Posts Tagged → climate change
Greta the baby pied piper parrot
Climate change is just the highest profile policy issue where its proponents have failed to persuade people with scientific facts. Instead of trying harder to explain the actual facts, and thereby win over convinced converts, climate change proponents always resort to bullying, shaming, and mocking people who remain uncertain, unpersuaded, unsure of what has been told to them, and then especially skeptical of all the resulting hype and abuse. Think of a teacher who, having failed to effectively explain a subject to a classroom then resorts to emotional blackmail and criticism of the audience. The truth is that the failure to connect with and educate the audience lies with the teacher, or in the case of climate change, its proponents.
Enter the latest unpersuasive advocate of human-caused climate change, the Swedish child Greta Thunberg. Yes, an unremarkable 16-year-old high school drop-out is now the newest face in this highly politicized subject involving multidisciplinary sciences and an entire planet. Yes, Thunberg is a child without any education degrees or really any formal education at all, lecturing and hectoring adults about what they absolutely must do right now with their hard-earned money and freedoms, and just listen to her, dammit.
I have no idea where Thunberg came from, in the sense of how or why she became an activist media darling activist. Nothing about her is particularly outstanding; not charisma, not intelligence, not education or mastery of science. Suddenly she was The Voice Of Reason, or at least The Voice Of Pesky Mosquitoes That Won’t Go Away. This little kid is just a little kid, that’s all she is, so “Oh c’mon!” is what I am thinking.
How can she be taken seriously, how can the quality of our national policy debate have sunk this low? And then I remembered that the face of the big government civilian disarmament effort is an attention hog named Hogg, himself also an unimpressive annoying little foot-stomping brat. And like so many other 16-year-olds across the planet, Greta is a foot-stamping, pouting, demanding little brat who wants what she wants and she wants it right now. It doesn’t mean she knows anything, or that she is correct about climate change, or that my 16-year-old son actually should be handed the keys to my pickup truck and given five hundred bucks for the weekend, either. This is just the way that sixteen-year-olds behave, and real adults ignore them at least and often righteously put them in their place.
Sixteen-year-olds have this habit of wanting all the adult stuff without having actually worked hard and earned it. It is what makes sixteen year olds both exasperating and yet so adorable. They are so clearly in an in-between place, between child and young adult, between having their own thoughts and learning new things. In America, most sixteen-year-olds like Greta are high school sophomores.
Do you remember what the word “sophomore” means? Yes, that’s right, it means “wise fool.” That is, a sophomore is a person who exhibits the traits exactly in between wisdom and foolishness. True to being a sophomore in meaning if not in actual school, Thunberg has the language skills of a young adult, but the reasoning abilities of a child.
The more we think about this unphenomenal child phenomenon policy thing, the more evident it is what a game it is. Thunberg is just the young white equivalent of what Obama represented. If she can’t persuade us with actual facts, she will pout and cry and try to bully us with childish tantrums. And if our adult inclinations kick in, and we contest Thunberg’s bullcrap, why then we are just a bunch of big meanies who made little kids cry. It was the same argument used to buffer Obama from being held accountable for his endless lies — anyone opposing him was racist, mean etc. For shame that anyone would even dare to question these good people! (sarcasm)
And so today was Thunberg’s big day. She led a bunch of American government schools in a student “strike” over her inability to actually persuade thinking people that human caused climate change is real. While students at government (“public”) schools are too young to go on strike, the sound of the word ‘strike’ is so grown up sounding and exciting, and anyhow, it is kind of sexy Marxist chic. Thunberg thinks the strike is better than actually getting an education, and in her own words, climate change policy and socialism are inseparable.
Ah-hah!
And so a bunch of Democrat union controlled government school administrators and political activists posing as teachers actually encouraged their students to miss a day of taxpayer funded education and go do something else, maybe get more leftist indoctrination, maybe protest, against whom or for what none could really say. But a day away from school is what so many kids crave anyhow, and so away some of them went. Maybe some of them want to be just like Thunberg: A high school dropout and professionally aggrieved whiny brat on an endless mission to harangue her elders. Great; it sounds like another Chinese cultural revolution, except now in America by yet more foreigners who want more of our free taxpayer stuff given to them.
Thunberg does not know the science about climate change, but she does know how to parrot liberal talking points. And so maybe we can finally categorize her as a baby pied piper parrot, a malignant force leading small children astray, away from hearth and home and all that is good. I think this description is more scientifically accurate than anything Thunberg says about supposed human caused climate change.
Climate change turned this little human into a parrot
Scary and mean little kid!
“And Duetschland vill haff a glorious thousand year reich!” This angry child is frightening. Is she the next Adolf Hitler in training?
Even weather.com promotes fake news, fake science
The other day President Trump mocked the anti-science “climate change” political activism crowd when he tweeted about the need for some “global warming” to offset the record low temperatures descending upon America. He was joking, and mocking, but everything he does creates an opening for enemies of America to attack him.
So cue up the faux indignation and mocking responses in return.
Fake science and lame-ass blatant political activism miraging as news reporting came from everywhere: Business insider, Newsweek, The Independent (UK), CNN, New York Times, Yahoo, Vanity Fair, and many other political activism outlets that pose as news outlets, including, amazingly, weather.com.
Weather.com, you ask?
And the answer is sadly, Yes, even weather.com, which you would think is just about the weather. Turns out that even weather.com is fully in the tank for anti-scientific climate change political activism. The one article weather.com staff wrote actually seriously evaluated just what more “climate change” would mean for America and the planet, and how terrible it is that President Trump wants this.
Either leftist activists have no sense of humor, or they are such crazed activists that no matter what someone says, it must always be turned into a political debate and crisis and a nuclear bomb aimed at whomever it is they disagree with at that moment. I vote for leftists being crazed, because nothing else explains their behavior. And so, weather.com published a very serious-sounding article about Trump’s tweet worthy of something from that source of awesome satire, The Onion. The article actually purports to be about how Trump is both a bad person for wanting more global warming, and how global warming is nothing to laugh at.
So weather.com wants it both ways: Trump is bad, and stupid, and by the way, just in case he wasn’t serious, he shouldn’t joke, either.
Every other mainstream fake news outlet followed suit with variations on this same theme, Trump bad and stupid, and global warming must not be mocked.
What surprised me was just how politicized weather.com is (and Business Insider, for that matter, being that it is aimed at business people). So I submitted a comment on the weather.com feedback page:
“Your ridiculous article about President Trump calling for “global warming” was 100% political attack on the president and zero percent science. The president was obviously, plainly joking about having “more global warming” and your decision to treat his joke as something serious worthy of real analysis is either stupid or political activism by your website. I am guessing your article is political activism, because it criticizes the president as if his joke was meant to be serious. I object to weather.com politicizing the weather. I also object to weather.com relying on the opinion of politicized climate activists posing as academics, and then failing to obtain a balanced or opposing view from actual scientists who dispute human-caused climate. You are promoting a religious view, not a scientific view. At the very least human caused “climate change” is a nascent scientific subject to review and debate. Presenting it as settled is a subjective choice weather.com makes and thus, your credibility is damaged. Please leave politics out of your weather reporting. It certainly alienates me from wanting to use your web page or service.”
And then I went further into weather.com and discovered entire sections of the website devoted to climate change fraud, and slickly packaged.
Why is it fraud? Because their assertion of human-caused climate change rests almost entirely on the provably false notion that “all scientists agree” that climate science is “settled.”
A) There is no such thing as climate science, and what science there is about climate change is all over the place. Real science is hardly ever “settled,” and it becomes settled then only after a long, robust and transparent debate. This kind of debate has not happened with climate change, because a great deal of it being politicized (“everyone says this is settled, so shut up”).
B) Scientists who have studied weather, climate, forestry, ecology, meteorology etc have come down all over the place. There is no universal agreement among scientists. Asserting there is universal agreement is like politics or religion. Leap of faith, or leap of belief in political outcomes.
So, add weather.com to the long list of political actors masquerading as scientists and humble service providers.
Duly noted!
Politics over weather science:
Hurricane Harvey: Land Use, Not Climate Change
If there has been one big lesson from the sad devastation in the Texas Gulf, it is that poorly planned and poorly implemented land use more than anything is responsible for the catastrophic results.
“Climate change” may be a political science exercise more than a science exercise, but there is no debate about the actual facts on the ground in the Texas Gulf communities like Houston: Residential developments built downstream from watersheds are in the path of a watery bullet or bulldozer. And to think that undisturbed, those watersheds perform highly valued ecosystem services, for free, that no amount of channelizing, dyking, levies etc can come close to reproducing.
For two hundred years America has described any kind of residential and commercial development anywhere as “economic development,” and therefore desirable. And yet, here we have a classic example that some places should not have development. Unless the buildings there can withstand serious flooding. Even then the costs far outweigh the benefits.
I feel terrible for the flooding victims in Houston. Our own home in Harrisburg was built in 1939, in the flood zone along the Susquehanna River. It is a foolish place to build a house, and in 2011 our home had nearly six feet of water in the basement. It is a traumatic, disruptive experience.
To the extent they can help, state and the national governments should try to figure out how to buy out development rights in areas subject to floods, wildfires, and other natural disasters. That is a concrete response to a demonstrated problem. This would be the actual function of government, versus a lot of the silly peripheral “social” functions slowly accreted by government over the past decades.
And this is one of my objections to alleged human-caused “climate change.” It reduces our focus on actual, tangible environmental issues like land use, which we can actually fix.
Forget sexy issues like “climate change,” let’s solve real environmental threats
By Josh First
Pennsylvania’s forests are suffering from a one-two punch-out by both invasive bugs and pathogens that kill our native and very valuable trees, and then by a following host of invasive vines, shrubs, trees, and other plants that are filling the void left after the big natives are gone.
Today yet another bulletin arrived from PSU plant pathology / forestry researchers, noting that ‘sudden-oak-death disease’ was detected on a shipment of rhododendron from Oregon.
Oregon got it from Asia.
Pennsylvania’s forests are becoming full of non-native, invasive plants, bugs, and pathogens. Each of our valuable tree species now has its own specific attackers. God knows what our native forests will look like in ten years.
The Asian emerald ash borer is literally making ash trees go extinct as a species. I see whole stands of forest, hundreds of acres, where not one ash tree is healthy. Dutch Elm disease killed off most of our elms in the 1980s. An Asian fungus killed off the once incredible and mighty American chestnut tree. Forget pathogens and bugs, because lots of aggressive, fast-growing invasive plants are taking up room on the forest floor, pushing out and overwhelming needed native plants. Few if any animals eat the invasives, which are often toxic and low value.
Human-caused climate change? It is a sexy political issue, and it is highly debatable. But forest destruction from non-native invasives is a real, tangible, non-debatable, non-politicized issue we need to address immediately. So many people and wild animals depend upon our native forests, that without them, our rural economies could dramatically fall and our wildlife could disappear.
Forester Scott Cary had this to say, tongue somewhat in cheek: “With the 1000 cankers disease in Walnut now in southeast Pennsylvania, that area is quarantined…maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on black birch and red maple [low-value native species long observed to be acting like aggressive, non-native invasives, and therefore harvested aggressively by responsible forest managers], that may be all we have left to choose from. Of course, Asian long-horned beetle may get the maple, so that leaves us black birch, the tree of the future.”
That is a sad place to be, folks. And to think that so much money is wasted selling the phony issue of human-caused climate change, while real environmental disasters are actually happening…it shows you just how dedicated the environmental Left is to political dominance, not useful solutions to environmental problems.
Burst pipes? You were in good company
Ten days ago, weather across the country was bitterly cold. Polar vortex, solar lull, regular winter weather…seems there’s a bunch of possible causes. One defining characteristic of that week-long deep freeze was the amount of burst pipes across the country, and around central Pennsylvania. Our home had burst pipes, and a property I manage had burst pipes, and the plumbers at both jobs told me they had spent days from six in the morning until late at night working on nothing but burst pipes. The big box stores were either short on or out of key plumbing components, which caused further delays in getting homes and businesses functioning again.
Which is all to say, I have never heard so many creative reports about where families washed their clothes and dishes. Many went to neighbors, friends, or nearby families. Some went to churches. Some used water from nearby creeks. As damaging as that freeze was, it only bolstered people’s spirit and resolve to carry on, and it cemented a feeling of community and caring among many people who normally just say “Hi” to each other coming home from work.
I found that refreshing.
You call this global warming?
Not only is the northern hemisphere in a deep freeze, a bunch of “climate change scientists” looking for evidence to support their religion … Oops … I mean their theory, got frozen in the Antarctic ice. Their ship is immobilized because so much ice is not only not melting, but actually increasing. Rescue ships also got frozen.
Members of the crew said it was the most ice they’d seen in years.
Guess what? Planet Earth is a dynamic place, with dynamic weather patterns and a multitude of factors simultaneously influencing climate.
Trying to ascribe cause-and-effect to these factors, or even worse, claiming to know what’s really happening with all these factors, is not science.
It’s politics, for sure. We know how clean that is.
Its adherents behave as though they’re in a cult, or at least in some charismatic religion.
Too many environmental groups use crisis to whip up support for their causes and to fund raise. Climate change appears to be one more scare tactic. The evidence just isn’t there to support the claims. Today’s zero temperature is classic.
But if you want to talk about overfishing the oceans, loss of farmland, loss of critical wildlife habitat, good wildlife management, why then reasonable people are interested.
In the mean time, I’m shoveling loads of carbon…oops, sorry, I mean firewood, into our wood stove as we trade yesterday’s carbon for today’s heat. Seems like a good and sustainable trade to me.
“Climate Change” has a scientific consensus, alright
The NIPCC issued a report demonstrating that most earth scientists and meteorologists do not concur with the hypothesis of human-caused climate change or global warming: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/16/PLS-HOLD-FOR-TUESDAY-9-17-AFTER-11AM-ET-Climate-Study-Evidence-Leans-Against-Human-Caused-Global-Warming. In their report, the NIPCC point out that much of the climate change science is not rigorously or even scientifically evaluated. It’s more politics and money than actual real science.
A study shows that earth science and meteorological professionals are overwhelmingly skeptical of the big claim: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/02/13/peer-reviewed-survey-finds-majority-of-scientists-skeptical-of-global-warming-crisis/
And this is my own beef: Why do all humans have to accept this new religion on faith? Why are we called names if we demand rigorous science? That does it for me. Once someone can’t make a strong argument, they’ve lost.