Tag: global warming

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.

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Tags climate, global warming, Greta Thunberg, hysteria

Accountability ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Listen to the Warm

I like publicity stunts as much as the next activist. But haven’t we had enough of the whole Greta Thunberg bit yet?

On Wednesday, the 16-year-old Swede provided testimony on an apt stage, let us grant her that — the U.S. House of Representatives’ foreign affairs subcommittee joint hearing on the global youth climate change movement.

She didn’t prepare any remarks, though. She merely “attached” the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming “as her testimony.” Her rationale? “I don’t want you to listen to me, I want you to listen to the scientists.” And “to unite behind science.”

You know, for “real action.”

It was what happened right after she demanded “real action,” though, where the stark reality of the situation became clear: a grown man in a suit, elected to Congress, asked, “Could you expand on why it’s so important to listen to the science?”

And then the non-scientist spoke … not very expansively.

Forget that science qua science isn’t to be “listened to,” it is to be engaged in, with conjectures, research and refutations. (There was nothing like that at the hearing.) Forget also that the science is increasingly less clear on the severity of what warming we see. Remember only that an elected official used a girl to imbue a text (the IPCC report) with moral legitimacy, dubbing it “best available ‘united science’” — the better to push an unargued-for massive coercive government intervention into the life of our civilization.

Is no adult in the room ashamed of what they are doing … exploiting a cute youngster to subvert rationality?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags global warming, Greta Thunberg, science, socialism, testimony

ideological culture

Hurricane 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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national politics & policies Popular

Greener Pastures

CO2, Carbon DiOxide, green, greenhouse, warming, climate,

There is climate change going on. And some of it is attributable to increasing levels of Carbon dioxide (CO₂).

It is uncontroversial and quite politically convenient to say that — despite Al Gore’s infamous propaganda positing climate change dogma as An Inconvenient Truth. The worldwide “green” movement to “fight climate change” has been supported by trillions of tax dollars and the eager, lip-smacking glee of major media mavens as they trot out story after improbable story, linking every storm, warm spell, cold spell, and summer ice melt to “man-made global warming.”

But there is no real “settled science” as non-scientists like to term the case for anthropogenic global warming, because there are

troubles with the temperature data,
difficulties separating weather events from climatic trends,
problems identifying CO₂ level variations as the cause of climate change rather than as a result,
a certain amount of dunderheadedness using a statistical construct of “average global temperature” to track actual trends, and

so much more. But we do know about one extremely positive effect of increasing atmospheric carbon: it makes the deserts bloom.

Or, at least, greener.

Six years ago a study of satellite data concluded that arid regions have gone greener. Increased atmospheric CO₂ levels makes photosynthesis more efficient, allowing plants to use less water, thereby creating more leaves.

Earlier this year, however, Forbes reported that a NASA study had just demonstrated that expanded agriculture and silviculture in India and China were responsible for most of that greening — but if you compare the Forbes article with the original paper, the CO₂ contribution persists.

Atmospheric carbon is plant food, so to speak, and without it, life on the planet would die.

An awkward truth?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags carbon dioxide, climate, climate change, CO2, global warming, green, greenhouse, warming

general freedom media and media people nannyism too much government

When Push Comes to Nudge

Ireland, global warming, authoritarian, totalitarian, control, climate,

Ireland’s prime minister — or “Taoiseach” — is enthusiastic. “Speaking at the launch of the Climate Action Plan in Grangegorman today,” the Independent reported last week, “Mr [Leo Eric] Varadkar said the government would establish a Climate Action Delivery Board in the Department of the Taoiseach to oversee its implementation.”

The plan will deeply affect “almost every aspect” of Irish life. “The Government plans to force petrol and diesel cars off our roads,” the Independent elaborates, “introduce new buildings regulations and change the school curriculum in a bid to counteract climate change.”

Though the scope of the effort is breathtaking, Mr. Varadkar pretends he is being oh-so-humble and cautious, “nudging” citizens rather than going for a “coercive” approach.

Typical politician’s whopper, of course. Higher taxes on fuel and plastics, banning oil and gas boilers in new buildings, forcing private cars off city roads — this is all force.

Pretending otherwise is something akin to a Big Lie.

And all in service to the cause of reducing “greenhouse gas emissions by two per cent a year each year for the next ten years.”

Varadkar says he is doing it for the young and at the behest of the young … who have been propagandized to believe “that the world will be destroyed in a climate apocalypse.”

Well, the Taoiseach didn’t use the word “propagandized,” and insists that disaster is “not inevitable, it can be stopped, action can be taken.”

But Ireland’s contribution to the planet’s “greenhouse gases” is negligible. If all the Irish held their breaths and keeled over for the cause, they wouldn’t make a carbon dioxide burp of a difference.

It is a power grab. Not anything like a “nudge.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.