RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/john_kerry_comes_up_with_a_politicocelebrity_cavalcade_to_lecture_us_on_global_warming.html

Welp. Looks like having just one Davos, that unholy celebrity-business-politico festival of globaloney held in elite Switzerland, isn’t enough.

John Kerry is creating what sounds like another, a cavalcade of the usual big names of has-beens and never-brains for the purpose of lecturing all us pudknockers about global warming, jetting in and out on plumes of carbon compounds. He calls it “World War Zero” because we’re supposed to be panicking, and thus, giving up our tremendous freedoms and way of life to … them, probably so they can make money.

Here’s the New York Times piece:

WASHINGTON — John Kerry, the former senator and secretary of state, has formed a new bipartisan coalition of world leaders, military brass and Hollywood celebrities to push for public action to combat climate change.

The name, World War Zero, is supposed to evoke both the national security threat posed by the earth’s warming and the type of wartime mobilization that Mr. Kerry argued would be needed to stop the rise in carbon emissions before 2050. The star-studded group is supposed to win over those skeptical of the policies that would be needed to accomplish that.

Former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter are part of the effort. Moderate Republican lawmakers like Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California, and John Kasich, the former governor of Ohio, are on the list. Stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Sting and Ashton Kutcher round out the roster of more than 60 founding members. Their goal is to hold more than 10 million “climate conversations” in the coming year with Americans across the political spectrum.

With a starting budget of $500,000, Mr. Kerry said, he and other coalition members intend to hold town meetings across the country starting in January. Members will head to battleground states key to the 2020 election, but also to military bases where climate discussions are rare and to economically depressed areas that members say could benefit from clean energy jobs.

Townhalls? Who’d volunteer to listen to this nonsense unless they were already in the tank for this kind of nonsense anyway? Especially from these people? Leonardo DiCaprio? Sting? Is Alyssa Milano going to join the cavalcade, too? The Times didn’t say.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/11/republicans_will_live_to_regret_joining_climate_alarmists.html

Anxiety about global warming is skyrocketing in the Western world to the point one psychiatrist says, “I believe that everyone now has some climate anxiety.”  It’s no wonder.  Western leaders stoke the fires.  On November 28, 2019, the European parliament declared a global climate emergency.  Its members were responding in part to a children’s crusade to save the planet.  In March 2019, millions of children in over 120 countries skipped school to embark on what has become a series of “climate strikes.”  Young speakers raised alarming scenarios like what would happen when people without food and water “sought sanctuary and were faced with cages and guns instead.”

“Climate crisis” and “climate emergency” are replacing the neutral-sounding “climate change.”  Then there’s the threatening “extreme weather,” which has become a major focus as warming has stalled over the last two decades.  Climate alarmists blame rising, man-made CO2 emissions for supposedly ever more frequent and intense hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanic activity, drought, flooding, and snowstorms.  (Never mind that twenty years ago, David Viner, a senior research scientist of the climatic research unit of the University of East Anglia, predicted that “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”)

 Tony Heller, a contributor to realclimatechange.com, made a video showing news clips of “extreme weather” from the 1930s, when carbon dioxide levels were low.  He narrated: “It was by far the hottest decade on record in the United States.  The deadliest flooding in human history occurred in China in the 1930s[.] … The worst droughts in U.S. history also occurred in the 1930s.  Eighty percent of the U.S. was in drought during July 85 years ago.  The heat and drought led to massive dust storms.  The U.S. also had some of its worst flooding on record during the 1930s. … The most intense hurricane in modern U.S. history occurred in 1935[.] … Climatologists simply omit the 1930s from their graphs.”

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

If you get most of your news passively by just reading what comes up in some kind of Facebook or Google feed or equivalent, you probably have the impression that the Climate Wars are over and the Climate Campaigners have swept the field of battle. In my case, I certainly don’t rely on those kinds of toxic sources of information, but I do regularly monitor many of the media sources in the “mainstream” category — the New York Times, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, the Economist, Politico, and several of the television networks like CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN. All of those (and plenty more) have clearly put an absolute ban on any news or information that would cast even the slightest negative light on the proposition that there is an imminent “climate crisis” that must be solved by government transformation of the world economy.

I’ll give a couple of examples of the lengths to which this has gone. Back in September, mentally unstable Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, whose only qualification was her ignorant passion for climate extremism, got the platform of the UN “Climate Action Summit” for a big speech. Excerpt:

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

You would think that sane people would want to stay as far from Greta as possible lest they get accused of child abuse. But instead, Greta is feted as a heroine. In October something called the Nordic Council awarded young Greta its 2019 Environmental Award. (It seems that she has rejected the award, thus claiming for herself an even higher level of holiness among true believers.)

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/22/climate-emergency-is-oxford-dictionaries-word-of-the-year/

Oxford Dictionaries has declared the phrase “climate emergency” as its Word of the Year, after a 10,000 percent spike in usage.

Since 2004, Oxford has selected a Word of the Year from a word or phrase that has seen an upsurge of interest and reflects the ethos, mood, or preoccupations over the past year, with lasting potential for long term cultural significance.

Oxford defines “climate emergency” as “a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it.”

The phrase“climate emergency” was once relatively obscure, but after a huge spike in its usage this year, it has become one of the most prominent expressions among English speakers. According to a statement published by their panel, “In 2018, climate did not feature in the top words typically used to modify emergency, instead the top types of emergencies people wrote about were health, hospital, and family emergencies. But with climate emergency, we see something new, an extension of emergency to the global level.”

This existential threat surpassed all other “emergencies” in writing by a “huge margin” despite not even making the list in 2018. Even other variations of the same concept, exhorting attention to the health of our native planet, were eclipsed by the relative urgency of the phrase.

The phrases “climate crisis” and “climate action” also made Oxford’s Word of the Year 2019 shortlist.

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.