When the inmates run the asylum, whispers of ‘climate’ explain everything
The coal-fired Plant Scherer, one of the United States’ top carbon dioxide emitters, in Juliette, Ga
Carbon dioxide, a colourless, odourless and tasteless gas, represents the most serious threat today to the citizenry of the developed world. No other substance known to man more often makes us go crazy.
“The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change” and combat CO2, Democrat firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stated two weeks ago, explaining her views and those of “millennials and Gen Z and all these folks that come after us.” A few days later the Doomsday Clock — the countdown to total nuclear annihilation established by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists during the Cold War — got wound up tighter than ever by adding CO2 to nuclear weaponry as an existential threat. “Today sets the Doomsday Clock at two minutes to midnight — the closest it has ever been to apocalypse,” the organization announced in a press release.
According to a fanciful study reported in The New York Times this week, the world as we knew it did end because of carbon dioxide, sort of, following Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the New World. After the white man’s oppression “wiped out 90 per cent of the indigenous population in the Americas, or about 55 million people … (the earth) then reclaimed the land that these populations left behind. The new vegetation pulled heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and into the land, contributing to what scientists refer to as the ‘Little Ice Age.’” Attributing climate change to Columbus on surmise based on speculation would in normal times be sensibly dismissed as the ravings of cranks. When the inmates run the asylum, and whispers of “climate” explain everything, no fantasy need withstand serious scrutiny.
For most of the last 30 years, Al Gore has been a prophet of doom, time and time again warning of catastrophe if we don’t repent, time and again coming up empty. His 2006 film, An Inconvenient Truth, warned of devastation from rising sea levels — animations showed Manhattan under water, along with San Francisco, Beijing, Shanghai, the Netherlands and much of Florida. Time and time again Gore predicted the melting of the polar caps, in 2008 announcing that “The entire North polar ice cap may well be completely gone in 5 years.” That never happened; today there is more sea ice in the Arctic than in recent years at this time.
In fact, none of the predicted man-made climate change disasters have occurred, except in the extrapolations of true believers. All weather events have been consistent with historical norms, including hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and also glaciers, some of which today recede while others today advance. Studies show polar bears are thriving. So is the global biota — as demonstrated by satellite data, the planet is greener than ever, a consequence of higher levels of carbon dioxide, aka “nature’s fertilizer.” Starvation is less rampant, too — so much food is being produced that obesity has become a major health concern in much of the Third World.
What is rampant is the proliferation of claims that blame climate change for all that ails us, quite apart from direct environmental calamities. Some blame climate change for wars in the Middle East, some for terrorism at home. Google “climate change” and the pet peeve of your choice and you’re likely to find some scientist, somewhere, showing a link between the two. The American Psychological Association speculates that climate change could be causing “higher levels of suicide, substance abuse, depression, anxiety, violence, aggression, interpersonal difficulties, and job-related difficulties” along with “loss of personal and professional identity, loss of social support structures, loss of a sense of control and autonomy and other mental health impacts such as feelings of helplessness, fear and fatalism.”
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists calls the world of today the “new abnormal.” But for the scientists at the Bulletin, it is normal to predict doom year after year — they have done so for more than 70 years. For the last 30 years, UN-approved climate scientists have likewise been predicting doom, over and over, and always with the same results.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” In line with this quote, attributed to Einstein, today’s climate-doomster scientists should be declared certifiably insane, and also culpable for driving so many others crazy. The only scientists who may be onto something are the psychologists.
Lawrence Solomon executive director of Toronto-based Energy Probe. LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
@ adamdalgliesh:
They were and are both important. The point is I was engaged in discussing Global Warming. Here. And you broke into the discussion. And effectively stopped the discussion on Global Warming.
As a chemist, the “CO2” subject caught my eye. The article was a real “gas”.
One of these days, the weather around the world will be more normal than any year in history. The Democrats will blame it on Global Warming aka Climate Change aka Donald Trump.
This from Ynetnews:
I know this has nothing to do with CO2, but I’m desperate to get some sort of rise out of you guys about the despicable murder of Ori Ansbacher by a Palestinian terrorist. Are all of you guys asleep? Do all of you think it is irrelevant to people who claim to love Israel? Is CO2 really more important to you? This from the Jerusalem Post:
Why do people enter this issue, or any, with their minds already made up? It is better to begin with the evidence. Then let your conclusions be drawn from an exposition of the evidence. To give one example in relation to the oceans, are the oceans rising in temperature, do we have the instruments to determine if so, what then is the evidence, are the instruments scientifically reliable to give these readings??? Many questions indeed. But the basic philosophical method here is than the species man is able to reach truths about these matters. These truths are absolute (absolute truth is possible) and at the same time are relative (relative because as soon as arrived at the world changes continually)
Whenever I see so many weigh in on a personal war against a young woman called Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from the Dems then I am suspicious. I believe the meaning of her comment was that the next 12 years will be decisive, not that the world was going to end in 12 years. Further to the GW debate I have been reading this and it is at least informative.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11659-climate-myths-ice-cores-show-co2-increases-lag-behind-temperature-rises-disproving-the-link-to-global-warming/
A major nuclear war would release a large amount of particulate matter into the atmosphere, which might result in drastic cooling of the atmosphere (the “nuclear winter” theory). Or it might produce global warming due to the intense heat generated by nuclear explosions, and the release of methane and CO2 into the atmosphere generated by this heat. Or, as some theorize, it could lead first to 30-40 years of intense cold, followed by an even longer period of intense heat–ice followed by fire. In effect, this theory posits nuclear war on avast scale (hundreds of magatons released) causing a vastly speeded up version of the ice age followed by global warming that may have occurred during the ice ages and the “interglacial” periods that ended them. Since nuclear war is far more likely to induce catastrohic changes in the environment than fossil fuel technologies used for peaceful purposes, environmentalists should concentrate their main efforts at promoting world peace and avoiding nuclear war. Instead, they are overwhelmingly “progressives” who are fanning the flames of war with Russia for purely partisan political reasons in the United States (driving Donald Trump from office with “Russian collusion” charges). This has already caused Trump to abrogate an important disarmament treaty from the Reagan-Bush41 era, and may lead to a prolifieration of dangerous intermediate range missiles deployed by the Russians, thereby increasing the dangers of a nuclear holocaust.
There are explanations for this phenomena, however, that do not disprove that CO2 has a warming effect on the atmosphere. The ice ages were triggered by periods of intense volcanic activity, including super volcanoes, which sent huge quantities not only of CO2, but particulate matter (such as dust) into the atmosphere. The particulate matter blocked sunlight and caused cooling, more than counterbalancing the impact of the CO2 , which traps sunlight and causies warming. However, eventually the particulate matter fell to earth, while the added CO2 remained in the atmosphere, causing the ice ages to end.
The danger of excessive global warming resulting from contemporary human technologies results from the fact that these human technologies release far more CO2 than they do particule matter. Ironically, most efforts to “clean up” modern fossil fuel emissions accentuate this trend, because they remove far more particulate matter from coal and petroleum emissions than they do CO2 emissions. Thus both those who belittle the impact of emissions from fossil fuel , and contemporary technologies used to produce “clean coal” and “clean gas” are contributing to the problem, not its solution.
Jackson Pemberton ·
Brigham Young University
I graduated with honors in Physics and Math and did a lot of research on anthropomorphic warming and found one crucial fact that seems to go completely unnoticed. The ice core data, which covers the last four ice ages, shows that CO2 concentrations continue to rise right into the first few thousand years of each plunge into a new ice age. The data is quite dramatic : temperatures fall sharply as each age begins and meanwhile CO2 continues to rise for 2,000 to 7,000 years. This shows that CO2 concentration does not drive warming otherwise it would track with temperature