Tag: climate change

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folly ideological culture media and media people

Mr. Vehement

global warming, hysteria, religion

He’s vehement — vehement with the force of 600,000 Hiroshima-​class atomic bombs exploding each and every day. 

Because he cares. 

He really does. 

He really cares about putting the days of Wooden Al Gore behind him and ushering in Apoplectic Foaming-​at-​the-​Mouth-​While-​Bleeding-​From-​Every-​Pore Al Gore.

It’s just unfortunate though that whilst ratiocinating at Davos, Mr. Gore destroyed the atmosphere and disarranged the solar system, further accelerating global warming and cooling.

If you’re wondering whether I am now just making stuff up, thank you for noticing; yes: I learned it from the best. But I’m sincere. Okay? I’m emoting very hard right now, for which I fully expect to receive social-​credit points that I can tape to my COVID-​19 passport and wave at the grocery-​store clerk as I pay a thousand dollars for a half-​dozen eggs.

If only vehemence were facts and cogency, Al Gore would be the most empirical, most logical man alive. As it is, a billion flabbergasted refugees have fled before the force of his rhetoric.

If you don’t believe that Gore not whispered but roared, nay, expectorated, the following, etc., at Davos about how the (man-​made) greenhouse effect is trapping “as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-​class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the earth!! That’s what’s boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers, and the rain bombs, and sucking the moisture out of the land, and … and … and —”

… then I refer you to the videotape. Roll it, Hal.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration created with Midjourney and DALL-E2

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folly general freedom ideological culture international affairs

Seppuku for Dutch Farmers?

farmer protest, Dutch, Netherlands, global warming, climate change

Two years ago, the Netherlands government was spending millions of euros to subsidize farmers and others hurt by pandemic policies.

Now it seeks to destroy many Dutch farmers by compelling them to drastically slash livestock herds to reduce nitrogen oxide and ammonia, thereby supposedly benefiting the environment. The government has also thwarted construction projects on save-​the-​planet grounds.

Farmers are protesting throughout the country. At one site, police opened fire. No one was hurt.

The prime minister objects to “intimidating” officials by, say, clogging highways with tractors — which protesting farmers have done.

Understandable, but shoe the other foot: Is using governmental coercion to destroy farmers a form of peaceful suasion?

Such irrational policies conform to ideologies that sure seem bent on the progressive destruction of civilization for the alleged sake of fine-​tuning the weather. Yet nothing the Dutch could do — not even mass seppuku — would appreciably affect our far-​more-​massive-​than-​the-​Netherlands global climate. But the government may succeed in making life harder for everyone in the habit of eating.

Just some overseas craziness that could never happen here?

It already is. Federal assaults on the oil industry have fueled skyrocketing fuel prices. Our current president says the burden is an acceptable part of “an incredible transition” to a world that will be “stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels.”

Will the U.S. government next decide that too many cows are emitting gases such as methane and mandate culling of herds here?

Who knows? It depends on the politics of the moment, how eager officials are to appease enemies of mankind, and other factors having nothing to do with respecting the requirements of human survival.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets ideological culture

The Woke Mob’s Capitalism

climate justice, social justice, woke, wokeism

A prominent rating system has gone “woke.”

“Exxon is rated top ten best in world for environment, social & governance (ESG) by S&P 500,” Elon Musk tweeted a few weeks ago, “while Tesla” — the billionaire’s high-​end electric car company — “didn’t make the list! ESG is a scam. It has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.”

We could quibble. Is “phony” the right word? “Social justice” has always been slippery. It’s a “mirage,” explained Hayek, really just a stalking horse for power.

What Musk is objecting to, though, is worth thinking about. The ESG standard is supposed to mean something … based on objective criteria. The reasons to eject Tesla from its Top Ten and place Exxon at the pinnacle are laughably transparent. It’s a woke power grab. The leftist ideology has taken over another capitalist institution, the better to create …

What?

Socialism? Fascism?

Michael Rectenwald, in a fascinating essay, calls it “woke corporatism.” 

The plan is, he writes, to “establish a woke monopolistic cartel.” Musk’s company has been “subjected to the S in ESG — the ‘social’ or ‘social justice’ quotient.”

Musk, Rectenwald argues, “has been deemed a deplorable, and thus his company does not pass ‘social justice’ muster.” In other words, the putatively pro-​inclusion folks are excluding him from the ranks of the favored.

And all because he wants free speech on a social media platform!

Laissez-​faire grew out of economists’ objections to the grinding inefficiency and over-​politicization of business. Adam Smith, back in 1776, called the pre-​liberal, insider-​based trade system “mercantilism.”

The leftist mob now pushes a neo-neo-​mercantalism, mobocracy capitalism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture national politics & policies

The Day and the Hour

prediction, forecast, fortune telling, climate change, global warming, blue and red

Time is almost up!

“Three years ago, scientists gave us a pretty stark warning: They said we have 12 years to avoid the worst consequences of climate change,” John Kerry, former U.S. Senator (D‑Mass.) and Secretary of State and current US Special Climate Envoy, stated last week. 

“And now we have nine years left,” the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate added, “to try to do what science is telling us we need to do.”

Science speaks to Kerry. Just nine years, though? Not much time. 

But it could be worse. 

And apparently already is.

According to BBC environmental correspondent, Matt McGrath, who reported roughly 18 months ago that “there’s a growing consensus that the next 18 months will be critical in dealing with the global heating crisis.”

“The climate math is brutally clear,” Potsdam Climate Institute founder Hans Joachim Schellnhuber argued. “While the world can’t be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence until 2020.”

“Healed”? Or brought to heel?

That time is running out “is becoming clearer all the time,” McGrath noted then, before quoting the eminent scientist, the Prince of Wales: “I am firmly of the view that the next 18 months will decide our ability to keep climate change to survivable levels and to restore nature to the equilibrium we need for our survival,” declared his royal highness, speaking at a reception more than 18 months back. 

Prince Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten-​Windsor is also considered something of an expert on receptions.

For my part, regarding these prophecies, I’m with Gavin Schmidt, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who advised, “All the time-​limited frames are bullsh*t.”

I can follow that science.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture

The Hobgoblin

wolf, winter, global warning, climate change,

Here in Virginia, it looks like we will have a soggy Halloween. But in Chicago the cold and snow may barrel in big time.

“A buckled jet stream weather pattern known as the Pineapple Express has sent warm weather from closer to the equator north to Alaska, setting records there,” we learn from The Chicago Tribune, “even as it’s forced below-​normal temperatures south from closer to the Arctic and into the Chicago area.”

The Tribune notes that they are working on a new record in the Windy City. Not a new lowest temperature, but, well, “a record for coldest high temperature.” Go back over a century and a half, before all this ‘global warming,’ and “records were set in 1873 for the coldest Oct. 31 high temperature, 31 degrees, and the lowest low temperature, 23 degrees.”

What is refreshing in all this is not the chill winds, nor the snow. It’s to read multiple articles about the weather and see not one mention of greenhouse gases and man-​made ‘climate-​change.’

Mark Twain famously once quipped that “everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.” Nowadays, too many people are trying to do something about not just ‘the weather’ but about ‘the climate.’

Which, we should understand, is deceptively simple when we put the definitive article in front of the word: THE climate. When I was a kid, most climate talk referred to weather patterns in regions. Not the whole planet as one big region.

What if the interaction of different regions were the real story?

So, my Halloween treat has already been digested: the hobgoblin of catastrophic climate change has been set aside, the cold weather too strong a contrast to feed that diabolical narrative.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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wolf, winter, global warning, climate change,

from a photo by Ian Collins

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Hurricane Apophenia

apophenia

While Hurricane Dorian lumbered towards America, Axios unleashed a rumor: President Trump had wondered about “nuking” hurricanes in their early stages. 

Sounds goofy, I know. Many used the rumor to question Trump’s intelligence, prudence, and sanity, but fretting about a mere rumor at length might give us reason to question our intelligence, prudence and sanity.

Before the hurricane hit the Bahamas, Reason magazine made the logical point about how useful “price gouging” would be for dealing with a disaster like Dorian. Then came the hit, which, ABC reports, was quite devastating: “Hurricane Dorian kills at least 5 in the Bahamas; US coastline braces for impact.”

While others prepare for the worst, we on the sidelines merely wonder, could Dorian be a sign of global warming?

It is hard not to think that thought.

But Tony Heller of RealClimateScience​.com cautions us against leaping to this cause for that effect. “Coolest January-​August On Record In The US,” Heller headlines his piece providing graphs showing how amazingly un-warm it has been in our half-​a-​hemisphere so far this year.

There is no honest way to associate this storm with “global warming” or even climate change.

As real climate scientists know. Still, linking bad weather to the much-​pushed Big Story Of Our Time is almost … irresistible.

Part of this is apophenia: our brains find patterns even where they do not exist.

Yet I sometimes wonder whether this weather-​climate mistake isn’t being programed into us by insiders with an agenda.

But that might be mere apophenia, too. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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apophenia

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