By Tom Harris
President Donald Trump was right to ignore climate change in his April 22, 2019 Earth Day message. Instead, he focused on issues that actually matter and over which we have considerable control: protecting the nation’s water infrastructure, conservation of land, water, and wildlife, improving forest health and, of course, economic prosperity, the linchpin on which all the rest is founded. After all, without prosperity, we cannot afford to protect the environment. Trump explained in his official Earth Day statement:
“Environmental protection and economic prosperity go hand in hand. A strong market economy is essential to protecting our critical natural resources and fostering a legacy of conservation. “
He is correct, of course, but this did not go over well with those concerned about man-made climate change. BNN Bloomberg reported that Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, complained, “The statement is really the antithesis of environmental protection. They are not mentioning the gravest existential threat [man-made climate change] facing humanity.”
The UK-based Guardian newspaper reported, in an article reposted by the left-leaning magazine Mother Jones, “The executive director of the Sierra Club said Trump was ‘the worst president for the environment our nation has ever had.’”
Concerns about dangerous human-caused climate change are not based on observations of what is actually happening in the real world. Even NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies admits that between 1880 and 2019 there has been only slightly more than a one-degree Celsius rise in the so-called ‘Global Annual Mean Surface Air Temperature’ despite a supposed 40% rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration.
And extreme weather is not increasing. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) database of state-wide extreme weather records, likely the best of its kind, shows that, in 2018, only one state record was set—the largest hailstone (5.38 inches in diameter) in the history of Alabama. So far, only one record has been set in 2019: the lowest temperature recorded in Illinois (-38°F on Mount Carroll). In fact, in the first 18+ years of the 21st century, only two states recorded their maximum temperatures—South Carolina in 2012 and South Dakota in 2006 (the latter tied with 1936, when 15 states established their all-time maximum temperature records).
Full story here:
https://townhall.com/columnists/tomharris/2019/04/23/trumps-perfect-earth-day-statement-n2545228
Broken Computer Climate Models Day?
More like broken thoughts here as shown by Andrew Dessler:
“The statement is really the antithesis of environmental protection. They are not mentioning the gravest existential threat [man-made climate change] facing humanity.”
This from allegedly well educated man, who acts like a child on this stuff.
Antithesis of environmental protection is of course true – provided you assume it is an immutable fact that everything humans do causes environmental damage and that fact will never change. ie that environmental damage is always caused by humans and only by humans and everything humans do causes and will always cause environmental damage. Otherwise the statement is utter nonsense.
The logic is immutable.
The key solution to a clean environment is exactly what Trump said – prosperity. A rich populous will want, and demand, a clean environment. A poor and destitute populous only cares about having food, water and heat. Their environment is the last priority if it exists at all.
And only a government responsive to the desires of its peoples will spend the wealth and energy to achieve a cleaner environment. A totalitarian government ignores environmental issues – see the old Soviet Union. Or today’s China.
Don’t leave out Venezuela, that would hurt Maduro’s feelings!
The oldest saying there is about computers:
Garbage in, garbage out!
Snowfall is approaching Chicago.
Could you be any further off-topic “ren” you seem to have a spectacular knack for comments that have nothing to do with the thread at all.
Sorry.
But you will teach somebody’s grandmother to suck eggs I bet. Happy, happy, joy, joy.
Oh, let me, Anthony. Snow is now falling on my front lawn, since about 11:15AM CDT. It was in the forecast, and as usual, I have photos of it. I”m waiting for it to cover the grass and the violets. It is a not-unusual spring storm, NOT a sign of climate change – NOT unless a glacier starts to grow here in July.
And this bit, from the article: He is correct, of course, but this did not go over well with those concerned about man-made climate change. BNN Bloomberg reported that Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, complained, “The statement is really the antithesis of environmental protection. They are not mentioning the gravest existential threat [man-made climate change] facing humanity.” — Well, it completely ignores the reality of the real world, which constantly goes through pot-stirring stuff, which may or may not include the snow falling in my yard.
The gravest existential threat facing humanity is that these people DO consistently ignore the real world and what happens in it, in favor of pushing their political agendas. They don’t care about the planet at all — not even a little bit. All they care about is getting us all to line up and wait to be told how or what to think/do/eat/live, until you surely must wonder just how demented they truly are.
I am glad that Pres. Trump made this a public statement, and very happy that it has upset the apple cart the CAGWers, Greenbeans, Warmians, etc., are counting on keeping under THEIR control.
Brava, Sara, especially for the third paragraph. But I wish it were only dementia.
Sara 2020
Agreed Tom! Excellent comment Sara.
Sara, thank you.
From the other side of the pond, many of us here have had enough of the (as you rightly put it) “people completely ignoring the real world”.
1 x million divided by 400 ‘parts’ equals 1 x 2,500th of the whole sky – and of which 95% is entirely natural. The 5% man-made bit of CO2 is an incy-wincy microscopic part of the entire atmosphere. We’re not to blame. It’s called ‘weather’.
I like the term “Greenbeans.” It fits. I also like “Warm-mongers.”
Jim
Thank you.
I think that, when you strip away the self-righteous rhetoric (which sounds like copy-copy-copy, more and more), and you get to the nitty-gritty of it, “weather” is the late-spring snowfall in my yard, which is now about 2 inches of fluff, and will likely be gone by tomorrow evening and “climate” will be snow that doesn’t end at all, gets deeper and deeper and encases my house.
“Climate change” takes years/decades and sometimes centuries to manifest itself. We all know that. There are no abrupt changes in “climate”, unless a massive volcano (Toba, Erta Ale) literally explodes and engages in what is called forcing, which may be a short-term change or may be a longer term change. But when someone like Michael Mann states publicly “rivers don’t get growlers” and there is plenty of hard evidence to show that they DO get growlers (chunk ice), as an example, you know that it is all baloney coming from them and their real agenda is to be on top of the heap.
WE have to know what they’re up to and make sure that they don’t get any closer than about 5 degrees from the top of the heap. And no one is really there yet.
Stay vigilant.
Sara, back in the early days of this AGW nonsense we called these people ‘warm-mongers’.
Does it for me.
Amen.
Sara, getting less chance of El Niño. The frost returns to all of Canada.
http://www.bom.gov.au/archive/oceanography/ocean_anals/IDYOC002/IDYOC002.201904.gif
I’m going to give “ren” the benefit of the doubt”
ren
I believe, rightly or wrongly and from reading on other blogs, “ren” is Polish with not much English.
Of course that doesn’t necessarily explain the” spectacular knack”.
“Speckly showers on tuesday”.
Flights canceled in Chicago as snow to streak from Minnesota to Michigan into Saturday night
Most Farmers and gardeners don’t plant frost-sensitive crops in the Midwest until after May 30 (May….not April).
I rolled the dice here in western PA and put some early tomatoes in, waiting on anything else.
I’m in a frost hollow in western MD, and the nearby farmers don’t plant frost-sensitive stuff like corn until at earliest mid-May. Mid-May damaging frost here is not uncommon.
Yes, not unusual for the US Midwest this time of year. I’ve seen this type of thing happen many times in my 57 years in Minnesota. So did my father, and his before him. So instead of making a point, you just made yourself look ignorant and/or foolish. Let me give you some advice: don’t just be a blind follower; think for yourself and do some research before you wade into a complicated debate.
Bravo President Trump! Trump could easily be the best president ever, given the enormous threat of permanent harm to the economic engine of the world, the premier knowledge-based incubator of science and personal freedoms from the most dangeous enemy ever faced by the country- the enormous anti-American fully- financed and dedicated enemy within. One more round of néomarxiste , insidiously brainwashed children and university graduates may be enough to dump America and, of course the rest of the workd into a new Dark Age lasting centuries.
Trump is on the verge of saving a reluctant Europe and the civilization it created from willful self-destruction by its ugly invention, the many times failed ideology that still holds these people under a macaber spell.
PR has to be directed relentlessly at the Republican Party, not to an implacable enemy, to get them to understand that if they don’t join up and support the revitalized party this man has brought to them, it is definitely lights out for America and the world.
+1
Trump is a master troll.
He can make them chase their own tails just for the fun of it.
Gary
There is a great comic section (one of many) in the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that I think is apropos. After the B Ark crash lands on the primitive Earth, there is a committee meeting held out in the open (they haven’t yet built any structures) to report on the progress of various tasks. One of those is to (re)invent the wheel. The haughty marketing manager presents her latest version. It is an octagon with the axle parallel to the plane of the ‘wheel,’ which has each of the 8 sections painted a different color. The hero slaps his head and says, “One of the simplest inventions in the galaxy and you can’t even get it right!” The marketing manager, standing her ground with hands on hips, replies, “Well, if you’re so smart, what color would you paint it?”
This seems to be characteristic of progressives who have got their priorities wrong. Trump is doing all the right things to strengthen the economy and make us more competitive in the world. The liberal press castigates him for ‘painting the wheel the wrong color.’ These are clueless people who don’t even realize just how out of touch with reality they are. They are indeed a threat to our survival!
Gary Pearse, yup. “Tolerance” was preached for so long for a reason — to allow them to slip into every aspect of our culture and society w/little resistance.
Have an unplanned (i.e. born alive) baby, today.
Congrats. Have fun.
They are not mentioning the gravest existential threat [man-made climate change] facing humanity.”
So, to recap: It’s worse than they thought. That’s new.
President Trump epitomizes the statement “Walk toward the fire. Don’t worry about what they call you.” May God continue to bless President Trump, 1st Lady Melania, and the United States of America!
Yes, I’ve never been so supportive of the US as today, your President, Donald Trump and his lovely, dignified First Lady, Melania.
Tempting to add, what a contrast to their predecessors.
Annie,
Thanks for the kind words of support!
Funny, the major part of Europe laughs at Trump, nobody takes him serious around here. Screaming and fooling everyone with a shortage of braincells.
No matter the content, follow the loudest mouth.
Yep, he nailed it, and of that supposed 1C rise since 1880, it’s a good bet that as much as half that is bogus, due to UHI and rural station drop-out (which would tend to have cooler temperatures).
Weather.com has a predictable Earth Day headline story reporting “troubling” Great Lakes Ice cover trending downward from the 1970’s to 2010. Why stop at 2010? Maybe because:
2015 – 95.7%
2014 – 95.8%
2009 – 93.7%
61%-2018
81%-2019
wonder what the trend has been over the last 20 years
billtoo,
the trend since 2002 has been upward according to a graphic in the same article. Generally in step with the “Pause”. That’s what’s really troubling for the warmists.
Just a few years ago they were claiming the water levels of Great Lakes were low and heading lower due to climate change.
Now the head lines are that the lakes are a foot or more above average.
“The summer forecast for Great Lakes water levels shows two of the Great Lakes could hit record levels.”
Do you think any of those Einsteins remember their strident prognostications about the California drought?
The alarmists have their heads in the sand, or possibly somewhere else.
A casual scan of the globe shows that the places with the best environments are those places where the population is not so desperate that they have to despoil the land just to survive.
The only way the alarmists will be satisfied is if humanity is wiped from the face of the planet.
“The executive director of the Sierra Club said Trump was ‘the worst president for the environment our nation has ever had.’”
Do some think that is an insult?
When I hear people going ape-poop about Trump being “literally Hitler” this goes through my head. I cannot help it!
‘Ecocide’ Would Criminalize Resource Development
I have written often here of the threat posed by the “nature rights” movement, designed by radical environmentalists to thwart large scale development and extraction of natural resources by allowing anyone to sue to uphold nature’s “rights” to “exist and persist.” The movement has been gaining ground for the last several years, most recently with voters in Toledo granting “rights” to Lake Erie.
Think of “nature rights” as a metaphorical shield against human thriving from the bounties of the earth. But radical environmentalists also have a spear — the “ecocide” movement. Ecocide activists are striving to enact international laws that would punish those who make large-scale uses of nature as criminals, equivalently odious as perpetrators of genocide and ethnic cleansing. In other words, oil-industry executives and the like could find themselves in the dock at the Hague facing years in prison.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/ecocide-would-criminalize-resource-development/
“The only way the alarmists will be satisfied is if humanity is wiped from the face of the planet.”
Doesn’t that include them?
Well, no. They are the good guys and excused extinction.
billtoo,
the trend since 2002 has been upward according to a graphic in the same article. Generally in step with the “Pause”. That’s what’s really troubling for the warmists.
The mentally impaired global warming activists (e.g., Andrew Dessler) do not understand climate, or better climates. Note the ‘s’.
Climates, such as the Mediterranean or a higher middle latitude west coast type, are not much influenced by a degree or two of temperature change. Position on a coast or inland, position of latitude, elevation (mountains or coastal plain), and a few other things determine climates. Note the ‘s’, again.
Further, the role of human released CO2 is much debated.
The POTUS appears to understand all this, even though he lacks the science credentials of the Climate Cult.
How is the Texas “permanent drought“ that he proclaimed turning out.
https://realclimatescience.com/2019/04/messing-with-texas-2/
If you mean Trump: Remember, his fans take him seriously but not literally. Those of the ‘never Trump camp’ take him literally but not seriously. He throws out one liners to keep the “nevers’ buzzing about like wasps whose nest has been hit with a rock.
Trump is something very special. Never in history has one man taken such a level of opposition not to mention unhinged hatred. Yet he thrives. Nothing can stop what is coming.
Perhaps what keeps him going are the good economy figures : annualised 3.2% for the first quarter of 2019, despite (or because of?) the Govt shutdown.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/gross-domestic-product-q1-2019-2019-4-1028142680
“The US economy blows past growth expectations in the first quarter”
Wish we had a Trump.
You’re right, Hokey Schtick, but the problem is there is no one even to close him after he leaves in 2024. After what he has (and people supporting him) been forced to endure, no one would want to run other than those towing the progressive line.
I have a button from the first Earth Day. It is green and reads “Earth, I Care”. I wore it every earth day for about 5 years. The objectives were clean air and water along with conservation of land use and a mind set that we all were stewards of the environment. e.g. Recycling was not mandatory, but we did it anyway. Fast forward to 2019 and Earth Day has morphed into something so far beyond 1970 that it looks like some bizarre halloween mask. I still hold those values I had in 1970 but today I am called a denier of science and a threat to the future of the planet.
But take it all too far (as is the current direction) you can end up with the following nightmare situation:
https://underdogsbiteupwards.wordpress.com/2014/12/26/for-whom-the-bells-jingle/
AN OBSERVATION: On one hand we have the real, physical world upon which humans are very recent arrivals who have had nothing whatever to do with its creation or continued existence for billions of years. On the other is the mythical, fantacy, “Gaia” world popular in the current GroupThink. That world is fragile, delicate and in need of saving by the most self-important and delusional animal ever to exist. Species come and go, but the Earth abides.
There aren’t any existential threats, and global warming is certainly not one of them. A full-on ice age would be, but only in the far future, although not quite as far as the sun burning out or a major asteroid hit.
On has only to look at the real “Third World ” countries like Africa,
and not at the pretend ones like both India and China, to see that poor
nations cannot afford to look after their environments. In fact to just
survive they are destroying it by our standards.
President Trump is right,. a wealthy country can afford to look after such
things, poor countries cannot.
MJE VK5ELL
Human Beings have indeed destroyed many things.
They virtually eliminated 60 million bison in North America for no better reason than short-term profit.
They completely destroyed the overall Californian ecosystem, chopping down forests, destroying wetlands and generally attempting to force fit European agriculture onto a climate utterly unlike Germany, much of France and all of the UK.
They destroyed the vast majority of salmon runs through damming rivers, polluting them and dredging them.
They are now actively destroying rainforests in equatorial Africa, South America and Southeast Asia.
What humans have not yet come close to achieving is destroying life on earth, nor the homeostatic climate system that sustains that life. They may come closer to destroying it through weather engineering.
Humans may not wish to recognise that fire is nature’s way to root out unhealthy trees, thus restoring vigour to arboreal stands. They may not wish to recognise that volcanoes play key roles in restoring fertility to adjacent land over which lava flows. They may not wish to recgnise that fertility in river plain tracts is maintained through periodic flooding and silt deposition. And as for great fertility resulting from advancing and then receding glaciers: shame on anyone for educating folk about LOESS.
Humans trying to play god may push their neuroses into abeyance, but they do not serve humankind.
There is a huge global overhanging legacy of ‘playing god infrastructure’, and climate neuroses are likely to maie such legacy infrastructure expand before it recedes.
You are so full of dog poop that I don’t even know where to begin. If you really think that humans are so bad for the earth and need to be removed, then how can you allow your own continued existence. By your participation in our modern civilization you are part of the pestilence and a complete hypocrite. If you really believed what you say, you would at least be living out in the wilderness somewhere as a hunter-gatherer in harmony with nature. So before you ask the rest of us to “get off the planet”, I say: You first. Set a good example.
I’m not a yank, but I love Donald Trump.
Trump.
He may not be every ones cup of tea, but he is good at his job. very good.
I love people who are good at their job.
I can forgive a lot of sins if someone performs even more good for others
let the dessler who has committed no sin cast the first stone
let the activist scientists be flung into the pit. they are an evil.
Well he is not that good,
The China trade war is not resulting possitive, there is no Mexican wall despite the all time worst shutdown and where are the jobs he promissed?
Speaking of China, are we loosing the technology competition and who is paying for our trade deficit?
Wow, another butthurt lie spewer. Perhaps your momie should slap the shit out of you, then you might grow a braqin.
Do Alarmists believe in evolution?
============================
Everybody who is worried about global warming, should answer these 2 simple yes/no questions.
1) Did humans evolve near Kenya, Africa?
2) Should humans be able to tolerate temperatures similar to Kenya’s?
The obvious answers to both of these 2 simple questions, are Yes, and Yes.
But no Alarmist can manage to say the answers. Can you see why?
I have even asked a climate scientist to answer these 2 questions. I received no answer.
For people who are interested, here are the real absolute temperatures for Kenya (in degrees Celsius) are:
winter = 14.7
average = 21.5
summer = 29.1
Nice and warm !!!
The temperature in Kenya is not below 14.7 very often, and the average is 21.5
In summer, the temperature in Kenya is often around 29.1 degrees Celsius.
Humans evolved in a hot country. Later, many humans migrated to colder countries. But we didn’t evolve in a cold country.
That is why humans can tolerate heat, better than they can tolerate cold.
For more global warming / real absolute temperature facts, read this article:
https://agree-to-disagree.com/rats-north-summer-south-winter
The climate in Kenya today is hot, wet and humid. But current theories suggest humans evolved there when it was in a much drier phase. So the climate of Kenya today isn’t the same as the climate there when humans first evolved. It probably wasn’t the climate there when humans started leaving Africa.
Humans kept evolving after they left Kenya. That’s why some humans lost the dark pigment in their skin when they moved to higher latitudes, which are colder. In other words, some humans have evolved to live in colder climates, because those places are also darker. Today some humans can tolerate cold better than heat, others heat better than cold. Personally, I can tolerate dry heat far better than humid heat (give me dry 40 degrees over humid 20 any day). I have definitely evolved compared with Kenya today, whose annual average humidity is 69%, no month below 60%.
Humans have continued evolving. Some can now digest lactose in milk as adults, by retaining the enzyme lactase, lost in all other mammals after childhood. This evolved in Europe around 5000 years ago, a result of the domestication of cattle.
Tom Foley.
Have YOU evolved into a different species yet?
There is always genetic variation within species.
Humans lost their skin pigmentation, so that they could use sunlight more efficiently, to make vitamin D. This was in response to weaker sunlight, not directly because of the cold.
There has been a slow cooling over the whole Holocene. So the temperatures over the last 10,000 years would have been even warmer than the temperatures that I specified.
I am working on it!
I guess it all depends on exactly who you meant when you said ‘humans evolved in Kenya’: Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis), Denisovians (Homo denisova) or Homo sapiens? Of course we now know that we have Neanderthal and Denisovian genes, so they can’t have been separate species, can they?
When whoever first evolved as human it was probably a matter of small genetic variation from their relatives. It would not have been obvious that millennia later, their ancestors would call these people a new species – and proceed to get totally confused about species and subspecies and how they all related. Actually the terminology doesn’t matter; humans have evolved since Kenya, and we can’t test whether the changes have made them genetically different enough from the Kenyan ancestor to warrant a specific or subspecific name, at least without a time machine.
I note that your response avoids addressing my main point, that the climate in Kenya today in not the climate the human ancestors evolved in.
Tom.
I specifically addressed the point that the climate in Kenya today is not the climate the human ancestors evolved in. I said:
There has been a slow cooling over the whole Holocene. So the temperatures over the last 10,000 years would have been even warmer than the temperatures that I specified.
When I talk about evolution, I am going back further than just humans. The last common human/chimpanzee ancestor was probably about 5 million years ago. We are still part of the ape family.
Over the last 5 million years we have survived through multiple full ice ages, and multiple interglacial periods. Today is not too different, from what we have faced before.
Evolution is an ongoing process. It can cause fast changes in special circumstances, but usually moves slowly. We are not likely to lose our adaptations to warm temperatures quickly. Most places, even cold countries, still have a reasonably warm or hot summer.
Have a look at the temperatures (average, winter, and summer), for 216 countries:
https://agree-to-disagree.com/how-hot-is-that-country
I have been to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where the bones of “Lucy” were on exhibition. Her story is interesting which started about 4 million years ago.
What distinguishes humans from all other species is the use of fire. No matter what the environment, warm or cold, fire, much hotter is the key principle.
Not coincidentally then humans evolved during the last 2+ million years of ice ages.
Whether that kind of challenge or stress had some kind of epigenetic effect is more interesting when we see the recent report from a groundbreaking study, researchers at Chicago’s Northwestern University have determined that–beyond all its other known de-humanizing effects–poverty actually attacks the DNA of its victims. Published in the February issue of the {American Journal of Physical Anthropology}, the study is based on a 35-year investigation (begun in 1983) of poverty-stricken children in the Philippines. Originally intended to be a 2-year study of 3,327 pregnant mothers, researchers from the U.S. kept in contact with their Philippine counterparts, and the long-term picture began to emerge.
This is a huge development.
Yet one more reason leftards are so terrified of Scary Orangeman!!!!! Without prosperity you are not going to clean up what does need cleaning up, either way humans continue to exist and make messes necessary to existing, and the wheel keeps turning.
There’s a story in the Canadian paper, The National Post, about a company that claims that they can grow shrimp on a commercial scale in water tanks in warehouses. If you want to help the environment get your energy from nuclear, get your water from desalination and grow your food in buildings.
https://business.financialpost.com/news/retail-marketing/canadian-land-shrimp-industry-has-work-to-do-if-its-going-to-be-the-new-cannabis
I came across this article today and after reading it I was struck by the relevance of Trump’s statement.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-27/decline-india
Each breaking stupid story further seals my impression that alarm over human-caused climate change has attained the position of a religious cult.
Stupid computer models produce stupid people. This is not how machines were supposed to take over us humans. I mean, who knew? — that it would be engineered cyber stupidity that dominated humans and not higher artificial intelligence?
Trump is right.
The best way to protect the environment is to ensure your society is ‘rich’ enough to only need to interact with the environment for entertainment reasons.
Look at this way:- if you are ‘comfortable’ with your life then you can take the kids out on the weekend to look at cute furry animals surrounded by trees. If you are living on the edge you can go and look at lunch and the fuel to cook it on.