RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/fossil-fuel-divestment-versus-institutional-neutrality-a-north-carolina-test-case/

An important test of “institutional neutrality” — a pillar of campus free speech — is now playing out in North Carolina, where the University of North Carolina Asheville (UNCA) recently chose to divest a portion of its endowment from companies selling “fossil fuels” (coal, oil, and natural gas).

Institutional neutrality means that universities should avoid taking official political stands at the institutional level, such as divestment from fossil fuels, since such actions tend to pressure faculty and students holding contrary views into silence. This is particularly true for public universities such as UNCA, for they belong to every citizen of the state.

What makes the UNCA test case especially important is that two years ago North Carolina passed HB 527, one of the first comprehensive campus free-speech laws in the country. HB 527 not only affirms institutional neutrality as a foundational principle of campus free speech at UNC schools, it mandates that an annual report by a committee of the UNC Board of Governors (which oversees the entire state university system) weigh in on any “difficulties, controversies, or successes in maintaining a posture of administrative and institutional neutrality with regard to political or social issues.”

The question now is how the annual report, due in September, will handle this decision by a public university to throw in its lot with the fossil-fuel-divestment movement. More broadly, the question is whether the UNC Board of Governors will act to halt and reverse this clear violation of institutional neutrality by UNC Asheville. Students and administrators at UNCA intend their move to pressure the entire UNC system to divest. That means the UNC Board of Governors’ response to UNCA’s divestment bandwagon will have an enormous impact on the survival of institutional neutrality at every public campus in the state.

Students and faculty at public universities have every right to take whatever stand they like on issues like fossil-fuel divestment, climate change, and the Green New Deal. It is precisely the neutrality of public universities at the official institutional level that supports and guarantees the ability of individual faculty and students to freely speak their minds on these issues. Public universities shouldn’t have an official political line. We wouldn’t tolerate a public university endorsing Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, or Donald Trump for president. Nor should a public university throw its official institutional weight behind a thoroughly political movement whose aims are the subject of active, widespread, and unresolved public debate, particularly when state law cites the principle of institutional neutrality as an essential component of campus free speech.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/07/29/will-the-global-warming-hysterics-never-tire-of-being-wrong/

Prince Charles’ recent pronouncement that we have only 18 months to save the planet from man-made global warming was followed up by a BBC report telling an identical tale. (Is there something in the Thames?) Nothing new here, though. The same wild, irresponsible guesses have been made for decades, and so far none has been right.

“Now it seems, there’s a growing consensus that the next 18 months will be critical in dealing with the global heating crisis, among other environmental challenges,” BBC environment correspondent Matt McGrath wrote last week with great certitude.

“Observers recognize that the decisive, political steps to enable the cuts in carbon to take place will have to happen before the end of next year.”

The year 2020, McGrath continued, “is a firm deadline” because “one of the world’s top climate scientists … eloquently addressed” the danger in 2017.

We’ve had “firm” deadlines before. Nothing happened. But we’re supposed to believe this one is really “firm.” That it can’t be ignored. Forget all those previous predictions of doom, they tell us, because this time they have it right. And maybe the window is not even 18 months. Those grand ruminators at Think Progress are sure we have only 14 months.

While the alarmists are busy today foretelling the coming climate disaster, they’ve conveniently forgotten the encyclopedic catalog of failed predictions. They just delete them from memory much the way that Moscow erased historical figures whose existence reflected poorly on the Soviet way, or displeased the thugs in power.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-7-24-the-real-data-on-energy-usage

Undoubtedly you read at least some organs of the mainstream media. Perhaps your go-to source is the New York Times, or maybe the Washington Post, or Bloomberg News, or The Economist, or maybe Reuters. And therefore you have the strong impression that the world is well on its way to a huge energy transition, away from the dirty fossil fuels of the past, and toward the low carbon and renewable energy of the future. Or maybe you steer clear of all of those propagandists, but you still have the same impression. Perhaps you are getting this impression from the politicians running places like New York, or California, or Germany, or Denmark, or South Australia, or Spain, or any of many other holier-than-thou jurisdictions that have announced the imminent end of their fossil fuel use. Anyway, with so many people so loudly proclaiming the approaching end of fossil fuels, surely by now fossil fuel use must have begun its rapid drop toward oblivion.

But where can you get actual information on world energy consumption of each type, and of how it is changing over time? One quite comprehensive source is the Statistical Review of World Energy, put out each year by the BP oil company. The 2019 version, covering statistics through 2018, just came out on June 11. It was covered at Watts Up With That by Larry Hamlin on July 23.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York waitress-turned-congresswoman, has a grand scheme to make the US carbon-free by 2030 — a project so costly and so far removed from reality that it has naturally drawn the gushing support of left-leaning editorialists and green-brained columnists. There is quite a bit more to it however than simply making the weather behave itself.”

Small children are prone  to say things that are very true but best not voiced in polite company. There’s been a similar embarrassment described in the Washington Post last week. It involves the chief of staff to one of the so-called fresh faces of the Democrat Party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, known for headline writers’ convenience as “AOC”. The 29-year-old New York bartender last year became the youngest-ever US congresswoman and maybe also the most socialist.  

The progressive media has built her up in half a year to household-name status. She was on the cover of Time as “The Phenom” and twinned in a Vanity Fair cover story in June with veteran Democrat Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker. Vanity Fair saw AOC as a “beacon of hope” and “youthful, charismatic and uncompromising”.

She continues in the spotlight with the “Justice Democrats Squad” of four black/brown congresswomen claiming last week to be victims of Trump’s racist rhetoric. Actually the Squad itself in recent weeks had been hurling racist insults at less-left Democrat colleagues, even including whistle-clean Nancy Pelosi.

AOC espouses a Green New Deal involving a hundred-trillion dollar mobilization of the US nation to go fully green by 2030. Her ten-year emissions makeover outclasses any two of Stalin’s five-year-plans. Adding to the Soviet ambience, AOC says her Deal would be implemented by groups including “worker cooperatives”. You might think, “Why waste time and ink on this?” Why, because left Democrats and the US media are mainstreaming her.  Five Democrat presidential candidates sponsored her Deal (including Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren) and AOC claims a total of nine candidates back it.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/07/24/the-o

The face of the global warming scare was once that of Al Gore. Now that face belongs to a 16-year-old girl who’s being treated as a prophetess. It’s hard to conceive of a world gone more mad.

Greta Thunberg has been thrust into the spotlight, tagged as the child who will lead us away from our inevitable climate disaster — if only we let her. Adults hang on her words, regard her as an omniscient oracle, insist that we are in the presence of our savior.

Thunberg’s “voice lets us know we’re in disavowal, and that we’d better wake up. Then it tells us, clear as anything, how to do this,” says Ali Smith, a Scottish author who writes for The Guardian.

But then if that voice had instead been telling us capitalism has lifted more than a billion out of poverty, Thunberg would have no forum. Though true, it doesn’t fit the narrative.

Because her message does fit, this child mystic of Sweden has been allowed to speak at the Davos economic conference, in Britain’s Parliament, and at a United Nations convention. She’s inspired a global school walkout and protested in front of Sweden’s legislature when she should have been in school. The kids at Vox have declared that when watching Thunberg speak, “it’s hard not to think of Cassandra, the brash young warrior of Greek myth who beseeched Apollo for the gift of prophecy.”

The more reasonable among us see a young lady who’s being exploited by an intractable, alarmist movement and a set of parents craving, what, relevance maybe.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-7-15-you-dont-need-to-be-a-scienti

If you follow the subject of global warming alarm, you will have read many times that there is a “consensus” of “97% of climate scientists” on — well, on something. I’ve actually never been able to find a precise statement of the proposition on which the 97% supposedly agree. But suppose you can find the statement. And suppose that it consists of some kind of definitive assertion that there has been significant atmospheric warming over the past century, and that most to all of such warming has been caused by human greenhouse gas emissions. Is this real science or fake science? How do you tell?

It seems that the most common approach of most people to this question is to trust the “scientists.” After all, science is complicated. You are not a scientist, so how are you ever going to understand this? And even if you are a scientist in some other field, and you have both the talent and the interest to delve into the details of how this conclusion was reached, you don’t have the time. You are told that 97% of “climate scientists” agree. Really, what choice do you have other than to trust the people who have done the work, and who call themselves the scientists and the experts on this subject? This approach apparently seems reasonable to a lot of people, including many, many seemingly intelligent people.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/07/15/prince

Charles Philip Arthur George, the prince of Wales and the man who would unfortunately be king, sees doomsday in the near future. Apparently his foreknowledge is a function of his royal super powers. He’s seeing something no one else is.

Of course there’s good reason for that.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Prince Charles, addressing foreign ministers from around the Commonwealth last week. “I am firmly of the view that the next 18 months will decide our ability to keep climate change to survivable levels and to restore nature to the equilibrium we need for our survival.”

The prince wasn’t wearing a sandwich board sign declaring “The End Is Nigh.” It wouldn’t have been expected of a distinguished gentlemen from a royal bloodline. But it would have been fitting.

A little more than a decade ago, about 124 months in the past, the prince announced the world had “less than 100 months” to save itself. He revised his doomsday prediction in 2015 to 35 years. Now he’s certain that it’s 18 months What he’ll be predicting next week is anyone’s guess.

But being a global warming alarmist means never having to admit error.

Al Gore, who invented both the Internet and global warming, predicted in 2006 there would be no Arctic within five years. In 2007, 2008, and 2009 he said the pole would be ice-free some time around 2013.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/now-its-a-climate-emergency-11563138092

When President Trump declared a national “emergency” in February to take money from the Pentagon to build his border wall, these columns warned he was setting a precedent that Democrats would exploit. Well, that day has arrived, as Democrats last week introduced a resolution in Congress declaring a national emergency due to climate change.

Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a joint resolution declaring that the climate Apocalypse is nigh, and demanding “a national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization of the resources and labor of the United States at a massive-scale.” Some commentators are calling the resolution “symbolic,” noting a contradictory provision that reads “nothing in this concurrent resolution constitutes a declaration of a national emergency for purposes of . . . any special or extraordinary power.”

Yet Oregon Representative Earl Blumenauer, who also introduced it, made his inspiration clear. “The national emergency is not the border, it’s the climate,” Mr. Blumenauer said on a press call. A Sanders spokesperson also drew the comparison, noting that, in contrast to Mr. Trump’s “phony national emergencies,” the Sanders resolution addresses a genuine “existential” threat.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=a

If you follow closely the subject of hypothesized human-caused global warming, you probably regularly experience, as I do, a strong sense of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, you read dozens of pieces from seemingly authoritative media sources, as well as from important political officeholders, declaring that the causal relationship between human CO2 emissions and rapidly rising global temperatures is definitive; declaring that “the science is settled”; and further declaring that impending further increases in temperatures over the next decade or several decades are an “existential crisis” that must be addressed immediately through complete transformation of our economy at enormous cost.

On the other hand, you studied the scientific method back in high school, and you can’t help asking yourself the basic questions that that method entails:

What is the falsifiable hypothesis that is claimed to have been empirically validated? You can’t find it!

What was the null hypothesis, and what about the data caused the null hypothesis to be rejected? You can’t find that either!

Where can you get access to the methodology (computer code) and the full data set that was used in the hypothesis validation process; and are those sufficient to fully replicate the results? You can’t find these things either!

You learn that there have been major after-the-fact adjustments to the principal data sets that are used to claim rapidly warming global temperatures and to justify press releases claiming that a given year or month was the “hottest ever.” You look to see if you can find details supporting the data alterations, and you learn that such details are not available, as if they are some kind of top secret from the Soviet Union. (You can read my 23-part series on this subject at this link.)