Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Guardian author Megan Bergman discovers worrying about climate change is not a priority for people with real problems.
Talking about climate change in conservative places is hard. But we can’t afford not to
Megan Mayhew Bergman
Thu 18 Apr 2019 19.00 AEST
Last modified on Thu 18 Apr 2019 19.02 AEST…
Climate change, I was told when buying a coffee, is not a “polite” topic of conversation in Natchez, Mississippi.
…
The elevated places of modern Natchez fare well in floods, but business and homes in low-lying areas are most at risk, like the Anna’s Bottom and Bourke Road areas, and the riverfront known as Natchez-under-the-Hill. While the Mississippi river has never been static, it is pushing towards a more efficient course to the sea down the Atchafalaya River; only manmade levees keep it in place. The nearby Old River Control Structure is one catastrophic flood away from a failure that would destroy entire cities and create an estimated economic loss of $14m a day.
Which is why, to outsiders, the avoidance of climate change conversations seems strange, if not unconscionable. The 2011 flood, which affected Natchez, caused $2.8bn of damage and affected 1.2m acres of agricultural land. The failure to talk about, let alone acknowledge, the future of climate change here could have disastrous impacts for the town and surrounding areas.
I met Natchez realtor Jim Smith for coffee to ask him about what I perceived as the town’s tendency to look backward, instead of forward. Smith owns Natchez Architectural and Art Discoveries, an art gallery and event venue downtown.
“Help me understand Natchez,” I said.…
“Is it hard to talk about climate change in such a conservative place?” I asked.
“I’m no liberal,” Smith clarified. “But despite what you think, a lot of people here understand the science of climate change.
“It’s a baffling place sometimes,” he conceded. “These are some of the greatest people in the world. But if you’re worried about getting food on the table, you might not be focused on climate change.”
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/18/climate-change-mississippi-plantation-economy
Bergman possibly doesn’t realise that she has stumbled across the real reason climate advocates cannot win a total victory in a free society.
Climate policies impoverish people. Useless renewables drive up the price of energy. Embracing renewables leads to the downscaling or closure of energy intensive businesses like factories and mines.
After a few years, anyone who supported climate policies now has a bigger problem to worry about; putting food on their table. So they tend to vote for politicians who are more focussed on economic issues, like President Trump.
Some of Bergman’s fellow greens are well aware of this dilemma, but they have an audacious solution; get rid of freedom.
Climate Litigation: The Latest Green Effort to Overturn Democracy
Bill Gates Climate Rant: “Representative Democracy is a Problem”
Claim: Democracy creates climate change paralysis
Guardian Headline – “Leading climate scientist: ‘democratic process isn’t working'”
DiCaprio Calls for “Deniers” to be Banned from Public Office: President Obama Stays Silent
etc.
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In the long run we cannot control the courses of the big rivers any more than we can control the climate or the tides and that is the way it has to be. If we did gain real total long term control of their flows they would no longer be rivers and the ecosystems they foster with their flooding would die. The rivers most controlled become nothing more than commercial channels with far less life and biodiversity.
The farmland in the flood plains suffer losses due to periodic flooding but that bottom land is the most fertile and valuable.
Imagine no swamps or oxbow lakes.
The gravel and sand we can most efficiently quarry in most of the country are from the deposits of river courses, both current and ancient.
The stupidity of Ms Bergman is typical of Liberals. They are product of a deficient education.
Her stupidity arises from the obvious fact that the people who live along the Mississippi River understand it has always flooded and changed course. Some periods between big floods are a decade, other floods come in sets of several in just a few years, they know that because their grandparents and their grandparents dealt with that reality.
Now the Stupid Left wants to tell them that now the floods are the result of recent “Climate Change.”
The folks of the Mississippi are actually smarter than Ms Bergman.
Better to focus on protecting people by the river. The ice flows down from the north.
Bergman writes short story fiction. She even won an award for it, the Garret Award for Fiction. Sounds to me like she is on track for another award.
Researchers found that when the jet stream meanders over the western US, as occurs after a strong La Niña winter, more frequent high ozone days are expected at the western US surface in the following spring. Using lidar and balloon observations alongside a global chemistry-climate model, the researchers trace the cause of these poor air quality days to ozone plunging down to the ground from high in the upper atmosphere in dynamical events called “tropopause folds.” The tropopause is the boundary between the lowest layer of the atmosphere (the troposphere, from the surface to about 10-15 kilometers) and the ozone-rich stratosphere (which extends from the tropopause to about 50 kilometers high).
In the US, Climate Change Alarmism exists primarily in the minds of East Coast and West Coast Liberal Elites who sneer down their noses at the Deplorables in fly-over country. Even in Texas in places like Austin or El Paso, the big blue splotches in a sea of Red, Climate Change is not an issue.
I go to the nearby Walmart Supercenter to buy my beer, mostly because it is much cheaper there than Safeway or WholeFoods. (The same IPA that I buy at Walmart is $6.77/6pack, compared to almost $10 at Safeway or $11 at WholeFoods). I also fill any prescriptions there and occasional allergy meds there because they are cheaper too by usually a few dollars. The store is large, newly renovated and quite clean. The people I see at WalMart are mostly elderly (on fixed incomes for sure) and lower class working folks, folks just trying to get by. Each probably has some kind of silently-engulfing economic struggle. There are no Teslas or new Audis in the parking parking lots.
When I walk across the huge parking lot to the entrance, I tell myself, “These are folks Hillary and her ilk call deplorables. These are the folks the US Liberals want to see disappear.
Being at Walmart, driving a Chevy pickup with an Life NRA member sticker on the back window, I’m certainly a deplorable too. Retired military officer, AF Academy grad, PhD from a Massachusetts medical school,… doesn’t matter …. the Left hates me. Because I shop at the WalMart SuperCenter, not the nearby Target or AJ’s upscale market, or even the WholeFoods, And they hate me even more because I loathe the climate change religion and the corruption of science it has delivered. And the NRA thing, well that inflames them even more.
The Liberals want them and me to simply disappear by impoverishing us with $6/gal for gas, double or triple our electric bills. The folks both shopping at Walmart and working there, these are the working middle class who compete at the low end of the wage scale and the East-West Coast Elites want to force to compete for wages with newly arrived “refugees” and illegal aliens.
And no one in the WalMart Supercenter cares one bit about Climate Change. Yet, we’ve got millionaire toads like Socialist Bernie Sanders who claims to be the savior of the working class, who can’t stop harping about the climate change religion and its drive to impoverish the deplorables.
I hold the US Democrats and the Socialist Democrats beyond contempt for what they want to do to destroy everything this country was built on. They are despicable and loathe-worthy.
The sooner people realize what Sanders and AO-C and her ilk represent, the sooner we can kick them into the rubbish heap of really bad ideas where they belong.
And I’ll keep voting for Trump just to give the middle finger to both the East and West Coast Liberals who think they are my betters.
Well said, Joel!
Joel,
You do NOT want to hang out around any academic institution these days…and not just on the East and West Coasts. There’s only wall to wall postmodern neo-Marxists professors…the result of 50 years of “filtering” by selective hiring and selective promotion and the outright firing of dissenters to “Democratic Socialism” (and they don’t really like the “democratic” part…they have to add that for now to help sell their poisonous philosophy). In the humanities and social sciences there is nothing but socialism and “identity politics” indoctrination. There is no real diversity. Only groupthink. Wearing a MAGA hats is considered to be an act of violence…could get you disciplined or even expelled…for being hateful (I can feel their love from here).
(Crony) Scientists have generated flows of government funds through their universities. The government money keeps flowing as long as the correct results keep getting published. Dissenters do not long survive…they are a threat to continued funding.
The MSM is now mostly a socialist propaganda machine. Every broadcast from every news outlet spouts the same stories all day long USING THE SAME CATCH PHRASES…it is so obviously a coordinated propaganda effort. I don’t watch any of them any more. They make me physically ill. Almost every story is presented with a big government slant or they take a swipe against American greatness (they hate America). They can’t even present the weather without a political slant.
Most normal Americans have almost nothing in common philosophically with these ugly hateful people.
These lying hypocrites preach the value of diversity, but would never include normal masculine American males in their “family of mankind”…they hate and fear us…(and these gutless pussies should…we are the last remaining threat to them). Diversity is just a tool (that they corrupt…they corrupt everything they touch)…they don’t want any real diversity of ideas.
Almost every fundamental institution of American civilization are infected with this social disease:
• Media
• Academia
• Science (regrettably corrupted)
• Law (legislating from the bench – hate the Constitution)
• Education
• Entertainment (not funny any more)
• Government (the biggest threat to the Constitution)
• Liberal Christian Churches…even the Pope (climate)
I’m not sure how we go forward with this powerful alien force working so hard to destroy America from within. The huge philosophical differences between these pseudo-intellectuals and real Americans are irreconcilable. I don’t want to live around them…I hate even being in their presence. They are arrogant and full of resentment. Arguing with them rapidly degenerates into name calling (racist, toxic Male, fascist…etc.). It’s all about acquiring power for them so that they can control the rest of. They are totalitarian authoritarians.
To make the pain of coexisting alongside them even more unbearable, ALMOST ALL OF THESE UGLY ANTI-AMERICANS ARE FINANCED BY US TAXPAYERS…* and none of them produce anything of any value*. If they all just disappeared one day, life would go on without any interruption. The world would instantly be better without them. We wouldn’t miss them.
Fortunately, three key indispensable Institutions of American civilization are still very pro-American. The 3 Institutions that deal with reality where the rubber meets the road:
• Law Enforcement
• The Military
• Engineering
Good News:
1.) Technology (Internet) is chipping away at the power of the MSM.
2.) Academia is pricing themselves out of the market. Online instruction is getting better every year, and results are getting better at FAR lower cost than brick and mortar Universities…need ~10 more years and 5G Internet.
3.) The general population doesn’t really believe Climate Change is a serious problem. Even liberals don’t live like they believe it is a serious problem.
I pray often that the Climate turns toward a decade or 2 of cooling…it is about due…Both AMO and PDO are turning negative, and multi-cycle analysis favors a cooling trend soon, and the Sun has been really quiet. I need to live long enough to see that.
Isn’t it funny how these non-deniers refuse to listen to skeptics or even acknowledge that “denier” is a vague and inaccurate term.
“denier” is a creation of their own mind in order to deprecate and denigrate the “non-believers” in their climate religion. I live in their heads as denier of the religion. I love it.
I am a Climate Change Infidel. I need to find a bumper sticker that says that, and put it on my pickup truck.
If the liberals who want to make the world subservient to them did not make “climate change” political, people would be happy to discuss what the future might bring. But when you know that the conversation is really about laying the chains on your neck and ankles, you are not going to want to participate.
The Guardian cares about the prophecy of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming and their Hope Solo thinks there are too many “white girls next door” in the Olympics. Conflation of logical domains and rabid diversity.
This seems to be an appropriate place to point out this article:
https://www.city-journal.org/seattleforall-campaign
While not specifically mentioned, you can easily see that the manmade climate change canard is part of their repertoire. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but it takes few people – maybe just one multi-billionaire – to put this in operation. It looks to me like an attempt to brainwash people on certain issues, then urge them to apply peer pressure to get the rest to follow.
I am very glad I live far away from Seattle and the rest of the west coast. If you do live in that area, you might want to consider moving away for awhile until these efforts crash and burn. Convincing people that these problems, including climate change, can be solved if you tax people enough and spend the money on government solutions never ends well.
How much “carbon” did the Guardian put into the atmosphere just to insult and denigrate people of the southern US. Being born and raised in the South — which is actually the southeastern US — I am used to being looked down upon by everyone else. As if my southern accent makes me ignorant, dumb, and deplorable. While not the majority, I have met many Yankees who spent their entire time bashing and mocking southern culture. This Guardian article reeks with disdain for people who have the audacity to believe something different than a progressive who never worked hard in their entire life.
Ms. Bergman should have read about the 1927 flood on the Mississippi and the history of floods and flood control since then. Flood on the Mississippi is nothing new.
There is NO evidence that flooding and other forms of severe weather are the result of the very small increase in global temperatures over the last 150 years, yet every time there is a flood, or a drought, it is blamed on global warming.
Nobody cares about climate change anywhere. Even the most fanatical activists don’t take it seriously. If they did, they would take up arms and start doing terrorist attacks against Chinese and Indian coal plants.
The democratic process is working very well where it is still allowed to operate. People vote in their own best interests and for what their reason tells them is the right policy. This is why the Warmistas and Alarmists hate democracy as people can see the holes in the Alarmist propaganda and have fairly good memories of history and typical weather. The main Warmist argument is ‘shut up and do what the 97% tell you’.
It’s like this Megan-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/good-friday-cold-blast-in-albany-brings-april-snow-to-wa-for-first-time-in-49-years/ar-BBW6Mfu
“Western Australia’s south west has received an unexpected surprise this Good Friday, with snowfall on Bluff Knoll in the Stirling Range.
This is the earliest recorded snow event in the state’s history.
The last recorded fall before this time was April 20 in 1970, according to the Bureau of Meteorology records.”
Wow you mean to tell me this time round a freak weather event occurred a day earlier than it did nearly half a century ago? Here let me help you-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Western_Australia
Not least the money quote-
“When Australia’s first inhabitants arrived on the northwest coast 40,000 to 60,000 years ago the sea levels were much lower. The Kimberley coast at one time was only about 90 km from Timor, which itself was the last in a line of closely spaced islands for humans to travel across.[4] Therefore, this was a possible (even probable) location for which Australia’s first immigrants could arrive via some primitive boat. Other possible immigration routes were via islands further north and then through New Guinea.”
They didn’t have thermometers or even Cuneiform let alone paper and pen but eventually the whitefellas did (not the Cuneiform) What is it with the moi generation Megan?
Mississippi has no climate change. People there don’t care about it in large part because it’s not happening. The Guardian says it’s because they are “clinging to old Dixie”
The data: http://appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/Mississippi.htm
The river and its Delta is constantly silting up as time goes by. This makes it want to find a new course when it rains a lot and the river rises from time to time.
DO THEY NOT TEACH REALITY ANYMORE!!! Its not climate change that silts rivers. This is a normal process.
There might be one person in Mississippi who worries about climate change but I haven’t run across him yet but I have lived here only 40 years. So far it has gotten hot in the summer and cold in the winter and never missed a year.
I’m born and raised in New Orleans and now live in Mississippi, two blocks from the Mississippi Sound. I’ve lived on the East and West coasts while stationed in the Navy. I’ve seen a good bit of the World. I decided to retire to Mississippi. None of my retirement is taxed by the State of Mississippi. Being over 65 my property taxes are below 100 dollars a year on our 2000 square foot home. My electric bill averages 175 dollars a month. My wife keeps the heat at 73 in the winter and the A/C at 72 in the summer. Just paid 1.40 a gallon for gas. We are not over run by the homeless, can carry a gun in the car legally without a permit. Our greatest concern is the price of boiled crawfish. That oyster po-boy I ate for lunch today was delicious. I can go to the grocery and get my stuff put in plastic bag, and go buy a large soda without having to pay a sugar tax. Life is simple and easy here. I don’t know why so many put up with the BS some states are imposing on its citizens.