RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/us_army_to_prioritize_fight_against_climate_change.html

The U.S. Army recently released a bulletin stating that it will henceforth be “prioritizing climate change“ in its strategic defense planning. The Defense Department has already established the “Department of Defense Climate Working Group,” a new office that will coordinate the DOD’s ongoing response to the allegedly grave threat that climate change poses to the national security of the United States. I wonder if Greta Thunberg will be heading up the DDCWG.

The Army’s laser focus on climate change appears to be in response to President Biden’s stated agenda of aggressively addressing climate change across governmental bodies and is occurring simultaneously with the culture change being imposed on the U.S. military from the top down. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, for example, fully supports Biden’s emphasis on climate change…as long as it doesn’t take time away from the troops’ mandatory “Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Training,” or their indoctrination into Marxist theory.

This past April, Austin asserted that “climate change is making the world more unsafe and we need to act.” He added, “Today, no nation can find lasting security without addressing the climate crisis. We face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does.”

Am I the only one concerned that the most important military in the world is frightened by climate change?

Austin also noted that his military is committed to electrifying its vehicle fleets and operating more sustainably. What about the cost to build/retrofit, as well as issues with performance and charging time, etc.? All things considered, will these vehicles really be better for the environment? And is that the point of a military?

https://townhall.com/columnists/katiepavlich/2021/05/20/facebook-fact-checkers-punish-and-censor-debate-on-climate-science-n2589647

Steven Koonin is one of the country’s top physicists. He worked for President Barack Obama, a Democrat, as Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy. Science Feedback, one of Facebook’s “independent fact-checkers,” is barring reviews about his book, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t and Why It Matters,” and classifying its content as false. 

“Mr. Koonin is no ‘climate denier,’ to use the concocted phrase used to shut down debate,” The Wall Street Journal writes in a review of the book. “The word ‘denier’ is of course meant to associate skeptics of climate alarmism with Holocaust deniers. Mr. Koonin finds this label particularly abhorrent, since ‘the Nazis killed more than two hundred of my relatives in Eastern Europe.’ As for ‘denying,’ Mr. Koonin makes it clear, on the book’s first page, that ‘it’s true that the globe is warming, and that humans are exerting a warming influence upon it.'”

“The heart of the science debate, however, isn’t about whether the globe is warmer or whether humanity contributed,” The Wall Street Journal continues. “The important questions are about the magnitude of civilization’s contribution and the speed of changes; and, derivatively, about the urgency and scale of governmental response. Mr. Koonin thinks most readers will be surprised at what the data show. I dare say they will.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/army-prioritizes-climate-change-as-serious-threat-to-national-security/

In a memo released Friday, the U.S. Army announced that it now classifies climate change as a “serious threat to U.S. national security interests and defense objectives.” The statement subsequently signaled the military’s intention to prioritize combatting climate change with new risk analyses, threat projections, installation and natural-resource planning, supply-chain procurement considerations, and general strategy.

The statement added that the effects of climate change can induce “humanitarian disasters, undermine weak governments and contribute to long-term social and economic disruptions.”

“The Army has a lot to be proud of, yet there is a lot of work to continue to operate efficiently across extreme weather and climate conditions,” the memo read.

To prepare for and mitigate the fallout from the Earth’s warming, the Army plans to conduct “in-depth assessments of likely climate change effects on the Army’s worldwide missions,” while also working to “lead the way in technology development for tactical vehicles that balances increased capability with decreased climate impacts.”

The Army’s policy change comes after the Biden administration signaled its commitment to fighting the climate crisis as a national-security threat. In April, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III called climate change an “existential threat.”

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/05/questioning-the-science-on-climate-change/

What is it about “climate change” that makes it so different from every other issue? It divides families, friendships and political parties, it has brought about media and campus censorship and classroom propaganda. Minds close over, spooked. To question any aspect is the eighth deadly sin. “Deniers” are sub-human.

About anything else, research that suggests that a looming catastrophe might not be as bad as at first predicted would be welcome news indeed. Some of the issues in question are highly technical, but most are not that difficult.

This is a layman’s attempt—not even particularly sceptical—to explain them and suggest a way ahead. The nub of it is the long-term impact of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There are respectable scientific arguments about it, as with many a complex problem, but politics, misconceptions and side issues are more and more clouding things over.

The “official” science comes from the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The main criticism is that it over-estimates future global warming—an argument easy to state but technical in detail and now smothered in irrelevance. In other words, some experts think “the science” is wrong.

So far, after thirty years of operation, the global warming the IPCC has predicted has been at the lower end of the “scenarios” of its mathematical modelling. There are respectable arguments—as there have been from the start—that the IPCC’s theories do not work out in practice.

The IPCC is effectively a global climate science monopoly, with unique power to estimate long-term climate trends and ways to mitigate them, such as the Paris Accords. It has access to a budget of billions, while sceptical scientists have barely peanuts for research and publicity. In Australia they are volunteers.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/14/the-green-new-deals-shock-troops/

The news didn’t last long in the cycle. But it deserved more attention. Americans don’t need an army of indoctrinated global warming zealots lecturing, hectoring, and harassing them over their insignificant carbon dioxide emissions. They should be aware of what their “superiors” in Washington want to unleash on them.

As reported May 5 by Fox News, “Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other progressive lawmakers are calling for the creation of a 1.5 million-strong group of civilians to work on federally funded projects addressing climate change as part of their sweeping Green New Deal legislation.”

This $10 billion show, which President Joe Biden wants as part of his “infrastructure” plan, would be called the Civilian Climate Corps, its foot soldiers trained to work with community groups on projects intended to “reduce carbon emissions, enable a transition to renewable energy, build healthier and more resilient communities, implement conservation projects with proven climate benefits, and help communities recover from climate disasters.”

We can imagine the “training” the members will receive. They won’t be learning the Boy Scouts’ oath, studying the great works of this nation’s founders, or pledging to uphold the Constitution. They’ll be told that human activity is overheating the planet. That American and Western lifestyles are unsustainable and must be reeled in by government. That environmental injustices have to be rectified by policies that will hurt the middle and lower classes. That the only way to stop the march of global warming will be the enactment of the Democrats’ socialist wish-list legislative agenda.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-5-9-new-scientific-scandal-shakin

As readers at this site are well aware, the field of climate “science” and alarmism is subject to an extraordinary degree of orthodoxy enforcement, where all information supporting the official narrative gets enthusiastically promoted, while all information disagreeing with the official narrative gets suppressed or attacked. For just one recent example of the latter, see the Wall Street Journal editorial in the current weekend edition reporting on a bogus Facebook “fact check” of the Journal’s recent review of Steven Koonin’s new book “Unsettled.”

In this context, an article just out on May 6 in the journal Science is truly remarkable. The article is titled “Does ocean acidification alter fish behavior? Fraud allegations create a sea of doubt.” It has the byline of Martin Enserink, Science’s international news editor. Science has a long history of publishing every sort of climate alarmism, and of being an unreceptive forum for anything expressing any sort of skepticism, let alone alleging fraud in claims of climate alarm. Something serious must be going on here.

To get the significance of the recent developments, it is important to understand where assertions of “ocean acidification” fit into the field of climate alarm. The use of fossil fuels by humans generates CO2 that goes into the atmosphere. CO2 is a “greenhouse gas,” and many models project that increasing levels of CO2 will warm the atmosphere in some significant amount. Activists then assert many harmful effects from the hypothetical warming — not just hot days and heat waves, but everything from melting ice, rising seas, droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, you name it. All of these asserted effects arise from the initial step of atmospheric warming.

But what if the warming doesn’t happen, or turns out to be far less than the fear-mongers have projected? That’s where “ocean acidification” comes in. “Ocean acidification” is the one allegedly harmful effect of rising atmospheric CO2 that does not stem initially from warming temperatures. Instead, the idea is that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere will somewhat increase the level of CO2 dissolved in the oceans, which in turn will lower the pH of the oceans. How much? Some projections suggest at the extreme end that average ocean pH may go down from a current 8.1 or so, all the way to maybe about 7.75 by 2100. If you know anything about this subject, or maybe took high school chemistry, you will know that pH of 7 is neutral, lower than 7 is acidic, and above 7 is basic. Thus a pH of 8.1 is not acidic at all, but rather (a little) basic; and a pH of 7.75 is somewhat less basic. The fact that anyone would try to apply the scary term of “ocean acidification” to this small projected shift toward neutrality already shows you that somebody is trying to manipulate the ignorant.

And besides, what’s wrong with a pH of 7.75? After all, pH of 7 is completely neutral — even if ocean pH went all the way down to that level (and not even the worst alarmists are claiming that it will), how could that possibly be harmful to any living thing?