RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.org/author/rael-jean-isaac/

It comes in waves, and it’s impossible to predict what will happen after the current wave of increasingly unhinged climate change activism breaks.

Global warming has been characterized by its critics (and occasionally by followers like Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono) as a religious movement. While this is correct, it is a religious movement of a special kind, that is, an apocalyptic movement. And although it is widely known that apocalyptic movements foretell an end of days, demand huge sacrifices by followers, and demonize dissent, what is less known is that these movements follow predictable patterns. The general “laws” that an apocalyptic movement follows over time explain both its short-term strength and, fortunately, its longer-term vulnerability.

In Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (2011), Richard Landes chronicles recurring apocalyptic eruptions over the last 3,000 years. Typically there is belief in an imminent cataclysmic destruction that can only be averted by a total transformation of society. Precisely because the stakes are so high, a successful apocalyptic movement has extraordinary initial power. Believers are committed, zealous, and passionate, the urgent need for prompt action putting them at a high pitch of emotional intensity.

Landes describes the four-part life cycle of such movements. First comes the waxing wave, as those whom Landes calls the “roosters” (they crow the exciting new message) gain adherents and spread their stirring news. Second is the breaking wave, when the message reaches its peak of power, provokes the greatest turmoil, and roosters briefly dominate public life. Third is the churning wave, when roosters have lost a major element of their credibility, must confront the failure of their expectations, and mutate to survive. Last is the receding wave, as the “owls” — those who have all along warned against the roosters’ prophecies — regain ascendancy.

While Landes does not apply his apocalyptic model to global warming, the fit is obvious. In the 1980s and ’90s, a series of UN conferences on climate launched the waxing wave. This was followed at the beginning of this century by the breaking wave. In 2006, Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth (which later became a classroom staple) persuaded a broad public that man-made global warming threatened doomsday. That same year Sir Nicholas Stern, appointed by Prime Minister Tony Blair to lead a team of economists to study climate change, prophesied it would bring “extended world war” and the need to move “hundreds of millions, probably billions of people.” In 2009, then–UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon told the Global Economic Forum, “We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/11/21/sycophants-who-flatter-child-climate-oracles-deserve-unrelenting-ridicule/

Following the Greta Thunberg path to fame is an Australian boy who gained notoriety for fuming about “narrow-minded” politicians. While the pair’s excesses can be attributed to their youth, the behavior of the shallow adults insisting the two are prophets who must be listened to cannot be excused. The proper response to these “grownups” behaving as high schoolers is harsh ridicule.

The world can’t help but know about Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish scold who seems to have dropped out of school to travel the world and impudently lecture her elders about how they have let her down. Though this girl knows nothing about climate other than it exists around her, and less about the world, adults nod in agreement as she rants, hand her multiple honors and awards, and have sworn they have been inspired as well as properly chastised by her. She was even considered last month as “the one to beat” for the Nobel Peace Prize, which was eventually given to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed for putting an end to his country’s decades-long conflict with Eritrea.

Now comes Australia’s “Outback schoolboy” Dylan Storer, not as famous as Thunberg, but just as green, and we don’t mean that in an environmental sense. Storer, also 16, “has been praised on social media after slamming ‘narrow-minded’ politicians while weighing in on Australia’s bushfire crisis,” the Daily Mail reports.

“It’s not political opinion to say climate change hasn’t contributed to these horrific bushfires,” he said earlier this week on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Q&A” broadcast.

Of course Storer’s words were “met with huge applause from the audience,” because who can’t resist showing just how hip they are by airing their enthusiastic support of a raving child?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cuomos-carbon-casualties-11574033835

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is a proud opponent of fossil fuels. But now that the consequences of his policies are harming people in the real world—those who can’t afford to escape to Florida—the Governor is blaming others.

Mr. Cuomo has blocked shale fracking upstate and several pipelines delivering natural gas from Pennsylvania in the name of protecting waterways. But this is an excuse. Natural-gas production in Pennsylvania has increased 60% since Mr. Cuomo banned fracking five years ago, adding $6 billion to Keystone State GDP and its waterways are fine.

Mr. Cuomo’s real purpose is to eliminate natural gas as part of his political commitment to “carbon neutrality” by 2050, and this isn’t a cost-free promise. Upstate New Yorkers struggle economically and pay among the highest energy costs in the U.S. A quarter still rely on heating oil, which costs about $1,000 a year more than natural gas and emits nearly 40% more CO2. New Yorkers pay about 40% more for electricity than Pennsylvanians and 15% more than in New Jersey.

The utility Con Edison in March halted natural gas hookups north of New York City due to pipeline constraints. National Grid, the gas utility that serves Long Island, this fall imposed a moratorium on new hookups after the Governor vetoed a 23-mile gas pipeline beneath New York Harbor. National Grid said it couldn’t guarantee uninterrupted service without the pipeline. New oil-to-gas conversions could cause future gas shortages and outages.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/11/15/global-warming-politics-are-dividing-us-because-thats-the-way-the-alarmists-want-it/

A CNN producer recently wrote an opinion piece headlined “Climate politics are tearing the West apart.” He got it about half right. They are tearing us apart but not for the reasons he thinks.

Johan Bader, an associate producer for “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” is in agreement with The Economist, which has declared: “environmentalism is emerging as Europe’s new culture war.” We’re seeing much the same in the U.S.

But the cultural divide is not simply “concerned citizens” who “are pouring into the streets to lambaste feckless politicians for failing to protect the planet” against neighbors who “inveigh against out-of-touch politicians for instituting environmental policies that fail to protect them.”

The schism has been caused by a coalition of anti-capitalists, arrogant academics, authoritarians who have a need to dictate to others, know-it-alls, those who relish the status of their imagined moral superiority, and inveterate virtue-signalers who have “othered” global warming skeptics as well as the agnostics who have legitimate concerns about how the policy solutions forced on them will change their lives.

The first group, the aggressors, believe that anyone who doesn’t believe what they believe is beneath them. These elitist bullies consider a conflicting opinion an indication of low intellect, or criminality, or both. That’s why they can so easily define skeptics as rubes and outlaws who should be caged.

The cultural gap has been made obvious by the Extinction Rebellion. In one of its more infamous tantrums, the “painfully middle-class agitators” went “to a working-class part of East London early in the morning to lecture and inconvenience people who just wanted to get to work,” British columnist Brendan O’Neill recently wrote in Spiked.

The tension is not produced so much by one group being more well off than the other as it is one group thinking it is smarter than the other, and is therefore justified in hectoring and obstructing the othered group, and stealing its time. This plays out in the many efforts of true believers to “educate” their inferiors.

There is of course a religious element to the global warming scare, as well.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/liberal-media-scream-jane-fonda-wants-nuremberg-trials-for-energy-executives

This week’s Liberal Media Scream features activist and Hollywood star Jane Fonda, who has been spending a lot of time in Washington recently protesting on climate change and even going to jail for her efforts.

Now, she wants energy executives and their political allies to be treated like Nazis and face a “Nuremberg” style trial similar to German dictator Adolf Hitler’s henchmen, who were often given the death penalty at the post-World War II trials.

She appeared on the debut of The Impeachment Show on the Viceland, where she said that there’s “literally a ticking time bomb over everything” because of climate change. She claimed “our government is being ruled by fossil fuel” and so “democracy is teetering on the edge of collapse.”

Charging that the “fossil fuel industry” has caused wars that have killed many Americans, she also charged oil executives and enabling politicians “should all be tried for crimes against humanity and nature.” Host Michael Moynihan said, “So, you want to see sort of a Nuremberg trial for climate criminals?” to which Fonda responded, “Yeah, I would.”

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/12/democratic-sen-mazie-hirono-believe-in-climate-change-as-though-its-a-religion/

Hawaii Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono thinks Americans ought to fundamentally change the way they think about climate change, arguing that climate change should be thought of as a “religion” rather than a “science.”

“Believe in climate change as though it’s a religion, it’s not a science,” Hirono encouraged.

“Believe in climate change as though it’s a religion and not a science” – Mazie Hirono pic.twitter.com/VkRDGr2rUn

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) November 12, 2019

The comment came during remarks the senator was delivering in support of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients, making the case that citizens should be more active in leaving one’s comfort zone to be more assertive on left-wing demands.

Hirono’s bizarre line about climate change being framed as a religion over science falls in line with the direction that Democrats have been pushing the issue, ramping up calls to take an aggressive approach to combat environmental pollution.

Many 2020 Democrats chasing the party’s presidential nomination have signed onto the “Green New Deal,” a broad socialist proposal championed by freshman congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York promising to wreak havoc on the global economy pledging “economic security” to those “unwilling to work.”

Ocasio-Cortez has previously compared climate change to World War II, calling for a World War II-scale movement to combat the impending destruction of the planet.

“So we talk about existential threats, the last time we had a really major existential threat to this country was around World War II, and so we’ve been here before and we have a blueprint of doing this before,” Ocasio-Cortez said last year.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/paul-joseph-watson-video-truth-about-extinction-paul-joseph-watson/

In this new video, Paul Joseph Watson exposes the motives, fraud and hypocrisy of privileged, environmental fanatics who indoctrinate eco-anxiety among children — and lecture working class people on how to live their lives. Don’t miss it!

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/open-letter-greta-thunberg-jason-d-hill/

Greta Thunberg:

You have declared yourself a leader and said that your generation will start a revolution. You have comported yourself as a credentialed adult and climate change activist who has fearlessly addressed politicians and world leaders. You have dropped out of school and declared that there isn’t any reason to attend, or any reason for you to study since there will be no future for you to inherit. You have, rather than attend your classes, been leading Friday Climate Strikes for all students in your generation across the globe. Your attendance at oil pipelines has been striking. There, you unequivocally declare that all oil needs to remain in the ground where it belongs.

I shall, therefore, against the backdrop of your activism, address you as an adult rather than as a child.

In September of 2019 you crossed the Atlantic in a “zero carbon” racing yacht that had no toilet and electric light on board. You made an impassioned plea at the United Nations in which you claimed that, “we have stolen your dreams and our childhood with our empty words.”  You claimed that adults and world leaders come to young people for answers and explained in anger: “How dare you!” You claimed that we are failing you and that young people are beginning to understand our betrayal. You further declared that if we continue to fail your generation: “We will never forgive you.”

You have stated that you want us to panic, and to act as if our homes are on fire. You insist that rich countries must reduce to zero emissions immediately. In your speeches you attack economic growth and have stated that our current climate crisis is caused by “buying and building things.” You call for climate justice and equity, without addressing the worst polluter on the planet China; the country that is economically annexing much of Africa and Latin America. You dare not lecture Iran about its uranium projects — because that’s not part of the UN’s agenda, is it?

You proclaim that we need to live within the planetary boundaries, to focus on equity and “take a few steps back” for the sake of all living species. You resent the hierarchical distinctions between human and animals and entertain no qualitative distinction between a monkey, a malaria-infested mosquito and a snarling hyena. You mouth slogans such as: “We have set in motion an irreversible chain reaction beyond control,” and you advocate for universal veganism on the Ellen DeGeneres show. You do not buy new clothes, and you don’t want the rest of us to either. You want us all to stop flying in jet planes without giving us an alternative as to how we would re-transform our financial and trading systems—to say nothing of our personal enjoyment of the world—without regression to a primeval era. Few can afford to cross the Atlantic in a $6M zero carbon yacht financed by rich people who made their wealth by the very means you condemn as loathsome.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/11/who_are_these_11000_concerned_scientists.html

Academics and scientists are yet again issuing “consensus” statements on climate change.  In 2017, we were warned by 16,000 scientists across 184 countries that “human beings and the natural world are on a collision course.”  This past week, BioScience, an academic, peer-reviewed journal from Oxford University Press, found 11,224 scientists, from 153 countries, who signed off on the latest climate change drivel.  Citing a “moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to “tell it like it is,” they’ve published the paper “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency.”  In dystopian tone, they’ve issued a demand for Earth’s population to “be stabilized — and, ideally, gradually reduced — within a framework that ensures social integrity.”

With the disclaimer that I’m just a layman who resides in “flyover country,” who are these “11,000 Scientists,” and do they even have credibility to weigh in on this matter?  Scientists, with few exceptions, are subject matter experts in specific fields — their expertise isn’t inherently relevant and extensible across varying fields of science.  For example, a physicist won’t teach a graduate-level course in biology, a podiatrist won’t perform open heart surgery, and a botanist has minimal insight on quantum computing.  How many of these 11,000 scientists possess germane degrees in meteorology, climatology, or atmospheric science?  Lo and behold, BioScience actually published a list of these scientific signatories in the attached link — so I looked. 

In keyword searches across 324 pages of signing signatories, spanning 11,224 scientists, I found 240 (2%) individuals with professions that can be construed as bona fide meteorologists, climatologists, or atmospheric scientists.