By Larry Kummer. From the Fabius Maximus website.
Summary: Left and Right in America are in thrall to propaganda. Here is the latest in climate doomsterism. This shows how it turns science into propaganda. It does not explain why we love these stories. It does not explain how we can regain our skepticism and desire to see the world clearly. See the end section for those answers.
Here is the latest in doomster coverage by Chris Mooney in the WaPo…
“One of the most worrisome predictions about climate change may be coming true.”
“Two years ago, former NASA climate scientist James Hansen and a number of colleagues laid out a dire scenario in which gigantic pulses of fresh water from melting glaciers could upend the circulation of the oceans, leading to a world of fast-rising seas and even superstorms.
“Hansen’s scenario was based on a computer simulation, not hard data from the real world, and met with skepticism from a number of other climate scientists. But now, a new oceanographic study appears to have confirmed one aspect of this picture — in its early stages, at least.
“The new research, based on ocean measurements off the coast of East Antarctica, shows that melting Antarctic glaciers are indeed freshening the ocean around them. And this, in turn, is blocking a process in which cold and salty ocean water sinks below the sea surface in winter, forming ‘the densest water on the Earth,’ in the words of study lead author Alessandro Silvano, a researcher with the University of Tasmania in Hobart. This Antarctic bottom water has stopped forming in two key regions of Antarctica, the research shows — the West Antarctic coast and the coast around the enormous Totten glacier in East Antarctica.”
Buried into the article is information putting this in a less dramatic context.
“Hansen said that ‘this study provides a nice small-scale example of processes that we talk about in our paper. …On the large-scale issue, it is too early to say how these feedback processes will play out, based on empirical evidence,” Hansen said by email. “If we stay on business-as-usual [greenhouse gas] emissions rates, so that global warming continues to increase, I expect that the freshwater injection rate will increase (mainly via ice faster ice shelf breakup and underwater melt) and sea ice area will increase. This experiment will be playing out over the next years and decades.'”
Deeper still into the article, Mooney reveals a detail which overturns the narrative.
“One limitation with the current study, however, is that although the researchers have found that deep water is not forming in two key Antarctic regions, they cannot say when a change in these regions occurred. Measurements do not go back far enough for that, study author Silvano said. Thus, it’s possible that deep water formation in these regions shut off a long time ago, well before the modern period of intense climate warming. That would make it harder to pin current events on human-caused climate change.”
Translate “make it harder to pin …on human-caused climate change” into “we’ll try, but have no evidence.”
Mooney relies on a staple of alarmists, what Andrew Revkin calls the “single study syndrome” (e.g., see his NYT articles here and here). The mainstream media broadcast scary papers but never mention those that contradict the doomster climate story. For example, a new paper by Nicholas Lewis and Judith Curry in the Journal of Climate: “The impact of recent forcing and ocean heat uptake data on estimates of climate sensitivity.” This is one of several paper suggesting that the climate is much less sensitive to CO2 than the major climate models assume. Letting people learn about this science would ruin the science is science is settled narrative.
It is not just politics. Climate alarmism serves a larger purpose for journalists. We live in what Peter Moore calls “the Crisis Crisis.” News exaggerated into fake news as too many journalists compete for clicks.
“It’s bad news Biblical style: plagues of swarming journalists are swallowing — and selling — every doomsday scenario in sight. …they’re talking crisis: drugs, vanishing rain forests, terrorism, Armageddon. They’re inflating stories to ten times their natural size, decrying the end of the world. Their graphics are flashier than video games, their footage better than MTV, their high-tension talk scarier than s-f.”
Amplifying this to cause panic
The WaPo article is too intellectual to cause mass panic. So it is amplified by the Leftist media. Alternet runs several articles like this every week, and none that challenge the narrative.
“We May Be on the Verge of a Human-Made Climate Disaster.”
By Thom Hartmann (Independent Media Institute) at Alternet.
“Is Europe about to experience famine?”
Lots and lots of speculation. No mention of contrary research. Mooney’s article is its foundation. Mountains of hysteria built on a molehill, concluding that doom is nigh (as a thousand other articles have said in the past 30 years).
“Given the stakes – the survival of much of the western world, and “civilization” as we know it – we all must step up and become political activists.
“Note to Republicans and GOP donors: It’s no longer just your children and grandchildren whose lives you’re ruining in a distant future when you think you’ll be dead. If this happens as soon as it looks like it may, it will be you and your friends, too.”
Going mad about climate change
“We Are Talking Billions of People Displaced by Sea Level Rise“
Janine Jackson interviews Dahr Jamail on “CounterSpin”, 27 April 2018. This got a large audience when listed at Naked Capitalism.
Jackson: “Antarctic glaciers are melting at dramatic rates, scientists are finding. …The most severe projections of potential impact are almost impossible to grasp: billions of people displaced? coastal cities disappeared?”
Jamail: “…The most important study recently regarding the Antarctic and sea level rise was published in Science Advances on the 18th of this month, and the title of the study is “Freshening by Glacial Meltwater Enhances Melting of Ice Shelves and Reduces Formation of Antarctic Bottom Water.” …
“And so this is worrisome for numerous reasons. One, that for a long time, scientists believed that Antarctica, being the ice continent, would either not be dramatically impacted by human-caused climate disruption, or at least minimally. But now what this means is that at least 10 percent of Antarctica’s coastal glaciers are now in full retreat, and because of this feedback loop, that retreat’s only going to speed up, and ultimately this feedback loop will start happening on other glaciers in Antarctica as well.
“And so for sea level rise, we already know that the Arctic sea ice is dramatically melting, which is going to only intensify the melt rate in the Arctic. Of course, Greenland, we know, is melting at record rates as well. And so now with Antarctica – save dramatic, dramatic changes in mitigation, in fossil fuel CO2 emissions across the planet, on a very, very abrupt timescale – right now, at current trajectories, we are on course, at a minimum, to hit the worst-case projections of sea level rise, which, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is 8.5 feet by 2100 {Ed.: in the RCP8.5 scenario}. But these worst-case projections, unfortunately, keep being upgraded every time more and more reports, like the one we’re discussing today, are being released. …
“So the urgency is clear. Sea level-rise projections are being increased dramatically. We are talking, in the longer run, billions of people being displaced by sea level rise. Entire megacities on the coast, like New York and Tokyo, that are going to have to be relocated entirely, or completely abandoned to the sea. …”
As SOP for climate alarmists, Jamail focuses on the implausible RCP8.5 scenario, the worst case given in the IPCC’s AR5. Even the Climate Central analysis of sea level shows only continued slow rising under the RCP2.6 and RCP4.5 scenarios. Note that their graph is in centimeters (one CM equals 0.4 inches). Also ignored is that the seas have been rising since the end of the last ice age – and will continue to do so until the next one.
About Dahr Jamail.
Dahr Jamail is a staff reporter at Truthout , where he has worked since 2008 – except for tour with Al Jazeera from 2010 to 2013. He reported from Iraq for more than a year, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last 10 years. He has won several awards for his work, the most recent being the Izzy Award for excellence in independent journalism. He lives and works in Washington State. His reporting is a hard-core green alarmist. For example, he wrote about the certain massive health and environmental disasters from the BP oil spill in 2013 and that Fukushima “could become worse than Chernobyl” (2011). See his website.
Jamail has written three books. The fourth will be released in January: The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption
The result
A steady diet of doomsterism has warped the perspective of bien pensant leftists. As Steve Rose explains in The Guardian’s review of Infinity War.
“Thanos’s methods {galactic genocide} are hardly humane, but there is a logic to his argument: climate change and environmental destruction are inarguable threats. Human existence is unsustainable.”
I doubt Rose would so casually admit there is logic to anything Donald Trump or Paul Ryan said. But a psychopath planning to achieve sustainability by killing half the people in the galaxy – that he grudgingly admires. Even mass murder looks good by comparison to certain doom.
We have become very gullible. I doubt that any reform of America is possible until that changes. For more about that, see these posts.
The paper
“Freshening by glacial meltwater enhances melting of ice shelves and reduces formation of Antarctic Bottom Water.”
By Alessandro Silvano et al in Science Advances on 18 April 2018.
An oceanographic survey was conducted on the continental shelf of the Sabrina Coast (115° to 125°E) between February 2014 and March 2015. They ran this data though a model, as described in the abstract.
“Strong heat loss and brine release during sea ice formation in coastal polynyas act to cool and salinify waters on the Antarctic continental shelf. Polynya activity thus both limits the ocean heat flux to the Antarctic Ice Sheet and promotes formation of Dense Shelf Water (DSW), the precursor to Antarctic Bottom Water.
“However, despite the presence of strong polynyas, DSW is not formed on the Sabrina Coast in East Antarctica and in the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica. Using a simple ocean model driven by observed forcing, we show that freshwater input from basal melt of ice shelves partially offsets the salt flux by sea ice formation in polynyas found in both regions, preventing full-depth convection and formation of DSW. In the absence of deep convection, warm water that reaches the continental shelf in the bottom layer does not lose much heat to the atmosphere and is thus available to drive the rapid basal melt observed at the Totten Ice Shelf on the Sabrina Coast and at the Dotson and Getz ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea.
“Our results suggest that increased glacial meltwater input in a warming climate will both reduce Antarctic Bottom Water formation and trigger increased mass loss from the Antarctic Ice Sheet, with consequences for the global overturning circulation and sea level rise.”
For More Information
For more information see posts about doomsters, about shockwaves, about the precautionary principle, about the keys to understanding climate change, and especially these …
- Requiem for fear. Let’s learn from failed predictions to have confidence in ourselves & our future.
- Threats come & go, leaving us in perpetual fear & forgetful of the past.
- Dreams of apocalypses show the brotherhood of America’s Left & Right.
- Collapsitarians and their doomster porn.
- Focusing on worst case climate futures doesn’t work. It shouldn’t work.
- We love scary stories. The reason why reveals a secret about America.
- Banish the doomsters. Make Earth Day a celebration!
Important: see these posts about making America more skeptical and better able to clearly see the world.
One thing I’ve always found fascinating about liberals. Before they can bring themselves to criticize another liberal, they have to throw in the boiler plate “of course conservatives are equally guilty”.
Not that they actually provide evidence to support that claim.
In Progressive-land, this is what passes for ‘bi-partisan’.
He doesn’t want to appear to be one-sided, MarkW, so he blames the Left and Right equally but then when you read the rest of the article, the stupidity and propaganda is all on the part of the Left..
From the article: “Summary: Left and Right in America are in thrall to propaganda.”
I’m on the Right and I am not in thrall to propaganda. I am in thrall to the truth. Got any examples of people on the Right being in thrall to propaganda? And don’t give me any of that fringe alt-right BS.
Solution to the inundation of fake news/info & general cultural marxism — turn off the TV except for rare exceptions, forego current movies & dump magazines/newspapers. A few reasonable commentators are available on internet podcasts & live broadcasts — listen to them if desired.
You could also quit watching movies. Many people can’t differentiate between real life and movies. And many of them believe the outlandish claims of advertisements. Americans suffer from being gullible, and believing someone who has lied to them over and over again. Well, the latter could just be defective memory.
I agree beng.
I stopped my 2 newspapers years ago, and dropped TV news recently. The News is predominantly the BAD News – gathering up the actions of sociopaths around the world and bringing it into your home every day.
I grew up in a town where bad events rarely happened. That is probably the norm. Now, I think people are addicted to bad news – they want this un-needed stress in their lives and get their fix every day from the news.
Try cutting out the bad news from your daily life – strive to be happy. Works for me.
Best regards to all, Allan
Allan,
“I stopped my 2 newspapers years ago, and dropped TV news recently.”
I doubt that is a useful solution. News media are and have always been biased. In 1700, Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels) would read several newspapers each day – piecing together the different perspectives to get a clearer view to the truth.
There is no short-cut or fast track to seeing the world.
Hi Larry,
I’ve seen the world – perhaps too much of it. I’ve done major business on six continents, and conclude that about 90% of the countries on the planet are run by criminals, great and small.
Most of the news is irrelevant to you as an individual, in that you cannot do anything about it – all you can do is be aware of the events and too often feel bad about them.
I tend to focus on things I can change, and have had considerable success in those endeavors. The rest of the stuff is just background noise – and too often it is collective misery that tends to darken my view of life.
I greatly value the beauty, sanctity and innocence of life, and strive to preserve it.
One of my recent achievements is described below. Earlier ones are described on my website.
Best regards, Allan
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/01/01/almost-half-of-the-contiguous-usa-still-covered-in-snow/comment-page-1/#comment-2708670
This all boils down to:
+1,000,000
Mr. Middleton: your reply here combined with several of your others, seems to me that you must have a very good taste in movies! (Or maybe we share the same bad taste…?) Have a good weekend!
I have most of the dialog memorized… LOL!
Michael S: You are of course included! 😉
…full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses…’ 😀
“No ma’am. We’re musicians.”
“We have BOTH kinds… Country AND Western!”
“Got my Cheese Whiz, boy?” 😎
Anthony, I have always been intellectually rejuvenated by Larry Kummer’s threads and even if I disagree with him on a few things I always at least enjoy his posts.
But, sweet jumpin’ crickets of doom, why in the world do his posts always include so many links back to his site? Maybe it doesn’t bother any body else but it feels like a big Fabius Maximus commercial.
Me too!
I think he writes his posts there and stores his media there. I sometimes upload my media to my personal blog and then link back to it from my posts here, particularly if I write the original article there.
David,
These posts are like chapters in a book. Other posts have supporting information and analysis.
That some people are bothered by links is …strange.
I do the same thing… Just not so well-organized… LOL!
He didn’t say that he was bothered by links. He was bothered by the apparent self-promotion.
Mark,
Andrew said: “Why in the world do his posts always include so many links back to his site?”
It’s supporting info. Hardly self-promotion, since the number of people who click on links is microscopic.
One thing I’ve learned from 15 years in this gig: nothing is too trivial for some people to complain about. “The princess and the pea” is the daily story of how some read the internet.
On the other hand there have been some who only post here so that they can include a link back to their own site.
Well… I don’t know if it’s the only reason… but yeah.
You’ll notice Larry, that my posts were complementary to both what you write and how you write it. I have read a fair amount of stuff on this site going back 5 or 6 years, an although I have disagreed with some of your conclusions, I like the fact that you understand the notion of critical thinking.
Having said that, you really have no need to be defensive. It was a statement. It does feel like a site commercial. It doesn’t mean I don’t like you or that I don’t like what you write. Indeed, I have even gone to your site, which is pretty decent for a luke-warmer site.
Quite frankly, I think as you toss the “Princess and the Pea” fable at me, just remember that it goes both ways.
Peace, my friend, just a thought and not an attack.
Computer model output is NOT SCIENCE!
Often, neither is the input.
Yep! It’s called GIGO Garbage In Garbage Out.
I used to be one, when I was in my early 20’s. fast forward a decade.. now I’m embarrassed at my past emotional state.
Winston S. Churchill supposedly once observed that anyone who was not a liberal at 20 years of age had no heart, while anyone who was still a liberal at 40 had no head. If there’s any truth to the observation, one wonders what to make of today’s college students.
sums it up perfect. These modern watermelons are intolerable
I have the same issue, but my emotional state dates back to the ice age scare in the 60’s and 70’s. Doesn’t stop it from being embarrassing though.
Where do “east” and “west” Antarctica begin and end, and how were these locations chosen?
The international dateline does not answer the question, by the way.
No – the Greenwich Meridian does.
Well you draw a line through the middle of Oz and it’s quite simple really-
&exph=476&expw=927&q=map+australia+top+of+world&simid=608039789429787423&selectedIndex=1&ajaxhist=0
Easy, East Antarctica is the part that is in the eastern hemisphere, and Western Antarctica is in the Western hemisphere.
It is all about geography. East Antarctica is separated from West Antarctica by a major transcontinental range of mountains The Transantarctic Mountains. West Antarctica is part of the Pacific ring of fire, mountainous, volcanic and earthquake prone. West Antarctica is separated from East Antarctica by the two embayments of the Weddell Sea and the Ross Sea. East Antarctica forms the major part of the continental area. Its rocks are geologically older than those of the west. In some respects East Antarctica is geologically similar to Australia, while West Antarctica is geologically similar to New Guinea.
Half of the political extremes as represented by the terms “Left” and “Right” are wrong.
Left still means intrusion in others’ lives on the vain hope that personal stress about, now climate, can be relieved by forcing someone else to do something they would not do otherwise. The sad part is that these personal concerns can never be relieved. A little while ago it was about Alar on apples. In the early 1970s, it was “Global Cooling”.
Nowadays, when the Left is opposed it accuses the opposition as being Right Wing. Or, as Ms. Clinton exclaimed in the early 1990s a “vast right-wing conspiracy”.
Now, to the part that is wrong.
The terms “Left” and “Right” were used in the first part of the 1900s to define the difference between international socialists and national socialists. Both are authoritarian and in calling for limited government today, which is opposed to the “Left” it is not, repeat not, “Right Wing”.
One should be able to criticize intrusion by demented authoritarians trying to “manage” the economy, or boasting they can “manage” the temperature of the nearest planet without being berated as a “Right-Wing Nazi”.
A reform to less government is not fascist.
Modern physicist, Murray Gell-Mann, had an elegant definition of authoritarian or totalitarian:
“That which isn’t compulsory is prohibited”.
Which, clearly, puts Communists, Nazis, socialists, 21st-century liberals summed up as the Left in one box.
The first known usage of the terms “left” and “right” in politics was during the French Revolution, when the seating of the members of the National Assembly were arranged such that supporters of the monarchy were on the right of the Assembly’s president, and the supporters of the Revolution were on his left.
I’ll sign the above post as : Non-Right Wing Bob Hoye
I ran across a nice definition of B.S. recently:
Carefully worded non-sense.
If the goal is to leave the bulk of the world’s remaining carbon fuels in the ground, then gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, coal, and natural gas must be made as expensive today as they will be in a hundred years time. This can be done by levying a stiff tax on carbon and by imposing a system of carbon pollution fines which is the functional equivalent of a legislated tax on carbon.
Even these measures may not be enough. A carbon fuel rationing scheme might be necessary in the form of mandatory energy conservation measures combined with explicit limits on the quantities of carbon fuel that governments allow private and publicly owned corporations to produce.
So far, with but few exceptions, most of the people claiming to profess a profound concern about climate change have studiously avoided advocating the only possible means of keeping those carbon fuels in the ground — using the coercive power of government in directly controlling how much carbon fuel modern society is allowed to produce and to consume.
It’s scary watching them at work. They badger each other into a mad frenzy trying to out do each other in hyperbole and doom-mongery. With SJWs, it’s not even Left and Right anymore. It’s do as I say, because I know better than you, because I care more. I’m the self-appointed moral guardian of humanity. Yet they are surprised they did not get voted in. Simple. To the SJWs (like Chris Mooney): you care more about things which are not problems, you do not care about things which are problems.
I predict more books and growing doom. It’s how evolution works in the media-based reward system.
I saw the latest Avengers movie on Wednesday and kept thinking, “Thanos sounds just like liberal eco-extremists. He’s a bigger version of Paul Ehrlich.” What I find funny is that they don’t seem to realize that Thanos is the bad guy in the movie.
… like Samuel L. Jackson’s character in the first “Kingsmen” movie
McGuirck,
I agree. It is amazing that the critics — mostly liberals or leftists — didn’t pause at Thanos’ application of their own beliefs.
Actually, it is very easy to understand why alarmism of any sort is so popular. Yes, any sort – “international communist menace”, “the threat of terrorism”, “the threat of immigration” – these are just a few that more right-wing people worry about and with similarly poor justification as »leftists« fret about global warming, endangered polar bears, plastic in the oceans, etc. You can never »regain our scepticism and desire to see the world clearly« unless you realise that both are based on an old fixed-action principle that has been with our species for 200.000 years, and probably with our ancestors before – so it is not likely to just dissapear.
Simplified, we humans tend to value loss higher than that of gain, i.e, we are prone to risk aversion. Try it on yourself, if you do not believe it: would you bet your house against your neighbour’s on a flip of a coin? There is an evolutionary reason why: our ancestors have survived with what they had – but they had no reason to believe that they would have survived better with additional wealth gained by risking what they had. The example above is a case of a fair 1:1 bet. Would you bet your house against your neighbour’s on a throw of two coins, where you lose only if both come up heads, i.e., 3:1 in your favour? 100:1? Take this to its extreme and you will realise that if an action does not cost you much yet is supposed to prevent even a purely hypotheticak threat to your existance, you will do it: throw some salt over the shoulder if you spill it, avoid the path that a black cat has just crossed, knock on wood if wish for something good, etc. Or join some protests against global warming. Or fiddle some research. It is called cheap insurance.
Expansionist communism didn’t pose a threat?
Terrorists are nothing to worry about?
Mass illegal immigration is not a problem? (BTW, I love the way liberals have to lie about this. The issue isn’t immigration, it’s illegal immigration. But you just have to make it about race.)
Really?
> Expansionist communism didn’t pose a threat?
Not really. Do analyse the weapons systems of USSR and USA and tell me which one was equipped for an aggressive, first-strike posture.
> Terrorists are nothing to worry about?
To start with, calculate your statistical probability of being involved as a victim in a terrorist incident – and compare it to your statistical probability of being involved in a serious traffic accident. Furthermore, consider which threat is worse: international terrorism which has killed less than 10.000 people in the last 20 years – or US “anti-terrorism” which kills about that many every year, 80% civilians?
Terrorists (or more precisely, asymmetric combatants) are primarily a threat to ruling elites. The defining characteristic of a sovereign state is its monopoly on violence, and therefore, monopoly on legal violence is the defining prerogative of ruling elites. Terrorists threaten that monopoly by perpetrating violence against the sovereign state’s citizens and therefore diminish the authority of ruling elites.
> Mass illegal immigration is not a problem?
If you regard it as a problem, please consider that you personally are a descendant of mass migrants who have displaced aboriginal people of your continent. Furthermore, mass migrations recently arriving into Europe via Libya and from Syria are the result of US and EU meddling in those countries – one would naively presume that our glorious democratic leaders had some inkling as to what would happen if they destabilised “nondemocratic” regimes in those countries.
MarkW, the world is not just white and black and The West are not always the good guys.
I am frequently embarrassed by beliefs of some if my “allies” in the CAGW debate – some views they hold dear are even less based on fact or science than the theory of anthropogenic global warming.
And we see MIso doubling down. Good idea to drop the parts about “communist threat = global warming”. MarkW, Miso cleared out communist threat in one sentence! I recall soviets having HUGE advantages in things like tanks, troops, etc., but such details will bounce right off somebody who thinks he can sum it all up in one sentence. And now the terrorist threat = polar bear threat (again, ?!) becomes terrorist threat to one individual = traffic accidents. Then, mass immigration designed to destroy civilization = centuries’ old immigration to come and build civilization. You are embarrassed by us?! Please stop embarrassing yourself.
Miso, so in what passes for your mind, the only way a country can be aggressive is via nuclear weapons?
The main reason why the threat of terrorism is so small is precisely because we have been fighting them.
As to your nonsense about them only being a threat to this so called elite, it isn’t the elite who get blown up in shopping malls.
Illegal immigrants bring crime and disease, they also strain the welfare system.
If that’s not a problem to you, it’s probably because you aren’t a taxpayer.
I love the way the troll declares that things aren’t black and white, as he proclaims that the west is always wrong and conservatives are evil.
Re: Miso Alkalaj
In almost every discussion of politics on the Web there is always some condescending, very verbal fruit who insists on moral equalization of the West and Soviet/Post-Soviet Russia. Apart from a million of other reasons why this position doesn’t hold water, consider just one undeniable fact: why is it that blood-soaked dictators like Putin and his thievish sidekicks always channel their ill-gotten money to Western countries but there is no opposite flow of dollars into Russia?
If things were so “morally equal,” why is it that the West always serves as a safe haven, and Russia is always the place people run from for their lives?
Alexander, even more telling. The west builds walls to keep people out. The Soviets had to build walls to keep people in.
Miso: Such exquisite balance! I’m on the right, and never considered that “communist threat” as poorly justified just like global warming; “terrorist threat” same as polar bear threat (?!); and “threat of immigration” same as drifting plastic (punctuation marks just won’t do for this whopper). Does solving life’s great mysteries in 2 short paragraphs tire one out? Did not know being “in the middle” was cause for virtue signaling. Anyway, thanks for (unintentionally) clarifying that the right rings alarm bells supported by evidence.
Ahhhh…. the vacuous bliss of relativism ‘thought’, where the very real threat of tiger eyes shining just beyond the illumination of the fire are deemed comparatively the same as an owl hooting in the distance.
There are evolutionary survival reasons why most homo sapiens reject your relativist inequalities. Some threats are ‘real and present dangers’. Skepticism is an essential part of threat assessment, management of risks, and prioritizing of resources to meet the real and present dangers.
I think, therefor I am skeptical….
Once again people such as Miso fail to recognize how communism manifests itself, while making a litany of excuses based in fantasy about what capitlism is or what communism isn’t:
Call it what you want (fascism/socialism/communism) but what we have here in the US is certainly anything but actual capitalism, and that video I just posted lays it out quite clearly. Additionally, if people such as this Miso fella had any ability to honestly appraise history, which necessitates researching the major players and their organizations, it would be patently clear they are themselves living in self-deceit…which makes sense for those suffering from group think; They cannot be real in-dividuals (un-divided) because a true undivided human lives without internal conflict. That is the essence of the In-dividual (but they don’t even know the language, or which is typical, obfuscate so we cannot actually come to terms, which permits them (in their own mind) to wiggle out of absolutes in discussion) It is a tactic of the emotionally devastated or weak. I am of the mind is it pure childishness weakness.
What we have here is yet another conditioned self-enslaving tool of those who made money in an actual capitalist system back when, using their immense wealth, bought power and influence to change the playing field so as to usher in strong governments to regulate fair competition (see New Deal, State mandated public education, The Federal Reserve, countless 3-letter regulatory organizations, abuse of the interstate commerce clause, etc etc etc, through the systemic dumbing down of the population so they would buy into this system of slavery (see How the truth became illegal parts 1-4 by School Sucks Podcast) and worked with crony politicians put in power by those same wealthy elites (JP Morgan, Chase Manhattan, Rockefeller, Dupont etc families) and it becomes quite clear how we ended up here, which is NOT Capitalistic any more, but a vague distant memory of a once remembered folk lore. PERIOD. FULL STOP. FOR ALL TIME.
Miso, you are a blunt tool, which is unfortunate, because you are only good at hammering home one idealogy, and a false one at that. People that possess such a limited intelligence, and I say that as an accurate appraisal, are the worst reflection of the limitless creativity and splendor of the human species. Most notably because of your complete lack of faith in yourself and others, but more so because you live in such a state of unfounded fear. You need boogeymen to explain your lack of sophistication, success, etc, so you create them through false meme’s given to you by your masters in “education”, and now you feel comfortable blaming an invisible boogeyman you created yourself. It is pathetic.
and to end, I find it so painfully ironic that people such as yourself formulate a worldview which is founded upon the evilness, greed, and foulness of humans, yet simultaneously you want to build an intricate system of control in which you necessarily put those same people in places of authority and power they would have otherwise not had access, and expect them to behave contrary to their nature. It is profoundly ignorant and insulting to those of us with any modicum of intelligence.
Miso:
I speak from personal experience, having traveled to Erich Honecker’s East Germany and Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
Both were sh!tholes, where human rights were trampled and sensible people sought to escape.
Apologists for these regimes were called “useful idiots”, reportedly by Lenin. You are one of them.
Regards, Allan
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/02/26/strategic-minerals-our-next-energy-and-security-crisis/comment-page-1/#comment-2753300
[excerpt]
… we had a socialist leader of the NDP political party return from East Germany and the traitor extolled it as the “economic model for Canada”, circa the early 1980’s. I was there in 1989 just before the Berlin Wall fell, and it was a sh!thole. Details below.
I was also in Cuba under Fidel, for a Board meeting, and it was also a failed state, economically poorer but less repressive at that time than East Germany.
Best, Allan
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/12/31/mother-jones-trump-effect-undermining-support-for-german-green-energy/comment-page-1/#comment-2386559
[excerpt]
Here is something I wrote long ago on the subject.
This article is true. I’ve also been to Cuba, and it is a cesspool of poverty and degradation (Trudeau boys, please take note).
What is truly interesting is that there are still apologists for Castro and Cuba here in Canada, even as Fidel himself has recently admitted that Cuba is a failed state.
They are probably the same “useful idiots” who said that Communist East Germany was a good model for Canada to emulate. I seem to recall several former NDP leaders who tried to sell us that line of BS (the names Broadbent and Lewis come to mind).
I travelled to East Germany, going through the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie in 1989, shortly before the Wall fell. East Germany was a cesspool too. While not as materially poor as Castro’s Cuba, it was an even more vicious police state where neighbour spied upon neighbour, and nobody felt safe from the Stasi secret police. Those who tried to escape were shot, and allowed to bleed to death in “no-man’s land” between the many barbed-wire fences that formed “the Wall”.
Epilogue
The last person to be shot and killed while trying to cross the border from East to West Germany was Chris Gueffroy on February 6, 1989. He was 20 years old. Rest in peace, kid.
George Washington wrote a cautionary note to America in his farewell address over the dangers of factions and various groups seeking advantage over their rivals or looking out for their own special interests. Even though it was written 220 years ago it comes through as if it was a commentary on our own times.
http://www.mountvernon.org/education/primary-sources-2/article/washingtons-farewell-address-1796/
Keith,
Thanks for that great reminder. That America would fracture into factions was the Founders’ greatest fear. We have come close several times, once resulting in civil war.
It’s a ever-present danger in a large Republic.
Yuri Bezmenov: Deception Was My Job (Complete)
Published on Jan 21, 2011
This is G. Edward Griffin’s shocking video interview, Soviet Subversion of the Free-World Press (1984), where he interviews ex-KGB officer and Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov who decided to openly reveal KGB’s subversive tactics against western society as a whole.
https://youtu.be/y3qkf3bajd4
Jump to 1:07:30 for Bezmenov’s discussion of ideological subversion. It’s all about manipulating the “Useful Idiots” – the leftists in the West.
“Anote’s Ark,” a high profile documentary is playing at a Toronto film festival. It makes the patently false claim that the Pacific island nation of Kiribati is in the process of being inundated by rising sea levels. We are to blame – of course.
An uncontested, peer-reviewed 2010 study of Pacific Islands (including Kiribati) states: “Results show that 86% of islands remained stable (43%) or increased in area (43%) over the timeframe of analysis. Largest decadal rates of increase in island area range between 0.1 to 5.6 hectares. Only 14% of study islands exhibited a net reduction in island area.”
ftp://soest.hawaii.edu/coastal/Climate%20Articles/Atolls%20Growing%20Kench%202010.pdf
Here’s a quote from a BBC article about the widely publicized study: “A new geological study has shown that many low-lying Pacific islands are growing, not sinking. The islands of Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Federated States of Micronesia are among those which have grown, because of coral debris and sediment.”
The documentary is named after Anote Tong, Kiribati’s former President, who is making personal appearances to hype the film. It is totally inconceivable that he would not know about the science. Also, Kiribati’s current government has not bought into the propaganda. They are making long-term infrastructure investments financed by major Asian banks. The latter are not known for “sinking” funds into risky projects.
When Andrew Montford saw the pitch for funding the film (The island nation of Kiribati is disappearing!”) he appropriately asked: “How is this not fr*ud?”
Kiribati has serious overpopulation, economic and climate related issues, but sinking under the waves due to sea level rise is not one of them.
So that whole thing about glaciers calving – a NORMAL event – escapes these “scientists”?
You know, if you spend – or waste – a few minutes of your life, which you will never get back, reading Karl Marx’s stuff, he sounds perfectly reasonable… until you realize that his was the ideology that spawned communism and consumed lives by the millions.
Advertising English or language (if you don’t use English) is meant to attract your attention first, then draw you in, and then sell the product to you, even if you don’t want it. In this case, “climate” is the product, along with the ideology attached to it. Obeisance is required, of course, and the assumption is that the target audience is too stupid or gullible or uninformed to resist the sales pitch. There is also the scare tactic – do it or die, join up or be left behind, conform or be shunned.
I’d strongly suggest continuing to publish this stuff, but instead of just the excerpts, give us the opposing arguments with back-up. An assessment, paragraph by paragraph is in order in that, also.
I’d like to know why there is this insistence on approval of mass murder from these geniuses. It will not solve the problem, and no, they won’t be on top of the heap at the end. Stalin had this quixotic habit of executing anyone on a whim. He did that with some of his senior Army officers at the start of WWII. That mass slaughter tendency is a manifestation of a deep-seated hatred and a psychotic need for control. .
Sara,
“So that whole thing about glaciers calving – a NORMAL event – escapes these “scientists”?”
No, it doesn’t. But these alarmists are not scientists.
Another fun aspect of those films with the scary scenes of ice falling into the sea from glaciers calving – that results from glaciers advancing.
When they shrink, calving slows or stops.
Science is fun!
The late editor of the Washington Post, Ben Bradlee (of Richard Nixon Watergate reporting fame) must be spinning in his grave at the title of “WaPo reporter Chris Mooney.” You need only look at where Mooney came from to understand why: https://www.desmogblog.com/desmogblog-welcomes-chris-mooney
Russell,
Thanks for that valuable info. I’m adding it to me post.
There is a market for scary stories, and climate porn is just one sub-genre. Plausibility definitely takes a minor concern compared to just being scary.
This expresses my views on the enviro-angst prophesiers of doom (and many similar fools) best – Enjoy!
I’m For Love – Hank Williams Jr.
https://youtu.be/9O7dE6YJ5hs
I know the world temperatures during the peak of the previous interglacial about 125K years ago were higher than any peak we’ve seen in this present interglacial. What I have never seen in all my readings is what the state of ice in the Arctic Circle theoretically would have been 125KYA ? Could the Arctic Ice Cap have disappeared for a time at the 125KYA peak ? Temperatures being higher at 125KYA is not used enough to undermine the alarmists claims of “unprecedented warming”. It has happened before, and totally naturally. It was much warmer when, as I like to say, “when our ancestors were wearing animal skins, and making knives by bashing one rock against another rock”
It has been ice free for periods of time in THIS current interglacial.
I’d like to be able to cite evidence of pre-industrial era Arctic circle ice free eras. In this, or past Interglacial periods. Such an era would cut the legs from under those who fool the public with prophecies of imminent biosphere destruction should the Arctic Ice cap even shrink, much less disappear.
At least the Swedish Academy is going through a reform. I guess that makes the NYT a bunch of deadenders.
‘Human existence is unsustainable.’
If I were going to put all of greenie rhetoric into a single phrase, that would be it.
And don’t kid yourself – they really mean it.
And in a nutshell, this is why it’s so much worse than eugenics.
John,
As pointed out upthread — we get the ultimate Leftist solution: Thanos! Kill one-half the sentiment population of the galaxy and boom — problem solved.
One way to fight this is to ask “how does that [insert alarm story here] show that man’s CO2 is the cause?
Then ask “please show actual evidence that man’s CO2 is causing serious global warming”
When they point to some NASA propaganda page, ask which of those claims shows that man’s CO2 is the cause.
Thanks
JK
So where does bottom water form. Wherever this is good sea ice forming above (these climate scientists think you need near-by polynyas. They don’t even understand how it forms).
Here is bottom water forming in Antarctica. Great vid.
Misguided loons who want a colder world are delusional.
Truly great underwater photography. Have to feel sorry for the unsuspecting starfish.
Found this looking for Penn & Teller selling carbon credits in a grocery store parking lot. Almost as good.
Found a real gem…
Helen sounds like quite the loon. It’s great that she is getting publicity.
Another Caldicott debunking.
Larry likes to spout on about ‘propoganda’ whereas he chooses to ignore the reality of events on the ground. It is people like him and Pruitt who are politicizing the issue of AGW instead of focusing on the scientific-based evidence. Gases in the atmosphere topped 410 ppm in April 2018 as a result of man-made CO2 emissions and the graph is continuing to trend upwards.
Pruitt should be fired for his complete lack of qualifications to do his job. And Larry Kumer’ s view – well who really cares what good old Larry thinks?
http://mankindsdegradationofplanetearth.com/2018/05/04/greenhouse-gas-reaches-alarming-new-record-cnn/
Ooo, Co2 went from 1 out 3300 atmospheric molecules to 1 out of 2500 molecules. What happened when it was 1 out of 250 molecules? We’re still here….
Ivan,
Thank you for your comic relief about this serious subject!
In the real world I am a somewhat dogmatic supporter of the IPCC and major climate agencies. Our opponents are not those that rationally disagree about the science (such disagreement is the engine of science), but the people — like you — who make stuff up (as in your comment).
Making up and increase in atmospheric gases to 410 ppm is fact rather than fiction – the highest it has been for 800,000 years and set to go even higher. You don’t seem to be able to distinguish between the fiction and reality and muddle up well-founded scientific research with so-called ‘propoganda’.
“Gases in the atmosphere topped 410 ppm in April 2018 as a result of man-made CO2 emissions and the graph is continuing to trend upwards.”
And it’ll continue to trend upwards even if the U.S. cut its emissions in half, or to zero. U.S. emissions are declining. But Asian and African emissions are skyrocketing, and will continue to do so. Go tell those countries’ peoples they can’t have cars, fridges, electricity, an industrial revolution, etc.
Bullshit and you know it. China no. 1 and US no. 2 when it comes to CO2 emissions. EU doing a good job, though, in reducing CO2 levels because citizens recognise the dangers of AGW.
“Bullshit and you know it. China no. 1 and US no. 2 when it comes to CO2 emissions.”
Strawman. I didn’t deny that. I said that “U.S. emissions are declining,” which they are..
“EU doing a good job, though, in reducing CO2 levels”
Wrong. Its CO2 levels are rising (slightly). See https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/05/04/friday-funny-european-unions-failing-grade-on-co2-emissions/ It says:
“BRUSSELS (Reuters) – European Union carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels increased in 2017, statistics office Eurostat said on Friday, indicating that the reduction of emissions blamed for climate change remains a challenge.“