Guest Opinion: Dr. Tim Ball
I know a great deal about this bizarre world because I have incorrectly been accused of being in the pay of Big Oil. In the early days, I did try to get their money in order to show them why they could ignore the great deception of global warming. I wanted to show them how pseudoscience was being used by ideologists to push a political agenda.
The charge by environmentalists that Exxon knew about the CO2 and global warming issue is correct because I, among others, told them directly. The charge that they did nothing is incorrect. They chose to ignore scientific evidence and follow a policy of appeasement, apparently, in the naïve belief they could placate the ideologues and win a PR battle. Right now, I am enjoying watching them squirm and wriggle as they fight lawsuits from those they thought they appeased. They now know Churchill’s definition is correct.
“An appeaser is someone who feeds a crocodile – hoping it will eat him last.”
They also learned the difference between what they do and what environmentalists do. Mason Cooley explained it pithily.
“Commerce is greedy. Ideology is blood thirsty.”
While the bizarre legal battle plays out in US courts, I learned from recent overtures by major players in the Canadian energy sector that they now realize their policy of appeasement with the left-wing environmentalists did not work.
I tried to warn big energy years ago to avoid the conflict of dealing with the new ideology of environmentalism. In frequent visits to corporate offices, my advice was that they had the expertize on staff to show how CO2 was not causing warming. I knew this because I was contacted by a group of retired energy sector scientists to help set up an organization to fight the Kyoto Protocol. The group exists today as the Friends of Science (FOS). It is why they still play my quote in their header that,
“The Kyoto Protocol is a political solution to a non-existent problem without scientific justification.”
FOS chose to stick to the science but were bloodied early by the politics. They have done a commendable job on the science. While their “science only” position is commendable because ideally, all science should be apolitical, it guaranteed little or no funding, especially from those agencies who could benefit from a clear, simple exposition of the science.
The question is why wouldn’t energy companies do climate research? There are few industries whose management, demand, and production cycles are more driven by climate. For example, the fact they vary the percentages of gasoline and home heating oil significantly from summer to winter. Frankly, I would not invest in a company that did so little research into understanding a major driver of its market demand.
Historically, capitalism was simple and predictable. It was about profit, and the only debate was around what was a reasonable profit. In the Middle Ages, governments set limits on profit, usually up to 9%, based on pseudo-religious values with any higher deemed usury and therefore immoral. There is no time or need to go into all the social and religious ramifications of those beliefs and actions. Suffice to say all these issues and debates continue today, albeit within a different set of values and constructs. Part of this is related to the founding of America with the escape from religious persecution of the Plymouth Brethren on the Mayflower. They considered profit good as long as it was balanced by a strict tithe to the church.
The religious views that formed the basis of history and economy in the western world up to the mid 19th century were challenged by Karl Marx in his most influential publication, Das Kapital in 1867. Note that this is only 8 years after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. It is reasonable to equate Darwin with the basic concept of capitalism, the survival of the fittest. After reading Darwin’s great work, Herbert Spencer coined the phrase. Darwin liked it so much he incorporated it in the sixth edition.
All this changed in the 20th century because Darwin’s work was used to challenge the existence of God and this juxtaposed formal religion against science. Because God was no longer the reason for humans being different in the academic world, it culminated in universities adding a completely new faculty, the Social Sciences, to the historic faculties of Arts and the Humanities, and the Natural Sciences. Remember, Darwin, was identified as a naturalist, not a scientist. This change and the impact on society continues as central to the debate today through the writings of Richard Dawkins and others. It all resulted in the demise of the influence of formal religion and created a moral and ethical vacuum among young people.
The battle was starkly enjoined as recently as 1925 with the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial. John Scopes was prosecuted in Tennessee for violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which forbade the teaching of evolutionary theory. The real issue was the need for balance in education, not indoctrination. What should happen is that at a minimum both creationism and evolutionary theory be taught, and students establish their opinions.
All this created a gap that allowed the new and necessary paradigm of environmentalism to become a religion among many but especially the young. Despite warnings from people like Dr. Michael Crichton, environmentalism became a religion. As Andy May summarized in reflecting Crichton’s views,
We must get the religion out of environmentalism. We must get it back on a scientific basis. Too many organizations are simply lying, pure and simple.
This is not going to happen for some time because like most great religions or fascist organizations it realized that it was necessary to control the education system. Children graduate from a school system that baptizes them into the environmental religion. The impact and extent of the changes are seen in the complete overturn of the order of learning. Just a few years ago, the older faculty held the prevailing wisdom and were challenged by the new young faculty. Now the young faculty comes into the system fully indoctrinated and unquestioning while the older faculty retain the necessary skepticism of a scientist.
The power of the moral high ground was quickly controlled by those who saw the political potential of environmentalism. So, the eco-bullying began and swept away the logic and rationale of science. Energy companies chose to appease, but it was an easy choice because there was no financial cost. They could pass on their appeasement costs, including carbon taxes, to the consumer. This means they were able to act with immunity, impunity, and without accountability.
Now I enjoy watching the bizarre situation of misplaced accountability; they are being sued for deliberately failing to do the right thing. It is all being adjudicated in a legal system that traditionally avoids scientific disputes because it admits it knows nothing. My sympathies are with the energy companies because it is fossil fuels that have raised humanity from marginal starvation and short life spans. Environmentalists are parasites who produce nothing while attacking those who do. They also, hypocritically, enjoy the benefits of what fossil fuels provide. Meanwhile, I enjoy the bizarre dance they both perform with no rationale or justification. A plague on all their houses, but a more lethal one, as survival of the fittest would allow on the non-productive one.
“There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.”
– A.N. Whitehead
Yay, a Dr. Ball post! Time for coffee …
Oh my God, I am daily surrounded by the insanity you describe.
Out here at the beach on the north Oregon coast, people who are pro-abortion would have you put to death for breaking a puffin egg.
many years ago a doctor told me story of someone who wanted an abortion. the doctor got the second opinion and supplied the tablets but said that she should go on the pill, her reply was OK if the pills were vegetarian (as she could not eat dead animals) {some capsules are made from gelatine which is animal based -so check it out next time you take some medicine- or just take them anyway as there is no evidence of interaction with bacon sandwiches}
Guess we need to cull the bald eagles & gulls (not so much foxes in Oregon, but just to be safe we should kill them too).
A superb post by Dr Ball a fine strike against the pseudoscience of the warmistas!
“Historically, capitalism was simple and predictable. It was about profit, and the only debate was around what was a reasonable profit. ”
say wuuuuut?
no- it was always about the right of the individual to ownership.
More than that, Gnom.
Even today the small badness and individual LLC’s and sole proprieter places may not want to be billionaires. Some do, some justice want a lifestyle that satisfies and allows basic survival, maybe more than simple, but not at the cost of quality of life.
Smith was right. Marx was wrong.
Gums opines…
“‘I’m not religious, I’m spiritual. Nature is my church.”
That’s what I hear all the time.
I tell them that they are actually members of Doomsday Cult #1,989,217, which thrives on human sacrifice — preferably 14 out of every 15 people — to bring “balance”.
Max, just ask them if they’re members of The Model Fellowship of Mann, Church of Omnipotent Greenhouse In Carbon (the new COGIC). They probably don’t realize they already are.
If “Nature” is their church, then “Critical Thinking & Logic” should be their creed and “Observation” their practice.
Nature abhors idiots, they get culled quickly.
Aye, those who place the preservation of nature above their own self-preservation have effectively volunteered for extinction.
“Nature abhors idiots, they get culled quickly.”
“Nature abhors a moron.”
—H.L. Mencken
[“Politics adores many morons.” ABCNNBCBS, 1992-218 .mod]
Roger and Moderator – Heads up – I plan pilfer/edit your comments. I like the way the last two phrases fit together. Never seen the run=on done so nicely.
They are at home with the wind whistling through the empty space-in their heads.
Higher Education such as this?
UN Sustainable Development
Partnerships For The SDGs
Higher Education Sustainability Initiative/HESI
Has lists of Universities participating in HESI. So many not possible to list them.
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/partnerships/hesi
UNESCO
UNESCO Global Action Programme on Education for Sustainable Development
Global Action Programme, (GAP) on ESD
Webpage has Links and publications
https://en.unesco.org/gap
And:
International Association Of Universities, UNESCO House, Paris France
Re:
Sustainable Development / HESD, Higher Education on Sustainable Development
Webpage has Links and Publications including a link to Partner UNESCO
Website also has participating Universities.
http://www.iau-hesd.net/en/organizations/194-international-association-universities-iau.html
International Association Of Universities, Paris, France
Membership by Country
https://www.iau-aiu.net/spip.php?&lang=en&page=article&id_article=75#ca
UN Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME)
Re: Business Education and Sustainability
Use Participation > Participation > Select any country on the menu for participants.
http://www.unprme.org/about-prme/index.php
Natural Resources Canada, 2017-09-05
Re: Climate change and IPCC
Assessment Advisory Committee
http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/environment/impacts-adaptation/19937
Where as some of us are much more rational and pray to Joe Pesci 🙂
http://pescistchurch.webs.com/
Mad me look (it up). That is funny! Did you make it up?
Dang – and I haven’t even had my first sip yet.
“Made”. I’m not mad. Crazy, but not mad.
I guess they think: because I’m atheist and have no formal ‘organized’ religion then I’m not religious.
It’s fair to call environmentalism a disguised, Godless, religion. Characterized by disgust with humanity, and faith in naturalism. Disgust with humanity (self hate if you like) is disguised by anti-Capitalist rhetoric, suspicion of new technologies, over-population and resource scarcity concerns. Leading to a paradox of greens calling themselves anarchist whilst having almost infinite faith in more environmental regulation (provided regulators bend to their will). They don’t trust people to manage our affairs, nor land/sea. Environmentalism’s naturalism is manifested by faith in: organic farming, renewables, ‘sustainability’, and a taste for fads which often claim naturalist wisdom. Outside these 2 tendencies: anti-humanism and naturalistic faiths, the 3rd pillar driving Environmentalism is the vast funding it gets from Foundations built on the fruits of Capitalist profit. Well over $6 billion per year in the US alone. Such funding costs much political direction. The apparent diversity of Environmentalist NGOs is unified by goals set out by the money men. Leading to many paradoxes: e.g. climate alarmist sits side-by-side with anti-nuclear power politics.
Max
As a confirmed CAGW sceptic and contributor to this august blog, in my humble educational, and spiritual capacity, I can’t help but wonder how mankind happened along and discovered fire, thereby ‘polluting’ the planet with CO2, at around the time atmospheric CO2 dropped to it’s lowest level ever in the planet’s history by, natural, but accidental CO2 sequestration, thereby threating the very existence of life, yet mankind is blamed by the green brigade for destroying the planet.
I’m sorry, but this whole humankind self flagellation hysteria is quite beyond me. By divine intervention, or mere scientific accident, mankind is bolstering the earth health and guaranteeing it’s future by liberating said sequestered CO2.
Scientice and religion ought to be worshiping/celebrating that single intervention/accident as the miracle it truly is.
Whichever way one perceives it, we might all glance over our shoulder and wonder, is someone at the control knob of climate other than the conceited confines of mankind.
As I said, I’m not religious, but it somehow gives me hope that we’re not alone, on a single, conscious providing entity (however simplistic) drifting through space and time.
I support the scepticism of religion, but i also support the scepticism of science. Can we learn, do we learn? Or are just cynical for the sake of it?
Here endeth, my uninformed observations.
Dr. Ball, you’ve more than earned the right to sit back and savor a wee dram of schadenfreude.
Never mind that foreign rubbish 🙂
Dr Ball can come and join us for a wee dram of the good stuff from Islay !
The problem is that democracies are controlled by the most votes. If you get enough of the people to believe in the big lie, then you can implement policies that discriminate against anybody that you want to discriminate against. Capitalism is by far an imperfect system but no one has been able to come up with a better one, so we are left to invent policies that restrain capitalism. This results in varying capitalistic systems around the world that range from near socialism to unfettered capitalism. Since 100% socialism is impossible (always immediately leads to a dictatorship) and has never been achieved , we are stuck with what we have.
Democracies are sometimes undermined by voter fraud, as seen in history repeatedly. This occurs in both capitalist and socialist democracies. It has been rampant for most of the 20th century and has grown more sophisticated and discreet in its deployment during this millenium.
Capitalist or socialist, democracies have always been controlled by aristocracy, as I see it.
Let’s just say “If they took all the rich folks’ money and gave it to the poor folk, in 5 years the rich folk would get their money back.” (a common truism in my niche-o-the-woods)
The USA does not have an aristocracy. But we do have bureaucracies and bureaucrats and the Elites who put them in place. (ie Lois Lerner, any Kennedy or Clinton, Obama, Ginsburg etc.)
Tomayto/tomahto…
We’re not necessarily stuck to what we have, that’s what revolution is for.
The French got rid of a King and got an Emperor for their pains.
“Nice revolution you got there. Be a shame if…..”
Maybe resolution is more productive than revolution in the long term, what d’ya think?
A benign dictatorship is what all nations should aim for. The death penalty would have to be used liberally as an incentive to limit the incumbent from stealing too much of the populations assets.
Ray, would you benign dictatorship be the second coming of the messiah, by any chance? That’s the only megalomaniac who’s guaranteed to please, here.
Of course resolution would be more productive, but the chances of that happening diminishes day by day. An attempt to root out the marxists during the the McCarthy era was effectively vilified by the media, academics/historians & politicians way back then. The marxism has progressed enormously since then.
Actually, no, Alan. Democracies are manipulated by motivated interest groups. Evidenced by the Prohibition movement that actually got a Constitutional Amendment to outlaw alcohol.
The insane California legislature instituted a sanctuary state law with zero proof that it will protect law abiding people, citizens or not. Only now are the real majority in the process of reversing the aberration.
The liberal idea is that if gangbangers are established next door, you’ll turn them in if you think authorities won’t look into your legal status, even though the authorities will let them out the next day.
Tomalty,
You said, “The problem is that democracies are controlled by the most votes.” The Founding Fathers understood that. That is why they created a Constitutional Republic where only the legislators are elected democratically. They instituted numerous checks and balances, and attempted to give senators more insulation from the whims of the electorate than what representatives have. The insulation was even greater for the election of the president because it is in the hands of the Electoral College and not the registered voters. That is something that the democrats still haven’t come to grips with.
The present day Democratic Party is not what the Party used to be.
There have been many able Democratic Party members that have served the U.S. very well.
Thanks Barb and Clyde.
Especially thanks to some folks back in 1887 in Philly. All we got,to do is keep it.
Gums…
We (and our democracy) in America are supposed to be protected by our Bill of Rights, Constitution, and Amendments. Unfortunately, the SOTUS has decided to devolve to a lower state, and pretty much rules according to what they feel is fair. Pity. Of course, we have a few dreamers (Trump… maybe some others) that feel the damage can be healed.
Maybe they’re right. Lets face it: life today is better than it was before present time. Plenty of food. Jobs if you want them. More toys than you can shake a stick at – or find time to maintain. Education at any level.
You just have to put up with city people making rules for folks they don’t know. Fortunately, I notice that on the eastern side of the state of Kalifornia, the law enforces the laws they like, ignore the ones they don’t. Makes life OK – as long as city people stay put.
What we have is a continual struggle between the left that wants to approach socialism and the right who want little restraints to capitalism. The problem is that almost everyone wants cradle to grave protection and everyone wants everything for free. Well there never has been a free lunch. The price has to be paid by someone. The green religion is a world of no pollution ( a good thing) where no one has to do anything they don’t want to do( also a good thing). The problem with that is Mother Nature doesn’t care want you want. She will continue to change the climate as she thinks fit and there is not a damn thing you can do about it.
“The problem with that is Mother Nature doesn’t care want you want. She will continue to change the climate as she thinks fit and there is not a damn thing you can do about it.”
There is a thing called (climate) forcing. It is why the climate changes. Sometimes it is natural. Seems to me skeptics use the word natural as if it is all you need to say to justify a change. The thing is there is always a reason behind even natural change. Often (but not always) it is the increase or decrease in CO2 in the atmosphere that drives the change. It seems at the moment we are driving the world to a warmer place. How much warmer and how much damage will result, are the two questions we should be looking to answer.
There is always a reason behind natural climate change. Completely true.
That doesn’t mean, or even imply, that we therefore know what that reason is.
There is no real-world proof that CO2 “drives” climate change. That is a Warmist fantasy. When you think about it, it is sheer hubris to think that man can control the climate. It is laughable on its face.
MarkW
Watch and learn
How much warmer and how much damage will result’
Naturally those are the only two questions you would ask. Try ‘how much benefit.’
‘Watch and learn’.
Jesus.
Bruce, I wonder if they are drawn into the notion that “the world is shrinking” and population is growing, so mankind must surely be a global influence. This has been the missive that permeated my adulthood working in public higher education.
Yikes, Simon, 2009? Do you have any documentations of what he is saying these days? A real scientist keeps an open mind…
If I wanted to watch climate science fiction, I’d look this up.
https://youtu.be/LrpM4_fPIT4
“Often (but not always) it is the increase or decrease in CO2 in the atmosphere that drives the change.”
Except, more often (but not always) and naturally, the increase or decrease in CO2 in the atmosphere happens because of the change.
Simon – You’ve had a couple of responses that should give you pause for thought (we don’t know how the climate works, and there is no proof that CO2 drives climate). I’ll add a bit more:
– You say that ‘forcing’ changes the climate. That’s an IPCC truism, because anything that changes the climate is regarded by the IPCC as a forcing. So that resolves nothing. ie, we still don’t know how climate works.
– In climate history, CO2 follows temperature on all time scales (well, up to a few hundred thousand years anyway). The reason is well known – a warming ocean emits CO2, and vice versa. There is no evidence in the whole of climate history that atmospheric CO2 drives climate change. For example, the ~450,000-year graphs used by Al Gore in “An Inconvenient Truth” show that atmospheric CO2 does not drive climate change on that time scale.
– All of the warming in the last 100 years or so has been net beneficial (a greening planet, etc). Actually, it isn’t all that easy to find any damage that has been caused by the warming. Hence it is verging on the ridiculous to claim that CO2 has caused or will cause damage.
– It is reasonable to argue that the atmospheric CO2 increases in the last 60 years or so have been caused by human activity, but Earth’s surface and/or lower atmosphere have been warming for much longer than that. There has been little or no acceleration of the warming since those CO2 increases began. The time period is now arguably long enough to demonstrate that atmospheric CO2 is not the driver.
– The missing warming in the tropical troposphere is actual proof that CO2 is not warming the planet in the way that the IPCC claim.
Simon,
What makes a warmer climate “damaging”? What justification do you have for pointing to some recent time period and claiming that is the climate optimum and any variation from that is “bad”?
Make up your mind, Simon. CO2 is forcing temperatures up or ‘it seems” CO2 is forcing temperatures up. You can’t even bring yourself to say with certainty what you are prepared to bet the farm on. And my farm, too!
If you are a true believer, shut off your computer, throw away your car keys and shut off your furnace. Start growing your own food. If you don’t, you’re just another hypocrite and you can take a hike!
You mean that Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was not real. Oh the heart break of learning the truth. After all those years of belief. The world will never be the same. 🙂
“Often (but not always) it is the increase or decrease in CO2 in the atmosphere that drives the change.”
Sorry, but bullshit. There is not a single scrap of empirical evidence that supports that claim, and plenty that refutes it. There is NO correlation between CO2 level and temperature on geologic time scales (geocarb reconstructions), and on shorter time scales where there IS a correlation (ice core reconstructions), it runs in REVERSE – temperature drives CO2 levels, NOT the other way around. Add to that temperatures plunging from “hot house” periods into a full blown glaciation with TEN TIMES today’s CO2 level (and rising) (450 mya), and the fact that in the ice core reconstructions, temperatures start RISING when CO2 levels are at their LOWEST, and start FALLING when CO2 levels are at their HIGHEST, with CO2 levels FOLLOWING temperature up and down like a dog on a leash, and the only HONEST, LOGICAL conclusion you can draw is that CO2 doesn’t “drive” Jack Shit.
John harmsworth April 5, 2018 at 4:12 pm
“If you are a true believer, shut off your computer, throw away your car keys and shut off your furnace. Start growing your own food. If you don’t, you’re just another hypocrite and you can take a hike!”
Ah the old….”you are either all in or all out,” nonsense. Actually I do grow a lot of my own food and I do cycle when I can. But I also drive, so am I a hypocrite? I don’t think so. If I am actively reducing the CO2 I am the cause of, then I think I am helping. It’s a question or levels. If I drink a glass of wine am I am alcoholic? Nope. You don’t have to wear bare feet and live in a hole to believe we are warming the atmosphere and we have a responsibility to future generations to leave them a habitable planet. That’s just common sense.
@Simon that’s straight up wrong and you provoke me to a rant. You and Al Gore keep arguing that the rooster crows to make the sun come up, but the rooster has about as much to do with making the sun rise as CO2 has to do with making temperature rise.
Changes in CO2 do not drive temperature change. Temperature change drives changes in CO2 concentration. Temperature changes because the amount of solar energy retained by the earth varies due to an incredible array of factors. CO2 concentration lags temperature change for the simple reason that CO2 solubility in water is a function of temperature. As the ocean temperature rises, CO2 comes out of solution like a hot bottle of Coke. And when the ocean temperature cools, CO2 is absorbed from the atmosphere.
Yes, we put a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere by burning stuff. It takes time for the ocean to absorb it so that the system is out of equilibrium. As a result, there is a little more CO2 in the atmosphere than there “should be” based on the actual temperature of the ocean. Maybe that means that we have 0.0408% CO2 instead of 0.0388%. Natural variation has been 0.5% to 0.018%. And yes, the incremental amount of CO2 that our activity puts into the atmosphere does trap a little more heat. In theory. Just like when you walk through a room, you raise its temperature. OK, a bit more than that, but not much.
The fact that we can nudge CO2 a little higher in a time of naturally rising temperatures is not meaningful. When the real drivers of temperature inevitably shift toward cooling, and CO2 is being sucked out of the atmosphere by the cooling oceans, we can burn everything in sight and CO2 will still drop like a stone, despite our pitiful efforts. We are not driving the climate. We are probably not even a back-seat driver in the climate car.
If you want something to worry about, worry that we are about to enter the next ice age and there is nothing we can do to stop it if that is about to happen. The devastation will be epic. Mass starvation, war, frozen corpses. Let’s hope this interglacial still has legs.
@Simon,
” … It seems at the moment we are driving the world … ”
—-
Good for you Simon
I notice you’vd successfully side-stepped the prefix “I believe …”, which would have “seemed” a bit quasi-religious.
But we all know the fundamental problem facing the planet is that humans exhale more CO2 than they inhale, and until that’s eliminated, the world will never be safe for the penguins.
Except the penguins also exhale more CO2 than they inhale, so they’ll have to go too … and it all sotra comes apart there.
Which really think about it, means, we’ll have to adapt a-‘naturally’, and genetically morph ourselves into clumps of rhubarb.
We’ll have do this just to get the right global sustainability structure in place, and make sure all animals are appropriately wiped out (especially the critters partial to a bit of rhubarb).
Adapt, Overcome … Never give in! … Never surrender!
So, “it seems” CO2 “drives” global evolution as well.
It’s all connected man.
Ooooh, Simon. A change in an approximate 1% climate forcing (AGW CO2 forcing) will drive the climate?
CO2-driven warming is speculation, and any resulting damage is wild speculation.
My biggest problem is the UN SJW types one must get into bed with to “fight” global warming.
@ Rich
“… Maybe that means that we have 0.0408% CO2 instead of 0.0388%. *** Natural *** variation has been 0.5% to 0.018%. And yes, the incremental amount of CO2 that our activity puts into the atmosphere does trap a little more heat. …”
—-
What slips past in this is the alarmist’s sly insinuation that human emissions of CO2 are not natural CO2 emissions.
When of coarse they are natural.
They want to pretend the Earth’s biotic process didn’t naturally evolve humans. They want to insinuate we are some kind of ‘artificial’ construct, an evil test-tube product, an extragalactic alien super-pox that has no right even being on earth, let alone dirtying it up, as they see it, when we are simply making it more fertile, every day.
And then there’s the noble Simon, the homo-homo-monkey, trying to also insinuate past us that the word “natural” shouldn’t be used, with respect to natural variability, nor to think of human CO2 as natural, as well, given we evolved on Earth, and merely adapted the best to the physical phemomena and materials (i.e. we earned the survival ‘right’ to do whatever the hell we want, if we can, big if), using naturally evolved intelligence, to fashion technology and a vastly better life, for all the Simon-esque homo-homo-monkeys.
The war on “natural” has commenced, apparently. You can only sustain the flaim humans are evil if you can prevent the young realising that every thing humans have done, or ever will do, is 100% NATURAL.
Explain away.
?ssl=1
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2017/11/26/study-before-warming-a-bit-antarctica-underwent-1900-years-of-cooling/
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2017/04/15/antarctic-peninsula-cooled-nearly-1c-during-1999-2014/
Tempt not thy God?
Religion has always struggled with observations mucking up a perfectly swell Garden of Eden storybook narative of alledged guilt and redemption, via strictured controls and by the mechanism of blood-sacrifices, and makingbburnt offerings of the best meats … for no reason at all … and no gains at all, either.
Hocus-pocus, fear and BS collide.
Only now it’s the econony, which feeds us, that Simon and cohort would like to make a burnt-offering out of, to appease the apocylips forseen in self-annointed priestly prophetic fantasies.
Yeah, very sound.
I read all this stuff about global warming and the earnestness even of sceptics who say well we will know in a few years whether we are going to have big problems or not and I think of the totally scientifically illiterate fellow (though a genius to be sure) who invented the meme as we understand it today. This is definitely a Bertrand Russell tiny teapot in orbit around the sun postulate! The credulousness is stupifying.
Oh what shall we do about all this global warming. Perhaps let’s just worry ourselves into a misery. And to think the whole idea was invented by a communist highschool dropout by the name of Maurice Strong who only a few years ago died basically alone and quietly in Beijing with not a lot of People knowing what this single little fellow had wrought..
He created the UNFCC as a way to accomplish a neomarxy system of tightly controlled global governance. He organized the Stockholm Conference before that and the Rio Conference for Kyoto and the IPCC. He created Agenda 21 to look like a mother statement as a thin edge of the wedge to effect controll at the municipal level.
He had been searching for a lever and thought the environment and plight of the planet might be a useful way to inveigle the world into his global plan for us all. When he heard about the little puffs of research on Climate Science he saw the opportunity! Take control of world energy and you have control of everything, a tailor made way of bringing down the western economy, the USA in actuality because Europe was already in the bag basically.
“What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude the principal risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? In order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?”
Maurice Strong
After the 10s of $trillions spent in impoverishing the planet and getting the yokels excited about green jobs in the energy sector, one has to conclude that useful idiots are our biggest resource.
com’on mods this is tame and historical.
Never quite sure about Alley. He appears to bend with money. In his early television appearances he explained how very sharp changes in the climate show in the GISP cores and last for a 1000 years or more. These he could not explain through CO² hypothesis.
Then he started on his latest trip explaining how co² controls everything. Perhaps someone offered him money or position? Who knows?
Claiming something is not the same thing as proving something.
There is no proof that CO2 controls the climate.
In fact there is lots of proof that CO2 is a bit player at best.
good thing = nature! (not you)
Simon, The deluded speaker in your video makes a leap of faith that CO2 must reinforce warming because he cant think of anything else. At no time in his speel does he mention the role of H2O. H2o that is many times more prevalent in the atmosphere and is proven to have a greenhouse warming effect vastly more powerful than any you can attribuite to CO2. As the planet naturally cyclically warms the atmosphere holds more H2O giving more insulation and there is your global warming forcing. CO2 increases in atmosphere as it warms as the oceans release it (the sea will hold twice the co2 at 0degC as it will at 30degC.) But this CO2 is virtually inert and doesnt warm the planet – Water vapour does. But the idiot in your video doesnt know that clouds form in the sky!!!
Bobn April 5, 2018 at 6:19 pm
“Simon, The deluded speaker in your video…”
The deluded speaker in the video is a very well respected scientist. Take a little time to watch some of his thoughts on Youtube.
“….makes a leap of faith that CO2 must reinforce warming because he cant think of anything else”
I think you will find he is very qualified to speak on all the possible reasons for the last 100 years of warming.
Actually, Allen just got his A$$ handed to him in the northern California court.
Dave Fair April 5, 2018 at 8:31 pm
“Actually, Allen just got his A$$ handed to him in the northern California court.”
His name is Richard Alley
Simon, anyone from Penn State is a dyed-in-the-wool marxist — no other culture is allowed. Don’t you know that by now?
“dyed-in-the-wool marxist”
Beng, Joe Bastardi came from Penn State. I also have friends who got their PhDs there who worked on the Glyphosate development team at Monsanto. Not even left-leaners.
beng135 April 6, 2018 at 7:07 am
Simon, anyone from Penn State is a dyed-in-the-wool marxist — no other culture is allowed. Don’t you know that by now?
Richard Alley is a Republican
Simon- What makes your choice of science authority more imperial than MIT prof. Richard Lindzen, or UAH researchers Roy Spencer and John Christy?
As spectators of this whole thing we choose our mentors by facts, not feelings.
If you believe that you know ALL of the possible reasons for the warming over the last 100 years, than you are fooling yourself.
Until you can explain what caused the 5 warm periods over the last 10K years, plus the Little Ice Age, then you can’t possibly claim to know all the causes of climate change.
Lindzen, et. al. aren’t accepted as members of the club by the people who run the club.
Therefore they have no right to speak on this subject.
Those words will light up a few folks. (^_^)
I care about the environment, and I act as if I do, but I am definitely NOT an “environmentalist”.
Conservation: A reconciliation of natural and human states and imperatives, and, perhaps, moral states and imperatives, too.
An excellent definition that requires some actual thought, rather than just parroting the ignorance of the crowd.
” … A reconciliation of natural and human states …”
Rubbish!
Humans ARE natural.
Everything humans do IS natural.
No reconcilliation required.
That ‘reconcilliation’ notion is as FAKE as our imbued Sunday School guilt for Adam and Eve’s imaginary ‘sin’, and imaginary eternal damnation, for eating imaginary “forbidden fruit”, that privides a knowledge of good and evil.
‘Conservation’, or what other baloney term is next concocted, is just the ignorant post-modern religious guilt-trip PROXY, with the very same old-school repressive aim of social and political control, via tokenistic delusional and useless virtue-signalling to say, I’m one of the ‘chosen’, I%m special, hollier than thou. You must do what I say.
But really are wolves in sheep’s clothing, attempting to rend the flock via a BS blitzkrieg.
Manufacture your own suckers.
Easy prey for an enterprising wolf.
The greens think that magical intermittent solar and wind will allow us to have free energy but as they have found out if you want constant power supply 24 hours a day you will always need a backup to solar and wind which results in extra costs for no benefit.
But COAL is actually STORED SOLAR ENERGY.
Want a super reliable redic cheap giant SOLAR STORAGE BATTERY, to solve the solar storage and continuity of supply problem after sundown?
Done! Queensland Bowen-Basin coal fields!
Bought to you by PHOTOSYNTHESIS.
It’s ALL natural and it makes rhubarb grow even faster!
Even the most pollution intensive fossil fuels can be made clean by extensive pollution scrubbers or other technology. The closer you get to 100% renewables the closer you get to guaranteeing that your power system will have brownouts and blackouts. Thus to survive we all have to do some kind of activity that either directly or indirectly protects us from the environment and puts food on the table. Maybe far in the future no one will have to work but until that day comes we are all slaves to the monetary system that we have set up to deal with the central problems of feeding ourselves and putting a roof over our heads. Simple really.
Thus to survive we all have to do some kind of activity that either directly or indirectly protects us from the environment and puts food on the table. Maybe far in the future no one will have to work but until that day comes we are all slaves to the monetary system that we have set up to deal with the central problems of feeding ourselves and putting a roof over our heads. Simple really.
An issue is that the greens follow the spirit of the Butler Act, and try to eliminate any criticism of their received Truth. They do act like an evangelical religion, and anyone not accepting their catechism is regarded as an enemy.
Faith is one of four logical domains. Religion is a philosophy that prescribes a behavioral protocol. Traditions are generational cultural modes. We need a separation of logical domains. We need to acknowledge the limited scope of the scientific logical domain, and the assumptions, assertions, motives that have lead to the conflation of logical domains by ostensibly “secular” individuals and organizations. For example, don’t teach “theory of evolution” (inference from a chaotic process) and “theory of creation”. Each occupies a logical space. Notably, the popular theories of origin: evolutionary (e.g. spontaneous) and inspired creation, where the former is not in a logical space (i.e. will never be observed and reproduced), and the latter is an article of faith. As far as we know, it’s all secular: wealth, pleasure, and leisure, and, of course, in a world with finitely available and accessible resources and unbridled egos: capital and control, respectively.
nn,
I think that there is a philosophy that could reconcile evolution and creationism. It’s simple, really, and I do not understand what the problem is with invoking it. I’m not saying that I believe what I am about to say, but I do believe that others should have no problems believing in it, and it is a win/win for either domain of thought.
It goes something like this (and I’m sure I’m not the first to put this out there): A designing intelligence can be conceived as having methods or techniques for creating the universe. Evolution is simply the method of the designing intelligence.
There need be no separation of the thought domains at all — they are mutually beneficial to one another.
Except that the designing “intelligence” could not have been all that intelligent.
Dawkins pretty much drove a stake through the heart of that idea.
I’ve published on “Intelligent Design Theory.”
It doesn’t bear examination because there are no known theories for design of universes. Supposing the universe was designed by reference to human design principles then merely begs the question.
Here’s the abstract: “The assumption of design of the universe is examined from a scientific perspective. The claims of William Dembski and of Michael Behe are unscientific because they are a-theoretic. The argument from order or from utility are shown to be indeterminate, circular, to rest on psychological as opposed to factual certainty, or to be insupportable as regards humans but possibly not bacteria, respectively. The argument from the special intelligibility of the universe specifically to human science does not survive comparison with the capacities of other organisms. Finally, the argument from the unlikelihood of physical constants is vitiated by modern cosmogonic theory and recrudesces the God-of-the-gaps.“
Actually there is a far far better meta-model to reconcile all of this.
All knowledge is, is a set of modelsof what is really there. All models are imperfect, some more than others. Some models are useful because they predict stuff well. Some models are useful because they make people feel good about themselves
Even our sense of living in a physical world of mass-energy in space-time, is just another model.
In short the world as we understand it, is models all the way down.
This tremendously powerful tool of consciousness has a huge drawback however. It has huge tendency to confuse the outcomes of its operation – the sensation of living in a particular word – with the truth.
In order to counteract this, religion arose. Religion says ‘there is more than meets the eye’ .
However that in itself became a problem when people started claiming that religion itself was ‘true’.
No model has demonstrable truth content. The problem is less that religion claims Truth, than those that oppose it claim Truth. Dawkins is particularly obnoxious and stupid. Science itself is absolutely based on unprovable suppositions.
That is why Karl Popper came to the conclusion that science is not about truth – it’s about stuff that works – for whatever reason.
For all we know we may be pan dimensional consciousnesses plugged into virtual reality sets having a Sunday afternoon’s entertainment experiencing ‘Life on Earth – the Movie’. Some aspects of quantum physics somewhat support this view.
But within the movie, the Matrix, it is simply not possible to tell,and that is the problem with all human knowledge. WE cant tell how close too reality we are. We just know that we aren’t living it.
Christian religion puts meaning and purpose into an empty Universe: It elevates Man from a mere accidental virus like emergent property of an uncaring materialistic Universe, into something that has a point. It helps us through the pain and vicissitude of life by promising some kind of eternal reckoning once the whole sorry business is over.
This makes for better survival in a hostile world. Christianity may be – like everything else – ultimately a lie, but it is a useful lie. It is self propagating. Christians do better at surviving in groups.
And scientists also do better at surviving. Science enables us to manipulate stuff to our advantage: Christianity gives us a reason to do it. Science teaches us how to behave with respect to the inanimate and Christianity teaches us how to behave towards each other, not to arrive at Truth, but simply to arrive at survival.
Culturally the Left part of us – traditionally catered for by religion, is a collection of touchy feely ambitions about where we think we ought to be, whereas the Right, so to speak is a handy set of pragmatic techniques for getting there.
When they work in harmony great advances (as defined by the Left) are made, when they don’t listen to each other, its a right bugger’s muddle.
To want to reduce the impact of humanity’s presence on the world as an act of spiritual humility, is perhaps laudable. To put the future of mankind and civilization at risk by lack of understanding of how to achieve this, is a step too far.
The Left overreaches itself. To ask for the least polluting ways to achieve human comfort and survival is weird, but not too hard to determine. It would in the case in question lead to the universal adoption of nuclear power wherever relevant. Clean safe, low impact on the environment, including the contentious issue of CO2 – what’s not to like?
Well the answer is ‘stuff we don’t understand, and that scares us and we know it can me made to go bang big time’
So therein hangs the horny dilemma The touchy feely emotional side of humanity that desperately wants the world to be other than it is, is by its very nature unable to accept the method by which this might be achieved.
To put it bluntly, the New Left wants a better world, but only if it can be achieved through the power of positive thinking… aka Magick.. or Prayer.
They will not accept rational technological solutions because those sully the spiritual purity of their desires.
Let us eat food that generates no shit, rather than build toilets…
rocketscientist, you presume that you know all of the design criteria used by the creator.
Just because it doesn’t make sense to you is not evidence that it makes no sense at all.
Robert,
You need to take it a step further to quell the critics.
Intelligent design, inclusive of potential (and even intended) change using evolution as the primary parameter, to create an art project. Criticism of the of the project, and imperfections in the project are intended … “good art provokes discussion”.
Or maybe it isn’t all that intelligent because it is (relatively) a 5th grade level project.
Things that seem to make sense, many times start to make sense when you look at it from a new perspective or when you come upon new knowledge.
Just because from your perspective, with the knowledge that you have available to you, God’s plan seems to make sense is not proof that the plan is nonsensical.
Along these lines, I saw this story about a coming bizarre legal battle in today’s gossip:
” Environmental group warns of lawsuit against Shell over climate change risks
FT reports: Environmental group Friends of the Earth has said it would file a lawsuit against Shell in the Netherlands, if the company fails to address concerns related to tackling climate change and bringing business in line with the Paris climate agreement. The lawsuit is being led by Roger Cox, a lawyer who had won a judgement in 2015 that forced the Dutch government to set more ambitious carbon reduction targets. Shell has announced plans to reduce its carbon footprint by 50% by 2050. However, the environmental group believes it is not sufficient to meet the goals of the Paris climate accord. It called for “binding rules” to make companies legally responsible for supporting carbon emission reduction. “But we believe climate change is a complex societal challenge that should be addressed through sound government policy and cultural change to drive low-carbon choices for businesses and consumers, not by the courts,” Shell stated.”
I wondered how this sort of rubbish can be taken seriously by the courts or where it leads if a bunch of useless parasites with no relationship to a company can ask a court to dictate how that company runs its business.
More to the point, how much of this kind of bullshit are oil companies going to take before they man-up and decide whether they’re in the business of politics and subsidy farming or producing fricken oil and act accordingly.
Maybe then they might collectively grow the balls to take losers like Greenpricks and Friends of the Herb to task.
…seems ExxonMobil already figured that out and so did the US courts who agreed with ExxonMobil that shareholders don’t have the right to micromanage a company’s activities.
Even in the EUssr, I wonder how this legal action has any legal basis.
The gormless parasite representing the dope smokers says Shell reducing their thin air emissions by 50% “… is not sufficient to meet the goals of the Paris climate accord…” and thus “…called for binding rules to make companies legally responsible for supporting carbon emission reduction.”
The Paris agreement is no more than a gentlemen’s agreement to annually make virtuous, hollow promises about maybe doing stuff which will in theory keep gullible warming in the distant future below an arbitrary limit picked at random so economists had some benchmark to use for imaginary cost calculations (the mythical two degree threshold).
The agreement is non-binding, has no basis in international law or treaty and the worst you can expect for not making imaginative enough promises is to get teased by the rest of the mob; how is it that a court in Holland might decide that “binding rules to make companies legally responsible for supporting carbon emission reduction” can be imposed on that basis?
Don’t the Dutch have a constitution? Do judges uphold the law as decided by the majority of elected representatives in parliament, or are they freeto make it up as they go?
But we’re not talking about America, we’re talking about a geriatric continent who’s demonstrably lost the plot, so I don’t doubt some senile, transvestite, dope smoking judge will ignore the rule of law (and common sense) and decide that dole bludging losers like Friends of the Herb actually have the right to dictate how tax paying companies manage their business.
After all the same morons made “…a judgement in 2015 that forced the Dutch government to set more ambitious carbon reduction targets”.
And you can’t fix stupid.
For once I agree with Shell that “complex societal challenge that should be addressed through sound government policy and cultural change … not by the courts”, even though since we’re talking about gullible warming there’s not a real ‘complex societal challenge’ on the table.
But I’d think it’s time for Shell to grow a pair and be a little more provocative; suggest that if any of these useless whackers really gave a shit about the claims of climastrology, they can vote with their wallets and abstain from using oil and gas instead of wasting a lot of time and money on a baseless court case. If said fisters manage not to freeze to death, perhaps they could then encourage the public to do the same.
The result might demonstrate how much sensible people care about expensive and disruptive solutions to imaginary problems though.
…One ‘failure to give a shit’ coming up.
Forget ‘peak oil’ or ‘peak lithium’; there are days when I wonder whether we’ve passed ‘peak evolution ‘ and people really are on a runaway convergent evolution path where by the time the weather is imagined to grow 2 degrees nicer, people and orangutans will be indistinguishable.
The stupid, it burns.
ah! I’ve just seen the article on this right here on WUWT. D’oh!
The dope smokers use CO2 to enhance the growth of their favorite plant.
And worse. Republicans are now split about 50/50 on the issue.
So left/right is no longer a guarantee of who is smoking what.
Since we know that climate change is natural, and we are in a warming phase of the 600yr cycle, and that this warming is about 1degc per century (20thC warming ave of estimates =0.8deg). So there’s no problem, we can do nothing and we will still be nowhere near seeing 2deg by the end of the century. Which is unfortunate because 2 or 3 deg of extra warming would greatly benefit mankind and all of nature. Shame we cant make it happen. We just have to keep on shivering.
Aggressors have always counted on appeasement.
” Children graduate from a school system that baptizes them into the environmental religion. The impact and extent of the changes are seen in the complete overturn of the order of learning. Just a few years ago, the older faculty held the prevailing wisdom and were challenged by the new young faculty. Now the young faculty comes into the system fully indoctrinated and unquestioning while the older faculty retain the necessary skepticism of a scientist.”
Things might begin to change when the “children” who were told at a young age that soon they would never see snow due to global warming are still faced with having to clear it from their driveways as young adults, 20 or more years after the predictions of balmy warmth were made. Do they believe Michael Mann and Al Gore or their “lying” eyes, and shovels full of white “global warming”?
It may take another five or 10 years, but at some point the “children of the environmental religion” will start wondering why the sea levels and climate are little changed from their childhood, and why should they bother sacrificing to avoid using fossil fuels if the increased CO2 has done so little to the climate over their entire lives so far?
Not at all.
The younger generations believe in CAGW because they were taught it in the schools as a mater of fact since an early age.
So what happens when CAGW or “Climate Change” finally does not occur?
The exact same thing as today!
Look around you. The message is *everywhere*. “Climate Change is real, it is here, it is happening now, you can see it, ecosystems are thrown into chaos, and it is only going to get worse.”
People believe this because this is what they have been taught and this is what we are all constantly being told.
Does it matter that none of the hysterical claims are true?
NO. Not at all. Bad enough that they believe claims which are demonstrably false, but they have nothing but disdain and contempt for anybody who evinces a more balanced viewpoint. This attitude makes it impossible for these people to ever become more informed on this complex topic.
Possibly, just as their teachers had desired.
AKA brainwashing, indoctrination.
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
Abraham Lincoln, (attributed)
This is the Phillip K. Dick scenario where the entire Earth believes things are true which are in fact false. Dr. Ball was correct it began with the perversion of education where morals and ethics no longer were taught because of the assumption that Man was an animal, and morals and ethics were religious or spiritual concerns, but I would place the source of this not with Darwin, but with Wundt in Leipzig, Germany in 1879 who founded modern psychology on the basis that Man was an animal, and psychology’s subsequent infiltration into the American (and other) education systems, as well documented in The Leipzig Connection https://www.amazon.com/Leipzig-Connection-Basics-Education/dp/0897390016, leading to the rise of the spurious “Social Sciences” and the deliberate dumbing down of America.
Climate change is now firmly metaphysical. It is no longer a model forms part of a rational explanation of the observed world, it is an assumption that colours how we perceive the world in the first place..
It will cease to exist when the civilisations that believe in it pass away, as did the Aztec and the Maya, because they too believed in stupid shit that turned out not to be true, or useful.
Tony et al,
Being a pension collector from a well known multi national oil major, I can speak with first hand knowledge of the depths to which the mis education system has infested even the best and brightest.
One of my functions in the North Sea was to act as wet nurse to the young graduates who had to spend six months off shore before becoming the current industry leaders.
Without exception they had been indoctrinated at even the ‘best’ universities into the extremists left wing religion.
Therefore it comes as no surprise that none of them are capable of defending the merits of fossil fuel in the public square, never mind a kangaroo kourt of Kaliforna law.
All you need to do is fool enough of the people to get a voting majority. Then you make disagreement with your position illegal.
Pop,
Lincoln also knew that he didn’t need to fool “all the people all the time” to get what he wanted.
He was above all else a politician. Asking hisself “how many and for how long?” is probably how he came up with the phrase.
In my experience with younger people, whether or not they remain indoctrinated depends on how far afield from academia the go as they embark on life’s journeys. I have a nephew and a niece that completed high school just as Obama came to power. They were almost completely indoctrinated upon finishing high school, and the first semester at university completed the indoctrination most thoroughly. The nephew then left the university environment and went to the world of work at real jobs. Five years later and he has come to his senses, even becoming an CAGW skeptic. The niece stayed in academia and even when going to work it was in education. She is still thoroughly indoctrinated.
Not everybody in academia is an AGW believer, but they dare not be seen as skeptics. It is career suicide. There is no academic freedom on this issue.
Did you notice in the last months of Obama’s misguided rein of stupor? He teleprompted at length about the non-existent imaginary alleged danger to the great barrier reef (even got his dopey family in on the act), but not once did he mention the astonishing on-going Chinese destructive debauchery within the South China Sea.
No, just pure claptrap about Austalia’s allegedly totally imaginary damaging of the GBR.
A prime example that the facts have nothing to do with this, as hopelessly warped and pontiticating globalist bloviators like Obama, and Truedough, are not the slightest bit interested in the reality, or in facts.
And they know what they are.
They speak in considered fantasies, by considered choice.
And they will never stop doing that.
Typo
expertize
should be
expertise
“In the Middle Ages, governments set limits on profit, usually up to 9%”. Well, if we have to put up with fake news I suppose that a bit of fake history is not too much to have to put up with. ‘Pseudo-religious’? Sounds impressive. Does it mean anything?
‘First Church of Our Lady of the Environment’. Me thinks somebody is getting his denominations in a twist. ‘First Church’ is a common usage among certain Protestant denominations. ‘Our Lady’ is not exactly a term you are going to hear very often from Protestants. I once used the term in a non-denominational (ie. not Catholic) school and got a somewhat bemused response.
“Because God was no longer the reason for humans being different in the academic world, it culminated in universities adding a completely new faculty, the Social Sciences”. Boy, does this fellow know how to make up stuff.
Yes.
It is the belief that Man owes more to Ma’ Gaia than to Man or God.
I didn’t make any of this stuff up.
I wonder why they were so fascinated by AIDS? The people most affected by that disease were already the least likely to be having children.
MODS
My comment disappeared.
(Was I a bad boy?8-))
[Nay. Gaia did steal it, and attempt to sacrifice it on the altar of purity. Learning of this deed, and with no regards for their safety, the mods charged the very gates of the Trash folder itself. There they did battle against the stone golems of WordPress, and lo’ in soft glow of early morning shortwave UV radiation, your comment was rescued to grace the pages of this blog once more. There is no need for thanks. We are, and will remain, your humble protectors. -mod]
Time to give the moderators a raise.
Who knew “Ma’ (“G”word) was polluting Man’s technology when everybody’s is up in arms about Man polluting Ma’ (“G”word)!
(Thanks!)
I was expecting somebody to come up with some variation on the twice nothing theme in regards to giving the moderators a raise.
[What? Huh? Which? Where? How much? When? (Mods wake up quickly, raise to the occasion.) .mod]
Yes. Actually environmentalism is not a religion at all. It’s simply a political movement with a particular ideology.
The author of this comment knows nothing about religions – that is clear from the comment. This makes him singularly unqualified to identify a political movement as a religion.
I forget, what is Dr. Ball’s area of expertise?
The most succinct definition of a religion I have yet heard…
lol … how to blow your foot off.
Religion us an idealism, the backbone of ideology.
“In the Middle Ages, governments set limits on profit, usually up to 9%”.
It is difficult to determine the actual effective profit margin in medieval England but it stands to reason that it would follow traditional religious beliefs on profit which tends to be in ~10% range. And medieval economies where highly regulated from at least 1066 onward (in England) and anyone who says it wasn’t, as you implied obviously hasn’t made a serious study of History. The Assize of Ale 1286(iirc) is typical of the type of price controls and hence profit regulation of the period. 9% is a good working number. And yes I’ve published on medieval economics way back in the day.
“In the Middle Ages, governments set limits on profit, usually up to 9%”.
I don’t know if some middle age gov’t did this or not. But I know the state of Oregon absolutely did this with the measure 49 override of measure 37. Too much profit not allowed.
Meanwhile, over in la la Land…
https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/apr/05/american-conservatives-are-still-clueless-about-the-97-expert-climate-consensus
Talk about a fifth grade level of intellect and emotional maturity. These rags are definitely colluding and the entire CAGW complex should be sued for crimes against humanity. I’ve been racking my brain to devise a strategy to sue them all. I’m not very smart though.
I read through the comments and my immediate response was disgust and embarrassment. Adults actually believe, talk, and act the way those commenters do on the guardian. How am I still affected by this? I know they operate this way but my, it’s really sickening. They are all completely ignorant of the data or lack thereof. There can be no doubt. This is a religion and dare I say because of technology, it will be the most devastating to humanity.
Be prepared folks, the red coats will be at our doors soon for Eco crimes or other such “atrocities” like breathing
The libs always push too far. CA sanctuary state is already falling apart.
It’s difficult to remain positive and have faith in our species when a good portion is so easily manipulated. Well, maybe easy wasn’t the word. This has been over a century in the making but regardless, the conditioning is so obvious I don’t understand how adults still fall for it. It’s like sales techniques. Once it becomes known how they work, one must think how did I ever fall for that? After that recognition, it’s much more difficult to be fooled again.
I’m working back to misanthropy, but more directed. My natural state is to wish good health and prosperity for all, abundance and comfort etc. However, with the modern green blob papo modernist/neo Marxists, they literally want humanity dead… As long as it’s not them. Well, I’m unfortunately becoming stronger in my self defense version of misanthropy.
If these people want us dead, and they do, well then I’m ok with those people suffering the fate they’ve mistook as placing on only us. They too shall suffer immensely, and I’m glad of it. I don’t suffer evil lightly, and deep in these people is a self loathing that only true suffering can repair. Hopefully we don’t all perish (not untimely I should say) but rather those who operate from total hatred for all humanity will see the error in their worldview, otherwise they shall reap what they sow. I just want to be left alone.
Two quotes remind me of our current state of oppression from the green blob.
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”
Shame on them for being fooled repeatedly.
I forgot the other quote
Thanks for another great post, Dr. Ball!
As most of us learned on the school yard, sooner or later you’re gonna have to fight the bully. Sooner is usually better….
Apparently it isn’t enough that Friends of the Earth Netherlands is suing Royal Dutch Shell to increase its renewable energy spending. Now, like ExxonMobil, #ShellKnew! about CO2 induced climate change back in the 1980s. And, of course, Bill McKibben is right on top of it….
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23ShellKnew&src=tyah
https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2018/04/05/shell-knew-climate-change-liability/
Considering Shell’s $$$ payoff appeasement of the environmental movement in Europe, this going from bizarre to extremely bizarre. I don’t think anyone could dream this up for a movie script.
Electric Utilities have been pretty big donors to Environmental Groups to appear that they care for the environment. The money is used to file lawsuits, lead protests and disrupt the power industry. Appeasement will never work.
I worked on a proposed coal fired plant in Florida. The state of Florida decided to diversify their fuel mix for the generation of power. Almost all of their power came from natural gas. They said that during peak power usage you could hear the rush of natural gas heading to Florida. Sounds like a wise choice.
The environmentalists got involved and stopped the plant dead in it’s tracks. They first got the site of the plant moved to a more remote location. After the new location was announced the environmentalists showed up at the commission and township meetings protesting the new location. A baby doll stopped the plant dead in it’s tracks. At one of the meeting an environmentalists threw a baby doll on stage and shouted that this new power plant will kill babies because of the mercury emissions form the plant. The project died.
The state of Florida then restated that what they meant by diversity of the source of power was to add wind and solar to the mix. They really did not mean to include a dirty fuel like coal. In just 3 years the entire premise of power generation was flipped on it’s head. And, no scientific or engineering reason for not building the plant, just emotion.
A side note. I am an engineer in air quality control for coal fired plants. I guess this means that I accept money from big coal or something like that. But, the utility was so intent on meeting the demands of the environmentalists that if the plant had been built it could not have operated as permitted. Examples: 99% SO2 removal efficiency on a 24 hour rolling average. In actuality it cannot be done. The highest to the date of the plant was 95%. The excess air required for combustion in coal fired plants is typically 20%. The client agreed to 15%. This would be impossible in a huge coal fired boiler. So again this shows that appeasement will not work.
I have a few questions on coal, maybe you can answer.
OK, so the client agreed to burn with insufficient combustion air.
Why on earth would they do that?
What was the supposed benefit?
What would have *really* happened has they tried it?
Mercury:
I have seen all kinds of claims for Hg emissions. I very often get the impression that enviros take the total Hg content of the coal and allege that *all* of it goes out as atmospheric emissions.
So:
How much is captured by the scrubbers, how much is retained in the ash, and how much actually makes it out the smokestacks?
Thanks for any insights you may have.
Not much – been thar dun dat
TonyL
No. They REDUCED THE EXCESS AIR from +20% to +15% HIGHER than that required for full combustion of the
“fuel per hour” used. There is STILL 15% EXCESS AIR to the burners.
Why? The air induction fans are massive, often 5 Megawatt motors. Reducing the power needed on those fans by even a little bit saves costs, reduced wear and tear on bearings and motors and gears and blower blades, and reduced the energy to required to create the electricity needed to run the fan. Power is proportional to load^3, so reducing fan power needed from 1.20 to 1.15 (from 20% excess to 15% excess air flow) is (1.15/1.20)^3 = 0.88 power required. 0.88 * 5 MEGAWATT = 4.4 Megawatt.
Savings = 0.6 Megawatt of electric power every hour of every day of every year.
But a typical nuclear plant = 0.33 fuel efficiency, a high-pressure (superheated) coal plant is 0.43 efficient.
Fuel savings then are 0.6 Megawatt/0.33 = 1.81 Megawatt reduced fuel useage.
To illustrate: A large windmill is 1-2 Megawatts, delivering only 17% of the power to the grid on average. (A few modern ones can get 3+ Megawatts, but those are very, very rare. Much hyped, but very rare.)
So, 2 Meg x 0.17 = +0.34 Meg per year, at the cost of the entire windmill and its power and cabling and foundation and maintenance.
Reducing excess air is more effective than building a large windmill.
Now, if the change is “forced” by an outside regulatory agency, then a fan reduction hurts the design flow and efficiency of the entire process train: Too low a flow = Higher temperatures in the boiler and reduced lifetime of the pipes and boiler tubing, ultimately a failing performance. EACH DECISION has to be based on the process conditions and ultimate lifetime of the equipment and the physics (thermodynamics) of each chemical reaction. An artificially “forced reduction” = “You cannot use that much air” can equal the difference between financial success (net positive rate of return on investment) and failure.
The Canadian nickel refinery was shutdown that way due to the hysteria over acid rain.
Meigs is correct. Most of the mercury is in the ash pond residue. Also, not in elemental form but tied up in compounds and oxides mostly. A toxic mix for sure, but the generating station I worked at in the 70’s had the city sewage plant adjacent to it spread digested sludge over an abandoned ash pond, and they grew trees on the site. I suppose the mercury must still be there in the mix somewhere, but well underground.
I cannot speak about the excess air question but my experience reporting Hg data from four different units was that when a baghouse with activated carbon was installed the Hg emissions were right about the detection limit. I am not sure what the control efficiency was but in my opinion if you can’t measure it that should be good enough.
@ all responders:
Thanks for the additional info.
This is the kind of info I was looking for.
Cheers.
Tony, I can try to answer some of them.
The lower excess air would theoretically lower the amount of NOx formed during combustion. It would also reduce the volume of combustion gasses that would require treatment for removing pollutants like particulates and NOx, SO2 etc. This would result in smaller equipment to treat the combustion gasses. Operating at the reduced excess air would take extensive operator attention and control to maintain a steady combustion process. An unstable burn creates all kind of issues in the boiler as well as ash quality issues. The utility agreed to it because that was one of the demands made by the environmentalist groups. Apparently they had read that if could be done and therefore it should be done.
Mercury is scary and that is the reason that it is regulated. If you read the initial Hazardous Air Pollutant study there were no known quantities of trace elements in coal that would create environmental harm. However the conclusion was that mercury should be looked at closely for regulation due to public perception and concern. Mercury emissions are measured in parts per trillion. As a comparison another common regulated pollutant, SO2 is measured in parts per million. Mercury is a tiny portion of the constituents in coal. The industry could not even measure the concentrations in the combustion before the EPA regulated it. Even today the limits set for mercury emissions cannot be measured. It is a guessing game.
If I am remembering right about 20% of the mercury comes out in the ash. If there is a wet scrubber removing SO2 on the plant another 70% can be removed. The issue with this is that some of the mercury becomes re-emitted from the scrubber. Additives are required to be added to the scrubbers to prevent re-emissions. Plants without wet scrubbers inject activated carbon in the combustion gasses to remove the mercury. The percentages above can vary quite a bit depending on the type of coal that is being burned in the boiler.
Keeping the power flowing requires a lot of work that goes totally unnoticed by the public. Environmentalists exploit that ignorance to get their way.
The best way to deal with Richard Alley it to take him at his word.
That alone is all that is needed to dispel his assertions.
Tim, actually a lot of the early research in climate was done by oil companies when few academics dabbled with it, many papers by company scientists were ultimately published with academics participating in the 1970s. It is incorrect to say they ignored the science. Many outside of business fields don’t understand that companies get into bed with the devil all the time. I would chalk funding and so called appeasement up to promotion and advertisement.
Companies invented virtue signalling as a business strategy. It’s not out of silliness that big companies contribute to all parties and civic office seekers during elections, nor that they fund hospital wings, enviros, academics, scholarships, olympic athletes, pay to name a sports venues, etc. Trump was somewhat parsimonious but he dished out support funds, mainly to Democrats – hey, it’s New York.
Non of this is appeasement. It’s buying Nice Guys’mantles. It’s good business usually. Fund a bureaucrat’s campaign and it’s harder for him to then not okay your permit! The mistake was in not knowing these are green terrorist organizations who hate Exxons guts. It’s like those who chide critics of an immigration policy that imports terror by saying immigration built the country! Yeah, but for the first time we’ve experienced a kind that hates our guts. What are they building in Europe?
National Socializts
It is necessary that some people stick up for the environment: Paul Watson, Aldo Leopold, Lawrence Solomon, etc., etc.
Some environmentalists are doing a wonderful job for no monetary reward.
Environmental lies are still lies.
Would you rather live in the polluted cesspool that was the old Soviet Union? link
Freedom means that some folks can advocate, often to the point of stupidity, for the environment. Freedom also means that other folks can call BS when things get stupid. Some environmental advocacy is good and helps keep us safe from being poisoned. Yes, some environmentalists lie, so do some polluters.
There are other approaches.
That makes everyone responsible for protecting themselves. Wiebo Ludwig may be the poster child for that.
Sounds like the difference between a conservationist and an environmentalist.
looks like SKeptical science is using the blue pencil against inconvenient facts again
$$$$$$$ at %%%% PM on $$$$$$$$$
Sea level rise predictions are exaggerated
Yesterday a post here (since deleted as spam) claimed that I had not produced a citation to support my claims aout nuclear power. I cited Abbott 2011 to support my nuclear claims.
Moderator Response:
[JH] Your post was deleted because it responded to a deleted post.
[DB] Further, the person to which you were responding has permanently recused themselves from further participation in this venue.
Gerontius … interesting choice of monicker.
You may know what you mean but what is anyone else to think? Try this instead.
This is 100% wrong after, “The charge by environmentalists that Exxon knew about the CO2 and global warming issue is correct…”
So far, ExxonMobil has done nothing but attempt to influence US regulatory actions in a manner least detrimental to ExxonMobil’s business.
If PR virtue signalling was the objective, ExxonMobil would be acting like BP, Shell, Eni, Total and other Euro-centric major oil companies. They are not. This has nothing to do with science and everything to do with real politik.
Plaintif’s in California vs Big Oil have revised their complaint…
http://blogs2.law.columbia.edu/climate-change-litigation/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/case-documents/2018/20180403_docket-317-cv-06011_complaint.pdf
existing motions to dismiss have been denied and new motions requested for 19/4 to 10/5 with Hearings to e held from May 24th
I’ll try and get the summary of changes to the complaint out of PACER
If you need to flush twice it’s pretty obvious what you’re dealing with.
Just read amended complaint.
Nothing there (apart from oil company stupidity).
Can’t sue under Nuisance for an event that may occur in the future.
Moreover the statute of limitations blows away most of their complaint.
If plaintiff gets any judgement against defendant then Alsup is corrupt . . . end of story.
Still believe this case will be dismissed.
If you want to eliminate science politicisation and corruption eliminate 100% of public ‘science funding’.
That’s the only way the paper publishing noise-makers will stop pushing FAKE-science muck and go get a job in a tragic hipster’s cafe.
Take away the sugar hit.
The moment I saw the Apple Mac in 1984, and its imagewriter then laserwriter printers, and desktop publishing mantra/paradigm, I could see the age of the professional con-man and political propagandist had fully arrived. You could write anything, make it look professional, and its credibility would soar, based on not much, to hot air. And that’s exactly what occurred, and by 1987 the CO2 greenhouse theory political scam and fear campaign was all over the publishing media.
Professional grade lie-manufacturing machinery had arrived on the doorstep of lower middle-class Homer Simpson’s, everywhere.
Thanks for this thoughtful, Tim.
“Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.”
Balzac
Or in my words, “Bureaucracy is the attempt to solve the stupidity of an organization by hiring more stupid people.”
Hmmm. So Tim Ball told the FF companies about climate change science? When? 1960s?
Exxon WAS doing its own climate research, and knew by 1970 that is was potentially a significant problem.
Exxon, rather than “appease the environmentalists” (whatever that means) instead got together with other corporations and launched decades of propaganda aimed at the right.
These are facts readily available online in scanned copies of original documents.
Could Ball really be ignorant of this? He’s sure distorted the truth (or outright lied) before, in his twisted interpretation of climategate emails. Go ahead, trust him – trust in the untrustworthy is part of what sustains denial.
Trust in the untrustworthy is also part of what sustains climate alarmism, Russophobia, WMD in Iraq, feeding of Viagra to Libyan troops, etc, etc.
Pointing out that Russia is doing bad things is Russophobia?
WMDs were found in Iraq, along with mothballed programs for creating more.
Never heard of the Viagra thing, perhaps you’re just making it up now?
As always Kristi, what you believe and what is true rarely intersect.
Kristi, the “facts” about the moon landings being fake, and 911 being an inside job are also “readily available online”. Doesn’t make them anymore true then the conspiracy you believe in.
Could you be more delusional? You are the ignorant one, not Ball.
Are there two Kristi’s?
At first she was a ranting lunatic declaring that all of us were in the pay of oil companies and such.
Then for a while she became rational and actually managed to ask some intelligent questions and appeared to be willing to learn.
Now she’s back to ranting lunatic form.
¬ Right now, I am enjoying watching them squirm and wriggle as they fight lawsuits from those they thought they appeased.
The schadenfreude is that more appealing because oil companies (and the government which too is being sued) could win their court battles easily: just bring in the experts and present thousands of scientific papers contradicting the theory of anthropogenic global warming, and wipe the floor with environmentalist zealots or their “scientific” support. But they cannot do that because it would make them very vulnerable to another type of legal action: why did the government pay subsidies for “low-carbon” technologies, or why did oil companies profit from wind farms, etc. – if they all knew that the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming was bunk?
Seems to that the only beneficiary of Kyoto is those Financiers in the Imagineering Dept who scored billions in real money being passed from hand to hand for ICCs (Imaginary Carbon Credits)
I envy them their ingenuity and wish I were bright enough to devise such a scam to make billions for me !
Interesting: breaking simple divisions.
one thing for sure – the alarmists are organized. why aren’t the sceptics?
4 Apr: TheLid: Media Campaign Against EPA’s Scott Pruitt Orchestrated By Obama & Clinton Cronies
by J.E. Dyer
My contribution in this post is adding a bit about the source going in. As (Daily Caller’s Michael) Bastasch notes, the source of much of the negative narrative-building on Pruitt is the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP). The EIP is a nonprofit founded in 2002 by Eric Schaeffer, a disgruntled EPA official. Here is how EIP describes it…
EIP has a strong animus against coal, as you can learn from the website…
Regarding funding, prominent sources for EIP, as documented by a congressional report in 2014, are the Wallace Global Foundation and the Energy Foundation, which in turn gets much of its funding from the Sea Change Foundation set up by renewables billionaire Nat Simons, a major beneficiary of Obama’s green-energy cronyism. (And yes, both foundation sources send money to and from the Tides Foundation and others in the standard list of progressive and radical-left money sumps.)…
https://lidblog.com/media-campaign-against-scott-pruitt/
5 Apr: Fox News: Trump and the US need Scott Pruitt to stay at EPA
by Steve Milloy
“I do,” President Trump said Thursday afternoon when asked by reporters whether he still has confidence in embattled Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt. And well the president should.
Pruitt has been the most effective appointee in implementing the Trump agenda. If Pruitt is forced out of his job because of charges he behaved unethically, America will suffer…
First, President Trump would have a hard time finding an EPA chief as competent and committed as Pruitt. Next, even if the president did, Senate Democrats would go all out to block confirmation.
President Trump should ignore the partisan attacks over trivialities. Let’s keep our eyes on the ball of EPA reform and restraint. Our national interest demands it.
Just let Pruitt do it.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/04/05/trump-and-us-need-scott-pruitt-to-stay-at-epa.html
flood the White House with expressions of support for Pruitt.
OMG – ironically speaking of course – there have been so many comments already but this article is one of the best journalistic pieces I have read since I can’t remember – THANK YOU TIM – SO ELOQUENT AND WELL WRITTEN – I MUST COPY IT AND I LIKELY DARE NOT PASS IT ONE TO THE HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS I already teach due to the likely recriminations of the religious like beliefs of my fellow science teachers – unfortunately I’ve already had back lash from indoctrinated students who, of course, think they know more than me about climate science – the word is out – I’m not one backing the new religion and reasoning with science I’ve found is a waste of my precious time – they’re converted
Dr. Ball, you write,
“FOS chose to stick to the science but were bloodied early by the politics. They have done a commendable job on the science. While their “science only” position is commendable because ideally, all science should be apolitical, it guaranteed little or no funding, especially from those agencies who could benefit from a clear, simple exposition of the science.”
All well and good using such worthy prose, the times your article attacks the politics of the alarmists, not the science, demonstrates how easily you find a political confrontation preferable to a scientific confrontation.
If you are claiming the scientific high ground, what advantage is political bitching in defending that science. Knock it on the head, it’s unhelpful…_
Appeasement – Would this have happened if the mainstream media did their job properly instead of acting as cheerleaders for CAGW? No company likes bad headlines, or TV reports saying they are destroying he planet because the (lying) interviewee from Greenpeace says they are.
I marvel at the way that environmentalists have reinvented the Catholic ‘indulgencies’ scam – where you pay the Church cash for a remission in your sins. (ie: carbon credits).
Yet it was the corruption of the indulgences scam that lead to the Reformation, and the eventual demise of the Catholic Church. And so if history is our guide, the naked greed of the environmentalists, in conjunction with their high minded moralising, will likewise lead to their demise.
R
I agree with you Tim.
Appeasement does not work against fanatics and bullies, especially green extremists.
What does work is full frontal confrontation – that is all that bullies understand.
Best, Allan
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/01/09/its-about-time-exxon-launches-counterattack-against-california-based-climate-conspiracy-lawsuits/comment-page-1/#comment-2713297
[excerpt]
I liked Exxon much better under Lee Raymond – he was reportedly impolite and tough, but he had the courage to face down blatant falsehoods like global warming alarmism and not acquiesce to them.
The current crop of oil industry executives don’t seem to “own a pair” among the lot of them, and they are now reaping the reward of their cowardly surrender to green extortionists. They have cost their shareholders a fortune.
This is particularly true in Canada, where the energy industry has been hamstrung by lack of oil pipeline capacity, such that price differentials between US and Canadian crudes have cost Canadians many billions of dollars.
A responsible Canadian oil exec would lead a lawsuit against these green extortionists and drive them into the ground.
However, that is not the nature of the modern CEO. Clearly, his “politically-correct” approach is not working.
Organized religion has embraced CAGW. Which is why I don’t associate. Besides the fact they are either dogmatic myopics or bible worshiping idolaters.
Fundamentalist, Creationist, Dominionist Christians like the Cornwall Alliance are dismissive of climate of science. The “word “deny” appears 5 times in their Evangelical Declaration on Global warming.
In another of today’s articles, one of the Green Weenies is whining about Evangelicals not falling into line.
Those of you who are too young to remember should be aware that managers in the tobacco industry were eager to enter into what is in effect an economic partnership with the government. That’s constructively what the Master Settlement Agreement of 1998 represents.
In exchange for revenue-sharing with Big Brother and a cessation of legal harassment, the industry was perfectly happy to betray its customers.
They really don’t give a damn about their customers. I suspect the craven managers of Shell, Total and BP wouldn’t hesitate to enter into a similar bargain with the devil. Given the opportunity, I fear that ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips would join in as well.
ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips would join in as well.
===============
Corporations are bound by law to make money for their shareholders. If the law says you must sell your soul to do this, companies will sell their souls. Otherwise, they will go out of business and be replaced by companies that will.
Unfortunately, Profit has become a dirty world, without anyone stopping to ask how we can pay for anything without profit. Even taxes rely on profit. Otherwise even the most powerful of governments will eventually fall.
Any company that doesn’t give a damn about it’s customers will quickly go out of business.
It’s those companies that listen to their customers and give those customers the things the customers are asking for that survive and grow.
Most companies know that they don’t have the resources to fight government, and so long as government stupidity hurts their competitors as much as it hurts them, they can find a way to live with that stupidity.
“Now the young faculty comes into the system fully indoctrinated ”
Exactly so. Look at the numbers of papers coming out from students or post grads, in conjunction with their supervisor, especially places like Potsdam and UEA.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking or believing the managements of Shell, BP, Total, ExxonMobil, Chevron or ConocoPhillips give a damn about whether the CAGW conjecture is right or wrong.
They don’t.
They will all sell their customers down the river in a heartbeat if it’s expedient.
Partially true, but it doesn’t have to be that bad. If pupils/students are correctly taught the scientific method in one arena, they will still have a tendency to use it in another. And at least some of the younger generation will always explore alternatives to the received ‘consensus wisdom’ just because….
Furthermore, if you end up studying a subject like, say, chemistry to any depth then it becomes far more difficult for an environmental activist to scare you with their invented tales of chemical armageddon. (Mind you, I did once share a lab with a another graduate chemistry student who disliked actually having to take a bottle of chemicals off the shelf if it involved her putting on a lab coat and safety goggles).
Excellent essay by Dr. Tim Ball.
The FOS really is FOS. They are the sun-worshiping Cult of Ra.
“The question is why wouldn’t energy companies do climate research?”
Because they are not a weather bureau or a university or a research institution. They operate for profit. Corporate R&D is for product development. Products they can sell for profit. Climate is not a product they can sell. They don’t need to convince consumers that oil is good. 97% of world’s transportation energy uses oil. Even Al Gore uses a lot of oil. If there’s money to be made in renewables, they will sell it too regardless whether it’s global warming catastrophe or the ice age.
They jumped on the “climate” bandwagon because it was politically expedient to do so. Looks like it has come back to bite them now, and they still don’t realize the mistake they made. Still singing the same ol climate hymns. Those climate hymnals must be getting pretty dog-eared by now.
Big Oil was perfectly happy with Climate Change so long as Big Coal was the target. They never stopped to consider the lessons of history. Having successfully invaded Poland, did this satisfy Hztler, or encourage him to go after even larger fish?
Having eliminated Coal, would the Green Blob be satisfied, or would this encourage them to go after Oil next? Look to the Courts for your answer. And after Oil, will they come next for you?
Those that forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.
They came for the Jews.
But I was not a Jew, so I said nothing.
“A plague on all their houses, but a more lethal one, as survival of the fittest would allow on the non-productive one”.
That statement is going to have me laughing to myself for the rest of the week; and maybe longer 🙂
That’s exactly the point. And it is the reason why we must support them to carry on, unless we actually like the idea of the return of the dark ages.
“Big Oil” can deliver what wind turbines and solar panels can not: raw materials for almost any purpose, medicine, fuel, plastics and all these other little things we actually need and the gadgets we love.
“Part of this is related to the founding of America with the escape from religious persecution of the Plymouth Brethren on the Mayflower”
I think you mean the group generally referred to as The Pilgrim Fathers [and presumably mothers] who eventually left for North America from Plymouth in 1620.
The Plymouth Brethren are part of a non-conformist Christian movement dating from around 1820, some 200 years after the Pilgrim Fathers [and mothers] left England. They probably share some beliefs but the Plymouth Brethren weren’t on the boat.