Reader Jason S writes:
Hey Anthony,
I set my calendar to remind me of this story. It’s been 5 years since Governor Brown made this statement! One for the failed predictions pile!
Thanks again for all you do,
Jason
I’m not sure how to create a list of the “Worst Skeptics” but I assume Anthony Watts is on it as well as Steve Koonin, Richard Lindzen, John Clauser, Alex Epstein, the 1600 or so signatories of the the Clintel Declaration, every conservative pundit, and a whole bunch I can’t think of at the moment.
This will be added to the Failed Predictions Timeline.
Thank you Jason.
They are their own best debunkers. All we need to do is wait. Usually it’s not too long, because they cannot resist a short timeline for disaster.
In the last five years, I have not personally known a single sceptic who has become a climate alarmist. But I know some climate alarmists who have become sceptics.
Even Fritz Varenholtz believed in the great scare with a misguided faith in the IPCC…..and then he looked at one of their reports and realised how bad they were. In the book The Deniers, there was also misguided faith in the work of others by many of those featured in the book where they had a problem with the work of activists in their own field.
The problem with waiting is that they do all sorts of bad stuff in the meantime.
Jerry Brown was bad enough as Governor his first time out, and got worse. As an example, he appointed Adriana Gianturco as head of CalTrans, a person who hated the idea of actually building roads.
If God gave you an office, surely He gave you a super intelligence as well 🙂
Must be a letent talent!
‘latent’.
Now that’s a funny way to spell Orifice.
Though Brown definitely has a couple and both spew identical effluent
What he really meant was that the worst skeptics will be believers that the alarmists are nothing more than panic-mongerers who often stand to profit if governments enact new taxes, laws and restrictions on ordinary consumers.
I am proud to be one of the baddest of the bad, as a signatory to the Clintel declaration
Me too.
Give them their dues, they have battered us relentlessly with tales of weather extremes, record heat, record rain, record drought, record ice lows, record everything. They expected their efforts to dodge actual evidence, while brainwashing people through agenda supporters in the mainstream media, would turn us all around. It’s been red meat (or wet lettuce) to Just Stop Oil, but that’s about all.
But the believers are always screaming that the extremes are happening NOW! I hope we have already seen peak gang green. I sure fear it going any further, but that is really ALL they have.
Battered yes, bettered not by a large margin
We’ve been battered, but never bettered.
Always remember these offices are about votes…illegal or legal votes…not about a person’s abilities or intelligence. A Roman Emperor appointed his horse as a senator….maybe America would be better off if some offices were filled with horses…dogs….goats….than the humans in the offices.
In many governments around the world, including here in Oz, they have started building horses, starting with several horse’s arses.
We already have turkeys.
Also, parts of horses!
“A Roman Emperor appointed his horse as a senator . . .”
That’s nothing. California voters have elected many a horse’s ass to be governor. Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom being among the top ones.
The lesson learned here is… “People who regularly deny reality should not make predictions.”
The problem with delusional people is they don’t know they are delusional because they are delusional.
But us more worster skeptics will always be
Deniers.
That’s very good. Like it.
Thanks, Scissor! I sure miss those guys!
Me too.
Brown says “skeptic” like it’s a bad thing…. 🤨
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Richard Feynman
“Skeptic” = pro data-driven science.
Count me in! 😀
Didn’t Brown also claim that California was in a state of “permanent drought” and that California was in a state of “permanent flooding”?
Callyfornia seems to be in a state of permanent scumbag politicians.
What does that say about the voters?
It’s from proximity to the Left Coast
California is proof that the country is tilted to the left. All the fruits and nuts have rolled to the west coast.
California has a peculiar mentality partly because of a handful of geographical accidents. The climate seems benign, but it isn’t. The land seems fertile and benign, too, but it isn’t. Fertile, yes, but prone to natural disasters like floods, fires, droughts and earthquakes.
The seemingly benign climate and the seemingly benign land are both the result of north-south mountain ranges catching Pacific Ocean moisture for part of the year, and shielding the region from frigid, continental air masses, while channeling the rivers into directions where they can be exploited for irrigation and municipal water supplies.
Settlement got under way in earnest when prospectors discovers “Gold, GOLD in them thar hills!” 60 years after the gold rush, filmmakers located there for the easy outdoor shooting conditions. Farmers used the flat valleys for large-scale agriculture of profitable specialty crops.
Add it all up, and you find a get-rich-quick mentality, mixed with resentment over the other guy who got the lucky breaks.
Commiefornia’s Prop 65 warning labels would be more apt if they read:
WARNING! Large government bureaucracies are hazardous to your health!
Increases in depression, despondency and suicidal ideation are directly linked to bloated federal, state and local governments! They may also cause cancer if used regularly!
As for Prop 65, they might as well come up with a single label, everything you eat and drink is bad for you. Stop at once.
This was Jerry Brown in 1992 when he thought he was done with politics.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/257560891
Wow, what a rare admission.
I lived in San Diego during all of Moonbeam’s terms. His most notable accomplishment was dating Linda Ronstadt in her prime.
True that.
Her cover of “Blue Bayou” was wonderful.
She sang that, with feeling, directly to/for governor Brown . . . as in “Blue Bye-You”.
So I’m no longer a “Worst Skeptic”. Now I can sleep at nights!
It’s like a flat-earther telling us that “within five years, the worst of us flat-earth deniers will become Believers”.Uh, no.
I would be honored to be placed on your list of worst skeptics.
Maybe he thought the censorship would be more effective than it has been. It is impossible to find the most-viewed climate website on any search engine unless you use “skeptic” or “denier” or know exactly what site you are looking for.
True. It’s a reason to read it.
I am conservative in my predictions. Ten years from now the most adherent CAGW believer will be skeptical
Nah – they’ll just say we were lucky we were in the 99th percentile of model results and that it was chance along with the trillions we
wastedwisely spent on subsidizing ‘carbon free’ alternatives that saved us from certain calamity.I think it will take a decade or two of cooling to really smash the climate alarmists.
All the CO2/climate alarmists have now is the satellite-era temperature record (1979 to present) to point to as correlation, and only because it has been warming during this part of the climate cycle. But when the temperatures start to cool, then they won’t have anything to point to as evidence that CO2 is causing the Earth’s atmosphere to warm, because it won’t be warming, while CO2 will still be increasing.
That time might not be far off.
I’d rather they were right. Cold sucks. Reading UKLeguin’s classic Left Hand of Darkness and the plot leans on icy climate as the bad guy- but also logs solid evidence of CO2-AGW theory going back >40 years. Most things people think are new are way, way older.
Jerry Brown is not someone I would look to for guidance.
How do you sign up/apply to be a ‘worst skeptic’? I have an excellent resume of downvoting Griff, Nick Stokes, and Final Nail’s comments.
Those three are strangers in a strange land here, like roomy pilgrims on a mission to save us from their demons. If you’d like recognition for social media banter,, go raise your voice somewhere where their opinions are well represented. Regular readers here tend to agree on the core issue. AGW: Nah no big deal.
Start by getting to the back of the line.
As my former Governor I can attest that very few things he said were ever found to be true .Reminds me of my favorite anti Jerry bumper sticker “ If it’s Brown,Flush it “
Gov Jerry Brown also once said:
California will face billions of dollars in spending to cope with the consequences of rising sea levels if low-lying communities along the coast are ultimately submerged, as scientists predict, Gov. Jerry Brown said Tuesday.
Brown’s remarks came a day after the release of two studies finding that a slow-motion and irreversible collapse of a massive cluster of glaciers in Antarctica has begun and could cause sea levels to rise worldwide by four feet within 200 years.
“If that happens, the Los Angeles airport’s going to be underwater,” Brown told reporters at a presentation of his revised state budget proposal in Los Angeles. “So is the San Francisco airport.”
https://www.latimes.com/local/political/la-me-pc-brown-sea-level-airports-20140513-story.html
But LAX is 128 feet above sea level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_International_Airport
And the quoted sea level rise is 4 feet in 200 years or 2 feet per century
At that rate it will 64 centuries or 6,400 years to reach Lax. Will we even need airports by then?
We’ll need SOMEPLACE to park all those Electric Airplanes.
I think the ice will reach LAX before the sea does!
No fair . . . you’re using scientific data and math!
As of yesterday, it was 1,841 signatories, and the number is still rising.
You get lots of true believers with massive hidden slushfunding bribes-
True Cost of Electric Vehicles Is More Expensive Than Expected | Positive Encouraging K-LOVE (klove.com)
It’s when you ask folks to dip into their own wallets with user pays for the cause the virtue signallers quickly evaporate.
(Sing along if you know the words)
I am Governor Jerry Brown
My aura smiles and never frowns
Soon I will be president…
May contain more than a trace of nuts?
Jerry Brown spent his whole political life pushing for what he called “An Era of Limits”, or some boogyman or other was going to get us “soon”. His track record for predicting the future has been poor.
Still waiting for that Carbon Saving high speed rail to Bakersfield and Fresno, my two favorite vacation destinations.
I have not been a “believer” for since about 2000 for obvious reasons, such as:
Most folks say things that only partially cover the offshore situation, which caused major dips in Siemens, Oersted, etc., stock prices at the end of 2020; the smart money got out
All this well before the Ukraine events, which started in February 2022
If governments have extremist goals (disconnected from reality), such as 1) 30,000 MW of offshore by 2030, by the posse of idiots surrounding Biden, plus 2) the 36,000 MW of offshore by 2030, and 40,000 MW by 2040, by the in-disarray, totally-disconnected-from-markets UK government, then you can be sure disaster will be at hand.
It is equivalent to demented bulls in China shops
Those goals were physically unachievable, even if there were abundant, low-cost financing, and low inflation, and low-cost energy, materials, labor, and a robust, smooth-running supply chain, to place in service about 9500 MW of offshore during each of the next 7 years, start 2024 to end 2030, which has never been done before, etc.
During that time, older offshore units will be giving up the ghost/retiring.
One commentator said “renewables are not always reliable”
That shows the types of ignorami driving the bus
WIND AND SOLAR ARE NEVER, EVER RELIABLE
The evidence shows, they will always need the following very costly items:
1) subsidies equivalent to about 50% of project owning and operations cost,
2) plus grid extension/reinforcement,
3) plus a fleet of quick-reacting power plants to counteract the wind/solar, up/down output, on a less than minute-by-minute basis, 24/7/365,
4) plus a fleet of power plants to provide electricity during low-wind/solar periods, and during high-wind/solar periods, when rotors are feathered and locked,
5) plus output curtailment to prevent overloading the grid, i.e., paying owners for not producing what they could have produced
Plus wind and solar could not physically be fed into the grid, without the above-listed 5 items, of which the LCOE is provided for free by taxpayers, ratepayers, or added to government debts to make wind/solar look competitive with fossil fuels
Batteries as an Alternative to Power Plant Fleets to Eliminate Evil Fossil Fuels?
Turnkey capital costs of large scale-battery systems are $575/installed kWh; based on 2023 pricing of Tesla-based systems
With 6.5% money and 10% for owner return on investment, and throughput at 10% of installed capacity, a delivered kWh costs about 91.9 c/kWh, on top of the cost of the electricity fed to the batteries; at 40%, about 23 c/kWh, on top
Excluded costs/kWh: 1) O&M; 2) system aging, 3) system losses from HV grid to HV grid, 3) grid extension/reinforcement to connect the battery systems, 5) downtime of parts of the system, 6) decommissioning in year 15, i.e., disassembly, reprocessing and storing at hazardous waste sites.
THE PHYSICAL AND ECONOMIC INSANITY OF IT ALL HAS BEEN CLEAR TO ENERGY SYSTEMS ANALYSTS SINCE 2000, THE INFAMOUS ENERGIEWENDE START IN GERMANY
US/UK 66,000 MW OF OFFSHORE WIND BY 2030; AN EXPENSIVE FANTASY
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/biden-30-000-mw-of-off…
BATTERY SYSTEM CAPITAL COSTS, OPERATING COSTS, ENERGY LOSSES, AND AGING
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/battery-system-capital…
World’s Largest Offshore Wind System Developer Abandons Two Major US Projects as Wind Bust Continues
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/world-s-largest-offsho…
but he was right – we have gone from mere skeptics to true believers that the so called “renewable” aka intermittent energy is complete nonsense and an economic disaster – we have also learned that the real goal of the green movement is really the destruction of capitalism and western civilization
Governor Moonbeam was a hard guy to classify. Believe it or not he was very much a fiscal conservative and one year California actually had a $5B surplus during his terms. He was anti-immigration saying the state needed to support the poor California people first before bringing in immigrants.
But he also was floating in the clouds on a lot of other issues including the environment and the climate which is where he got his nickname. Overall I would give put him more on the nutcase side of sanity but no where close to Newsom and the others, who really are more chasing the money than the beliefs.
Moonbeam’s gift to California taxpayers . . . the gift that keeps on giving . . . is the high speed rail (HSR) project, what used to be commonly known as the Brown Boondoggle.
Originally proposed, and approved by California voters in 2008, at a cost of $33 billion, the current estimated price tag has risen four-fold to $128 billion to complete the entire system between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Furthermore, the first construction phase, currently 119 miles of a planned 171 mile segment connecting the towns of Merced and Bakersfield, has been underway since January 2015 but will not have its first full-train test runs until 2028 at the earliest.
— source: https://hsr.ca.gov/high-speed-rail-in-california/central-valley/
So, this project rightfully deserves its scornful title of the “high speed train to nowhere”.
The latest cost estimate to complete just that 171 initial segment is now $35 billion, with a completion date estimate of 2030.
— source: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-11/new-cost-estimate-for-high-speed-rail-puts-california-bullet-train-100-billion-in-the-red
— source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail
That’s a phenomenal spend rate of more than $200 million per mile of track, and that’s based on current $ spent to purchase relatively-inexpensive, open land and performing track and overpass/underpass construction on relatively flat terrain involved with the first, simplest phase of construction.
Finally, the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) has ceased providing estimates for when the SF-LA HSR system will be complete. But just linearly ratio-ing the estimated first phase progress:
((~500-171) miles/171 miles)*(Dec 2030 – Jan 2015) = 31 years from end-2030, or the year 2062.
Want to guess the impact of inflation on those cost projections, looking some 39 years into the future?
“Even the worst skeptics… “
“the worst”
Words mater.
Yes, climate change is happening, but not because of an increase in CO2, but because of pronounced changes in solar activity. This is a distinct sunspot cycle that has affected climate change many times in history through changes in circulation. Especially in winter, blocking the zonal circulation during weak solar winds is already having visible effects, especially in California. In California, winter this year will be similar to the previous one, with lots of snow in the mountains. Flooding is expected in the lowlands. This is because during times of low solar activity there is a strong blockage of zonal circulation over the western Bering Sea, due to excess ozone in the area.
In my opinion, the chart shows about a two-hundred-year cycle of activity.