have to do anywork, since GW is more important than fixing roads or schools(that is work) (Also its easy to give friends and family GWarming contracts and stuff your swiss bank account
Needs a few more arrows from Maobama.
2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 12
I agree with 8 and 9. The others are absurd.
I note Global Warming is listed under Environment, not Man-made Disaster.
Importing terrorists is the reason for #4.
I think you are right on AP.
David,
Did you run the old site called “panic watch”?
Loved that thing.
That wasn’t me… but it sounds like my sense of humor.
Not that microbial resistance to antibiotics isn’t a serious problem. A main reason why there are going on eight billion people is the ability to control potentially lethal infections.
The gross overuse of antibiotics, particularly in the developing world in lieu of water treatment facilities, but also in the developed world, has created real and potential monster pathogens, like MRSA, only worse.
Health care professionals and medical scientists are taking steps to slow the evolution of resistance in pathogens and to find new drugs. Thanks to improved understanding of microbial genetics and new techniques and technologies such as directed evolution and synthetic biology, the search for new medicines is on a sounder footing, less hit and miss.
Billions of lives are potentially at risk if we fail.
Huge potential in material science and nanotechnology. I.e surfaces that actively reduce micro load (i.e. Copper) or more advanced materials they by the very nature of their ( ano) shape do not allow micro owls to reproduce.
Sorry for the garboled typos. Interpolate and it will make sense.
{If your gargoyled typo’s had bad breath, would you require they be gargled garboyled before climbing down? .mod]
I was able to do so.
Micro owls are a big problem.
Are these the micro owls you are referring to?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmy_owl
Anus shaped micro owls is world´s #1 problem.
Urederra,
It is a problem in Spanish: ano vs año. Can also be a problem in English if you do things per anum instead of per annum.
Yes, antibiotic materials are also promising. It might be harder for microbes to evolve resistance to such substances and surfaces than to chemical or biological agents of control.
Moreover, it means less chance for propagation. I.e, surfaces actively prohibit reproduction as opposed to depending on questionable sterilization practices.
We’ll still need to keep using sterile procedure, in case microbes adapt to antibiotic surfaces.
But, yes, new materials will make important contributions in fighting untreatable infections.
Antibacterials claim to kill 99.9% of germs. If you ask me, it’s the 0.1% they don’t kill that you need to worry about.
The problem is that the number of pathogenic strains resistant to all available antibiotics is growing.
Evolution in microbes, with 20 minute generation times, is very rapid.
I remember my Grandma on the farm after I had milked the cow and hand separated the milk/cream, would put a silver dollar in the milk can and leave the whole can in the root cellar since that was supposed to be able to stop bacteria from growing. The cream went in the fridge for further refining into butter/cheese. My gut feeling is that there is truth to this. I own shares in a health company that has been developing all kinds of silver based nano based tech, so no doubt that copper/silver and probably lots of other materials are making things bug resistant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_uses_of_silver#Antibacterial_cream
Thanks Chimp…Looks like maybe I should sell the stock. Based on the Wiki article, silver antibacterial cream and bandages etc, aren’t all they are hyped to be even though the FDA have approved some so far.
Ron,
Ineffectiveness alone might not justify selling stock. Many have been sold on colloidal silver by such pitchmen as Alex Jones, so the market might still be growing.
+1000. Incomparably more dangerous (and plausible) than CAGW.
@ Chimp May 8, 2017 at 1:20 pm: The resistance/dirty water syndrome comes back to poverty. In 1800 our ancestors were 90%+ poor. But the fruits of science enabled a huge change by 1900. Looking at what happened we see that a growing resistance to the corruption of family preference slowly allowed better distribution of wealth. Some may not like this, but it was the basic Christian premise that we are all equal, being descended from the same folk, which facilitated this (hence Magna Carta). Starting with freeing all slaves over some decades. Literacy and a decision to refrain from violence made by the Chartists after ‘Peterloo’ in the West’s leading society, meant poor people could rise by peaceful cooperation and education. They could thus increase their economic heft, at 1st as groups, then individually. Because the rising middle class came from poorer parents, votes and voting trends favoured societal improvement.
A snowball of incredible progress, viewed from here. It is not the way of Warmism, however.
Capitalism is responsible for the huge increase in wealth since the 18th century, when it began to replace mercantilism, which replaced feudalism.
First there was rapid population growth, thanks to more wealth and such advances as public health, ie clean water, thanks in part to Dr. Snow’s discovery that cholera was a waterborne disease, and later, sterile surgery.
Then, as people learned that they didn’t need to have ten kids for two to survive, population stabilized, due to the phenomenon of demographic transition, which happens naturally. It doesn’t require tyrannical intervention, as China has only just now realized.
“The concept of irony appears to be lost on his critics.”
Irony is often a strange concept to folks on the left of the political spectrum. They can’t conceive of anything being as but what they imagine. That is why they can’t believe that there is anything amiss with the global warming hypothesis. To admit such would cause their whole conceptual house of cards to collapse.
Mumbles,
You said, “They can’t conceive of anything being as but what they imagine.” That has certainly been my experience with liberals attacking me on The Conversation blog. They accuse me of things that they think I believe and do without any evidence except a brief statement from me commenting on an article. Therefore, I had similarly concluded that one of the characterizing traits of hard-core liberals was a binary view of the world and an incapacity to imagine anything in between their world view and that which they think are their conservative ‘enemies.’ It is a sad commentary on their closed minds that they defend their liberalism with the ferocity of someone who has just had their religious beliefs attacked by a heretic.
I had a similar experience with a friend who’s a kind of journalist/PR person. My youngest son had just started an apprenticeship with a local firm with a big name. I didn’t think it was really his thing, but didn’t say anything negative at all, and just praised him for getting the place (200 applicants for 4 slots) and told him to do his best. Over drinks, the friend pressed me for my views, and when I hesitated, stated ‘You just think……’. I replied that it was interesting to be told what I thought when I hadn’t said a word on the subject. Result: silence, and pained expression.
Arguing logically with liberals is like playing chess with a pigeon; he’ll knock over all the pieces, strut around, crap on the board and say “he’s won!” Gear your argument to the emotions of a 3-year-old child and you might have at least a chance of getting heard. For some reason these people WANT to believe the world is ending and it’s all their fault. I think at this point we need to ignore them–don’t click, don’t retweet, don’t give them a platform to rant their apocalyptic nonsense. Goes double for bimbo (male and female) “celebrities” with the IQ of a garden snail.
they are weak minded robots desperately virtue signaling in the hopes that nobody will accuse them of some “terrible” fault (usually one of the -ism’s )
@ Clyde Spencer
May 8, 2017 at 2:36 pm: Yes, it is just another leftist sounding-board, which disallows contrary facts or opinions.
“He used the Hillary Clinton campaign as an example; in his view, certainty of victory was one factor in her defeat.”
Absolutely. The messenger hypocrisy, inability of the climate models to predict and doomsday prophesies that are proven wrong time and time again will be their own undoing. Sometimes people will listen better to a whisper than yelling. People eventually smell the rat, see who is receiving the monies and are turned off forever. People forgive mistakes, not outright lies.
When Hillary referred to many of the people who supported Trumps as being deplorable, it may have caused a great cheer from the ranks of the faithful (who were going to vote for her anyway), but it turned off many moderate voters/
It was an own goal for sure.
She thought she could win without the deplorables.
Voters in FL, PA, OH, MI, WI and IA showed her wrong.
I beg to differ, Duncan. Look at how many people voted for Bernie. 100 years have proved that Socialism is not only a failure, but also one of the great evils on this earth.
Jon, I am center-right on my politics. At the end of the day, it takes all types to make this world go around. What would art be without the free spirited type persons? Life would be boring. It is your neighbor that you drink beer with who voted for Bernie, do you hate your neighbor? Just injecting a little counter-sight. Even your Democracy is a ‘social’ Democracy – you pay taxes to the benefit of the people’s right?
Bernie supporters do not drink beer. They drink Merlot
Bernie wasn’t and isn’t a free spirit … he is a evil man slouching towards death and irrelevance …
Duncan,
One example of what the Democrats do: Here in Texas, the state police (Department of Public Safety) released a report in 2014. They had a program that tracked the crimes committed by foreign nationals here illegally. From 2008 through May of 2014, that group committed some 10,000 plus homicides and sexual assaults. I think that would qualify as an epidemic of rape and murder. And that epidemic was and is a direct result of the Democrat agenda. Every one who has voted Democrat bears some responsibility for it. In truth, however, most didn’t know what they have done.
Curiously , my Father was in the Occupation forces in Germany after WW2. The German people for the most part, said that they didn’t know what was going on,, just the same as Democrats voters today. So, the military took bus loads of them for tours through the death camps. My Father was stationed in Munich, so their tours were through Dachau. I am NOT equating Democrats to NAZIs. But I am comparing the ignorance of the average Democrat to the ignorance of the average German.
So, for the poor Hispanics who are suffering this “epidemic”, do you think that having a daughter raped or a son murdered a suitable sacrifice for them to make? Do you think that your next door neighbor Democrat is willing to make that sacrifice? Or is that sacrifice only for little people?
You might ask yourself “Self, the saying is “if it bleeds it leads” so why didn’t I know about this epidemic of rape and murder?”
Here is an excerpt from the report; I can send you the whole thing if you want.
2. Criminal Aliens in Texas and the United States
Criminal aliens are foreign nationals who are arrested on criminal charges in Texas. In Texas, these criminal aliens can be measured through arrests; and identified through the Secure Communities initiative, and as individuals who have been incarcerated in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
From October 2008 to April 2014, Texas identified a total 177,588 unique criminal alien defendants booked into Texas county jails. These individuals have been identified through the Secure Communities initiative, in which Texas has participated since October 2008. A review of these 177,588 defendants shows that they are responsible for at least 611,234 individual criminal charges over their criminal careers, including 2,993 homicides and 7,695 sexual assaults. Note that these numbers include only those aliens whose fingerprints were already in the federal system when they were booked, and it does not necessarily include all those who are incarcerated in federal prison.
Voting to enslave your fellow citizens is not just another form of art. It’s an evil act.
Those who support evil may manage to convince themselves that they are justified in stealing from people who have too much, but they are still stealing.
Mark,Jon
I am not sure how we got from me saying essentially ‘love thy neighbor’ (with differing opinions or view points, free spirit or otherwise) to thinking I am supporting, evil, rape, murders, enslavement, etc. I (already) agree with points you’ve guys made but you’ve made it into a Straw Man argument, I never said or defended any of these things. Guys need to chill out a little, this was sorta my point in the fist place. We’re still on the same team at the end of the day.
@jon Jewitt. I grew up in Texas. Went to law school there. Practiced there for 20 years. In 1980 we had the Reagan revolution that took over Texas. Everything since in Texas has been run by Republicans. Republicans need to own what has happened to Texas. I dealt with the abominable laws Republicans passed in Texas for 20 years.
Take some responsibility for what Republican laws and rule have done. The war on drugs is a Republican idea. Democrats don’t like those laws. Despite what a number of commenters here have said, in my experience it is Republican legislators and Republican judges who take away the rights of citizens far more often the Democratic legislators and judges do.
Republicans revere the second amendment and pretty much give lip service to the rest except the religion clause of the first amendment.
Buck up and take some responsibility for Texas sad state of affairs, especially its health care crisis.
As bad as the ACA was, and it was bad, the ACHA will be ten times worse.
And all of you who don’t like social programs, give up your social security and all those diplomas you got from public schools. Sounds like most of those diplomas are worthless any way.
They were so sure they were going to win, they didnt even bother stuffing ballots in too many places…
The real biggest threat is the central banking oligarchy and their agenda for global dystopic, Marxist government.
CAGW is of course designed as a wealth redistribution tool and to gain extreme political and economic control over every aspect of our lives. It is a proto-infrastructure for global governance.
In order to push through global government they need to destroy the current systems of dominance that could resist, such as the West cultural and economic dominance, in particular the US.
This is why they’re eroding the west on economic fronts with the engineered credit crisis, over-regulation and CAGW, and societal cultural fronts with Marxism, feminism and the associated increasing totalitarian-related legislation.
This is why they’ve taken over academia to raise the next generation to be obedient, weak communists.
They need to destroy the family as their ultimate strategy is ‘divide and conquer’. Family forms the backbone of societal cohesion and confusing traditional gender roles, masculinising women, feminising men serves to make male/female relationships and marriage difficult to form leading to less families and a fragmented society. Children have less parental influence as a result and are more subject to state brainwashing.
They also need to destroy religion as devotion to God before the state is intolerable to them, especially a God that promotes individual rights and traditional family values.
They defend Islam because this is required to nurture the destabilisation agenda. They flooded the West with immigrants, most single males to destabilise economically and create civil tension. They let Muslims get away with much because they need to promote as much tension and chaos as possible..
So ‘divide and Conquer’ and ‘Order out of chaos’ are their mottos. when sufficient chaos and strife has occurred they will pull a League of Nations/UN trick and claim we need a world government to make sure this will never happen again.
They have no qualms about break many, many eggs to make their global dystopic omelette and they’re the biggest threat humanity has ever faced.
of course there’s always the possibility that their altruistic in intent and believe they’re creating a better world but I doubt it.
The nut cases are out today.
Here is your backup for you view. Your welcome(non sarc).
IPCC official, Ottmar Edenhofer, speaking in November 2010: “But one must say clearly that we redistribute, de facto, the world’s wealth by climate policy. … one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute, de facto, the world’s wealth…” “This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy, anymore.” http://www.nzzDOTch/aktuell/startseite/klimapolitik-verteilt-das-weltvermoegen-neu-1.8373227
22Jan2015”At a news conference [22Jan2015] in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity, but to destroy capitalism. “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said . Referring to a new international treaty environmentalists hope will be adopted at the Paris climate change conference later this year, she added: “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”
Sabre, yes. We have spent $20 trillion to destroy the black family. (It was called the war on poverty.)
sabretruthtiger,
I can agree with most of what you said, but the concept that those hyper wealthy psychopathic elite types actually intend to establish a Marxist state is downright silliness to me. They might market what they have in mind as that (with your help!) but that ain’t the plan, I’m very sure.
The central bankers are fascists not Marxist but enjoy your hatred of everything left.
So that is why they funded Hillary and Not Trump.
It appears that increasing CO2 is decreasing infant mortality –
http://blogs.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/infant-mortality.jpg
You missed the ‘greens’ point, they are trying to reverse this trend.
+8 billion.
I’m afraid to consider your comment, as correct.
But sadly, you could easily create an argument that would support that contention.
This comes close to actually making me feel physically ill, considering that to be the case.
The greens would improve that trend by counting the abortions as well.
The Chimp beat me to it!
Someone else posted this video months ago. Great visualization of lifespan increase with the industrial revolution (aka CO2). With my comment above, should have added a /sarc tag but it could be that serious for some zealots.
Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes.
No surprise for the BBC that capitalism didn’t get mentioned among the causes of increased health and wealth.
Very unfortunately, Hans Rosling recently passed away due to Hep C and pancreatic cancer. He opened many minds and one could never argue with his conclusions once one saw the real “facts”. Something like global warming in a way.
Bill, thanks for the info on Hans, unfortunate, such free life. Agreed, his method of education, just the facts, will be missed. God speed Hans.
It appears that increasing CO2 is decreasing infant mortality – (^__^)
… or is it that decreasing infant mortality is increasing CO2?
More people breathing the air sucks more oxygen out of the atmosphere, while pumping more waste exhalations into the atmosphere, thereby upping CO2 concentration. Yeah, that’s gotta be it !
“More people breathing the air sucks more oxygen out of the atmosphere..”
You reminded me of another inconvenient CO2 anti-correlation for the shyster Paul Ehrlichs of the world to choke on, population growth rate is slowing down and projected to continue slowing down –
(Frankly I think that is pessimistic; I expect it to be going negative by 2070 if we can end CAGW mass psychosis sooner than later.)
With the population set to stabilise in 2050 then decline thereafter (if we keep getting wealthier), we can also note that the increase in electricity prices is driving down consumption, especially by industry.
https://mg.co.za/article/2017-04-29-court-ruling-on-zumas-nuclear-deal-is-a-marker-of-south-africas-political-health
That is a Mail and Guardian article on the courts mixing President Zuma’s ‘contracts for buddies’ in the form of a nuclear power plant deal with Rosatom. In the article the decline in consumption is noted, as is the lower cost of coal power which South Africa has lots of now.
The article picks at the scab of the capture of the state by the Gupta family, but not at the capture by Big Green which also has its hooks in deep.
2050 was the most recent UN “estimate”. Every 10 years they come out with a new “estimate” and every ten years the turnover point gets earlier.
The reason for the over estimates is because of bad assumptions built into the model. First that those countries whose rates are above replacement and falling, will stabilize right at the replacement level. Secondly, that countries below replacement level will return to replacement levels.
Neither has happened yet, and no reason to assume either will happen in the next few decades.
Forrest…you are so right. And probably exceedingly unfortunate that CO2 just happened to be going up at the same time the planet had some minor warming. If warming had been flat, I would think that it possible that there never would have been an issue with a colorless, odorless trace atmospheric gas called CO2. It appears there was a mix up with soot from coal and diesel, and smog in the cities. Something that people can see, but also something that we were able to mostly reduce or eliminate.
better infant mortality rates are easier when you abort millions of them before they are classified as infants … 🙁
If that doesn’t work, you can just reclassify what counts as a live birth in order to improve your numbers.s
In many European countries, any baby that dies in the first 24 hours after delivery is counted as a still birth rather than an infant death. In other countries the baby has to be above a certain weight at birth in order to qualify as a live birth.
I think you are forgetting that minor planetary cooling from 1945 to 1975 was also blamed on fossil fuels. Plus we had a phoney acid rain scare blamed on fossil fuel power. The anti-capitalist agenda is hugely adaptable.
JasG
You are right: cooling is caused by large scale burning of coal, and warming is caused by large scale burning of coal, and flat temps is caused by large scale burning of coal that balances sulfate particles with CO2.
That being the case(s) all we have to do is promote the burning of the right sort of coal in the right manner to set the global thermostat wherever we like, right?
Who knew it could be so simple!
More than correlation, this is linked causation. More energy = living more fully human = ability to protect our children. For me, the pan-global and persistent decline in infant morttality over the past 200 years is 100% attributable to increased exploitation of energy.
Yes, you are correct, in two ways. Increased energy (that releases sequestered CO2 in the process) is related to an increased standard of living which directly reduces infant mortality. And also the CO2 decreases infant mortality by providing more food.
I would say the greatest threat to the world is the growing ignorance in the civilized world. It is because of the growing ignorance that tyranny and poverty can still exist. Almost as bad is the closed mindset that permeates virtually the entire western civilization now, basically, of course, from the educational priorities that has created the ignorance to start with. It is leading the race in a downward spiral that instead of reaching for the stars, is pushing us towards a return to Neanderthal thought processes.
This is by design. “Education” on any number of subjects is little more than left-wing indoctrination today. How can they claim to be all about “science” while pushing “gender theory,” and trying to recruit children as young as 3 into the normalization of other-than-natural “sexual identities?” Dumb it down any more, and we’ll have multiple generations who think a “smartphone” is “life” and who utterly lack the ability to think critically for themselves about anything–they’ll be consumers of whatever “content” exists, and that’s all.
World Poverty? How exactly do you measure that? It is a relativistic adjective. Even the poverty stricken in the US are in the worlds top 2% of affluence.
IMHO stupidity is the world’s biggest problem. Ignorance can eventually be overcome by those with intelligence, but stupidity persists. If only we would stop enabling and protecting it….
There is only one cure for stupidity, unfortunately.
Everyone should read Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. That’s the only cogent explanation I’ve ever had for the apparent utter inability of large portions of the human race to see the impending outcomes of their actions, be they “subway surfing,” “BASE jumping,” or unprotected casual sex. You can’t fix Stupid, and a surprising percentage of the human species has an IQ south of 80; that’s just the way it is. Pity we can’t talk about it without Antifa starting a riot.
The facts are even more awful, as there are many people with dazzling IQs who are somehow genuinely seduced by the left view of the world. The tendency seems related to personality rather than learning potential. Oddly, it is possible to be an avid and successful learner within a crazy world view. This is a salient lesson for us all.
IQ is not a measure of wisdom … never has, never will be …
I’ve mentioned my brother. Mensa quality mind, but don’t leave him alone with power tools.
To believe that climate change is the number 1 problem, you need to believe that there is a specific climate model that can accurately predict future weather AND that there is a specific economic model that accurately predicts the future economy.
We know that the accurate economic model does not exist because anyone who possessed it would have the secret to making a vast fortune buying and selling stocks and commodities. Actually, just having an accurate climate model would be enough to make a fortune in agricultural commodity speculation.
Should we be prepare for global warming? OR global cooling? Which causes the greatest hardships?
ICE AGE BRITAIN: River Thames will FREEZE OVER on ‘this date’ – and could kill millions
Solar activity is running lower than previous predictions!
Forrest Gardener
Referring to the dangers of cooling such as Finland loosing 1/3 of its population during the Great Famine of 1695-97 (not the lemming dash to the sea.)
How about an anonymous, professional columnist with no labels?
Geologists in Texas are more likely to “fear” Federal regulatory malfeasance more than huge earthquakes and Yellowstone super-eruptions, combined.
The bolded sentence follows the same principle as the key claim in Doran & Kendall Zimmerman: “Experts” usually magnify the importance and/or validity of the subject matter with which they are most familiar.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2009EO030002/epdf
One of the most frequent refrains is the assertion that “climate scientists” endorse the so-called consensus more than other disciplines and that the level of endorsement is proportional to the volume of publications by those climate scientists. Well… No schist, Sherlock! I would bet a good bottle of wine that the most voluminous publishers on UFO’s are disproportionately more likely to endorse Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a documentary. A cursory search for “abiogenic hydrocarbons” in AAPG’s Datapages could lead me to conclude that there is a higher level of endorsement of abiogenic oil among those who publish on the subject than among non-publishing petroleum geologists.
Here in Washington State, the Oso slide was “completely unforeseen!!” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Oso_mudslide) Yeah, right–politics and money were the real problems. It depends on which geologists and engineers you ask.
I have a friend who has property on the Sauk River, and we drive by the slide area a couple of times a year. It’s quite something to see.
Jim
I believe the biggest threat to most of the developed world is over-reliance on technology. Vast percentages of vulnerable humans would turn into Zombies after a few days without power and the Internet….. Just saying, most folks who seem brave over the internet turn into pussbags in real life when forced out from behind that curtain.
Let alone the censorship/fake news/disinformation initiative happening with internet power brokers. Just look at Facebook and what they are doing in the UK before the elections as an example.
Reliance on transport is a threat comparable to electrical power. Most cities in the developing world would run out of food in a few days without modern transportation systems. If a collapse of power and transport occurred in NH winter, megadeaths would rapidly result.
This is just one reason why the Norks must not be allowed to develop an EMP weapon. China’s economy would also collapse without exports to the West, especially the US.
Over the years the US has made promises to NK if they would drop their nuke bomb programs. Such as food assistance and help with NK nuke power plants for electricity. The US backed out of every promise after NK gave up their bomb research and other military stuff. You now see the result as NK went back to bombs after being repeatedly shafted by the US. Also, in NK the military helps with crop planting and harvesting. For many years now the US and South Korea hold joint military exercises in SK at planting and harvesting times that result in NK keeping it’s military at readiness and out of the fields.
[??? .mod]
I need to point out the communist-socialist states you are propagandizing for have murdered some 120 million people since the 1917 revolution. Yes, the United States is right in opposing communism worldwide.
Again, your ignorance is manifest. The US did not “back out” of any deal. NK violated every agreement!
But when all you have is hate, I guess your view of the world is binary. Bad must be the US fault. Ignore the fact that NK has nukes now. Ignore the fact that they are not created over night. Ignore the fact that Un is a meglomaniac that even their staunchest allies think is a fruit loop. The irrational hate explains it all.
ossqss and Chimp,
And, interestingly, a Carrington Event, such as happened in 1859, would shut down electricity and vehicles and isn’t even on the list of the 30 most feared items supplied by Middleton. If we had to go for months without heat and food, those surviving would probably welcome a warmer climate.
Since NK never slowed down, much less gave up their nuclear bomb program, you are delusional.
PS: It’s a really sad country in which the military needs to help with the harvest, otherwise people starve.
How do most folks pump gas without power. Just sayin, manually , and after a short while, the ethanol goes bad in the US.
My comment was more towards our dependence on tech for every day life. No tech, no life for many.
“Oh the Pain” with out a Keurig, eh?
So Schmedly believes Venezuela and North Korea would be successful regimes, Utopian, if not for the USA.
Really?
No one could really believe such absurdity.
This odd fellow is either being overtly provocative or …
(The Latter I think is most likely.)
… or he’s showing his ignorance.
(The “latter” missing above.)
..Robroy, I think the word you are looking for is “INSANE” ?
snedly arkus May 8, 2017 at 2:36 pm
You have that back@rseward. Is there any Loony Left Lie for which you won’t fall?
http://nypost.com/2016/01/06/you-can-thank-jimmy-carter-and-bill-clinton-for-north-koreas-nukes/
The Nork Kimdom regime used the threat of nuclear weapons to blackmail the West into supporting their tyranny, which has impoverished their subject people, Gullible dupes Carter and Clinton fell for the sc@m, gave them all they asked for, but of course the Norks went ahead with the development program anyway.
As will Iran, thanks to President Obama. Another not-Treaty.
There’s no escape, even the Amish are on Facebook. We’re all doomed!
Probably not ALL Amish. Even so, their agrarian lifestyle would favor them for survival in the event of an infrastructure collapse.
snedly arkus. I think that you make the most stupid, illogical, and untrue comments I have ever seen on here.
Common sense and wisdom have disappeared from the social discourse. People have understood the hazards of certainty since forever. Here are a couple of examples.
and
One of the main themes of Greek mythology was hubris.
The only place in post secondary education where I am aware that such wisdom is explicitly taught is in the colleges of engineering. In professional practice and ethics courses, engineers are taught to stick to their areas of competence.
“People have understood the hazards of uncertainty forever”
Oh really?
I fail to see your point.
Are you upset that people can agree that human activity has caused a small increase in warming, without agreeing that we need to end the use of fossil fuels?
I think you read wrong. The hazard is certainty.
One of the stupidities of post-modernism is this idea that we can ever really be “safe.” “Safe” from each other’s avarice, from natural disasters, from heating cooling tornadoes asteroids or earthquakes. This is a very 21st-century notion, the idea that being “safe” is some kind of a human right. Ask my ancestors who buried most of their children before the age of 5, or whose country was overrun by invading armies on a regular basis for 500 years! Prior to modern times most lives were short, brutish and nasty but don’t tell the Utopian transcendentalists who think if we just embrace “diversity” and “sustainability” all would be well!
Foot in mouth. Read wrong, as you say. Dang.
Actually Goldrider, I think we have to blame baseball. Think about it. Nearly every kid in the US, Japan, the Caribbean,and some other places too grows up playing a game with the main object of being “safe” at “home.” 😉 😉 😉
Perhaps journalists should spend more time talking amongst themselves.
Most of what “journalists” do is to impress each other and further their own careers, not inform the public.
If “journalists” capture the attention of your eyeballs for 10-30 minutes, they have earned their paycheck in the eyes of the advertisers paying them to capture same. Informing the public, educating the public, or presenting a balanced view of anything not to count. It’s just all about Getting Your Attention.
They do and they all agree with each other and freeze out anyone who disagrees.
The headline doesn’t surprise me at all. Microbiologists share something very important with, say, synthetic chemists:
Their science regularly teaches them the humility that comes from being wrong. More importantly, it teaches them that quite quickly. Many climate scientists will go to their grave not having learned how many of their good ideas were actually bad ideas, bad in the sense that bad ideas don’t reflect what actually happens in the real world.
Microbiologists might get smacked on the wrists by reality in a few days or weeks. Chemists can often suffer the same agony in hours. Both sets can learn and move on, without having to resort to models in order to prove that they are right and reality is wrong.
Absolutely Michael – right on the money. As a synthetic chemist once upon a time, how many times did I go into the lab in the morning expecting a 99% yield reaction, yet finding a charred black mass in the flask? Certainly double figures. The so-called climate “scientists” can’t, or simply don’t want to admit that Arrhenius, 1896, and the “simple physics” blather are failed conjectures, or they don’t have the ability to understand the frequency with which Mother Nature will slap a scientist down.
I’ve done my own fair share of synthesis, Phil, and know exactly what you’re talking about. Nitrogen compounds usually produced a red/black tar. 🙂
Regarding the climate modeler syndrome, my experience with them — now well over a dozen — is that they have no understanding at all of physical error analysis.
They don’t know the meaning of a calibration experiment, or the impact and meaning of calibration error. They have no idea at all of how to evaluate the physical reliability of their own models.
Sound like hyperbole? It’s not.
Hence the consensus of certainty.
Right Pat. DNA chemistry does involve a fair bit of nitrogen-based “issues”.
Because they, ostrich-like, don’t feel like they have to address the actual, real, tough, question(s), they have to chant slogans that you could teach a parrot to speak. Even going on silly marches to chant them.
How about building a piece of equipment to actually measure the back-radiation from CO2 at 280 ppm and variable water vapor (up to 40,000 ppm), and then CO2 at 400 ppm and then variable water vapor (up to 40,000 ppm). That could probably be built for well less than a $ Million, I’m sure. Probably throw in some convection too, even. These f-wits wouldn’t know an experiment if it bit them in the @ss.
If you are to believe the latest issue of Discover…… [and their fear mongering cover] (NASA) scientists are predicting best case sea level rise of 1 foot by 2100, worst case 8 foot rise. —-Isn’t 1 foot kinda “normal” or expected?” I don’t see this on the list of things to worry about [I guess it is a only subset of Global Warming]. They have the requiste pictures of inundations of NY, etc. of course. All because of the glaciers in Antarctica melting. I must say it is VERY hard for a normal person to keep his sanity with all this “information.” Somebody please put my mind to rest…. please….
John
Best case assumes that the sea level rise of the last 400 years will continue.
Actually if we have a Dalton minimum like cool snap, SLR will drop dramatically.
7 inches is normal and expected @ 1.7mm/year
A number of women have told me that 5.5 inches is normal, but maybe they were just being kind.
Sorry to break the news Chimp, but they were talking about girth.
ah, chimp- don’t fall for those half-truths.
;}
When asked, I always answer “long enough”.
“Adequate for the purposes intended.”
The Malthusian option: Food or Ethanol? A Limerick with explanation.
When EPA regulates, they are but slobs;
No thought what effect it will have on our jobs. (1)
You want food? You want fuel?(2)
The one choice is too cruel. (3)
A Malthusian choice, that’s why Mother Earth sobs. (4)
https://lenbilen.com/2012/02/12/the-malthusian-option-food-or-ethanol-a-limerick-with-explanation/
I believe the biggest threat to human kind is nuclear war. There are people inside the US military who really believe that we can win a “limited” nuclear war. I believe no nuclear war will stay “limited” and that a full exchange of nuclear weapons will end human life on this planet — or, at least, set us back to the stone age.
Oh, and what did the author mean by “fringe libertarian club”? it was Classical Liberalism that built industrial western civilization and we now must call that belief system “libertarian” since the socialists stole the name “liberal” over a century ago. See here for what Classical Liberalism meant: https://mises.org/library/what-classical-liberalism
Even if every single nuclear weapon on the planet were exploded over cities, which is not how they’re intended to be used, it couldn’t end human life.
The main use of strategic nukes is to deter their use by others. Since no adequate regime for verification of elimination of nukes is possible, we’re stuck with them. Tactical use wouldn’t necessarily lead to an all-out exchange.
You clearly know nothing about American nuclear doctrine. We more than anyone have sought conventional alternatives to tac nukes. We’ve gotten rid of all tac nukes, except for some strategic bombs which could be dialed down to lower yields.
Meanwhile, Russia and China have acquired ever more numerous and capable tac nukes. Russia ostensibly withdrew its stockpile of nuclear artillery and tactical missile warheads after the US did in the 1990s, but is now building and fielding a new generation of tac nukes. Every Russian submarine carries nuclear torpedoes.
Wouldn’t a nuclear torpedo be suicide for the sub that launched it?
No. Nuclear torpedoes are low-yield and typically travel a long way before detonating.
The power of tactical nukes is widely misunderstood.
That said, the joke for crews of the jeep-mounted Davy Crockett atomic recoilless rifle was that it was the only weapon with a Kill Probability of 2.0.
And you are just wrong. News of generals who think we can “win” are credible.
And if every nuclear weapon was exploded, I suppose you think there would be no damage to the planet from the radiation? Really? No damage to humans from the radiation? Plus, the idea of a “nuclear winter” has never been disproved.
You list your top worry, I listed mine. But please, keep your ignorance to yourself.
Radiation is bad, but not as bad as many try to paint it.
And yes, nuclear winter has been disproven. Mere fires can’t loft material into the stratosphere.
If the NK launched against the US, and the US obliterated the country, why do you believe China and Russia would feel the need to get involved?
Clearly, they wouldn’t. The Norks just aren’t that important to China and even less so to Russia nowadays.
Besides which, we could obliterate everything that mattered in the DPRK without nukes, although Trump might prefer that route. We wouldn’t need to obliterate the whole, poor, suffering country. I’m giving away no secrets by pointing out that our target sets are 1) political and military leadership, 2) nuclear infrastructure, 3) command, control, transportation and selected energy grid and 4) general military, especially those threatening South Korea most directly.
High on the list of the latter category of course are the 15,000 artillery tubes trained on the border, and Seoul in particular. Given six-tube batteries, that’s about 2500 aimpoints, once the guns and rockets are rolled out of their tunnels. IOW, some 300 US and SK F-16s and F-18s, each with eight cluster bombs, could solve that problem in one pass.
“High on the list of the latter category of course are the 15,000 artillery tubes trained on the border, and Seoul in particular.”
Chimp, my favorite retired American Air Force General said last week that it would require about 30 MOAB’s to destroy the North Korean artllery stationed along the North/South Korean border.
U.S. B2 stealth bombers can carry at least two MOABs each, so 15 B2’s are required for this attack. Sounds doable to me.
TA,
B-2 can just barely carry two MOABs, but we built only 15 of the bombs, of which 14 remain. The line could be reopened, however. We have 20 B-2s, of which 15 might be operational at any one time.
Dunno which USAF general that was, but his statement doesn’t compute. The 2500 or so artillery batteries would be too spread out for just 30 MOABs to destroy all of them. Maybe he was talking about taking out those which most threaten Seoul, or attacking command and control nodes for the tunnels in which they are stored.
Maybe the general was planning on taking out the 30 tunnels closest to Seoul.
If there are, as once estimated, 200 to 500 such tunnels, each would contain 30 to 75 tubes, ie about a regiment each (typically 54 tubes in three battalions, each of three batteries). Heavy and rocket artillery units may differ.
B-52s loaded with 70,000 pounds of dumb ordnance could also carpet bomb the DMZ, a la Arc Light missions of yore.
To save face, just because your cousin is a nutcase, your mother will get upset if you dont protect him from bullies…
“B-52s loaded with 70,000 pounds of dumb ordnance could also carpet bomb the DMZ, a la Arc Light missions of yore.”
That works, too. 🙂
It was Lt. General Tom McInerney, Chimp.
“I believe the biggest threat to human kind is nuclear war. There are people inside the US military who really believe that we can win a “limited” nuclear war.”
There are military people in China and Russia saying the same thing. They think they can limit any damage to themselves by intimidating their foes with a small-scale nuclear strike.
We should make clear to them that we don’t recognize a small-scale nuclear strike, we will have to assume it is an all-out nuclear attack and will respond accordingly. We are not going to wait around to see if they are going to stop shooting at us.
As a geologist who lives in the northwest, I can tell you that I worry not a fig about a large earthquake. I do however worry about drilling a hole in the ground and it being a duster. And then getting fired because my science was incorrect. And then going broke because my science was incorrect. And not feeding my kids because my science was incorrect.
I long for a job where the science is not provable within my lifetime but the paychecks and pension checks just keep showing up until the end of my days. What a dream job! Like being an uncle; all the fun and none of the responsibility.
+1,000
The sad thing about dusters is that the science was usually right. Most dry holes are “geological successes”… 😉
Why not become an academic? You can be as wrong and incompetent as you like, and not lose tenure. Just ask Paul Ehrlich.
And get rich!
One might want to worry about links put out by Sigma Xi, supposed to be the best of science.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-long-running-study-finds-peoples-characters-dont-remain-fixed/
Let’s see, great way to study something, first have teacher do it, then you do it decades later. But there is sense out there somewhere because–“Nate Hudson, a social psychologist at Michigan State University who was not involved in the study, points out that the lack of personality stability could be an artifact of having different people rate the participants”
But this one must be genuine because—“Jagai and her team also warn that a bill introduced in February to terminate the Environmental Protection Agency, which provided the environmental data used in the study, will severely harm researchers’ abilities to further investigate the factors that contribute to disease.”
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2130086-increased-cancer-rate-in-us-linked-to-bad-environment/
1.3 billion people live without electricity? Yeah? Does that include the Amish/Mennonite communities who, when the world didn’t end in 2000AD as they believed would happen, still decided to abstain from electricity?
Are you aware that until 1925, housing was commonly NOT wired for electrical usage in general? Seriously, there is a huge flaw in that statement alone. People survived quite well for multiple millenia without electricity. I have two antique oil lamps that provide more than adequate lighting to do things if the power goes out. I’m hardly left in the dark, and no, I do not have a working TV, haven’t since 2012. Don’t want one. That doesn’t mean I’m bereft of the latest headlines or don’t know where to find the best prices for grocery shopping. I have a daily paper delivered to my front door. Wednesdays are the day the sale papers appear in my mailbox, no electricity involved at all.
Living without electricity does NOT make anyone poverty-stricken. I’m surprised at anyone saying that living without it makes you automatically poverty-stricken. That is just not true. Poverty is more a state of mind than an economic level.
The problem is that now billions are reliant on electricity through grids, without adequate backup alternatives.
Sara, think of the millions who live in apartments, inner city slums, hospitals, nursing homes, trailer parks, and all the big cities in the US. The death rates without electricity would be catastrophic. And things would get worse over time with, the breakdown in law enforcement, roving packs of looters and killers, lack of water supplies, sewage collection, transport and treatment, lack of medical care, mass starvation, pandemic diseases, and the failure of many other things.
The entire infrastructure that provides your groceries, newspapers, lamps and even roads, it’s entirely dependent upon electricity. You are rich enough (as a society) to be able to afford decent living conditions without much electricity, simply because the society on which you depend has adequate and cheap electricity.
‘afford decent living conditions’ – I think that depends on what you mean by ‘decent’. I’ve visited an Amish harness maker to get repairs done to bridles and saddles, and not only was his entire house ‘decent’, there wasn’t a power/phone line pole for miles in any direction.
Loss of infrastructure that you are used to will create a greater sense of havoc and catastrophe than it would if you were not dependent on it.
The assumption that we are only well off, and can only have ‘decent lives’ if we have electricity is incorrect. If this were 1817, you’d be wondering whether or not you could have gas piped into your home for lighting and how much it would cost to install the latest innovation, the flushable toilet.
And yet, as I said previously, it was not until 1925 that wiring houses for electricity became and common thing. It wasn’t that it was not available. It was that not everyone though it was necessary and certainly was not required.
Granted, Chimp, but there are plenty of people who are, and have been for some time, ‘off the grid’ and either do without electricity intentionally, or generate it themselves. Included in that ‘do without’ part are people whose lives are still nomadic and do not use or need electricity, and people who still live in primitive environments where no electricity is available and in many cases is not wanted. Three places I’m referring to are the Amazon basin, Mongolia where nomadic herders still move their sheep from one place to another seasonally, and parts of southeast Asia, never mind the Amish/Mennonite communities who decided to continue with their non-electricity lives. I think we could learn something from all of them.
You have a point Sara. I am accustomed to electricity and modern convenience. But I can also live completely without if need be, and am set up for it. Not that I want to go back to my cave, but I could if need be. I would probably miss the internet though, since then wouldn’t get my daily fix of WUWT. We all still need a sense of connection…belonging. Some of these ultra poor poverty stricken people are the happiest people on earth.
When I look back at my life, some of my happiest times when I was younger were when I had nothing, no electricity, and no direction home. Freed of any possessions. So, maybe the Bhutanese have it right: It’s not the GNP of a country, but the Gross National Happiness (GNH)
Ron, do you bother reading what you write? “Some of these ultra poor poverty stricken people are the happiest people on earth.”
I’ve lived there, and they ain’t happy folks. Especially when their kid gets sick, the nanny goat dries up, etc.
Sara,
I’ve lived without electricity both at home, by choice, and abroad because it wasn’t available. When I was a kid, we used a windmill to pump water and outhouses for sanitation. We cooked with wood indoors in the winter and outdoors in the summer.
But even people living off the grid in the US benefit from the fact of electricity available elsewhere. For instance, as a kid, my family had cars and farm equipment made of aluminum, smelted by electrical power from the then-under construction Columbia River dams. The world could not feed itself today without electrical power, and fossil fuels, of course.
When given the choice, most people prefer to have power. Most off the grid would like to get on it, to obtain labor-saving devices, refrigeration for food and drugs and of course TV and the Internet. Granted, cooling can be done with propane, but it’s usually delivered by a vehicle or pipeline requiring electricity, and gas pumping generally also relies on electrical power, although not always.
Sara, have you lived for a significant period of time in a Third World Country? And I don’t mean in a city apartment or country villa.
“Most off the grid would like to get on it, to obtain labor-saving devices, refrigeration for food and drugs and of course TV and the Internet.”
Chimp, you just made that up.
Nope. Having lived among people without electricity, what they want is refrigerators, even more than the Internet, about which they know little.
“Poverty is more a state of mind than an economic level …’.
=====================================
Poverty as a state of mind:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RNmdCDV4UbU/UkrNXvFVDtI/AAAAAAAAAGw/GYgc8ZQnayI/s1600/poverty.jpg
Ah, the charms of the bucolic life. Who wouldn’t want their kids to grow up (maybe) there?
The smugness of the comfortable Western mind. Neo-colonialism? Did you mean the White Man’s Burden? Let’s have a contest as to the most patronizing person on this thread. Sara? Chimp? Ron?
Thanks, Sara, you said most of what I was going to say.
To add to your comments, people who live in areas without electricity often choose to. They have decided that the lack of electricity is not the most important thing to them.
‘I told them that I believed poverty was the world’s biggest threat. The reason is poverty is the underlying condition that causes so much misery in the world. Consider that 1.3 billion people don’t have electricity. And then consider how the lack of that basic necessity — what the rest of us take completely for granted — hinders their ability to develop economically and to succeed, let alone to have access to adequate healthcare. If we fix poverty, we could stop easily preventable health problems, such as infectious disease and malnutrition.’
This is bordering on neo-colonialism. How people live is none of our business.
Those 1.3 billion also lack access to a lot of other things, due to lack of electricity.
And what if they choose to do without those things?
‘Those 1.3 billion also lack access to a lot of other things, due to lack of electricity.’
What’s your point? People live in different ways. Once you decide that your way is better, you have taken the first step towards colonialism.
They don’t live like you do. Get over it. Don’t try to ‘fix’ them.
‘If we fix poverty’ is a justification for colonialism.
Betcha those voluntarily living without electricity demand a hospital with it.
[blockquote]no electricity involved at all[/blockquote]
So you wash by hand? You go to the river to get water? Let me know how can you write here without electricity!
The Amish/Mennonites never have had a predicted date for the apocalypse.
PS: For the most part Mennonites do not shun modern conveniences, they just prefer to concentrate on a simpler lifestyle. In several of the towns I have lived in/visited, the best restaurants were run by Mennonites.
The Left has got very desperate and is grasping at straws, their hyperbolic doom mongering has alienated many, I have leftist friends and they are very idealistic, too much so IMHO and it blinds them to reality.
In my view, tyranny that displaces humanity and the right of self-determination (classical liberalism) is the greatest risk to the future of prosperity and humanity. Glimpses of a future apocalyptic vision may be seen in N.Korea, theocratic autocracies, eco-socialist bureaucracies, policy-based evidence and so on.
Specialization induced myopia is the greatest threat in learned circles. Specialization is for insects..Lazarus Long (from Robert Heinlein’s novels).
Climate change has been happening for eons, long before Mankind made use of fossil fuels. Based on the work that has been done on climate models one can conclude that the climate change we have been experiencing today is caused by the sun and the oceans over which Mankind has no control. There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate. There is no such evidence in the paleoclimate record. There is plenty of scientific rational to support the idea that the climate sensivity of CO2 is zero.
The AGW conjecture is just too full of holes to defend. One researcher found that the basic calculations of the Planck climate sensivity of CO2 ( that is the climate sensivity of CO2 not taking into consideration any feedbacks) is too great by a factor of more than 20 because those making the calculatoins forgot to include the fact that a doubling of CO2 will cause a slight but very significant lowering of the dry lapse rate in the torposphere which is a cooling effict. So instead of 1.2 degrees C, a better value for the Planck sensivity of CO2 is .06 degrees C.
Then there is the issue of feedbacks. The idea has been that CO2 based warming will cause more H2O to enter the atmosphere which will cause even more warming because H2O is the primary so called greenhouse gas. Many like to assume that H2O amplifies CO2 based warming by a factor of 3 or more. But this ignore’s the fact that H2O is a major coolant in the Earth’s atmosphere moving heat energy from the Earth’s surface to where clouds form via the heat of vaporization. According to some models, more heat energy is transported by H2O then by both LWIR absorption band radiation and convection combined. Evidence of H2O’s cooling effect is that the wet lapse rate is significantly lower than the dry lapse rate. The feedback also has to be negative for the Earth’s climate to have been stable enough for life to evolve. So a more realistic assessment of the effect of H2O is that H2O diminishes the warmiing effect of CO2 by a factor of 3 yielding climate sensivity of CO2 of .02 degrees C which is trivial.
A real greenhouse does not stay warm because of the action of heat trapping, trace gases with LWIR absorpiong bands. A real greenhouse stays warm because the glass reduces cooling by convection. It is a convective greenhouse effect and not a radiant greenhouse effect. So too on Earth. The surface of the Earth is 33 degrees warmer because of the atmosphere because gravity limits cooling by convection. The Earth’s convective greenhouse effect is a function of the heat capacity of the atmosphere, the pressure gradiant, and the depth of the troposphere. As derived from first principals the Earth’s convective greenhouse effect keeps the surface of the Earth on average 33 degrees warmer than it would otherwise be. 33 degrees C is the derived amount and 33 degrees C is what has been observed. There is no additional warmth caused by a radiant greenhouse effect. A radiant greenhouse effect has not been observed on Earth or on any planet in the solar system with a thick atmosphere. The AGW conjecture depends upon the existance of a radiant greenhouse effect but such an effect does not exist so the AGW conjecture is nothing but science fiction. If CO2 did effect climate then one would expect that the increase in CO2 over the past 30 years would have caused at least a measureable increase in the dry lapse rate in the troposphere but such has not happened.
Mankind needs to stop spending time and resources trying to solve a problem that Mankind does not have the power to solve. It would be far better to spend those same time and resources solving problems that can be solved by Mankind.
Water vapor is another part of convective heat transfer ..low molecular weight means it partially circumvents gravity. High latent heat of vaporization too. Most get lost in the albedo effect of clouds..trivial compared to enthalpy of vaporization.
Much as I like electricity I doubt it is the single thing necessary to eliminate poverty. Look at the Romans, they didn’t have wiring and look what they did for us.
True. They gave us the society and infrastructure on which to build our society and technology to the point where we could generate and use electricity.
That way we no longer have to survive on slavery to have a decent standard of living, unlike those Romans.
They also had lots of slaves.
What have the Romans ever done for us?
The number one threat to humankind is … stupidity.
The number one threat to the world, however, is an invalid concept, since the world could “care” care less.
Then it looks as if humanity had the seeds of its own destruction built in…
No.
Sounds like they are scientist that deal with science that is not restricted to staying within “the nine dots” of climate seance.
A good example.
Steve Koonin recently wrote
“The crucial scientific question for policy isn’t whether the climate is changing. That is a settled matter: The climate has always changed and always will. . . . Nor is the crucial question whether humans are influencing the climate. That is no hoax:”
Wikipedia writes
“Ten days after Koonin wrote this, Jeffrey Kluger in Time [11] called Koonin’s piece disingenuous if not dishonest. Koonin simply used the old debating trick of setting up a strawman to knock down by misconstruing what climate scientists mean when they say the climate debate is “settled.” “…they mean that the fake debate over whether climate change is a vast hoax is finished,” writes Kluger. He goes on to state that every point Koonin made is and has for years been widely acknowledged by climate scientists, very few of whom utilize the kind of overzealous language their critics commonly use.”
The climate scientists themselves may or may not use apocalyptic language, however their followers most certainly do. If wasn’t skeptics who declared that Antarctica would soon be the only continent capable of supporting life.
It wasn’t the skeptics who keep claiming that the oceans are going to rise 100 feet in a century.
PS: Hansen and Mann have certainly made their share of apocalyptic pronouncements, and most people consider them to be climate “scientists”.
Is it just me who sees the hypocrisy in the Kluger comments?
Interesting defense of Hansen.
“When I interviewed James Hansen I asked him to speculate on what the view outside his office window could look like in 40 years with doubled CO2. I’d been trying to think of a way to discuss the greenhouse effect in a way that would make sense to average readers. I wasn’t asking for hard scientific studies. It wasn’t an academic interview. It was a discussion with a kind and thoughtful man who answered the question. You can find the description in two of my books, most recently The Coming Storm.”
I just can’t wrap my mind around the “certainty” expressed by climate science practitioners related to CAGW. And the extreme lengths taken to twist data or reasoning, or to ignore or attack contrary information.
The ongoing failure of the IPCC climate models should give anyone pause. Certainly, AR5’s arbitrary cooling the near term model projections is a dead giveaway of models’ unfitness to justify fundamental changes to our societies, economies and energy systems. [I gave that one to Dr. Curry as a comment for her report to the attorneys, and she used it.]
On May 4, 2017, we have moved the sea ice processing to a new server. This implied switching to a newer version of the mapping software GMT (Generic Mapping Tools), from version 4 to version 5.
In principle, everything should stay as before, with one exception:
The newer GMT version also uses newer and more accurate Antarctic coastlines. However, we will stick with the landmask that comes with the AMSR2 satellite date as it was (though it is not entirely up to date) in order to keep the sea ice extent time series consistent.
DMI not updated yet either. Coincidental?
Forrest I go through Judy’s Blogroll to Arctic sea ice blog Daily graphs 4th graph down Arctic sea ice extent had the comment
Some graphs are very unreliable due to the proprietor and his mates but his blog seems to support up to date links
citing , Sea ice remote sensing using AMSR-E 89 GHz channels J. Geophys. Res.,vol. 113,
The other link that is broken is the DMI Daily Arctic mean temperatures north of 80NDMI seems very sensitive to political pressure and adjust their graphs down every time it seems to return to the mean, or above.
So go here for your graphs of sea ice:
https://sites.google.com/site/arcticseaicegraphs/
and don’t forget this:
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
Sea ice extent still tracking 2015/16 with only 2012 and 2007 lower – but thinner, less volume and more broken up, with much less thick/multi year ice I(and most of that heading out the Fram Strait to melt)
going to be a roller coaster ride to a record low in 2017
Yawn, you are boring, Griff.
I’m frightened Toto….
You gonna go up there and fix it are ya Griffy? Good luck to ya. Now get back to making it colder outside, spring is here and summer is comin’!
Notice the change in Griff’s story. Not long ago, it was all about how the ice extents were the lowest EVAH and that this was proof that the arctic had entered a death spiral and soon there would be no ice at all.
Now that the arctic has failed to comply with his earlier pronouncements he’s screaming that while the arctic has rebounded from the lowest levels EVAH (something he previously claimed to be impossible) the fact that ice levels are still low is proof that the death spiral is still around the corner.
Thanks Forrest, and Griff (JCH in disguise? Only joking) Griff I notice DMI is now above 3 of the 4 most recent years. Only a temporary phenomenon I guess?
IMO, the greatest direct and immediate threat to humanity is significant global cooling. Such as a volcanic event like Mt. Tambora in 1815, or Laki in 1783. If we were to miss one crop in the northern hemisphere, then all bets are off that billions wouldn’t starve or die in some type of war or calamity. Perhaps all out nuclear war would also provide this cooling, on top of the misery of the blasts themselves.
Therefore, in the scheme of things, the 1 extra degree from human induced AGW we have managed to warm the planet in the last 150 years is the best insurance policy we have. It would sure be interesting to have a peek around 18,000 YBP, when CO2 was 180 ppmv, and life itself was on the verge of extinction like the 47 species of mega fauna that did go extinct. It is obvious why humanity is doing so well now, and it is because we live in an interglacial, and a pleasant one at that. And it won’t last forever either.
I just hope we don’t find out that CO2 actually is a net cooling agent, and the extra bit of warmth we have been getting is some form of natural variation that would have warmed without us. In the final analysis, a warming world is better than a cooling world, so I am at odds to understand what the fuss is about with a little bit of a warmer world.
You have to understand something about farm commodities. Prior to modern storage methods, the grain and livestock available to the consumer market had more to do with getting those items (wheat, corn, cattle, hogs) to their respective markets in the cities than anything else, and yes, weather was an important factor. There was no long-term storage for grain the way there is now, no refrigeration for slaughtered hogs or cattle for shipment, no quick transport by air, which is what we have now.
The storage of grains at grain elevators (wheat, corn, soybeans, etc.) is the result of work by Dart and Dunbat in Boston in the 1840s, something that allowed for very long term storage and a quick move to city markets. Meatpacking – slaughtering and processing livestock for public consumption – took place in major cities like New York, starting in the 1850s, and Chicago, starting in 1865. This was all a new way of meeting the demand for meat and grains. Greengrocer goods (fruits and vegetables) were grown locally and frequently sold out of delivery wagons to customers who ordered them ahead. Ditto dairy products – they were delivered by horse-drawn wagons in the cities.
Now these same things are bid on and sold months ahead, and it doesn’t matter if you are talking about strawberries from Florida or from Chile, or apples from Washington or Wisconsin, or potatoes from Wisconsin or Idaho. Even cut flowers are a commodity, raised in Argentina and flown in overnight to buyers. Half of your produce in the winter comes from South America and Mexico.
This is all a modern way of marketing what used to be done locally, and while things might change in a cooling period, I doubt seriously that any markets of any kind would be completely shut down. If you watch the commodities markets at all, the talk about futures prices and November or June delivery means that the contracts being bid on in May, now, are for whatever commodity they represent for future delivery, not what is available in the store this Wednesday. The May beef that you buy this week has been in the freezer section for months, waiting for delivery to the corporate purchaser who bid on the contract back in November.
We aren’t nearly as vulnerable as you seem to think we are.
“Bret Stephens Is Why Liberals Have Every Right to Be Dicks.”
Comments like this are the reason people need to explain civilized behavior to children.
1.3 billion people without electricity , burning cow dung and most of those do not have potable water .
If the USA had to go without fossil fuels for a week the economy would implode .
Eco warriors need a new mascot and paper dragon to demonize if they want to keep cash coming in .
This might no longer be true, but someone once plausibly calculated that the single human activity consuming the most calories was Third World women carrying water from wells or other sources, due to lack of pumping and distribution systems.
I recall my sister telling me that on their privately guided Safari trip to Tanzania, they drove by a small village on the border of the National Park where women were walking 4 miles x 2 trips per day, for jugs of water from a dirty muddy dugout that animals drank from. On the return later the next day, my sister gave them some money for being able to spend part of the day with them and allowing them to take pictures of them with themselves around their camp fire at their grass huts and sharing a meal with them. Those tribespeople were most grateful. Like something you would see out of a 1960’s National Geographic magazine. Now that’s what I call completely unacceptable poverty in this day and age.
I think there are different kinds of poverty, self imposed for example, like a Buddhist monk. Or temporary poverty that we see here in the cities that may be caused by addiction or an economic crash. Or war poverty that one group does to another, because they are stronger and can out of hatred, like what North Korea does to its own people. Or a type of caste poverty that just puts whole swaths of peoples in the poor house and their ability to climb out of that institutionalized poverty is near impossible to break because it is state allowed.
As responsible good citizen’s of the earth, we should be trying to erase basic poverty where these people live so as they aren’t just left to die. Or don’t become the refugees that destabilize other countries, and put them in poverty.
Ron, my church supports this, which is making a real difference to communities like the one you mention:
http://www.wateraid.org/uk
I guess they have a branch where you are
I have a generally low opinion of NGOs, as I do of governmental organizations, but those involved in drilling wells in the developing world, as long as their overhead is low, can do a lot of good:
https://thewaterproject.org/digging-wells-in-africa-and-india-how-it-works
News flash! The new number one threat to mankind is rising sand levels-
http://www.newsjs.com/url.php?p=http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/news/locals-overjoyed-as-beach-washed-away-30-years-ago-returns-after-storm-35688860.html
So don’t bother asking the way to Dublin anymore.
Doomed I tell ya, we’re all doomed!
A leading threat to mankind are CACA advocates who want us drastically to cut back on fossil fuels and get rid of nuclear power.
A few decades ago I attended a special graduate school lecture at the Ohio State University, Ohio, USA. Dr. James Lovelock was the lecturer. In his presentation he gave evidence that on a mass basis bacteria are the “King of Earth”.
From that I deduced, hypothesis, that bacteria were the main biological agent to have the capacity, i.e. mass, to affect the chemistry of the oceans and by way of gas exchange the atmosphere.
Volcanoes such as Pinatubo and Tonga produce punctuated events. The volcanism of the mid-ocean ridges and high pressure liquid/gas phase exchange affects are still not well resolved and could be very large, if confirmed.
I do not give much thought to poverty or tyranny of humans. For such a low-mass group, though well endowed with technology beyond their bodies, I dismiss them as having any significant or long lasting effect on the Earth.
Whatever effect humans might have on earth, we will never be more than a pimple on the posterior of microbes.
The prokaryote group which did have a catastrophic effect on life on earth was the cyanobacteria. The waste gas produced by these first photsynthesizing organisms led to the Great Oxygenation Event, also called the Oxygen Catastrophe. These bacteria not only caused mass extinction in the biosphere, but fundamentally altered the composition and chemistry of the atmosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere of our planet.
Happily, life recovered, adapted and evolved, leading finally to animals and humans, living in an atmosphere and hydrosphere with free oxygen to breath and an ozone layer to protect the surface from dangerous radiation, enabling the evolution of land animals like us.
I should add that even multicellular organisms such as humans contain on the order of ten times as many unicellular microbes as body cells. Our eukaryotic cells however are bigger, so contain more mass.
From the very outset of multicell animals, symbiosis with unicells has been the rule. Sponges for instance harbor so many cyanobacteria or algae that they produce surplus oxygen, despite being animals, and therefore consumers of O2. As shown by lichen, fungi too form such symbiotic relationships with unicells, ie cyanobacteria and/or algae.
Algae are themselves eukaryotes with endosymbiotic cyanobacteria, ie chloroplasts, which have been encorporated into their cells as organelles, same with the prokaryotic ancestors of mitochondria.
I remember sitting at lunch at a scientific conference with eminent professors, who also happened to be microbiologist, physicians, molecular biologists, etc. One of the professors brought up global warming and a few people weighed in. The general opinion seemed to be that nobody had seen evidence that would convince them, scientifically, but most assumed the experts in that field were competent so they were willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. No rousing agreement, no demands for ideological purity.
I also remember a student who presented a paper about climate change affecting ocean microbiology. The paper wasn’t very good, and it was dismantled by the faculty in short order. Her last slide was something about how everyone needs to have “faith” in climate change and work to avert catastrophe. Yes she used the word faith in a scientific presentation. Everyone applauds these sort of journal club presentations, but after her final slide there was dead silence followed by brief scattered claps as most stood and left.
My experience in science is that most academics won’t suffer fools or foolishness like that.
But they did when PhD student Michael Mann produced his Hockey Stick that wiped out decades (if not centuries) of research and historical documentation of identified warming and cooling periods. Where were the academics then?
There is a duality in academics where incisive critical thought must coexist with the herd mentality imposed by government funding.
Politics drove formation of the ipcc and their charter to detect a human cause of climate change. Politics drives them to slavishly enforce diversity metrics in every grant application. If there is grant money to be had by pushing the global warming hoax, an academic field will grow to fill the void.
I think that is why this article is important, because critical thinkers in other fields are put into the same boat as non scientists. If the journal club had been offered by Michael mann himself, they probably all would have given him a standing ovation at the end out of respect. But having a student present something published by someone else allowed them all to critique it and expose all the flaws.
I think academic science is very broken for a lot of reasons, but in my experience professors in biomedical research use the scientific method properly, and may doubt global warming but also might not be pulling the bandwagon.
KTM,
Nobel Laureate in 1937 for identifying vitamin C as the anti-scurvy factor, Albert Szent-Györgyi, realized that “a discovery must be, by definition, at variance with existing knowledge”. He presciently wrote of the baleful consequences of “science” by government and foundation grant.
In 1972 he divided scientists into two categories: the Apollonians and the Dionysians. He called scientific dissenters, who explored “the fringes of knowledge,” Dionysians. He wrote, “In science the Apollonian tends to develop established lines to perfection, while the Dionysian rather relies on intuition and is more likely to open new, unexpected alleys for research…The future of mankind depends on the progress of science, and the progress of science depends on the support it can find. Support mostly takes the form of grants, and the present methods of distributing grants unduly favor the Apollonian.”
Congress Should Investigate the Peer Review and Publication Process
Claims like “out of 10,858 peer-reviewed articles only 2 rejected the claim of man-made climate change” are more applicable to Cuban and Russian elections than real science. It simply isn’t plausible that something as complex, dynamic and mysterious as the global climate can legitimately reach a consensus on a single variable being the cause out of an infinite number of factors. If CO2 were truly deserving of a scientific consensus the IPCC models wouldn’t fail so miserably
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/05/08/congress-should-investigate-the-peer-review-and-publication-process/
Just a nit, but true capitalist economists hailed Brexit as a victory for the UK’s economic health. They likewise feared a Eurozone collapse long before Brexit, solely because of its socialist policies (the tyranny that is the EU is directly linked).
My gorgeous ex fiance (thank you for that meme Willis) is a microbiologist.She has more than 30 years of experience working in the Mid East and Africa, managing labs and researching drug resistant TB.
Believe me, the last thing on her list of causes is climate change.
Down in the noise.
Minuscule.
Not there.
Microscopic.
Read the NYT article, the fact it would upset anyone is amazing….
It was sort of saying the Emperors clothes dont seem to look as heavy as normal………Never mind the fact he is standing there stark naked with his dong in his hand…
Good stuff. Did Snedley mention that the USA overthrew a secular democracy in Iran in 1953, with the help of the Brits, of course. The darned Iranian gov was going to nationalize the oil and leave BP with nothing so we taught them a lesson and gave them a dictator, the Shah. It’s not even a secret anymore. It’s becoming funny that people who have no problem pointing out that our gov is run by idiots will never question when it comes to foreign policy/wars, we find it unpatriotic to question their judgement. Support The Troops! Support the troops by sending them to the other side of the world to fight and die for corporate interests and bankers.
CIA formally admits role in 1953 Iranian coup – USA Today https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/20/cia-iran-coup-documents-acknowledges-classified/2675911/
The CIA has officially acknowledged its role in the 1953 coup in Iran which paved the way for the return of the Shah.
http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-middle-east-23762020/iran-coup-sixty-years-on
Ah, but when our guys get into power, they won’t make any mistakes!
Yawn. Iran without the CIA assisted coup would have been either a USSR puppet or what it is today, a corrupt theocracy with delusions of recreating the Persian empire. The USSR in that period with warm water ports and the ability to conquer the Arab nations in the region would have been a complete disaster. Boring shallow revisionist pap that pretends it was all for BP is incredibly ignorant. The disaster happened when that fool, Carter, decided to be shallow as your analysis and allow the corrupt medieval theocrats to take over. Until then Iran was a wealthy progressive and peaceful nation that posed no danger to the region.
AGW ‘science’ threatens real science and millions of lives by grand funding theft. Science must fight back globally lobbying Government at all levels.
Thank you for a very insightful recounting of what it was like in the pre- climate obsessed world. Your essay reminds me of the distinction between “anthropogenic” and “anthropomorphic”. Both are man-made. But the latter, since it exists as a projection of the human imagination, is much more difficult to rationally discuss.
I’m a philosopher. I believe that a lack of truth is the greatest danger facing humanity…
Is truth easier to define than justice?
Alex – almost fell of my chair this morning: writing in WUWT and New Scientist?!?!
What’s it like to have telepathic mind control?
Or is something good happening to editorial policy over at NS?
First you have to define “the world”, and then you have to define “threat”. The word threat is an emotion-laden one. It assumes there is some sort of imminent danger. The only folks claiming that are the Climate Liars. They need people to be fearful, in order to push the lies they tell.
So – how are 1.3 million people going to get electricity (which I might add they do want: living without is a choice in the developed world, not so elsewhere)
Well conventional grids and fossil fuel power have not provided this in the last 50 years…
but increasingly reenwable energy, especially solar is delivering.
It starts with solar LED lanterns, sold cheaply, making a ral differnce in allowing (for example) kids to study after dark and reducing energy poverty (the kerosene lantern is expensive to fill and takes a lot of peoples income)
Then there are larger solar/battery set ups, often incorporating existing diesel generators… extends the power available and means much less expensive diesel gets used.
Scaling up the Kenyan govt is right now connecting every Kenyan. And wind, geothermal and solar are a big part of that.
Nationally we have Morocco – no large fossil fuel resource of its own to speak of, spending lots importing it. Homegrown solar CSP designs and solar panels are supplying round the clock electricity and improving the balance of payments.
A solar plant like the one recently put in in Rwanda can double a city’s grid power in Africa in months.
Griff May 9, 2017 at 3:55 am
“”So – how are 1.3 million people going to get electricity (which I might add they do want: living without is a choice in the developed world, not so elsewhere)””
……………..
I honestly doubt you even care about 1.3 million people that live without electricity.
Living without electricity in the “developed world” is no different. If you honestly believe there are no people in the “developed world” that have no funds for electricity, you haven’t done your homework.
……………………
“”Well conventional grids and fossil fuel power have not provided this in the last 50 years…””
……………………..
Right Griff, those so called “leaders – politicians- presidents- ect.. of those living in that “elsewhere” you claim have electricity ? dont they? gosh, i mean how could a leader from that “elsewhere” be a leader of any said “elsewhere” without actual electricity? why not their people?
I think what you meant to say was that the rich greedy heads of those countries continue to deny their people the right to have electricity, while they bask in the sun themselves,
………………………………..
“”but increasingly reenwable energy, especially solar is delivering.””
“”It starts with solar LED lanterns, sold cheaply, making a ral differnce in allowing (for example) kids to study after dark and reducing energy poverty (the kerosene lantern is expensive to fill and takes a lot of peoples income)””
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That is touching, how children can actually starve all day long, haul water for miles, ect……
but yet a single solar LED is going to Magically change their life…
Get a Grip Griff……. really.
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“”Then there are larger solar/battery set ups, often incorporating existing diesel generators… extends the power available and means much less expensive diesel gets used.””
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yes, good idea ! lets pollute the land with zillions of batteries !
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“”Scaling up the Kenyan govt is right now connecting every Kenyan. And wind, geothermal and solar are a big part of that.
Nationally we have Morocco – no large fossil fuel resource of its own to speak of, spending lots importing it. Homegrown solar CSP designs and solar panels are supplying round the clock electricity and improving the balance of payments.
A solar plant like the one recently put in in Rwanda can double a city’s grid power in Africa in months.””
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Are you sure you’re not an actual UN member?
Are you Leonardo?
Are you Nye?
Who really, are you ?
I’m listening for your truth, but gosh, can’t seem to find it.
“I’m listening for your truth, but gosh, can’t seem to find it.”
You won’t, because there isn’t any.
Griff is a paid “Renewables” propagandist for spivs like “Sir” Reg Shffield, Mrs. Nick Clegg, Chris Huhne, Tim Yeo, John Gummer, Al Gore and all the other trough snouters ripping off the public with their subsidy farms.
As long as he gets a bit of beer money, he couldn’t care less about the thousands that die of fuel poverty every winter in the UK, the 330,000 households that were disconnected from the grid in Germany last year, the fact that the funds wasted on the AGW hoax could supply clean drinking water to over a billion families in the Third world ten times over or the massive number of birds and bats killed by the windfarms and solar farms like Tonopah.
But hey, what do all those minor details matter to a virtue-signalling Watermelon when there are a few beers to be earned?
How many people did not have electricity 50 years ago? How about 150 years ago?
You would be funny if you added a /sarc tag, but are simply sad because you never think before posting!
Mankind will likely become extinct due to the planet just killing us off by using one of its many well-tested methods. We are not endangering a fragile planet, we are surviving on a very hostile planet!
That’s 1.3 billion, not million. And no one here argues that, in some cases, renewables may make sense, as a stop-gap measure. It isn’t up to us to decide that though. And it certainly isn’t (or shouldn’t be) up to those pushing the “low-carbon” lie for ideological reasons.
The greatest threat to civilization is the breakdown of the nuclear family, which is the primary factor in its development. See C. Owen Lovejoy’s study in Science and The Family and Civilization by Carle Zimmerman.
Is drunk driving/measles/autism/ the worlds No.1 threat? No. Should we do something about it? Yes.
Except that “climate change” is not a threat. So far, more CO2 in the air has been beneficial. There is no evidence that even more plant food will somehow be bad.
seaice1, I, personally, can’t do a thing about any of that. Do-gooders bother me.
Tom … Did I miss something? What is it about Opus Dei that causes you to label its adherents “fanatics”? Ever read Sceptre Publishing? Saint Jose Maria Escriva? How fanatic?
Some of my late mother’s friends in California were in Opus Dei. About as bad as my late father’s cousins who were Birchers.
During Escrivá’s beatification process, his former personal assistant, Monsignor Vladimir Felzmann, accused him of having supported H!tler.
The Church must have decided that the charge was baseless, since it went ahead and canonized him.
IMO Liberation Theology advocates, like the present, Marxist pope, are at least as fanatical as the most right-wing Opus Dei member.
SJW all the way!