Powerlineline’s Green Weenie of the Week Award has now raised the bar against which all green weenies will now be measured. ~ctm
From Powerline.
Posted on January 4, 2019 by Steven Hayward in Climate, Green Weenie Award
As I suggested in my latest Loose Ends post earlier today, our standards for giving out one of our highly coveted Green Weenie Awards have been significantly raised. You can’t get one any more just for proposing a Green New Deal or something economically illiterate. You have to do a lot better than that.
Like Samuel Miller-McDonald, who writes at The Trouble today that perhaps the only hope for avoiding catastrophic global warming is for a nuclear war to reduce human population and consumption. You need to read the whole thing to appreciate its full dementia, but here is the climax of the argument:
One wrench that could slow climate disruption may be a large-scale conflict that halts the global economy, destroys fossil fuel infrastructure, and throws particulates in the air. At this point, with insane people like Trump, Putin, Xi, May, and Macron leading the world’s biggest nuclear powers, large-scale conflagration between them would probably lead to a nuclear exchange. . .
A devastating fact of climate collapse is that there may be a silver lining to the mushroom cloud. First, it should be noted that a nuclear exchange does not inevitably result in apocalyptic loss of life. Nuclear winter—the idea that firestorms would make the earth uninhabitable—is based on shaky science.
Um, isn’t the idea of nuclear winter based on the same climate science that is settled at the 97 percent confidence level? Oh never mind. To continue:
An [nuclear] exchange that shuts down the global economy but stops short of human extinction may be the only blade realistically likely to cut the carbon knot we’re trapped within. It would decimate existing infrastructures, providing an opportunity to build new energy infrastructure and intervene in the current investments and subsidies keeping fossil fuels alive. . .
Like the 20th century’s world wars, a nuclear exchange could serve as an economic leveler. It could provide justification for nationalizing energy industries with the interest of shuttering fossil fuel plants and transitioning to renewables and, uh, nuclear energy. It could shock us into reimagining a less suicidal civilization, one that dethrones the death-cult zealots who are currently in power. And it may toss particulates into the atmosphere sufficient to block out some of the solar heat helping to drive global warming. Or it may have the opposite effects. Who knows?
What we do know is that humans can survive and recover from war, probably even a nuclear one. Humans cannot recover from runaway climate change. Nuclear war is not an inevitable extinction event; six degrees of warming is. . .
It is a stark reflection of how homicidal our economy is—and our collective adherence to its whims—that nuclear war could be a rational course of action.
Now, I’m so old I remember when the most socially conscious people regarded the prospect of nuclear war with dread rather than hope. And perhaps we should be grateful for Mr. Miller-McDonald in making explicit what I put in boldface above—that the climatistas want to “shut down the global economy.” This is another good sign of how climate change has completely deranged some people.
And if this doesn’t merit a Green Weenie Award, I don’t know what would any more.
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You know you are part of a cultish religion when….you prefer nuclear war, mass death and destruction over building more nuclear power plants.
So, the alternative to CO2’s slowly frying the planet is nuclear war’s evaporating large portions of the planet.
The only important thing is climate, right ? — climate for climate’s sake ? — never mind those pesky, cancerous humans living in the climate, right ?
I would give a ROASTED green weenie award here. Oh, and make sure the weenie is NON-meat, NON-gmo, NON-chemically preserved, NON-fat, NON-salt, NON-gluten, NON-soy. So what’s left? — water, I guess, … in the form of a weenie ice cube, … BUT it has to be spring water, purified with reverse osmosis and/or steam distillation, harvested from natural mountain streams, and blessed by the Pope, prior to weenie-shape freezing. What to use as green coloring, however, poses a huge problem.
What sick pathetic anti-scientific apocalyptic claptrap.
End the funding and limit across that these dangerous parasites have.
Somebody sits around reaming this stuff up. Perhaps they could do something useful. I think the AGW people who are calling for claims of crimes against humanity should pluck the log out of their own eye first. That is sick.
” Nuclear winter—the idea that firestorms would make the earth uninhabitable—is based on shaky science ”
What shaky science is that? Where forests don’t burn? Where material that normally doesn’t burn in most fires, does in a nuclear event?
Someone’s imaginary opinion screed based upon:
Uh, no!
Wars do not halt economies!
Wars send economies into hyperdrive mode.
* Every factory is active making war goods. Fossil fuel generated electricity required for the CNC machines, robots, technical centers, mines, smelters, refiners and manufacturers!
* Every form of vehicle that aids the military is manufactured at record pace. All fossil fueled.
* Every military expands to the maximum, consuming fossil fuels at record pace.
* Every division of the military goes on highest alert!
* Every form of transport operates at maximum speeds.
etc., etc., etc.
Whomever this loon is, they clearly have never studied wartime economies; and it’s very unlikely they’ve studied regular economies, plagues, disasters, weather, climate or atmosphere.
Exactly the kind of person who shouldn’t be publishing these kinds of screeds.
Uh, no!
Wars do not halt economies!
conventional wars do not (unless it’s such a lop-sided conflict that the war ends almost as soon as it begins. a War between the US and Tuvalu, for example would not last more than a day and that day would pretty much be the end of Tuvalu’s economy along side it’s existence assuming the US used it’s full force in wiping out the island nation of 11,000 or so). But he’s not talking about a conventional war. He’s talking about a nuclear war, where entire nations can be effectively wiped out at the push of a button (Destroy all the major cities, utilities, refineries, factories, and other major parts of the infrastructure of a country, even a large country like the US of A, simultaneously with some well aimed nukes, and there won’t be much economic activity that can be accomplished by the few survivors who weren’t in those cities or working in those utilities, refineries, factories and other parts of the infrastructure at the time of the nuking).
* Every factory is active making war goods.
Not when all the factories are melted heaps of slag.
Fossil fuel generated electricity required for the…
unavailable when the utilities and refineries are melted heaps of slag
Every form of vehicle that aids the military is manufactured at record pace.
see above about the factories being melted heaps of slag. The record pace of a melted heap of slag is ZERO.
Every military expands to the maximum, consuming fossil fuels at record pace.
Consuming requires something to consume, that something to consume requires an infrastructure. When the infrastructure is destroyed, it’s literally impossible for the consumption to expand as resources to expand with are no longer are available. consuming at a record pace would then just exhaust what little bit of resources were left over after the nuking.
Every division of the military goes on highest alert
which would be something, if the military wasn’t one of the main targets of the nukes. Do you really think a country would launch an all-out nuclear barrage and not include all the enemies military bases in the primary targets list? if so, then it is you have “never studied war”. What ever parts of the military that were off-base at the time of the attack can be on high-alert all it wants for all the good it will do them – too little too late.
Every form of transport operates at maximum speeds.
Until their fuel runs out, which will be very quick at “maximum speeds” due to the above about utilities and refineries being melted heaps of slag.
Whomever this loon is
While I agree the guy is a loon, it’s not because any of the stuff you posted. It’s because he’s advocating nuclear war as a good thing.
That is a TV fantasy.
A one day war is called “a battle”.
Armies, governments, leaders are very anxious to minimize civilian damage, and especially to not irretrievably destroy factories, hardware and basic utilities. Nor to leave a contaminated sterile landscape.
Leaving nuclear bomb capabilities in the “what if deterrence” level and books about terrorist plots.
Repeat: Wars historically send economies into overdrive. Every able bodied person working or in service to the military.
Nuclear bombed and devastated countries is fear mongering. Even in WWII when the USA bombed Japan to force an end to the war, they did not obliterate Tokyo.
The bombings were a warning. That the USA would destroy parts of Japan instead of losing the lives of men in service.
We are back to the Population Bomb. Bomb the population this time. It’s the only Final Solution. SARC.