Tag: global warming

Don’t Destroy Farmers

farming, Europe, climate change, global warming

It’s lucky that today’s anti-agriculture tyrants weren’t around when the Fertile Crescent was just getting going.

But they’re here now.

And they seem hell-bent on destroying farms.

That’s what thousands upon thousands of European farmers are saying, anyhow, and we should listen to them. After all, they provide the food we eat. We need to eat in order to survive. If we don’t survive, we can’t continue living. So, whatever we do, let’s keep the farmers.

But that’s not current policy, at least in Europe. In the Netherlands, Belgium, and elsewhere, powerful political interests continue their crusade to shut down thousands of farms in the glorious cause of pursuing “climate goals” which, they believe, by being achieved will enable the fine-tuning of the weather and the creation of the best environment.

Or at least to say they gave it the old college try.

“I want to have the possibility to continue my dad’s farm,” Brendt Beyens told the AP. “But right now I feel like the possibility of that happening is slowly shrinking and it’s getting nearly impossible.”

So once again, thousands of tractors are clogging the streets, this time in Brussels, the capital of Belgium (video of the protest is on Twitter). The farmers object to being destroyed. They have a point.

Nor is it just about the livelihoods of sodbusters. With food prices rising worldwide and the threat of serious famine looms in Africa and parts of Asia, it’s also about saving lives.

My advice for today is don’t destroy farmers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags climate change, Europe, farming, global warming

folly ideological culture media and media people

Mr. Vehement

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.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Midjourney and DALL-E2

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags climate change, global warming, hysteria, religion

folly general freedom ideological culture international affairs

Seppuku for Dutch Farmers?

Post author By Editor
Post date July 11, 2022
2 Comments on 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.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags climate change, Dutch, farming, global warming, Netherlands

national politics & policies

End in Ice?

When I was young, some folks worried about a return to Ice Age conditions. The climate alarm, in the decades since, prophesies hotter conditions, not colder.

So, with this cold snap hitting North America — ice storms from Washington State to Texas and now heading east by northeast — climate change has emerged in the back (or even front) of our minds.

It’s just not necessarily Fire we fret about. It’s Ice. (Cue recitation of the great Robert Frost poem, now.)

“The arctic air that poured into Texas resulted in a record-breaking demand for power that caused the state’s electric grid to fail,” the Weather Channel reports. “Suppliers had planned to use rolling blackouts, but the system was overwhelmed” — effecting an “estimated 75% of Texas power generation capacity.”

Millions in Mexico are also without power, because natural gas pipelines from Texas froze.

The main hit to the electric grid sure looks like it has been directly* to the distribution — if what I glean from Georgetown’s electric outage page is a good indication.

But that town went heavy into alternative forms of energy production (as has the whole of the state, along with many others). Did that investment help them when the cold came? Former Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette says the problem is that alternative energy sources are not “base load electricity” but “intermittant and sometimes unreliable.”

Just as batteries under-perform in the cold, windmills don’t turn well when covered in ice. When we really need power, energy production that flakes out is not an energy alternative at all — it’s non-energy.

And if an Ice Age does come back, we’ll need more energy, not less than were global warming to remain the trend.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The reason there was no weekend podcast from me is that my partner in podcasting was without power simply because an ice storm brought down trees on multiple power lines in his area.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags climate, energy, global warming

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.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags climate change, climate science, global warming, panic, prediction

ideological culture

Mad Prophetess?

The latest scandal of the How Dare You Say That!?! variety features The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, who is banned from Fox News, we learn, because he characterized the celebrated “climate activist” Greta Thunberg as “mentally ill.”

He said it while serving as one of those invited talking heads. The other guest immediately cried “how dare you?”

And censoriousness ensued, with high moral dudgeon and nasty put-downs and the whole shebang.

While I don’t really know much about Miss Thunberg’s mental health going into all this, I do not believe it can be much improved by playing Prophetess on the world stage.

Which also gives too much cultural power to someone so young. And since power corrupts … that’s not good for Greta, and it makes her promoters corruptors.

And that is the point Mr. Knowles appeared to be trying to make. Reasonable people can disagree on the propriety of how “the execrable Michael Knowles” (as his fellow Daily Wire colleagues jovially refer to him) referred to the Swedish prophetess, of course. But it nevertheless remains rather shocking to witness

activist adults abuse
one child to
scare millions of children to
pressure powerful adults to
engage in precipitous policy action.

“Adults sometimes like to use children to carry their messages,” vidcaster and Dilbert creator Scott Adams points out, “because it makes it hard for the other side to criticize them without seeming like monsters.”

How can we “listen to the scientists,” as Miss Thunberg recently implored, if the talking is being done by a young teenage non-scientist?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing