Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t James Delingpole / Breitbart / Willie Soon – according to climate novelist William T. Vollmann, compulsion and coercion is the only way to convince people to comply with his climate ideals.
“Are we prepared to endure lives with less comfort?”: William T. Vollmann on climate change.
The famous novelist and journalist has a new two-volume tome on climate change.
By Eric Allen Been Apr 19, 2018, 8:40am EDT
“For a long time I was a climate change denier,” says author, journalist, and war correspondent William T. Vollmann. “I didn’t want to be stressed out by something that might someday affect people after I’m dead.”
And yet for Vollmann — a brilliant, idiosyncratic writer whom some have described as a plausible candidate for the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature — the reality of climate change has become a personal obsession. Last week, he released the first volume of a sprawling, two-volume polemic called Carbon Ideologies. Titled No Immediate Danger, it explores in more than 600 pages how our society is bound to the ideology of energy consumption. Addressed to humans living in a “hot dark future,” the book is highly technical, chock-full of tables, studies, and hundreds of Vollmann’s own photos.
Vollmann traveled the globe for years reporting for this project, going so far as to self-finance after his publisher’s patience wore thin. “I spent my own money,” he writes, “and occasionally other people’s, to hike up strip-mined mountains, sniff crude oil, and occasionally tan my face with gamma rays.”
…
There are things that that can be done and maybe won’t be done if somebody says, “Well, it’s going to cost too much money to make that change.” Then what do you say? Do you say, “Well, we’re going to make you do it at a loss”? Or do we say, “All right, we’re going to give you money to help you change”? I can’t pretend to have an answer about stuff like that. All I can do is say, well, there are lots and lots of problems.
It’s not just what some consumer does at home. It’s niggling little issues that add up. In Japan, roughly 50 percent or so of all the methane emissions — and that’s one of the three most dangerous greenhouse gases — are caused by rice growing. All this stuff that seems so innocuous. It seems to me that you have to drag people into some kind of regulatory hell, unfortunately. Maybe there’s a better way to do it, but I don’t see one.
…
Can you imagine what the world would be like with people like Vollmann in charge?
Vollmann is the real deal – according to the VOX article, at one point the police suspected him of being the Unabomber, because of the hardline anti-growth and anti-development themes of Vollmann’s writing.
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Well, sure, why not? That’s was the NKVD (pre-KGB) did in the 1930s through 1950s. They found dupes they could use in celebrities in Hollywood, and prominent authors like Ernest Hemingway, people who were acceptable to the US establishment but leaned somewhat leftish until the McCarthy stuff took place. The pattern that emerged 80 years ago is underway again now. So is Putin funding this? Why not? He and that obnoxious person Soros have their own agendas, although I think Vlad’s is more oriented toward getting cash for his gas and oil products.
Sara, Putin has made it clear to anyone paying attention what he desires. He believes one of the great tragedies in all of history was the dismantling of the Soviet Union. Few people know enough history to know that many of the Soviet states were a part of Czarist Russia, e.g., Ukraine. He blames the USA for the split up happening. He sees himself as a great Russian patriot so to disrupt the USA anyway he can is what he is going to do until they put him in a box. The KGB funded both radical political groups in the USA as well as radical environmental groups in Europe up until the Soviet Union rebranded itself and the SW states split off. He cares about oil and gas only as it funds those that keep him in power and as a weapon if and when the EU get out of line.
The reality is that, based on the paleoclimate record and the work done with models, one can conclude that the climate change we have been experiencing is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and plenty of scientific rational to support the idea that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is really zero. If you really want to get rid of methane you have to get rid of all hydrocarbon compounds that might produce NH4 when they decay and those compounds include us. The AGW conjecture is based on only partial science. The AGW conjecture depends upon the existence of a radiant greenhouse effect that has not been observed anywhere in the solar system. The radiant greenhouse effect is science fiction so hence the AGW conjecture is science fiction. All the regulation in the world will have no effect on the Earth’s climate. It is all a matter of science.
So, he’s pumping out enough ecobabble by the early 90s to figure prominently in the FBI’s Unabomber case , by his own claim, but at the same time declares himself a “long time climate denier.” So, like, that six weeks in his late 20s between Hansen’s Senate Circus and his emergence as an ecotwit classifies him as a “long time climate denier?” A designation which is supposed to lend some added credibility to his claims?
Rice and natural gas.
Natural gas upwells from the deep earth. When rice paddies are
drained, the soil culture can digest it, converting it to CO2.
When the paddies are flooded, the gas is forced to the surface
quicker than the aerobic microbes can digest it. Rice does not
produce Natural gas.
The CH4 emitted from rice paddies is produced by the decay of organic matter in the soil. It is not coming from “up welling hydrocarbons”
He’s a novelist and journalist? Meh. Why would I be even slightly interested in his opinion on this matter?
“occasionally tan my face with gamma rays.
======
Nonsense. Only a scientific illiterate would think this true.
Gamma rays are high energy protons. In effect you are trying to get a tan from very tiny high speed bullets passing through your body. Good luck with that.
I believe the scientific term for this is “fruitcake”.
“Gamma rays are high energy protons.” Photons, not protons. Don’t get suck too deep into his work of literary fiction.
I should sue him for … um … depramation.
And yes, gamma rays are high-energy photon; cosmic rays are mostly high-energy protons, with some heavier nuclei sprinkled in to add a little crunch.
Are we prepared to allow Progressives to weaponize government to impose their policies? We are allowing them to destroy the basic mechanism of peacefully resolving contentious issues if we do.
What is notable is not the science, but the socialistic demands of those who are attempting to use climate scaremongering as an excuse to usher in the long sought, but totally unsustainable, Progressive Utopia. This is ironic since the very same Progressives scold the rest of us on the topic of “sustainability.”
The science is settled: the climate is changing and always will be changing. In fact, something would be very wrong if the climate stopped changing. The issue was never really change, but the extent to which the change was going to harm our biosphere.
I don’t deny that less than 25,000 years ago northern Illinois was covered by more than mile of glacial ice. I don’t deny that green plants must have at least 160 ppm of CO2 to live. I don’t deny that at the peak of that last period of glaciation that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere bottomed out at about 180 ppm of CO2. I don’t deny that green plants almost ceased to exist.
I don’t deny that less than 12,000 years ago mammoths were flash frozen in Siberia with fresh grasses still in their stomachs. I don’t deny that 1,000 years ago Vikings in Greenland were cropping barley so they could use the grain to make beer. I don’t deny that millions of Europeans died in the Great Famine of 1315–17, caused by cold and wet conditions. I don’t deny that the Thames River froze solid to such an extent that during 26 separate winters from 1408 until 1814, Londoners were able to hold a Frost Fair on the ice.
Up until now, advocates of “climate change” demand solutions that converge far more on socialism than on anything else. This is a means to an ideological ends having nothing at all do do with protecting the biosphere. It is intended to advance the long awaited secular Utopia.
It seems with every passing day the one constant in the debate about this issue is far more about how socialistic the policy solutions must be than any other factor. That tells me that the “settled science” involved is far more Scientific Socialism than any real science.
He says he was a climate change denier for the wrong reasons:
“William T. Vollmann. “I didn’t want to be stressed out by something that might someday affect people after I’m dead.””
Basically he believed in ‘climate change’ but wanted to ignore it as ‘it would not affect him’.
This shows a certain – not nice – trait of character, but it does not qualify him as ‘climate change denier’, it disqualifies him for it.
To be a qualified ‘climate change denier’ one needs to look into ‘the science’ and to understand the arguments by himself – what he obviously did not do.
As a member of the climate change denier community I contest his pretence to have belonged to this very special community.
As I said earlier, rice is a wetland plant. Like wheat, it is a grass that was long ago domesticated by humans for food. There are two kinds of rice that humans use, the long grain rice from Asia, with which most of us are familiar, and the short grain rice from Africa, which is used in puddings and risottos, among other things. Grain domestication started about 18,000 years ago, when the ice sheets began to recede.
As I also said, wetlands – which are everywhere – give off methane as part of the decay process. They support multitudinal species of wildlife from insects no larger than the head of a pin to wading birds and diving birds and the aquatic critters they live on. They are part and parcel of any healthy ecosystem. They take runoff from flooded creeks and rivers, absorb and hold millions of gallons of water that trickles down into aquifers, and since things change over prolonged periods of time, they may eventually dry up, turn to peat, and eventually, peat becomes coal – a naturally occurring fossil fuel that is useful in many, many ways. (Yeah, I’m generalizing here, so just deal with it.)
If you don’t understand how much things change over prolonged periods of time, then spend some time watching ‘Winged Flight’, a film that followed migrating birds from northern Europe south ward to the African deserts. Why in the blue-eyed, blinking world would water birds like geese, ducks and pelicans migrate to a desert, if the desert had not at some time in the distant past been wet and green? Since there are pictographs in caves in the Sahara that show it was once flush with wildlife, lakes, trees and grasses to graze, the pictographs show that the CLIMATE of the Sahara was once wet and green and that means that it will change back to wet and green in the future. Nothing is static on this planet. NOTHING.
So how does acknowledging this natural process make anyone at all a climate ‘denier’, whatever that is?
What this ignorant man Vollman infers – without EXACTLY saying so – is that anything done by humans, including cultivating a domesticated grass that feeds people, is anathema somehow and should be obliterated. If this is not indicative of psychosis, or close to it, then what is it? And if he doesn’t like what humans do, and wants to obliterate the species, then how does he expect to make a living?
Oh, yeah: regarding climate change, out of curiosity some time ago, I did an Excel bar chart to find out for myself how often the climate goes from cold to warm to cold and back and forth like that, and what I found with this very rough chart is that the warm periods were considerably shorter than the prolonged cold periods. Going back 600,000 years on that chart, the shortest warm period lasted about 35.000 years and at this point, we’re more than halfway through that. I probably should have gone back a full 1,000,000 years, but I saw enough in that 600KYR timeframe to realize that there is a glaring difference in the length of time between warm periods and cold periods. We may be coming to a blip in this warming period – don’t know, but these warm and cold periods follow a wave pattern just like those temperature charts you all love so much.
Essentially, my chart shows plainly that the climate cycles change on a constant basis and it is part of the natural processes of this little blue marble we live on, and no one, including the ecohippies and eco-celebrities, can do any thing at all to alter these natural processes.
This Vollman person is just jumping on the wagon so that he won’t be left out in the cold if things go sour.
Okay, rant over.
I almost forgot to add this: If what I posted in this rant of mine makes me a “denier”, then the people who make such claims have interest only in getting your attention, your cash, and control of you.
Maybe we’ll get lucky and a new ice-up will send the snow line creeping south and smash their private jets to flattened pancakes. Now that would be awesome.
If I ever meet this miscreant, I’ll be sure to spit on his shoes.
Clearly, Vollmann needs to go live in the woods, in a yurt or teepee, living off the land, or maybe a cabin he builds himself using hand tools, and scrap lumber. He could be like a modern-day Thoreau, only dumber. Maybe, just maybe, after a year or two of that, he’d wise up. But I doubt it. It’d be good for his obviously-tortured soul though.
I would happily support something that requires ALL these clever and obviously Superior Beings to spend a minimum of two years – 24 full months – living entirely without any kind of modern support net.
No food, except what they can obtain by foraging and hunting.
No clothing, unless they make it themselves from hides and plants,
No medicine, unless it is so-called “natural” medicine, meaning herbal stuff.
No power utilities, no electronic comm stuff, no pumped water.
Dig a well, test it themselves. Or carry water in a bucket.
And above all: (my favorite): NO MODERN PLUMBING. Dig a cesspit, get some lime to keep the smell down and build their own outhouses.
And certainly most important, drop them off some place in winter, before a blizzard strikes, and wish them good luck.
They already have a “challenge” like that, Sara.
Try “Naked and Afraid” on one of the satellite or cable channels. The warmistas can apply for the challenge, then see what they are asking for.
Most teams don’t even make 21 days.
I watch the series because I earned a degree concerning human behaviour and group dynamics to provide a real diploma besides the one I already had from “real world” group dynamics. I watch and am always fascinated by the dynamic, but I also learn a new way to get a fire going, catch a fish, trap a rat or use the vegetation for building and eating.
Gums sends…
Thank you, Gums, however, I do not have a working TV and perhaps it’s best i do not. Considering that watching ecohippies trying to live ‘Garden of Eden’ style would destroy my appetite, the prospect of watching a bunch of idealistic nitwits caving into defeat at the hands of Mom Nature & Company might be tempting, but I want to keep my lunch down. 🙂
I thought that even Thoreau only lasted 2 years at Walden Pond .
The point of my above comment is that the upwelling natural
gas is converted to CO2 by microbes if the paddies are not
flooded. The natural gas becomes CO2 over time in the
atmosphere if not eaten by microbes,
Sarah, most swamps are anoxic, therefore the natural gas
read at the surface is caused by the lack of oxygen to support
the aerobic microbes which otherwise would reduce the
up welling hydrocarbons to CO2.
Yes, but I was trying to be brief, Jerry. Methane is a byproduct of digestion, whether it’s animal (which includes humans) or plants. Doesn’t matter. I just wanted to get to the point, that’s all.
In fact, a phenomenon like will-o-the-wisp/Ignis fatuus, is a phosphorescent flame that feeds off gases from swamps and marshes. Adding something like that is valid, but I wasn’t going after such natural phenomena, simply discussing the silliness of Vollman’s attitude.
Jerry,
You are wrong about where methane in wetlands comes from.
Unfortunately, people like Vollmann are all too common in the world—bullies, intent on coercively imposing their own views on everyone else . . . and “by any means necessary”.
Our federal governments, or state governments, and even many local governments draw these people into so-called “service” (really self-serving activities). One of the reasons governments tend to grow in power and authoritarian tone is because only government has the legitimate authority to use force to impose policies, and bullies like to have a monopoly on the use of force—they love to make people do as they say. So it’s natural that one might expect those will a bullying nature to fill up government roles. True classical liberals are disgusted by this kind of behavior, and tend to have a live and let live attitude, plus most classical liberals (non-bullies) have better things to do with their lives. It was the knowledge of this power magnate for bullies that was the impetus for writing our constitution as it was created—to greatly limit power. But, of course, no piece of paper will stop the bullying by itself.
“Climate XXXX” (X=change, disruption, ..) neatly fits into the tool belt of bullies, much as blaming things on evil spirits (without the need for proof) fit into the tool belts of people in institutions like the Inquisition in bygone days.
Should we be surprised?
The plant life was never in danger of lack of CO2. The production of
CO2 from the upwelling natural gas puts CO2 at or near the plants.
The ice cores being a great distance from soil production of CO2 in
ice age periods means that the cores were probably capturing only
or mostly capturing volcanic production of CO2.
I suggest you read a textbook on diffusion physics.
There is no “upwelling natural gas”.
There is methane from rotting vegetation, and that’s pretty much it.
Jerry,
Take the good advice being offered and study the topic a lot more.
From a fact-based perspective.
It will help you.
In essence it just boils down to neomalthusian doomthought. I’m not buying it. Malthus was wrong, Ehrlich was wrong.
“going so far as to self-finance after his publisher’s patience wore thin. “I spent my own money,” he writes, “and occasionally other people’s,”
I spend my own money every day……only an elitist would report that they are to be famed for their sacrifices by spending their “own” money.
“It’s niggling little issues that add up. In Japan, roughly 50 percent or so of all the methane emissions — ”
50% is a niggling little bit that adds up? Wha…?
That’s all I needed to read to tell me this idiot is a self possessed class A asshat that needs to extract his own melon from his posterior and take a look around once while.
What does this man have against rice anyway? Seriously the diet staple of billions of people and it’s “bad” now? Heck, he could have looked at corn or wheat too…but nope–just rice. Rice is bad because it’s individual GRAINS and individuality is bad. Look at corn or wheat flour–all the grains are mixed up, like a good society should be–forced to break down and become powder under the grinding wheel of regulation. It’s RICE and RICE ALONE that will kill us all people! Don’t you get it? Let me break it down for you again…oh wait….I need to go suntan ontop of a mountain while my Sherpa who I don’t pay very well lugs my laptop up 20K feet and brings me my freshly ground, freshly brewed Kenyan coffee. I’ll get back to you on the importance of the evils of rice after my nice warm bath.”
Elitist fish wrap. I say.
As is so often the case with the “we know best” progressives, they are on higher missions placing them above the law, giving them licence to take whatever measures they deem necessary and obligates them to take fascist control in order to impose what is for our own good.
Countless activist bureaucrats at every level of governance possess varying degrees of this attitude while simultaneously making sure they take no responsibility for anything that goes wrong.
Mostly by mendaciously concealing what they can to prevent facing consequences for their progressive missions of insanity.
Global Warming/Climate Change is Earth Day with confiscatory taxes.
Hans,
The paradigm in western thought is wrong. Hydrocarbons are not fossils.
I realized that the idea that hydrocarbons on earth were only artifacts of
biological life when in 1958 my gen science teacher told us that the outer
planets contained methane was wrong.
Since then the pictures of Titans’ oceans of hydrocarbons, analysis of the
atmosphere of exoplanets all showing hydrocarbons convinced me that
claiming that claiming that earth’s hydrocarbons were fossils defies logic.
Then I read about Russia’s petroleum teaching and Dr. Gold’s book.
I then saw Dr. William Woods video about the jungle soil in Brazil called
Tera Preta growing back after the top third of the soil was mined for garden
soil, at a rate of appx 1/2 inch per year. I realized that that process required
an enormous amount of energy.
My hypothesis was that Trera Preta was over a plume of natural gas.
I tested my theory, first in Kansas, then on East Tennessee farm land,
then on my own property in East Tennessee. The amount of upwelling
natural gas, in the presence of adequate moisture, is related to the
richness of the topsoil.
In the Atlanta, Georgia, the shield is at or near the surface.The shield
blocks most to all of the of the upwelling gas, and the soil is very poor.
I have described the test in previous comments on thus blog.
I realize that a retired business man who has been self employed
for the last 45 years lacks credentials in the scientific world, but
a lack of a paradigm frees me to make connections that other
people do not see.
My test is simple. My daughter tells me that it is too simple, therefore
people think I cannot possibly be right. My discovery proves, with a
little thought that my statement about rice paddies is correct.
I am proving Dr. Gold was correct.
More later. My flight is being called.
Perhaps also reading geohydrology textbooks would be useful. Are you familiar with the physics of permeability measurements?
Let me see if I have this right. There is methane on Titan, therefore all methane on the Earth is from cosmic sources.
Is that really the story you want to hang your reputation on?
You found ground that was rich in organic material, found that methane was coming from it. And this proved that all methane came from primordial sources?????
No, the methane was coming from anaerobic bacterial breaking down the organic material in the soil.
Jerry,
Your “test” does not explain the documented evidence that biological processes produce methane in the abundance you detected.
Additionally, the tests of caron isotopic sourcing shows you are incorrect.
Also, methane, like H2O, CO2 and other molecules have both biological and non-biological pathways for their generation.
Why limit the experiment to three weeks? Let’s just strand these sanctimonious idiots on some South Pacific island for the rest of their lives. They can pass whatever laws they want there.
Interesting to see he mentions strip mined mountains. In Kentucky rehabilitation of mines that have cleared vegetation off the sides of hills (contour mining) call for the land to be planted with grasses and not the original trees. Why? There so little land for cattle and new housing the state mandates no trees.
There’s nothing wrong in principle with “regulatory hell” to motivate social compliance. The challrnge just has to be big enough – as a war would be for rationing, the closure of non-essential industries, lights out at night etc.
We already use regulatory hell for the common good. Previous industries would br horrified at current regulaions on safety, pollution and quality control. Many today would agree – think pipelines for one!
What should be unacceptable – but what I think the writer is describing and recommending are ever changing, impossible to fulfill rules. The purpose of this is to impose an elite agenda unsupported by the majority, one doomed to legislative control.
In Canada, the socialist government of British Columbia is following te “hell” tactic to stop the Kinder-Morgan pipeline. As the Greens are still doing with the Keystone XL pipeline.
The EcoGreenWarmists consider CO2 to be a planetary cause greater than any conventional conflict. From their view, the nuclear option is a solid option. What we need are courts and legislators who simply say, “We’ve heard and considered your opinions. The answer is ‘no’. Go away.”
Good governance can’t always satisfy all positions of the citizenry. Where are our leaders willing to admit this and act on it?
How much money would it take to stop the warming of the planet?
Depends. How much you got?
Vollmann has a point. Why produce rice when it contributes such a high percentage of methane emissions. What use does rice serve? Is it really worth placing the planet at risk in order to produce lovely landscape photo opportunities?
What a numb it.
Kristi Silber and Timg56
Rice paddies release Methane ‘What is the problem ,
Methane breaks down into CO2 and HO2 in ten years .
Methane is so small a fraction of the atmosphere that it has to be measured in billionths..
Get over it
Methane is a non problem .Find some thing else to worry your little heads about
Timg56, just how ignorant are you? Aren’t you aware that rice is a major food source for much of the world’s population.
Aren’t you aware that many of the places where rice is grown, nothing else will grow?
Are you so sheltered and ignorant that you actually believe that the only reason rice is grown is so that rich westerners can take pictures.
I would advise you to grow up, but I doubt that is still possible.
PS: Only people who know nothing about physics believe that methane posses a problem.
Wow. I have seen some dumb things posted on the internet, but Timg56 takes the cake.
Methane is a byproduct of plant and animal tissue decay. It’s part of the natural processes that keep this little old planet of ours habitable.
What use does rice serve? It’s a staple of the diet of several billion human beings, which obviously has no value to YOU, Timg56, and it also, as I have indicated in a prior comment further up the page, provides food for migrating birds. Rice, like corn and wheat, is a domesticated plant that has been grown for thousands of years by humans.
Since you have no concept of what the natural world consists of, and that what I said is way outside the boundaries of your information zone, but I strongly suggest you become informed before you make statements such as ‘what use does rice serve’.
Most of the unstable energy-rich (the two go hand in hand) methane on our planet comes from a rock-water reaction called “serpentinisation”. Methane contains carbon and energy, making it an ideal substrate for life in places where the sun doesn’t shine. It is not the end stage of life, but the beginning.
http://living-petrol.blogspot.com
If that were true, the source rock for this reaction would have been consumed billions of years ago.
That something can happen is not evidence that it is the only thing that is happening.
MarkW,
if that were true, the source rock for this reaction would have been consumed billions of years ago.
====
glib (adjective)
readily fluent, often thoughtlessly, superficially, or insincerely so:
e.g., a glib talker; glib answers.
(dictionary.com)
A) “Why is the seafloor so recent and the continental crust so old?
The oldest oceanic crust is about 260 million years old. This sounds old, but is actually very young compared to the oldest continental rocks, which are 4 billion years old. Why is the seafloor so young? It is because of subduction: oceanic crust tends to get colder and denser with age as it spreads off the mid-ocean ridges.” – NASA Earth Observatory
b)
“Radiogenic carbon age dating of the carbonate structures and overlying sediments indicates that the Lost City hydrothermal system has been ongoing for at least 30,000 years. This is at least two orders of magnitude longer that most of the known black smoker systems. Geophysical data also suggests that there is a significant amount of fresh peridotite at depth in the massif that can still be altered, and thus the serpentinization processes in the basement rocks have the potential to drive the Lost City system for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years.
https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/05lostcity/background/serp/serpentinization.html
MarkW doesn’t want to see any evidence sdemonstrating that methane is a product of rock-water reactions.
There are none so blind as those who refuse to see.
Of course, oil comes from the same abiotic source.
Saturn’s moon Titan has an ocean of liquid methane. Obviously not of organic origin.
https://www.space.com/28957-titan-methane-alien-life-search.html
That stars produce carbon, and that hydrogen is plentiful in this universe is not in question.
Our atmosphere may well have had a lot of methane in it as well when the earth was young.
However once plants started photosynthesizing, that methane disappeared. Completely.
That these hydrocarbons can come from an abiotic source is not evidence that all hydrocarbons come from abiotic sources.
The problem is that if your theory was correct, it could be proven by finding oil and natural gas in large quantities in places were biotic could not have created it.
Unfortunately, despite years of trying, such searches have always come up empty.
My understanding is that long chain hydrocarbons must be organic in nature…and that abiotic hydrocarbons are much simpler molecules. Thus, I’d agree MarkW…
rip