Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to New Yorker Magazine we need to stop denying the inevitable imminent end of the world.
What If We Stopped Pretending?
The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.
By Jonathan Franzen
September 8, 2019“There is infinite hope,” Kafka tells us, “only not for us.” This is a fittingly mystical epigram from a writer whose characters strive for ostensibly reachable goals and, tragically or amusingly, never manage to get any closer to them. But it seems to me, in our rapidly darkening world, that the converse of Kafka’s quip is equally true: There is no hope, except for us.
I’m talking, of course, about climate change. The struggle to rein in global carbon emissions and keep the planet from melting down has the feel of Kafka’s fiction. The goal has been clear for thirty years, and despite earnest efforts we’ve made essentially no progress toward reaching it. Today, the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable. If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it.
...
Even at this late date, expressions of unrealistic hope continue to abound. Hardly a day seems to pass without my reading that it’s time to “roll up our sleeves” and “save the planet”; that the problem of climate change can be “solved” if we summon the collective will. Although this message was probably still true in 1988, when the science became fully clear, we’ve emitted as much atmospheric carbon in the past thirty years as we did in the previous two centuries of industrialization. The facts have changed, but somehow the message stays the same.
…
All-out war on climate change made sense only as long as it was winnable. Once you accept that we’ve lost it, other kinds of action take on greater meaning. Preparing for fires and floods and refugees is a directly pertinent example. But the impending catastrophe heightens the urgency of almost any world-improving action. In times of increasing chaos, people seek protection in tribalism and armed force, rather than in the rule of law, and our best defense against this kind of dystopia is to maintain functioning democracies, functioning legal systems, functioning communities. In this respect, any movement toward a more just and civil society can now be considered a meaningful climate action. Securing fair elections is a climate action. Combatting extreme wealth inequality is a climate action. Shutting down the hate machines on social media is a climate action. Instituting humane immigration policy, advocating for racial and gender equality, promoting respect for laws and their enforcement, supporting a free and independent press, ridding the country of assault weapons—these are all meaningful climate actions. To survive rising temperatures, every system, whether of the natural world or of the human world, will need to be as strong and healthy as we can make it.
…
Read more: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending
If believers are ready to retire to the climate apocalypse bunker and close the lid, I’m happy to support their freedom to live out their end of world fantasies, but I wish they would stop trying to impose their life choices on others.
Would someone please tell me what “solving the climate crisis” entails?
Griff?
It entails giving those who own these puppet politicians the power to control the population and limit the natural resources that they need to power their, and their descendants, luxurious lifestyles.
+ 10 x 10^42, bingo!!
Funny that is just seems to be that every policy on the left wing agenda is somehow magically construed as ” a climate action”.
Apparently if the whole of the US gave up their guns and got on to hormone treatment and changed gender the whole AGW thing would disappear. Is that too much to ask to save humanity, all the living world and the planet itself?
In total agreement with you, Bill. But I’m hoping someone could focus on CLIMATE and not the pathological need to control our lives.
The problem with that is that it was never about climate to begin with, it’s always been about gaining control. Some say it’s about money, but the money is just a proxy for power.
DAVE
“…one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute, de facto, the world’s wealth…”
IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer, speaking in November 2010
Sadly, that’s exactly right. (as an important aside, if that power is given to the politicians, change will occur, but it won’t be on the climate.)
Is Griff a climate expert too ? I thought he only knows nothing about windmills ? 😀
Griff is certainly no climate expert, but he spouts the nonsensical alarmist talking points as well as anyone.
In single sentences of 150 characters or less…perfect for the Twit(ter)verse
So does a parrot!
Yeah but the parrot is smarter
Excerpt from the article:
“I’m talking, of course, about climate change. The struggle to rein in global carbon emissions and keep the planet from melting down has the feel of Kafka’s fiction. The goal has been clear for thirty years, and despite earnest efforts we’ve made essentially no progress toward reaching it. Today, the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable. If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it.”
[end of excerpt]
To be clear, this deluded writer is talking about global warming catastrophes driven by increased atmospheric CO2. The green blob likes to take about “climate change” because it is unscientific, a non-falsifiable hypothesis, and they claim confirming evidence from warming, cooling, wetter, dryer, up, down and sideways. That is imbecilic.
In reality, it will not get dangerously warmer – it is more likely to get dangerously colder, and more people will die from cold and from the destabilized power systems damaged by intermittent green energy schemes. That is our future, and the greens and their acolytes will be responsible for this carnage, because they have squandered trillions of dollars and compromised our energy systems.
The thermal properties of CO2 are well known.
The Sun excites CO2, the greater the concentration the greater the heat. It’s a simple enough concept. All understood science used in many fields of science and engineering.
Only the complete Morons who never understood basic chemistry or thermodynamics.
Unfortunately, you are right and wrong at the same time. You are correct in saying that CO₂ concentration is related to infrared retention. You are wrong tho’ in letting it go at that, as if that were the end of the story.
The real story is caught up in a unique curve called the ‘extinction coefficient’ curve for EACH gas in the atmosphere. In the visible window, extinction is near zero, for all gasses except dinitrogen tetroxide. N₂O₄ or (NO₂)₂ if you prefer. This is the dark rust-red gas that gives smog its cheery brown hue. The other gasses of the atmosphere are clear.
The “extinction curve” for CO₂ has well-defined dips (absorption) and clear transmission bands between. The absorption of sunlight by the absorption dips is what heats the atmosphere in daylight. As it heats, with well-defined physics of infrared emission, it then radiates the heat at a longer infrared wavelength. These wavelengths are broad spectrum. Some (but only a few) are again reabsorbed by close-by atmospheric gas, heating the molecules in turn… eventually the infrared emissions are “above the horizon”, so as to point outward toward the black space beyond Earth. This is how the atmosphere sheds both the heat of optical absorption of Sol’s rays, and it is how both Earth and the adjacent convection heated atmosphere emit ground heating, both in day and night.
But the thing is, that the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere does not linearly relate to total infrared absorption. Doubling (which we are well on the way to, from year 1900 to today) of the CO₂ will not double the degree of infrared absorption and heat-blanketing capacity for the atmosphere as a whole.
It cannot.
Because the absorption bands of CO₂ were then (1900) and are today almost completely saturated in the atmospheric column from “space” to “ground level”.
Recalling that the pressure of the atmosphere at sea level is about 100,000 pascals, which divided by 9.81 Pa/kg gives a round 10,000 kg of atmosphere for every square meter, it also defines a LOT of atmosphere above our heads.
At — you choose — 285 ppm (1900) or 405 ppm (2019), the 10,000 kg of atmosphere per square meter corresponds to 2.9 to 4.1 kg of CO₂ per square meter. 65 to 91 moles worth.
That turns out to be nearly the saturation-of-infrared-extinction level for CO₂. So, doubling to just under 600 ppm, expected to be reached with Asia’s, Africa’s and Central/South America’s prodigious and still remarkably increasing fossil fuel burning, oh by maybe AD 2100 or thereabouts.
The less balanced (charitably euphonic for “sky is falling!”) projections are expecting a sizeable kick up of not just CO₂ itself, but CO2e … the other greenhouse gasses that can be numerically equivalenced to a proportionate increase in CO₂ above-and-beyond the projections.
These call for 600 ppm CO2e by 2080. With most of the ‘e’ being methane emissions, especially from the highly touted-and-repeated methane clathrate subsurface deposits of the Arctic and virtually all northern hemisphere lands having permafrost.
OK, that could be some bad mojo.
But really?
I’m less inclined to think so from this perspective: increasing the CO₂ of the atmosphere has already worked wonders to increase farmland yield.
Other articles have cited that computer-guided air forces of specialized tree-planting drones could easily add 250 billion trees a year all over the place, which would suck up additional CO₂ quite easily. Further, simplistic – but jaw-dropping – experiments with oceanic fertilization JUST with iron sulfate have shown that great swathes of the open ocean are ripe for sucking up far, far more CO₂ and sequestering it away to the bathynic deep … that is easily rebutted.
Point is… We have the means.
The means, and the money.
Something on the order of $50,000 million to $150,000 million a year.
And that’d be the END of CO₂ increases.
Considering that the world is presently using some 90,000,000 bbl of oil per day, even at the high side … $150,000,000,000 / ( 90,000,000 bbl × 365 days ) = $4.50 a bbl. At todays spot rates, that’s maybe what, 9%?
So. the money is DEFINITELY there.
All the worlds oil would need tariffing, at the wellhead. A really large multinational corporation would set up the thousands of remediation centers to plant trees, fertilize oceans, invest in research and instrumentation, print articles, write papers, justify their existence and janitorial services to keep the offices looking pretty.
A hundred and fifty billion … pays for a LOT of employment, too.
Win-win!!!
Well over 2,500,000 people employed, at American mean worker rates.
Continuously.
Foreverly.
Win, win, win, win.
Just saying,
GoatGuy ✓
GoatGuy,
Even if the money was there, the need is not, unless there’s a need to spend trillions of dollars to mitigate the misplaced angst of those who were misled into believing that there is a need.
I don’t even think that $150 billion per year would be enough, especially since theres more to CO2 production than combusting hydrocarbons. Breathing, decomposition, aluminum smelting, concrete manufacturing and other processes significantly contribute to atmospheric CO2. The $150 billion per year might be enough to cover the US alone, but we’re only responsible for about 15% of the global CO2 emissions.
The $150 billion or more comes from consumers paying more for energy which ends up making everything cost more, putting the brakes on the economy and eliminating more jobs than green can possibly create and sustain. Just to break even, that $150 billion must be returned to the taxpayers. It’s a lot more loose-loose than win-win, especially since any climate impact will be undectable.
Marc L Jackson wrote:
“The thermal properties of CO2 are well known.
The Sun excites CO2, the greater the concentration the greater the heat. It’s a simple enough concept. All understood science used in many fields of science and engineering.
Only the complete Morons who never understood basic chemistry or thermodynamics.”
True but really false or irrelevant.
Discussion:
Scientists who support the catastrophic human-made global warming (CAGW) hypothesis say that based on physics at the molecular scale, they KNOW that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and more CO2 will cause warming. Two questions: How much warming, and what are the scale-up effects?
How much global warming?
Christy & McNider (2017) and Lewis & Curry (2018) proved that climate sensitivity to increasing CO2 is too low to cause dangerous warming – see Section #11.
Furthermore, atmospheric CO2 changes LAG temperature changes at all measured time scales, including ~9 months in the modern data record and much longer in the ice core record. It is possible, perhaps even probable, that increasing atmospheric CO2 causes some mild warming, but full-earth-scale data prove that this CO2 warming effect is drowned out by the much larger impact of temperature on CO2.
Conclusion: Temperature drives atmospheric CO2 much more than CO2 drives temperature. Climate is NOT highly sensitive to increasing CO2. Increasing CO2 will NOT cause dangerous global warming.
What are the scale-up effects?
Earth is not molecular-scale, and there are complex CO2 interactions between the oceans, the land, the biosphere and the atmosphere. Some of these important interactions are described in #1 to #7 above.
Warming tropical oceanic temperatures cause evaporation of seawater, tropical water vapour increases (and water vapour is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2), equatorial warming follows, that warming then extends to the rest of the planet, and atmospheric CO2 increases. Tropical sea surface temperatures increase, global temperatures increase, and atmospheric CO2 increases, in that order.
The huge “seasonal sawtooth” Keeling Curve of atmospheric CO2 is dominated by photosynthesis in the Northern Hemisphere (NH) Spring that draws down CO2, and oxidation in the Fall and Winter that releases CO2 back into the atmosphere. The Keeling Curve amplitude ranges from ~16 ppm at Barrow Alaska to ~1 ppm at the South Pole. The seasonal CO2 flux is much greater than the ~2 ppm average annual increase in CO2.
Atmospheric CO2 is increasing, and the conventional view is that this CO2 increase is human-made, caused by fossil fuel combustion, deforestation, etc. While this is scientifically important, it is not necessary to debate this point in order to disprove global warming alarmism.
Scientists including Salby, Berry and Harde have hypothesized that the increase in atmospheric CO2 to more than 400 ppm is largely natural and not mostly human-made. While my 2008 observations support this hypothesis, I have considered this question for ~11 years, and am still agnostic on the conclusion. Regardless of the cause, the increase in CO2 is strongly beneficial to humanity and the environment.
References:
The Keeling Curve, Scripps Institution of Oceanography https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/
Address to the Sydney Institute, Murry Salby, 2011 http://youtu.be/YrI03ts–9I
“Human CO2 Has Little Effect on Atmospheric CO2”, Edwin Berry, 2019
https://edberry.com/blog/climate-physics/agw-hypothesis/contradictions-to-ipccs-climate-change-theory/
“What Humans Contribute to Atmospheric CO2: Comparison of Carbon Cycle Models with Observation”, Hermann Harde, International Journal of Earth Sciences Vol. 8, No. 3, 2019
Recent evidence supports my above conclusions, as follows:
9. Even if ALL the observed global warming is ascribed to increasing atmospheric CO2, the calculated maximum climate sensitivity to a hypothetical doubling of atmospheric CO2 is only about 1 degree C, which is too low to cause dangerous global warming.
Christy and McNider (2017) analysed UAH Lower Troposphere data since 1979:
Reference: https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/2017_christy_mcnider-1.pdf
Lewis and Curry (2018) analysed HadCRUT4v5 Surface Temperature data since 1859:
Reference: https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/JCLI-D-17-0667.1
Climate computer models used by the IPCC and other global warming alarmists employ climate sensitivity values much higher than 1C/doubling, in order to create false fears of dangerous global warming.
Does that mean I can finally stop worrying about climate change and buy a new F 150?
No
Solving the climate crisis entails accepting the climate as it is and stop worrying about what you’d like it to be or not to be. Because, you certainly cannot change it.
If it gets 4C warmer I’ll be happy.
Today I inspected my scarlet runner beans. I have one bean 5” long. These rest are about an inch long. This has been the coolest summer I can remember in thirty years. I’m normally harvesting runner beans in early August.
And our fearless politicians talk about warmest year on record.
Bring on the warmth!
I won’t get 4 C warmer based on either the IPCC’s most likely model nor on the observed TCR and RCS from satellites (such as the UAH fleet as reported by the excellent Dr Roy Spencer) and balloons. We’ll run out of easily accessible hydrocarbons before then. Unfortunately the supply of control freak, parasites and malinformed eco-crazies seems to be unlimited.
Sorry about the beans. Predictions are they are unlikely to get longer over the next few decades – credible solar magnetic models predict coming cold.
To bad we can put “eco-crazies” energy to good use. like finding a cure to cancer. I would settle for a new antibiotic. Climate change is a moot point if only since it looks like each doubling would only produce less than 2 C change. The useful idiot of the left are incapable of understand much..
There are limited positions open for village idiots and far too many in the job pool.
They are too unintelligent to find a cure for anything. (I doubt they could cure concrete)They might be useful as lab rats. Their only contribution to science will be as data points.
Simply throwing warm bodies at a complex problem won’t fix the problem as most economists and bean-counters believe. It usually makes it worse.
Not all warm bodies are created equal.
If you want 4C warmer do like I did move to Arizona valley of the sun, 109 days of +37.7. It does wonder for my arthritis. I was up in North Dakota for a week in August and the temps were less than 21 C i could not close my hands. I hatte the cooling that coming this fall and will wait for the warming next spring. After 55 years in the north the last 12 down here have been a blessing, Yes 109 day above 37 C is great. Yes I do have air condition even with the AC set at 31 C I do go outside to warm up.
Agree. Humans began in hot, semi-arid areas (where sweating was an effective cooling method). Humans don’t compare well physically w/most other similar-sized animals (like strength), but can tolerate (dry) heat w/the best of them.
The only way to solve the impending crisis is for the scientific truth to emerge. It’s definitely an existential threat, but the threat is to free market capitalism and civilization itself should something like the new green deal be implemented.
The Democrat party agenda. Read the last paragraph above:
“Securing fair elections is a climate action. Combatting extreme wealth inequality is a climate action. Shutting down the hate machines on social media is a climate action. Instituting humane immigration policy, advocating for racial and gender equality, promoting respect for laws and their enforcement, supporting a free and independent press, ridding the country of assault weapons—these are all meaningful climate actions.”
Since the only people in this country who actually possess assault weapons are police and military, we’d have to ask ourselves if we really want to put ourselves at a defensive disadvantage by taking them away from those whose profession is our protection. Civilians don’t legally own assault weapons (except for a handful of gun shops, and an even smaller handful of legal owners under the draconian firearms acts – all of whom are known very well to the BATF and FBI).
I wonder how long law enforcement would continue to have “assault rifles” after all the manufacturers go broke and cease manufacture of this type of weapon.
My guess is that the U.S. would be buying military rifles from overseas somewhere at a greatly inflated price!
So, no 1st Amendment, no 2nd Amendment, no 5th Amendment, no 14th Amendment, and no national borders. Sounds like a plan!
A bit of advice to Jonathan Franzen and others of his ilk: If you want to reduce carbon emissions, get your mouth sewn shut and put a clothespin on your nose. Your personal contributions are polluting my atmosphere.
Sorry, that was just MEAN of me!
You are sweet even when being “mean”, Sara!
The proper class descriptor for Franzen and others of his ilk is “oxygen thief”.
I thank the author for tying global warming to each and every EXTREME leftist political cause and action … such as … “combatting extreme wealth inequality”. Speaking of which … The Obama’s personal wealth is “disgustingly” unequal to mine. I mean, I mean, how many houses do the Obama’s need? And how many illegal immigrant families could be housed in Obama’s multiple mansions?
Yeah, thanks for ignoring the “settled science” and going straight for the political nonsense.
Large amounts of money (yours), a suspension of personal freedoms (also yours) and conferences via private jets (mine).
Nobody has yet been able to articulate (that I’m aware) exactly what “winning the climate crisis” looks like, with real numbers and graphs that are self-consistent.
about half a dozen scientists coming up with a simple enough story te public can understand that refutes ‘climate change,the hypothesis’ completely.
It means some guy with a degree in German from Swarthmore College is gonna show you how inanely a person can whine, when he has no idea what he is talking about, but is sure he does.
You must be desperate to ask Griff.
What it entails?
It must involve buying a $15 million beach side estate after extreme promotion of the rising seas concept using the largest governing body on earth with hundreds of departments all lined up to issue global warming crisis statements and queue up for weekly press releases. It involves attacking any nonbelievers in the policy from the Presidential podium with a speech written by advocacy groups. Retiring to the beach is what you do when leaving the hollow policy superstructure to blow away in the winds of time. Thank goodness for fragile policy designs based on synthetic reality.
They don’t care when it floods they just buy another.
That sound you can hear is James Thurber spinning in his grave…
There are a few things missing from the wish-list that we re peddled as “caused by global warming” back in Copenhagen. Does anyone remember?
When asked what the $100 billion per years was going to be spent on, the answer came that it was to be used to help people in poor countries overcome the impacts of global warming. This included having no school classroom, having bad quality water, breathing cooking fire smoke, poor housing, lack of sewage and so on – all developmental objectives of any developing country. What was different that time was the idea of claiming these things were the result of global warming caused by people in rich countries.
How amazingly convenient. All the rich have to do is hand over $100 bn a year and the warming problem would go away, their sins of emission were absolved and forgiven, provided they continued paying. Read the Copenhagen Agreement some time and ask yourself, who administers this money and who are they accountable to? The answer is “themselves”. Unremovable, rich and well-intentioned. Who wouldn’t sign onto that? A lot of people, apparently.
There is Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus. What would happen if you took all the money wasted on renewable energy and all the money wasted on trying to prove that CAGW is real? You could do a whole lot of good.
As it stands, anything related to CAGW is a complete waste of treasure and talent.
I think the Copenhagen Consensus findings are the key to changing the climate debate.
They found that the only comparatively effective climate policy at this time is research and development, rated at $15 of benefit per dollar spent, based on the mainstream scientific projection of warming costs by the end of the century. Lomborg promotes spending of a few hundred billion dollars per year as the correct response to the mainstream projection of risk.
That price tag is around a third of the projected price of the Paris accords of 1 trillion per year if fully lived up to. Most importantly R&D would be a reasonable investment even if we expect no warming costs to occur – it makes sense simply on the basis of wanting to find energy sources to replace coal in particular.
Theoretically the only disagreement on the most effective climate/energy policy is therefore only on how much to spend. If you think there will not be much warming or much cost to warming you might not support over a hundred billion on R&D. But both for catastrophists and extreme skeptics the basic policy should be agreeable, for catastrophists because R&D is rated as being several times more effective than any other climate policy, for skeptics because it makes sense to look for a replacement for coal and to protect the future economy from the risk of oil becoming relatively rare and expensive.
This takes the debate away from the completely bogged down and entrenched debate on climate change to what the best solutions are. We don’t have to win the warming debate to win the debate on how resources are spent. Theoretically at least, there is an extremely broad potential agreement on focusing climate related policies on R&D that includes everyone that doesn’t have an agenda, or is too concerned about a potential catastrophe to be able to think rationally about the best allocation of resources.
The main debate is ultimately a sideshow compared to the policies, and the policy debate appears to be completely in favour of energy research that would make sense even in a no warming / no costs scenario.
“….. to what the best solutions are.”
NO!
Until you can define and get agreement what the problem is, there is no way to know what “the best solutions are”.
I could look for the best way to spend a significant part of my income on research directed at how to keep elephants out of my front yard. But I’d be focusing on a non-problem.
Research on how to replace the current sources of energy when those we now use become scarce and unaffordable is a lot different from trying to develop “renewable energy” to replace fossil fuels because of a global warming panic.
(Of course it gets much worse when irrational ideology interferes. Nuclear research would solve both aims but one side refuses to even consider it.)
Thank you George D. It is easy to spend money on solving a non-problem.
Rhoda,
It’s easy when it is OPM, regardless of what the problem is and whether it is even a problem.
Coal power is estimated to cause 30,000 early deaths in the US, per year. Besides early deaths, it obviously has a serious effect on human health whether it affects life span or not. The toll on human health of the build up of coal in developing nations will be huge.
Nobody need disagree that there is a problem with coal, and I would think, the potential of oil reserves starting to run thin, choking economic growth. Since R&D is the most effective solution for those problems as well as any theorized costs of global warming I would have to say again there should be a very broad consensus for promoting investment into R&D instead of other climate policies governments have undertaken which clearly waste money to no or little effect.
Germany’s electricity bills have more than doubled – besides coal and the benefit of working on alternate energy sources to other expendable reserves, a third undeniable benefit to focusing the debate to an R&D focused solution is because it will prevent wasteful spending on other “solutions” that do little for any of the proposed problems.
The climate debate is stalled, and in terms of real economic welfare the truly important debate is in solutions. The R&D solution has undeniable benefits regardless of whether or not warming costs will ever exist. If we can focus the debate on this it’s a win win situation.
So, you claim to be in charge of when “people” die? Really? Okey dokey, then.
People die, constantly. In America if you are attempting to say people are dying at a higher rate because of industry you are 80 years to late. Go to China, India, Africa, Indonesia and South America. Do a “study” in those places. I will donate fiddy cents to your memorial fund after you are summarily executed for telling, well, whatever you manage to get out of those places. Here in America you spew lies with impunity, hence why you are here doing it.
It appears as though the justification of actions has expanded as well:
It seems as though any thing you deem needs doing, but few others agree with, can be done in the name of saving the climate legal or otherwise. If enacted such laws that they advocate could just as quickly imprison them for their thought crimes as well.
These fools should be very afraid of what they are advocating and there has been sage advice to the contrary.
“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.” T. Jefferson
Others have already pointed this out, but you’ve got me wondering how many others misheard or misremembered that remarkable exercise. The entire point of the exercise was that, given some funds to help the poor, there were many, many projects that would be far more efficient than spending the money on climate change initiatives.
Any serious, actual scientist of any climate or related field should be standing up and flatly calling this BS out. That so many “climate scientist” stand silent proves that they are not serious and not actual scientists. Just keep the grant money, speaking fees and travel keep flowing please.
Kerry Eubanks, you are so right. One of the most depressing features of this scam is that so few people are speaking out. Not even expressing a tiny shred of doubt.
Why can’t people think even a tiny bit about what is being said? Take the first item in the list for example: “massive crop failures”. What about the massive increase in crops that global warming would make possible in Canada and Russia?
Every way you look at them, the predictions of doom make no sense (and many have already failed).
I know several geologists, and they know dozens more. They all laugh and scoff at the notion of AGW. When I ask them why they don’t speak out, they say “Because I’m not yet retired, I need to work.” The rest is left unsaid but well understood.
Sorry, that’s just cowardice.
Jeff, you have to feed your family; cowardice is abandoning your responsibilities.
One’s responsibility is feeding one’s family. Abandoning one’s responsibilities is cowardice, Jeff.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/in-unprecedented-move-head-of-key-meteorological-organization-slams-climate-extremists_3076409.html
Blah blah derpa herp derp blah blah, it’s the same comic book plot every single time, cooked up in the sick and demented microminds of the cultists. Our descendants will have fun looking through the countless examples of madness and after proper study maybe future generations will find a way to inoculate themselves from mass delusions.
I hope people like Jonathan Franzen will have heaped upon them all of the ridicule and scorn they have earned and so richly deserve, while we are all, them and us, still very much alive and kicking and aware.
I will be disappointed not to see them all get their comeuppance, to be known by all as abject fools, bedwetting jackasses, modern day doomsday catastrophists.
Which is exactly what they are.
These smug $#%&heads have no idea how incredibly stupid and wrong they are, and that needs to change, soon.
So, we must throw out the U.S. Constitution, do away with free speech, install the anti-Trump, and do whatever else these social justice warriors want to do, all in the name of keeping “order.” Thus, the end justifies the means, I suppose. One would think that keeping assault weapons (whatever they are; I guess they mean rifles) would help keep order in the coming chaos they imagine, but perhaps they did not think this out very well. Or, perhaps they have, and they’re not telling us all that they intend…i.e. it’ll be a lot easier to suppress the people if they don’t have weapons when they try to implement their totalitarian style of government.
I do believe the writer has a right to issue his or her thoughts, but I am appalled at this, and my ancestors who built this country out of a wilderness would revolve at high RPM in their graves if they read this.
If we’re going to have the End of the World, then I need an armory room full of Assault Rifles more than ever. That and a bunch of colanders to make facemasks for my wrecking crew.
Is there even ONE peer reviewed paper that predicts or projects such dire happenings and more importantly has a rational explanation of how rising CO2 is the cause?
Media and political personalities now seem to be in a mad race to out do each other with absurdities and no one seems to call them on it; and I’m referring to actual scientists especially.
Sorry, George, I’m not younger than 60. I will continue to drive my SUV around, eat beef, play golf, and yes occasionally add noxious gases to the atmosphere. Good luck to you.
Good. Somebody tell Justin Trudeau. No more need for any Carbon Taxes.
Tell Garry Trudeau, too.
Hard to imagine seeing so much doom and gloom, he must be on Prozac. Liberals are always so depressed.
Well, New York’s lucky – since it’s all over anyway, they’ve got lots of tall buildings to jump off, if the apocalypse starts getting too close.
Anybody remember the Orson Wells ‘War of the Worlds’ radio broadcast? There were people ready to cut their wrists the moment they saw the Martian war-machines coming over the hills.
“massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought.”
These kind of “people” are dangerously insane !
Why would The New Yorker publish something so obviously crazy ?
Eric,
I am so glad you took this one on. Had I tackled it, I would have triggered every concern troll on the Internet… 😉
My response to “Jonathan Earl Franzen, American novelist and essayist“…
“Securing fair elections is a climate action.” The United States Constitution already did this 230 years ago. It’s called the “Electoral College.”
“Combatting (sic) extreme wealth inequality is a climate action.” The award-winning “journalist” can’t even spell “combating.” Combating extreme wealth inequality is Marxism. Our Constitution actually prohibits this.
“Shutting down the hate machines on social media is a climate action.” Would be Stalinism and violate the First Amendment of our Constitution. It would be a grotesque assault on rule of law.
“Instituting humane immigration policy, advocating for racial and gender equality, promoting respect for laws and their enforcement, supporting a free and independent press, ridding the country of assault weapons—these are all meaningful climate actions.” I think this just set a new world record for non sequitur fallacies in a single sentence. No psychobabble phrase in his Marxist litany actually follows from the previous phrase. One-by-one:
“Instituting humane immigration policy”…
Congress did this. President Trump is attempting to enforce the laws passed by Congress.
“advocating for racial and gender equality”
You are free to advocate for whatever you wish. Just leave the rest of us the frack alone!
“promoting respect for laws and their enforcement”
Horst schist! Almost every asinine thing you wrote craps all over respect for laws and their enforcement and our Constitution.
“supporting a free and independent press”
You mean supporting fellow Marxist press and silencing Breitbart, Fox News, The Daily Caller, etc… and probably WUWT too (what you refer to as “the hate machines on social media”).
“ridding the country of assault weapons”
Hey Ricardo Cabeza! An assault weapon is capable of selective fire. They’ve been illegal for about 80 years. Regarding “ridding” the country of firearms that scare you and your limp-wristed ilk…
I just wrote some of the same kind of responses (i.e. the Electoral College is their target, etc.). Then your post appeared.
Anyone who has read the US Constitution should have come up with a similar response to this Marxist dumb@$$.
The entire point of the electoral college was to prevent populist candidates from becoming president. It was expected that the elite would vote for candidates like Hilary Clinton and prevent people like Trump from becoming president. So it is quite ironic that the only reason he is president is through a quirk of electoral college maths. The US constitution did not originally have direct popular elections for the president since the founders did not believe in representative democracy and thought that the land-owning elite should run the country.
As it stands the electoral college is extremely undemocratic. Why should it take
over 450000 votes to get an electoral college vote in Florida but only 150000 in Wyoming? If you think that everyone’s vote should carry equal weight then you need to either get rid of the electoral college or at least reform it significantly. And remember that there is nothing in the
constitution that says how the states can direct their votes in the electoral college. There is
for instance the popular vote interstate compact that says that states will allocate their votes to whoever wins the popular vote. Or there is the example of Maine that splits its votes according to who wins each district. If either system had been in place nationwide Trump would not currently be president.
No Isaac. The function of the Electoral College is to keep high population density regions from controlling the elections. It was one of the Great Compromises of the Constitution. Rhode Island and the various southern states were afraid that the populations of New Your and Mass, for instance, would overwhelm them. Sort of like today we’re worried about NYC, Chicago, San Fran LA, Austin and Miami determining the next President. The Founding Fathers definitely didn’t want an elite class ruling things.
No Izaak,
You mischaracterize the intent of the Electoral college. (Big Shock)
The elections of 1860 and 1992 best embodies the wisdom of the electoral college.
Both instances, neither Abraham Lincoln nor Bill Clinton received anywhere close to majority of the total votes cast. But both won the Electoral College vote by a wide margin, giving them the mandate to be President.
The same with President Trump. His electoral college vote margin of 304-227 meant that Hillary had no case to argue that she “won.”
It is only dishonest Democrats (redundant, I know) who can’t admit that the Rules clearly gave the Presidency to Trump, and Hillary was clearly defeated. They wanted to change the rules after the game was over. Big losers chumps all of them.
As for the Interstate Compact on the popular vote, it is unconstitutional for a number of reasons.
1. The US Congress must approve all Interstate Compacts. Right there it has no authority.
2. Ignoring #1 for a moment, let’s say Colorado majority vote goes to Trump, but Trump loses the National majority vote. Then Colorado by its passage of the Compact allocates it electoral college votes to the Democrat. The State legislature with its Compact Agreement just disenfranchised the majority of Colorado voters with that action. Do you know what that means (disenfranchisement of voters by a state) under the 14th Amendment?
(I doubt it, as you seem rather ignorant overal of the US Constitution. So to expect you to know what it means for a state to disenfranchise its voters w.r.t. to the 14th Amendment would be overly optimistic.)
Like everything the Dumbocrats ever try to do to engineer a political outcome, it almost always fails and then backfires on them. Harry Reid nuking the filibuster to push a few Obama nominees through is the most clear example, but there are many others. Like using Dirty Dishonest Tricks to try and stop the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation with Liar Blasey-Ford’s dishonest accusations. It ended-up costing them 3 seats in the Senate, now the GOP has solid majority to confirm all of Trump’s nominees rather than a razor thin 50-50 split. Democrats are too smart-dumb for their own good. But that is their nature.
Joel,
Firstly in regards the national interstate compact it would appear that a large majority
of people regard it as constitutional – there appears to be a good discussion on wikipedia about it validity. I am not a constitutional scholar and clearly there is a range of opinions on it. But your other example would appear to suggest that it is ok to disenfranchise the majority of voters in the entire country since overall they voted for Clinton over Trump. If it is undemocratic for that to happen to the population one state then it would be undemocratic for it to happen to the entire country.
Alternatively if congress were to increase the number of seats so that urban districts had the
same number of voters as rural ones then the electoral college maths would again change dramatically.
The point is that the electoral college can be as democratic or not as you like depending on what
rules are in play about how each state chooses it voters and how many votes each states gets. None
of which is spelled out in the constitution and as it currently stands it violates the principle of one person one vote.
Izaak,
It’s dumb@sses who think the Compact on the Electoral College vote is constitutional without Congress’s approval. So you trust those dumb@ssses to be right? Apparently they can’t read. Nor can you.
The Constitution clause on Interstate Compacts is crystal clear:
“No State shall, without the Consent of Congress… enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State.”
It couldn’t be more clear.
And Mitch McConnell and the GOP will be in control of the US Senate thru 3 January 2021, regardless of the outcome of 2020 Senate elections, winners that do not get seated until January 2021. The Electoral College vote for 2020 will be certified by Congress in December 2020 after the November elections. There is zero chance that Congress will Consent (the Senate certainly) to that Compact until after the 2020 election is already decided and submitted to Congress in December 2020.
Thus the compact is patently unconstitutional if any state tries to invoke it in 2020 to deny the Republican candidate electoral votes that were otherwise “won.”
Period.
And then the poison-pill kicker is if they do attempt it, per the 14th Amendment, Section 2., the Courts would be obligated under challenge to strip that state in the 2020 reapportionment of many millions of resident for disenfranchisement, to wit: “the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion”, and thereby reduce their Congressional representation in the House.
That would be oh-so sweet justice.
Joel,
There is nothing in the constitution that says how states allocate their electoral college votes. They are free to do so in whatever manner they choose. And similarly if electoral college members decide to vote differently than what the states expected that is similarly constitutional. However would you agree that in an ideal democracy all votes should count equally? If not can you explain why some votes should count more than others?
This is not just an issue with the US. In Australia for instance voters living in smaller states get a much bigger representation in the Senate. Do you think it is fair that Tasmania with a population of 530000 gets 6 senate seats while the ACT only gets 2 with a population of 420000? Or the British House of Lords where you get automatic entry if you are one of a select group of Bishops or peers while the rest are appointed for life.
All such examples are legal and constitutional but they are not fair and are profoundly undemocratic.
Izaak,
You clearly should **not** be commenting on the details of US politics, US elections, or US constitutional matters … like you know anything. Your lack of understanding the details is painfully obvious.
So Stick to Aussie politics.
And I will stick to US politics.
Learn by keeping your mouth shutt and your ears open when you know little.
Besides for everything else, the small states would never have ratified the Constitution to begin with were it not for the senate and the electoral college.
It will be far more ironic and indeed funnier if and when Trump gets the most popular votes, and thereby gets the electoral votes of people who voted against him.
Now THAT will be funny!
November 3rd, 2020…night of the ‘splodin’ leftist heads!
I can hardly wait!
The same people who were sure Hillary would win in 2016 are now expressing great confidence in polling, we have the first of a parade of celebrities declare that Trump WILL not be re-elected, and speculations are running towards such inanities as D’s winning the White House, and the Senate and increasing their lead in the H.of R.
Good luck wit’ dat!
The reaction from the left will make election night and the time following it in 2016 look like a sunny beach day barbecue party by comparison.
After all, what could go wrong?
Democrats are one and all promising higher taxes, gun bans and outright confiscation, putting large groups of working class people (in swings states no less!) out of their jobs forever, open the borders to anyone who wants to come, take away the health insurance from every single person who has any, and give it to illegal aliens for free, and the unprecedentedly outlandish menu of new items they will take from us or take control of: The food we eat, silly stuff like straws, our ability to travel, our CARS(!), our thermostats…
The list includes several items that by themselves have lost previous elections for Democrats and affected voting choices for years to decades thereafter.
The vast majority of Americans are opposed to every one of these positions for which polling has been done.
Even staunch Democrats are warning that several of the positions taken by the whole D field are unsupportable.
But yeah…they are gonna win an election against Trump.
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed68.asp
Fascinating most of those “climate actions” are things the liberals have been trying to force on the rest of us for decades.
The rest of them, things like ensuring fair elections can be best understood when you understand liberal speak.
For example, elections are only “fair” when they win.
MarkW,
An essay you’ll enjoy.
“Climate Change” Is A Hoax
by Kurt Schlichter
Townhall.com/ Posted: Sep 09, 2019 12:01 AM
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2019/09/09/climate-change-is-a-hoax-n2552748
Ha – saying civilisation is about to collapse but we want to collect all your guns is a little absurd…
I was going to pick out parts of that last paragraph but you beat me to it.
Just how does this guy reason that “Shutting down the hate machines on social media is a climate action.” and “supporting a free and independent press” are the same thing? Giving him (or others like him) the power to define what is “hate”? The power to declare that someone who disagrees with you is “hate”?
Ricardo: “ridding the country of assault weapons”
David: “Hey Ricardo Cabeza! An assault weapon is capable of selective fire. They’ve been illegal for about 80 years. Regarding “ridding” the country of firearms that scare you and your limp-wristed ilk…”
Who would obey a law regarding the ever vague and shifting definition of a law banning “assault weapons”?
Criminals out for themselves never have.
Political criminals out for power always have.
Push this backdoor stuff too far and those who remember “The Cause” (Declaration of Independence type stuff) won’t either.
That whole article, especially the last section, was promoting a present political agenda, not future scientific projection.
PS David, do you have an Ohio version of that flag? 😎
PPS I lived in New Hampshire for a few year 30 years ago. What would it take for them to live up the best state motto in the US? (Not a windmill.)
A baseball bat can be used for assault. Therefore it is an assault weapon. We must eliminate baseball.
Makes as much sense.
These people are so deep in their echo chamber they have literally no idea how crazy they have become.
The echo chamber was long been more or less a cliché, but over the past 4 years the amount of civilized exchanged of information via conversation between the people on the left and the right has gone from not so large to nonexistent.
IOW…these people never hear contrary opinions.
They think people who disagree with them on anything are a tiny fringe minority, even as they have lurched sharply to the left lunatic fringe.
“ridding the country of assault weapons”
Muskets were the assault weapons of their time. Times change. Anyone who thinks the framers didn’t understand this are pretty stupid.
Also… In 1790, a “well regulated militia” as did not mean “government regulated.”
In 1790 to the end 19th Century (or so), the term “well-regulated” only meant “well trained and equipped”.
In 18th-19th century frontiers days, there were “Regulators.” Men banded together, equipped and trained in arms to dfend and protect the population from Indian attacks, bandits, gangs. even rogue corrupt Sheriffs and Marshals. The word “Regulator” came from “regulations”, meaning trained in arms and so equipped, to be able to mount a credible defense to threats to life, property, and liberty.
Thus the expectation that Free Men (especially on the Frontier) were expected to form loose-militias and have access to all the arms and training “being necessary to the security of a free State.” That is what “well-regulated” means in the true context of the 2nd Amendment. It has nothing at all to do with government regulations.
To a person in 1790-1910, government “regulations” were meant only for military conscripts, NCOs, and officers where military (edict-imposed) regulations from a superior officer were essential for establishment of order, discipline, and ensuring troops were equipped and trained. Regulations came from bureaucrats or generals.
Thus in 1790, regulations did not apply to Free Men. Only Laws, laws passed by duly elected Representatives, were what governed a Free Man in 1790. That is the foundation of Western democracy. No King could impose fiats or regulations on a free man without the consent of his/her duly-elected representatives in parliament or legislature.
“The award-winning “journalist” can’t even spell “combating.””
The famous checkers at the New Yorker have been thinned down, apparently.
(I caught them in an oversight several decades ago, which they acknowledged in a postcard back to me.)
David the hate machines could be cut down voluntarily by the neomarxy left since they operate them all.
Just tell them the culling is coming EARLY…. this next Friday.
Friday the 13th + Full Moon (Harvest Moon) = End Times.
“Get to your bunkers NOW you wankers!!”
Isn’t language an amazing thing? First we had global warming, then climate change, now escalated to climate emergency, apocalyptic fires, epic floods, melt down, extinction. When that doesn’t scare enough people, what’s the next level?
Is there any leader out there ready to talk common sense?
Will the IPCC speak up? After all, they are planning to complete their AR6 Synthesis Report in the first half of 2022 – that hardly seems like a crisis timetable.
Fact check – the IPCC still talks about global warming of 1.5-2.0 Degrees C since pre-industrial times, yet the world still seems to be healthy, having already warmed by 1 degree. So another 0.5-1.0 degree C of warming will be apocalyptic? Me thinks the emperor has no clothes.
#ExxonKnew…
Apart from the recent El Niño, the “climate” has remained in the “approximate range of undisturbed climate in the past few centuries”… we’re barely warmer than this…
David, are your grandkids agreeing with you?
“Is there any leader out there ready to talk common sense?
Will the IPCC speak up? After all, they are planning to complete their AR6 Synthesis Report in the first half of 2022 – that hardly seems like a crisis timetable.”
Yeah, one would think if CAGW was such an existential threat, the IPCC would speed up the timetable a little bit.
Of course we can’t prevent the climate apocalypse. It is here already. Don’t you read newspapers? Watch television? Use social media?
I’m leaving on a Rocket to Mars…don’t know if I’ll be back again….oh, no…oh, no…by leaving I take my carbon with me, though.
Ah, yes, because there is not one.
The author’s true intention of course:
“In this respect, any movement toward a more just and civil society can now be considered a meaningful climate action. “
To wit he gets to define “meaningful climate action”:
– “Securing fair elections is a climate action. “
= vote harvesting (a la California) + illegal aliens voting + ignoring the Constitution on Electoral College process
– “Combatting (sic) extreme wealth inequality is a climate action. “
= seizure of wealth through taxation + taking property without compensation + giving it to politically preferred classes to secure their vote (See above on voting)
– “promoting respect for laws and their enforcement”
(this one is at odds with everything the writer suggests, like seizing lawfully owned guns, taking property to re-distribute, I doubt the writer really then undersatnds anything at all about how our justice system works, that is an accused is innocent until adjudicated guilty, usually by a jury of peers)
– “supporting a free and independent press”
(Full retard Frazen has never been to China apparently if he thinks the US doesn’t have this, or he means a “free press” as one given taxpayer monies as long as it is ThinkProgress, which is going out of business)
– ridding the country of assault weapons—these are all meaningful climate actions.
= the real agenda of the writer revealed — totalitarianism masquerading behind Climate Change, because why stop with AR-15s? If allowed to start, then it will be all guns (“arms” in #2A language) as Liberals are always of the “never enough” mindset.
Conclusion:
Franzen has gone Full Retard. Never go Full Retard. There is no redemption.
GOOD NEWS! There is no climate crisis. There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and there is plenty of scientific rationale that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is zero. We must also realize that the climate change we are experiencing today, as it has always been, is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. Extreme weather events will continue as they always have because they are part of the current climate as they have always been. The Earth’s climate is changing very slowly. Most likely the current warm up from the Little Ice Age will stop and temperatures will gradually cool as we transition to another cool period but that may be hundreds of years off. Eventually the current interglacial period will end and another ice age will set in but that may be thousands to tens of thousands of years in developing so enjoy the relative warmth while is lasts.
Franzen’s fatalism and acceptance that it’s already too late on stopping Climate End Times, logically means we can move on as a society to economic issues and that Climate Change itself must be relegated the non-problem arena. That is, there is nothing that needs to be done in the name of Climate Change action. Nothing. Move on.
But logic and reason now eludes Liberals. It’s all based on emotions and feelings for them. Everything from the anti-vaxxers, the anti-GMO’ers, the RoundUp™️ is cancer believers, …. they are the “facts don’t matter” crowd … they are all on the Left.
I think I’ll drive my Chevy Silverado to the store and get a 6-pack to celebrate the End of the Climate Crisis.
Why doesn’t he just get a group of like-minded idiots and go off to Mars in a Tesla? It would make our lives easier waiting for the apocalypse, and would give them a chance to start a new life (if Elon can fire them in the right direction this time).
Is there a chance we can weld the lid shut after they close it?
I remember when the New Yorker was a magazine for intelligent, educated and sophisticated people. I guess they stopped pretending there were any more of that type among their readers.
I don’t have time for novel-length articles. Just get to the point, or shut up…
The New Yorker decided its paying subscribers were like themselves. … Uber-Liberal and willfully ignorant of reality by living in echo chambers with each other. They don’t let reality inside that bubble.
Robber , Sept 9, sums it up perfectly. Lets go back to what it all started
off as , “”Global Warming””, and challenge the IPCC to explain that as
we have already had a increase of close to 1 degree C. since 1880, then
how can a additional .5 C make any real difference.
Then we should challenge all of the Greenies starting with the UN’s IPCC
to prove 100 % how CO2 can cause a additional heating effect when
clearly it does not store heat, but only re-radiates it.
The major problem is that faced with a mostly hostile Media, we need
President Trump to create what is in effect a Ministry of Information ,
to put the other sides point of view.
Al Gore and his supporters are a modern day version of Germanys
Dr. Gobbles, so we need a government counter to what is clearly Propaganda
A major part of the problem , at least from the sceptics side of the debate ,
is that most people do not seem to realise just how critical energy is to a
modern civilisation, and of course that the energy has to be both 24/7 and
reasonably priced. Reduce the amount of energy and we will see a massive reduction in our standard of living.
This is already happening here in Australia where the ever higher cost of
electricity is affecting all things , especially the retail sector. People have
less and less spare cash so there is far less speeding on everything except the
basics such as food. Plus of course the rent or a mortgage .
The people have to be told just what is the Greens idea of a perfect World,
just what sort of life the majority would have to live in. Of course just as in
the earlier version of the Greens ideal world, the old USSR in Russia , , the top brass
lived very well, but the vast majority did not.
MJE VK5ELL
The UN is not accountable to any one/thing/country except itself and it’s not sharing those findings. Imagine giving vast sums of money to a self appointed organization to solve problems and getting nothing in return except shaming, fear mongering, and demands for more money. There you have the UN and it’s about time we do something about that quango starting with the IPCC.
Fascinating how the entire leftist agenda is under the umbrella of climate change. they ways they express it all thru climate change, they are unhinged. They are HYPOCRITES.
This is good.
I thought this is the start of the Left awaking.
The New Yorker published the article. The New Yorker and the Atlantic are the standard reading for thinking Left.
This appears to be a Left guy that is thinking and criticizing the green scams. A scam is a scam regardless of which party you vote for.
For example:
“Vast sums of government money must be spent without wasting it and without lining the wrong pockets. Here it’s useful to recall the Kafkaesque joke of the European Union’s biofuel mandate, which served to accelerate the deforestation of Indonesia for palm-oil plantations, and the American subsidy of ethanol fuel, which turned out to benefit no one but corn farmers.”
This is the first Left guy that notes there is limited money to spend.
Bernie’s plan to spend $16 trillion on green stuff would in reality mean there will be $16 trillion less to spend on stuff the Left want such as Medicare, student debt relief, social programs, and so on.
There is a fix amount of GDP to spend. The politicians have already spent all we got and more. If it was possible to spend an additional $16 trillion it would have been spent.
“Our resources aren’t infinite. Even if we invest much of them in a longest-shot gamble, reducing carbon emissions in the hope that it will save us, it’s unwise to invest all of them. Every billion dollars spent on high-speed trains, which may or may not be suitable for North America, is a billion not ….”
Quote.. Today, the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable. If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it.
I’m below 60 and I haven’t seen any of the things he mentions, can someone point me to the evidence? I want data not anecdotes.. and alternate realities don’t count..
..yeah that’s what I thought..
He doesn’t say you’ve seen them, but that you have a good chance at some unspecified date in the future. Of course, these are the things they’ve been saying for 40+ years, so far, nada.
The Climate Jonestown IS coming. The Faithful are starting to realize that renewables and carbon taxes were never going to significantly slow down fossil fuel use, and too many Greens are still more afraid of Nuclear power then of the Climate Crises.
But they still can’t accept that they have been scammed, or that their ‘belief in science’ is nothing scientific.
So now they are absolutely convinced that doomsday is upon us, and nothing can be done to stop it. Unfortunately there are many examples in history of where such beliefs lead.
And just as a reminder, the Jonestown Massacre started with the Faithful killing a US Congressman and his people they thought was going to reveal how bad things were there, and involved killing anyone they could reach that they blamed for their problems.
~¿~
~¿~
This is even funnier !
Alien civilizations may have explored the Milky Way and visited Earth already, new study claims
https://www.foxnews.com/science/alien-civilizations-explored-milky-way-earth-already
“Stars, along with the planets around them, orbit the center of the Milky Way on unique paths at varying speeds, and they sometimes zip past one another as they do, Business Insider reports.
Carroll-Nellenback’s study points out that the aliens could simply be waiting for their next destination to come closer to them.”
How many millions of years would they be waiting ?
Heard it all before. Even people 30 years old should be figuring it out by now.
Plagues of raining frogs?
Death of the first born?
Dogs and cats living together?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmzuRXLzqKk
Well, I am still younger than 60. Currently, nothing makes me want to live to 100 more than the prospect of telling today’s 20 year old’s that they were really sold a lemon with that global warming thing and don’t you feel stoopid now?
Perhaps I should make a few Youtube videos, posthumously telling them “I told you so”.
Fortunately, most of the crop of actual science deniers (today’s pseudoscience climatologists) will be all dead in 40 years. So maybe cli science then can actually move forward without tenure and ego mucking things up and learn something valuable and enduring about climate change.
Amen, Brother Michael…
Oh goody. Someone else I can send Dr Frank’s “peer reviewed and published” link to ..
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2019.00223/full
Here ya go Mr Franzen. Happy reading.
Pat Frank’s landmark post at WUWT is now up to 550 comments.
Pat’s is the kind of article that almost requires comment software that can differentiate old posts in the thread from new posts. Otherwise, one has to read, or at the least scan, 400 or 500 comments to find the new ones. I bet if the somments were easier to read, there would be a lot more additional comments.
This feature used to be available at WUWT, where the new posts in a thread would be highlighted in a different background color with each new visit. Very convenient. This feature went away with the WUWT/WordPress system crash.
The most accurate, truly global data for average lower atmospheric temperature change over the last 40 years comes from the UAH satellite-measurement database (Version 6.0) See https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/09/04/uah-global-temperature-update-for-august-2019-0-38-deg-c/
The best fit through this “noisy” data (largely—but not consistently—reflecting ENSO variations of about +/- 0.4 C about the trend line) is a linear fit at a warming rate of +0.13 C/decade.
In the 20-year interval from Jan 1979 to Jan 1999, humans released 25% of the total cumulative amount of CO2 calculated to have been released anthropogenically from 1750 to end-2018, but in the 20-year interval from Jan 1999 to Jan 2019 humanity released a much larger percentage of the same cumulative amount: 37%, or almost 50% more.
(Data source: http://www.globalcarbonatlas.org/en/CO2-emissions via https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions )
Does the trending of UAH satellite-based global lower atmospheric temperature show an atmospheric response to this large change in the release rate of anthropogenic CO2? Or even response to the Keeling curve exponentially-increasing growth of atmospheric CO2 concentration, however originated? In both cases, no, it does not . . . the overall temperature trend is linear at a constant slope over 40 years.
So, does anthropogenic CO2 affect global lower atmospheric temperature? No, it does not . . . we have actually performed the necessary experimental test with the required measurement accuracy and spatial resolution in the actual dynamic system (with all associated feedback mechanisms and complexities) over 40 years and have seen a null result.
CO2 at present or higher atmospheric concentration levels does not and will not affect global warming, which is obviously being driven by other natural factors: the three leading candidates are long term changes in (a) percent global cloud cover, (b) atmospheric absolute humidity, and (c) global ocean circulation patterns.
To the extent that basics physics says that CO2 should act as a “greenhouse gas,” which is credible due to its absorption and re-radiation spectral bands, it likely became saturated in ability to cause such an effect at much lower concentration levels (likely in the range of 200-300 ppm, see https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/08/the-effectiveness-of-co2-as-a-greenhouse-gas-becomes-ever-more-marginal-with-greater-concentration/ ), now leaving only water vapor and methane as the current non-saturated GHGs.
Took the dog out for a walk earlier. Beautiful night, great weather. Try as I might I couldn’t find the climate crisis anywhere during our walk.
I know only one person who subscribes to the New Yorker Magazine.
She is a Jew who hates Israel and loves Obama.
Just a factual observation, no more.
Truly delusional, then?
My God! This person obviously needs some immediate psychiatric intervention. He’s seriously delusional. I hope he doesn’t cause injury to himself or others.
What we are seeing is the ravings and prophecies of a millennarian religious cult.
It can happen to anyone. Even the educated upper-middle class.
Perhaps this is a new angle for the Planetary Saviors. Auntie Beeb is offering something similar, and such a deal at just $1.8 trillion: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49635546.
Who knows, maybe Auntie also has Windsor Castle for sale.
That place is a bit of “Fixer-Upper” (in real estate-ese parlance) I suspect.
Is this author, Jonathan Franzen, going to be held accountable for this apocalyptic drivel ten years from now, or has he already stashed it in his file, ready to compose his next clever piece?
He has freedom of speech to write whatever insane nonsense he likes.
Fortunately, he and his fellow band of Full Retards do not have the “freedom” to use the police powers of the government to impose them under the US Constitution.
Which is why they hate the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
It tells them where they cannot go. They cannot seize guns in the US like happened in Australia and NZ did. They cannot impose a Federal “wealth tax.” They cannot restrict groups of people incorporating and speaking with one voice in political speech. And they cannot bypass the Electoral College for selecting the President/Vice-President.
And Barack Obama can never again be President.
And they cannot change a Life-time Appointment to the Supreme Court (or any federal court).
The writer is totally correct. We can’t stop the coming human-made climate apocalypse. How could we possibly stop something that doesn’t exist?
Seems to me that the alarmists realize that the gig is up and they’d like everyone to forget what they’ve been saying for decades. If it’s too late and we’re all gonna die, we may as well just sit back and enjoy what time we have left, amiright? It’s a short hop from “It’s all over” to “What? Me worry?” And if there’s nothing we can do about it, absolutely nothing, then we don’t need to listen to any more climate preaching, right? So I can drive my beloved Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Sahara around town without guilt (not that I ever drove it with guilt). I can indulge my preference for plastic straws. And if all the chaos and destruction is going to happen anyway, I’d better run down to my local gun store. I’ll need to stop at the Lowe’s on the way back and order a load of bricks for the 15′ wall I’ll be building around my property.
Thank God these green ecofreaks have stopped reproducing !
In short, “Every key plank of the Democratic party is a climate action.” What complete and utter trash.
Well, we’ve been warned for many years about the coming space alien attack, which will wipe humanity off the planet. But did we do anything about it? Noooooooo! We did nothing! No space shield, build-up of high-powered lasers, etc. Nope. Nada. If anything, we’re even less prepared. But since space alien armageddon is coming no matter what we do, we may as well face the buggers with full, vibrant economies powered by inexpensive, abundant, and reliable fossil fuels supplemented by nuclear. We may as well help folks in poorer countries also enjoy the benefits of fossil fuels and nuclear power, raising standards of living, and helping them have clean air and water, along with abundant food. We may as well have governments run under the concept that ‘less government is more, allowing free markets to flourish along with the democratic principles so cherished by our country’s founders. We can do this!
Come to think of it, even if the space demons decided to bypass us, and go elsewhere, which is extremely unlikely which 98% of the experts say, we should do all of this anyway. Win-win!
I have it on good authority that that alien race you refer to is named the Vogons. And, yes, we were warned about them as far back as 1978 . . . and we have done NOTHING to prepare for them.
They will NOT bypass us, for they need to destroy Earth for a bypass.
Liberals have been lighting him up, but without actually disagreeing with him. He’s saying that society is not going to take the drastic actions that some say are needed. They’re not saying he’s wrong. They just don’t like hearing it.
Call it an aversion to reality.
Bunker mentality would be good for these jetsetters and carbon emitters.
Futility is a blessing. If the whole world could recognise that any attempts to save the world will fail and that the best option is to do nothing and preserve as much financial capital as possible so that this final generation of people can truly enjoy the rest of their lives ( even if only another 12 years)
Perhaps then the world will actually be saved from this climate madness that is destroying it.
“…despite earnest efforts we’ve made essentially no progress toward reaching it.”
============================
LOL, earnest efforts???
Like climate accords that require successful capitalist countries to cut emissions, but the rest of the world is free to ramp them up?
More truthful would be to say “lots of virtue signalling but no real efforts.”
No stopping apocalypse? Good. We can all stop worrying and go on with our lives.
Oop, there it is! Ever’body cabbage patch. Break it on down.
“the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable. ” Easy to say those words while ignoring lots of evidence that does refute it. These journalist are hacks for the climate change industry.
The New Yorker was once a decent literary magazine, arguably the best in the English language. They even had good non-fiction articles that covered topics in depth. Somewhere between the 1970s and 1990s they lost it, became politically correct, published fiction only because it was by minorities or third world writers, or by Joyce Carol Oates, and their non-fiction became fiction by ax-grinders. I wonder which corporation bought them out. The article, which I read in full, is an abomination of twisted facts, distorted lies, absurd generalities, and doomsday fear-mongering. Jonathan Franzen, if you ever read this, get out of the twisted cage you call your mind and go walk in the woods. You’ll feel much better.
Re Joel Brian, , 10th Sept.
In Australia only semi auto firearms were banned. As the compo paid for
them was enough to buy two bolt actions there are probably many more rifles
in Australia today.
With a little training the bolt actions are a more accurate a weapon, so we
are far from being defenceless.
MJE VK5ELL
One word, SMLE! I own several and yea, you can fire quick aimed shoots.
Mankind is arrogant to think it can change the climate that mother earth give us.
Just imagine if we had a habitable planet to colonize. Planetary Services could send all of these folks to safety on Mars Colony, the Biggest, Newest, and Most Exciting of All of the Space Colonies!!!
“any movement toward a more just and civil society can now be considered a meaningful climate action. ”
Let me guess… Moar Socialism? That’s what “social justice” means these days. And I bet if something NOT involving Socialism (like Nuclear) could prevent your so-called Climate Apocalypse, you would rather let the planet burn?
It’s kinda amazing to look down at all these comments. Such a divide between people of COMPLETELY opposed views, and even those who have similar views don’t seem to agree?
I must be super naive, but wouldn’t it have been a better use of everyone’s time to have got together in the comment section and solve one problem, no matter how small. Rather than squabble and accuse each other of being wrong. To me at least, that seems to be the issue nation’s are facing across the globe – no one agrees, and no one seems to be able to find a middle ground. Left or right.
Its probably just human nature. I wonder if we can change it? Is there a middle path out there, that’s not right or left? Any thoughts?
Let me help you! Climate changes, constantly. Humans are not causing it and can not stop it. See? Now you can move on and do something useful with your time, instead of worrying uselessly about something that you did not cause and can not stop. Your welcome.