RUTHFULLY YOURS

There will be plenty of ABC seats and microphones awaiting US astrophysicist, fact-challenged warmist and tireless self-promoter Neil de Grasse Tyson when he tours Australia this year. That’s the way it works if you hold little respect for actual science and a lucrative contempt for those who do.
At first we had Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW). That was a pretty specific threat. It spelled out the crime, the perpetrator and the result. But when it started to become clear, after 20-odd years of research, that there wasn’t actually a great deal of warming, that the Earth was greening and worldwide crop production continued to increase, something had to be done. Changing the mantra to Beneficial Anthropogenic Global Warming wasn’t going to cut it for the trough-snouters at the IPCC, so we got Climate Change and, more recently, Climate Disruption.

These latter euphemisms for something that isn’t happening are much easier to defend when Mother Nature provides an inexhaustible supply of disasters to draw upon as proof of the coming apocalypse, notwithstanding that the evidence is that these events are not increasing in either frequency or strength. And now, as the highly contrived warming predictions that are the IPCC’s stock in trade deviate ever more from its lurid modeling, yet another fresh mantra has emerged.

Neil de Grasse Tyson, for those of you who don’t know of him, is a celebrity astrophysicist. Like his British counterpart Brian Cox, is a fervent believer in CAGW. Only, of course, he now doesn’t talk about CAGW or even Climate Change. He talks about — drum roll, please — “Science!” CAGW is now, er, science. What were formerly mere “climate change deniers” are now full-blown “science deniers”. What more evidence could you possibly need to conclude that those who question the extent of global warming are, at best, deluded fools or, at worst, Gaia’s eager rapists?

Tyson argues his case in a four minute video that, as we have come to expect from warmists, relies heavily on the strawman argument. At one point he states that, up until now, he “doesn’t remember any time when people were standing in denial of what science was” – whatever that means. To back up this rather vague proposition the video refers to anti-vaxxers, anti-GMers and then, of course, climate change deniers. Oh, and he also throws in a clip of now Vice President Mike Pence arguing that evolution should be taught as theory rather than fact. (To be fair to Pence, that’s not quite the point he made in the full address to Congress, arguing that Charles Darwin’s view is but one perspective, that evolutionary theory is subject to constant and ongoing tweaking and that, as a Christian, he prefers to believe mankind and all the world were brought to their current state by Divine guidance. In this he differs not much from the Jesuit paleontologist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whom Pope Francis cited with approval in his recent dark-green plea for the planet, Laudato si, which, funnily enough, Tyson endorsed to the fullest. Then again, why take anything Tyson says without a grain of salt? A famous mis-quoter, he also has trouble recalling his own past. But enough of Tyson, at least until he arrives in Australia later this year for a series of lectures, when someone might ask him a few pointed questions.)

The interesting thing about this line-up of ‘denialism’ is that of the four examples chosen, three come down to individual choice – you can choose to vaccinate or not, you can choose to eschew GM foods and you can reject evolution if you think that it is incompatible with creationism. These are the views of fringe dwellers which have marginal impact on society. But CAGW affects everyone; you can’t opt in or out of the theory’s consequences, as evidenced by your latest electricity bill and the rent-seekers who make it o much larger than it should be. What Tyson is doing is an example of trying to impose guilt by association. According to Neil, science never gets anything wrong.

Hard upon Passover and Easter Week comes the two high holy days for the Green Cult, last Saturday’s Earth Day, and next Saturday’s People’s Climate March. This two-bit nature-worship calls itself “environmentalism,” but like another pseudo-science that ravaged the modern world, Marxism, this “ism” is definitely a “wasm,” its contradictions, hypocrisies, and cognitive incoherence patent. But just as Marx’s poltergeist lives on in various collectivists ideologies, environmentalism exacts a huge cost from those who can least afford it.

Resource management is an obvious imperative for human beings. We are practically and morally obliged to use nature in such a way that we maximize benefits for all people, and leave for those who come after us the resources for maintaining and improving their lives. Our earthly home is not the wild, the untouched nature that excites our romantic sensibilities, but the garden. We develop and improve nature so that people can survive, but also have clean air and water, and find aesthetic pleasure and solace in its beauty. But nature per se has no intrinsic value or meaning. Nature is matter and the laws of physics, literally inhuman and meaningless. It is indifferent to us, this one species of millions, most of which have disappeared. We give meaning and value to nature, because we are conscious of our uniqueness and its necessary end. Thus nature’s importance rests solely on how it sustains and benefits human beings.

Until the modern world and the development of revolutionary technologies that freed us from nature’s cruelty, people rarely idealized nature. The hard task of providing food made our relationship to nature an adversarial one, and our efforts often failed. It wasn’t until improvements in agricultural techniques in the 18th century began to liberate more and more people from this drudgery. As late as the early 20th century the majority of people farmed. Today two people produce food for a hundred. Freed from the harsh and destructive forces of nature, we began to idealize it. Taking for granted a steady supply of abundant, nutritious, and safe food, protected from nature’s daily cruelty and violence, we indulge fantasies of “harmony” with nature, and curse our encroachments on it. We have turned what Joseph Conrad called a “the shackled form of a conquered monster” into a house-pet.

Industrial capitalism, of course, and its soul-killing technologies are the villains responsible for a modern world that pollutes for profit and ravages mother earth. This stance is blatantly hypocritical, since most of us today would not last five minutes without the technologies that have given us clean water, abundant food, and protection from nature’s fury. Idealizing nature is a luxury of the well fed who don’t have to wrestle sustenance from a harsh indifferent environment.

Worse yet, environmentalism has become the ally of post-Marxist leftism, since both find an enemy in free-market capitalism. Raymond Aron explains why: capitalism “has succeeded by means which were not laid down in the revolutionary code. Prosperity, power, the tendency towards uniformity of economic conditions––these results have been achieved by private initiative, by competition, rather than State intervention, in other words by capitalism.” That’s why at every G8, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank protest, the Greenpeace flag can be seen waving side-by-side with the hammer and sickle. Anything that undermines the politico-economic order that kicked Marxism into the dustbin of history is collectivism’s ally.

Forget North Korea’s threat to make Australia a lake of irradiated glass because such an attack would be as nothing in comparison with the civil war amongst tax-supported catastropharians. What set them off? One side’s footnoted paper that renewables can’t hold an organic candle to atomic power.
Fights within the climate-alarm community are vibrant entertainment for sceptics. There’s the fun factor as rival climate alarmists kick shins and yank each others’ hair. And they deride each other’s extreme and foolish arguments, which saves sceptics some work. Moreover, the unedifying fights reduce the credibility of so-called climate “science” in the eyes of important onlookers like politicians.

A splendid fight-in-the-family broke out this month with the publication of a paper by four advocates of the nuclear-power route to emissions reduction. Their paper, “Burden of proof: A comprehensive review of the feasibility of 100% renewable-electricity systems,” is published in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, (edited by Lawrence Kazmerski, who visited Australia in 2010 and played a small, proud part in forcing up electricity prices to their current obscene levels).

The study mercilessly exposes the nonsense of the wind and solar advocates, who imagine a world of 100% electricity from renewables by 2050. These fantasists have induced Australian state and federal governments to set unrealistic renewable energy targets, much as mad dogs infect bystanders with rabies. (The Victorian government, for example, last February passed its Climate Change Act with a net zero emissions target by 2050).

There is the added piquancy that all four authors exposing the technical impossibility of wind/solar regimes established their academic profiles in South Australia, where blackouts have made the state a global cautionary tale against moving to 50% renewables (let alone any higher percent).

The lead author is Ben Heard, PhD candidate at Adelaide University, the co-authors being Professors Barry Brook (U.Tas), Tom Wigley of National Center for Atmospheric Research at Boulder, Colorado, and Corey Bradshaw (Flinders U.) All are nuclear-power advocates, which enrages their wind/solar-loving peers.

Here’s the gist of the Heard paper:

“Our sobering results show that 100% renewable electricity supply would, at the very least, demand a reinvention of the entire electricity supply-and-demand system to enable renewable supplies to approach the reliability of current systems. This would move humanity away from known, understood and operationally successful systems into uncertain futures with many dependencies for success and unanswered challenges in basic feasibility.”

They reviewed 24 scenario studies supporting 100% renewables as the way ahead and found not one passed the technical-feasibility test – let alone any commercial tests. On the Heard scale for technical feasibility, with a top score of 7 , they found only one study that even achieved a score of 4.

Four studies scored zero – these included, of course, the propaganda screeds presented as practial plans by WWF and Greenpeace. Another seven studies scraped up scores of just 1. Among those scoring a mere one out of seven was a scenario co-authored by the Climateworks (Monash University/Myer Foundation) crowd, headed by Labor’s John Thwaites, who was once Victoria’s deputy-premier. The Australian Academy of Science relied on that half-baked Climateworks exercise in its 2015 submission to the federal government endorsing the magic zero emissions solution to global warming by 2050.