RUTHFULLY YOURS

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. 

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

Global warming is garbage.

But that hasn’t stopped the cottage industries from sprouting up, making money and propagating proven junk science.  And the Left, in its hysteria, continues to scream.

The worst of it is the Paris Climate Accord, something young Greta Thunberg’s moneyed sponsors are raring to make a killing on.  That’s the European Union–style agreement that demands that the U.S. cut the carbon emissions and kingpin polluting countries such as China take the money.

Irony of ironies, the U.S. has met all its Paris climate quotas based on the miracle of fracking.  The sanctimonious European nations who run this Paris show have not.  Not seeing cause and effect, nations such as Germany got rid of their low-emission nuclear power and opted to buy from Vladimir Putin, hoping no one would notice. 

Trump promised to get us out of that whole scam — and now it has begun.  Promise kept.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/10/30/california

California’s Great Blackout of 2019 has begun as the lights keep going out for millions across the state’s northern stretches. What should be the past now seems to be the future.

Pacific Gas and Electric began shutting down power early the morning of Oct. 9, when electricity was cut to more than 140,000 customers in Sonoma, Napa, Solano, and Marin counties. Those outages and the ones that followed were ordered because there was a high risk of wildfires. By Tuesday, weeks later, the media were reporting that nearly 2 million Northern California residents were expecting to be hit by the fourth planned blackout of the month, 

PG&E is hoping to avoid a repeat of last year, in which electrical transmission lines owned and operated by the utility sparked the Camp Fire, which killed 85 civilians, burned more than 150,000 acres and nearly 15,000 homes, and injured several firefighters. It was the deadliest, most destructive fire in California history.

PG&E labeled the disruption a “public safety power shutoff.” The utility industry calls it “de-energization,” a sort of euphemism that sounds less serious than “blackout.” It’s not a word that should be used in the 21st century in California. But there it is.

This state has long considered itself a model of progress, always pressing forward. Yet California now chooses darkness. And rather than being a rare exception, these autumn blackouts are more likely a preview of coming long night.

A modern state with a modern economy, a state not fighting typhus and other Medieval diseases in its streets, would have resolved the problem before the blackouts began. But California’s system for delivering electricity is primarily managed by utilities that are lumbering, inflexible bureaucracies operating government-protected monopolies.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/10/28/apocalypse-not-how-science-is-distorted-to-serve-the-activist-agenda/

Part 1 in a series

Much of modern environmental activism, which owes more to zealotry than evidence, has spawned a nasty perversion — let’s call it the Pseudo-Scientific Method. As employed by environmental campaigners and the activist scientists who enable them, it has little to do with scientific discovery or the accumulation of knowledge; rather, it is “advocacy research” that creates “evidence” to support a pre-determined public policy — usually, inappropriate regulation or even bans.

The “target” is usually an ideologically disfavored industry or its products, such as nuclear power, genetic engineering, or pesticides. The result is flawed public policy choices and the ever-deepening corruption of the scientific enterprise.

Take the Great Bee Hoax, for example. If you’re still relying on the mainstream and social media for your information, you probably believe that honeybee populations are crashing worldwide, that without bees to pollinate our crops we’ll all soon starve, and that we’re in this sorry state because evil pesticide companies are reaping huge profits and despoiling the environment, while crony regulators look the other way.

At least, this is what Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer seems to believe. When the Agriculture Department recently suspended its annual census of U.S. honeybee hives due to budget cuts (a decision that was soon reversed), the Democratic senator from New York rose in high dudgeon claiming — what else? — collusion.

“Schumer demands USDA continue counting honeybees as populations plummet,” headlined a newspaper account of one of Schumer’s numerous statements on the subject. Suggesting that “corruption may be afoot,” he explained: “There’s great speculation that this [falling bee populations] is done by pesticides. … Maybe the pesticides industry went to the USDA and got them to quietly kill the survey.”

Dr Fiona Synapse, the controversial consultant psychiatrist, treats climate change worriers for eco-grief, lachrymal depression and related mood disorders at her secluded practice in South Devon, United Kingdom, known locally as The Funny Farm. She first entered the media spotlight several years ago after delivering a paper at the Tripe Centre for the Very Nervous on mental illness and religious experience.

The recent rise of Extinction Rebellion (XR) prompted Dr Synapse to return to the lecture circuit with a new mission: to get the technique that made her a world leader in the treatment of atmospheric apocalyptic anxiety (AAA) onto the National Health Service (NHS) approved list.

Here is an edited transcript of her presentation at Imperial College this month.

_______________________

Ladies, gentlemen and gendered others, welcome to my “coming out” show in London. It’s a great honour to be talking to you tonight at the home of UK science and technology. Judging by the XR banners outside, there’s a lot of people who would have been happier had I stayed in Devon (laughter). But I’m on a mission too, so let the chips fall where they may.

The human mind, like climate change, is extremely complex. Nine-tenths of it is irrational and prone to idiosyncratic paroxysmal expression. Only one-tenth is rational. Let me say that again for the benefit of those outside: only one-tenth of your behaviour is rational. That’s on a good day when the moon is not full. Shocking, yes, but true.

We don’t do dodgy computer modelling down at The Funny Farm; nor do we dance to the tune of that fiddler with the truth, confirmation bias, and make up stuff for a media moment. Yet we still have ways of discovering orderly – or indeed – disorderly patterns among the mind’s multitudinous facets that are just as controversial (laughter).

Psychoanalysis is one of them. Based on the inferences we make from the verbal utterances of the mentally ill (MI), the worried well (WW) or unwell (WU), it can give us insight into what’s going on – or switching off – in the psyche or unconscious.

Freud and Jung disagreed about a lot of things. Both agreed, however, that superstitious belief and ritual are deeply rooted in our cerebral cesspools. Both agreed that superstition is not a relic of the pagan past, nor confined to a gullible or fearful underclass. It is part and parcel of all of us. It can come to the surface at any time, especially when there’s constant chatter about the end of the world and the Doomsday Clock is, allegedly, at three minutes to midnight.

Their evidence consisted mainly of patient case histories. Both stressed the emotional element in superstition. This helps us understand why confronting a superstitious person with contradictory information makes so little difference. In such cases, the rational mind is out to lunch, or literally “possessed” in some way.

XR is making claims that are, frankly, hysterical. Your website says there’s the possibility of billions dying. That is just not credible, is it? Your extreme weather story is utter nonsense. (4.0min.) (LBC interview, Nigel Farage and XR protester, 15min., 14 October, 2019)

But what is superstition? Any irrational belief or practice is superstition. It can arise from ignorance, from misunderstanding causality, fearing the unknown, or believing in fate or magic. For example, reducing the world’s fossil-fuel energy consumption (currently 85%) in less than a decade would be a magical outcome, yet some people claim it’s possible.

https://www.city-journal.org/radical-green-movement

The Left’s fixation on climate change is cloaked in scientism, deploying computer models to create the illusion of certainty. Ever more convinced of their role as planetary saviors, radical greens are increasingly intolerant of dissent or any questioning of their policy agenda. They embrace a sort of “soft Stalinism,” driven by a determination to remake society, whether people want it or not—and their draconian views are penetrating the mainstream. “Democracy,” a writer for Foreign Policy suggests, constitutes “the planet’s biggest enemy.”

Today’s working and middle classes are skeptical about policies that undermine their livelihoods in the promise of distant policy goals. Even now, after a decade-long barrage of fear-mongering, a majority of Americans, Australians, and even Europeans doubt that climate change will affect their lives substantially. A recent UN survey of 10 million people found that climate change ranked 16th in concerns; most people in the developing world, notes environmental economist Bjorn Lonborg, “care about their kids not dying from easily curable diseases, getting a decent education, not starving to death.”

Like other people in high-income countries, most Americans want to improve the environment and many, if not most, are concerned about the potential impact of climate change. But they still rank climate as only their 11th leading concern, behind not just health care and the economy but also immigration, guns, women’s rights, the Supreme Court, taxes, income, and trade. A recent Harris-Harvard poll found that three-fifths of Americans reject the portfolio of Green New Deal policies, including a third of Democrats and half of people under 25.

Simply put, once the current green agenda is understood in terms of its impact on jobs and energy prices, it does not play well. In recent Australian elections, voters soundly rejected a progressive agenda that targeted suburban residents and the country’s large fossil-fuel industry. Opposition was particularly strong in primarily blue-collar areas like Australia’s Queensland. The results in Australia led local celebrities and pundits to brand their fellow citizens as unremittingly “dumb.”

https://www.city-journal.org/global-warming#.XbGKGtFqQQM.email

We’ve all come across the images of polar bears drifting on ice floes: emblematic victims of the global warming that’s melting the polar ice caps, symbols of the threat to the earth posed by our ceaseless energy production—above all, the carbon dioxide that factories and automobiles emit. We hear louder and louder demands to impose limits, to change our wasteful ways, so as to save not only the bears but also the planet and ourselves.

In political discourse and in the media, major storms and floods typically get presented as signs of impending doom, accompanied by invocations to the environment and calls to respect Mother Nature. Only catastrophes seem to grab our attention, though, and it’s rarely mentioned that warming would also bring some benefits, such as expanded production of grains in previously frozen regions of Canada and Russia. Nor do we hear that people die more often of cold weather than of hot weather. Isolated voices criticize the alarm over global warming, considering it a pseudoscientific thesis, the true aim of which is to thwart economic modernization and free-market growth and to extend the power of states over individual choices.

Not being a climatologist myself, I’ve always had trouble deciding between these arguments. And then I met Judith Curry at her home in Reno, Nevada. Curry is a true climatologist. She once headed the department of earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, until she gave up on the academy so that she could express herself independently. “Independence of mind and climatology have become incompatible,” she says. Do you mean that global warming isn’t real? I ask. “There is warming, but we don’t really understand its causes,” she says. “The human factor and carbon dioxide, in particular, contribute to warming, but how much is the subject of intense scientific debate.”

Curry is a scholar, not a pundit. Unlike many political and journalistic oracles, she never opines without proof. And she has data at her command. She tells me, for example, that between 1910 and 1940, the planet warmed during a climatic episode that resembles our own, down to the degree. The warming can’t be blamed on industry, she argues, because back then, most of the carbon-dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels were small. In fact, Curry says, “almost half of the warming observed in the twentieth century came about in the first half of the century, before carbon-dioxide emissions became large.” Natural factors thus had to be the cause. None of the climate models used by scientists now working for the United Nations can explain this older trend. Nor can these models explain why the climate suddenly cooled between 1950 and 1970, giving rise to widespread warnings about the onset of a new ice age. I recall magazine covers of the late 1960s or early 1970s depicting the planet in the grip of an annihilating deep freeze. According to a group of scientists, we faced an apocalyptic environmental scenario—but the opposite of the current one.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/10/ozone_hole_shrinking_nasa_announces.html

NASA recently announced that evidence indicates that the planet’s ozone hole over Antarctica is closing and now the smallest it’s been since it was discovered three decades ago.  By 1990, the ozone hole had enlarged to 8 million square miles (twice the size of the USA).  The cause of this opening has been blamed on chlorofluorocarbons, which most countries outlawed.  The shrinking hole should be significantly reduced and stable by 2040–50 and eliminated by 2100.

Sounds as though the climate change (or global warming) enthusiasts have to adjust their strategy for arousing fear among the industrialized nations regarding potential planetary damage from human behavior.  It now appears that the polar bear population is stable.  Climate change advocates now must deal with this good news, which messes up some of the scare tactics they have employed for several decades.

However, this good news was delivered with a negative caveat.  For three decades, we have been told that the ozone hole was a threat to the planet and life, as it allows more solar radiation (UV) through to the Earth’s ground.  This will increase the risk of DNA mutations, they argue.  Ozone is a multiple oxygen molecule that also is a greenhouse gas.  Therefore, it can raise the heat retained in the atmosphere.  The hole allows some heat to escape and helps cool the planet.  Though these amounts are small, they work against global warming.