Category: Climate

Blocking the Sun

The sixth century AD was not a lot of fun for most people, especially in Europe. The Roman Empire had definitely fallen, at least in the West. With that fall came barbarian invasions, endless wars, economic decline, trade collapse, and infrastructure deterioration. The year 536 was the worst year of a bleak century. In fact, the year 536 might well be the worst in recorded history.

A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record “a failure of bread from the years 536–539.” Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse

What happened? The most widely accepted theory is that a volcano erupted in Iceland and emitted ash and dust into the atmosphere. This volcanic debris blocked enough sunlight to cause the Earth to cool as much as 4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit. Such a decline in temperature caused a devastating decline in agricultural productivity throughout the Northern Hemisphere leading to famine and plague. It took centuries for the population and economies of European and Asian states to recover.

The year 1816 was known as the Year without a Summer.

In the summer of 1816, the Northern Hemisphere was plagued by a weather disruption of seemingly biblical proportions. Following a relatively ordinary early spring, temperatures in the eastern United States plunged back below freezing, and communities from New England to Virginia experienced heavy snowfalls and crop-killing frost during June, July and August. Europe also found itself in the grip of an unseasonable chill. Winter snows refused to melt, and between April and September, some parts of the Continent were drenched by as many as many as 130 days of rain. The unrelenting gloom inspired author Mary Shelley to write her famous novel “Frankenstein,” but it also wreaked havoc on farmers. Crops failed across Europe and China, spawning deadly famines and outbreaks of typhus and other diseases. In India, the disturbances gave rise to a virulent new strain of cholera that eventually killed millions. The suffering in the United States was less pronounced, but many still felt the squeeze of soaring grain prices. Some poorer Americans were even reduced to eating hedgehogs and scrounging for wild turnips.

This time, a volcano erupted in Indonesia. Mount Tambora emitted ash and dust into the atmosphere. The volcanic debris blocked sunlight, causing the Earth to cool by .7 to 1 degree Fahrenheit, again causing a devastating decrease in agricultural productivity. 1816 was not as grim as 536, but the Year Without a Summer was enough to cause food shortages worldwide. The period of global cooling may also have changed American history by encouraging thousands of people to leave New England to settle in the Midwest.

In the twelfth century BC, the longstanding civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Fertile Crescent collapsed rather suddenly. Historians are still not certain what caused the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Many factors contributed to the Collapse, but it is possible that it was triggered by a volcanic eruption that emitted dust and ash into the atmosphere. This volcanic debris blocked sunlight causing the Earth to cool.

Do you begin to see a pattern here? Let’s not forget that the most widely accepted theory for the cause of the extinction of the Dinosaurs is that an asteroid hit the Earth, throwing tons of dust into the atmosphere. This dust blocked sunlight and caused the Earth to cool.

Clearly, any decrease in the amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth’s surface results in disaster for life and civilization. With that in mind, surely only a madman would suggest we pump aerosols into the atmosphere to block sunlight. This is precisely what some very influential people plan to do to fight climate change.

Bill Gates’s radical plan to “save the planet” from “climate change” by blocking out the Sun has officially launched as scientists began pumping chemicals into the sky this week.

As Slay News has previously reported, Bill Gates has long been advocating for the plan to fight “global warming” using experimental geoengineering to block the Sun.

The idea, promoted by Gates and leftist billionaire George Soros, involves pumping manmade white clouds into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from the planet’s surface.

The radical scheme would lower the planet’s temperature and allegedly “combat global warming.”

Soros claims the technology will help to prevent ice sheets from melting.

Ice sheets melting in Greenland in particular, he claimed, could doom human civilization.

“Our civilization is in danger of collapsing because of the inexorable advance of climate change,” Soros said.

“The melting of the Greenland ice sheet would increase the level of the oceans by seven meters.

“That poses a threat to the survival of our civilization,” he alleged.

The method pushed by Bill Gates involves increasing aerosol concentrations in the stratosphere to reflect solar radiation away from the Earth.

The people proposing this plan are either insane or evil. Most likely they are both. They are mad enough to believe they can control the climate. They are evil enough to aspire to become the worst mass murderers in history. If this plan is implemented, we will see a repeat of some of the worst years in history. Millions could die of starvation. We will not have to worry about the imaginary threat of global warming. We will experience the very real threat of global cooling. We will not have to worry about the ice sheets of Greenland melting. We will have to worry about the polar ice caps advancing down North America and Eurasia.

This is a really bad idea

I do not remember ever being asked to vote on this madcap scheme. There has certainly been little public discussion of the concept. Even if the idea of blocking sunlight to fight global warming was sound, I think implementing actions that might drastically alter the Earth’s climate ought to be decided in some form of democratic manner. It definitely ought not to be decided by a handful of powerful oligarchs whose wealth will protect them from the consequences of their folly.

The Gates-Soros plan to bring about a new ice age is as mad as it is evil. It has to be stopped.

 

Warning Labels on Everything

Last month, Arnold Schwarzenegger revealed his plans to sue the oil companies for first degree murder because of their contributions to and denial of climate change.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s next mission: taking oil companies to court “for knowingly killing people all over the world.”

The former California governor and global environmental activist announced the move Sunday at a live recording of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast here at the SXSW festival, revealing that he’s in talks with several private law firms and preparing a public push around the effort.

“This is no different from the smoking issue. The tobacco industry knew for years and years and years and decades, that smoking would kill people, would harm people and create cancer, and were hiding that fact from the people and denied it. Then eventually they were taken to court and had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars because of that,” Schwarzenegger said. “The oil companies knew from 1959 on, they did their own study that there would be global warming happening because of fossil fuels, and on top of it that it would be risky for people’s lives, that it would kill.”

Schwarzenegger said he’s still working on a timeline for filing, but the news comes as he prepares to help host a major environmental conference in May in Vienna.

“We’re going to go after them, and we’re going to be in there like an Alabama tick. Because to me it’s absolutely irresponsible to know that your product is killing people and not have a warning label on it, like tobacco,” he said. “Every gas station on it, every car should have a warning label on it, every product that has fossil fuels should have a warning label on it.”

He argues that at the very least, this would raise awareness about fossil fuels and encourage people to look to alternative fuels and clean cars.

He added, “I don’t think there’s any difference: If you walk into a room and you know you’re going to kill someone, it’s first degree murder; I think it’s the same thing with the oil companies.”

I think that those steroids that Schwarzenegger used to bulk up have caused his brain to rot. If we were to put warning labels on every single thing that uses fossil fuels in their manufacture, we would have to put a warning label on almost every single thing. Our manufacturers absolutely depend on the electricity provided by fossil fuels. Alternative sources of energy such as wind and solar do not even come close to providing, by orders of magnitude, the energy needed to keep our economy running.

Aside from that, fossil fuels themselves are components in various industrial processes. The gasoline in our cars is not the only petroleum product we use on a daily basis. Plastic is also created from petroleum. In his article at PJMedia , Tyler O’Neil provides a short list of the sort of things that would require a warning label if Arnold had his way.

ink, upholstery, vitamin capsules, dashboards, skis, mops, umbrellas, nylon rope, shampoo, guitar strings, refrigerators, toys (LEGOs, for instance), glue, cameras, pajamas, purses, life jackets, luggage, toothbrushes, toothpaste, crayons, pillows, balloons, football helmets, footballs, roller-skate wheels, nail polish, panty hose, insect repellant, ice cube trays, trash bags, sun glasses, paint brushes, artificial limbs, perfumes, soap, shoes, slacks, DVDs, dice, surf boards, tents, telephones, drinking cups, milk jugs, Aspirin, lipstick, rubbing alcohol, shaving cream, garden hose, heart valves, hearing aids, and toilet seats.

A more complete list can be found here. I suspect that even the warning labels would be made of plastic that comes from petroleum.

This campaign against fossil fuels is, in many ways, a campaign against modernity. Before the introduction of fossil fuels and the Industrial Revolution, humanity used such renewable sources of energy as the sun, wind, and most importantly the muscles of humans and animals. Life was not a utopia in which everyone lived in harmony with the Earth. Life, for most people, was nasty, brutish and short, with only a very small elite (the 1%) living in anything resembling the comfort taken for granted by almost everyone lucky enough to live in the developed world. Fossil fuels helped make our present levels of prosperity and economic development possible. If restrictions or punitive fines and taxation make access to fossil fuels and the power and products they provide more expensive, the cost of nearly everything will increase. For a successful movie star and businessman like Arnold Schwarzenegger, this would no burden, but for those of us who are not wealthy, this campaign against fossil fuels will result in a lower standard of living,and for those still living in poverty in the developing world, increased poverty and the loss of any hope of improving their circumstances. Whatever the intentions of Green crusaders like Schwarzenegger, the policies they advance may create a sort of neo-Medieval world in which a tiny elite live in comfort while the great masses lack the necessities of life.

Of course, they may not see it that way. Implied in this crusade against fossil fuels is the idea that alternative, renewable sources of energy will be able to pick up the slack as fossil fuels are regulated and taxed out of profitability. In the long run, fossil fuels will become obsolete, probably sooner than anyone believes, but I do not think that making us all poorer will speed up the process and I am not sure that these people really want us to have cheap, abundant energy from any source. Nuclear power is the one alternative to fossil fuels that is really viable right now and the same people who want us not to use fossil fuels do not seem to be very excited by the idea of replacing our coal plants with nuclear reactors, even though that would drastically lower our carbon footprint. I sometimes wonder if it is global warming or resource depletion they are worried about, or the idea of the common deplorables having access to cheap, abundant energy.

In any case, let’s hope that Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn’t get anywhere with his insane lawsuit.

Earth Day

Today is Earth Day and what better way to celebrate than to recall the predictions of the first Earth Day back in 1970. Here is a list, courtesy of Freedom Works.

  1. “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”  — Harvard biologist George Wald
  2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” — Washington University biologist Barry Commoner
  3. “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” — New York Times editorial
  4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” — Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich
  5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [By 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” — Paul Ehrlich
  6. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” — Denis Hayes, Chief organizer for Earth Day
  7. “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” — North Texas State University professor Peter Gunter
  8. “In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution… by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” — Life magazine
  9. “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt
  10. “Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” — Paul Ehrlich
  11. “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate… that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt
  12. “[One] theory assumes that the earth’s cloud cover will continue to thicken as more dust, fumes, and water vapor are belched into the atmosphere by industrial smokestacks and jet planes. Screened from the sun’s heat, the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” — Newsweek magazine
  13. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” — Kenneth Watt

For more information about these predictions, read this article from way back in 2000 in Reason.com. 

I grew up in the 1970’s and 1980’s and heard these sorts of doomsday predictions all the time. I was young and foolish enough to believe them. I sincerely thought that the world of my future would be an overpopulated, polluted dystopia. As I got older, I happened to notice that none of these gloomy predictions seemed to be coming true. We were not all starving to death or choking on pollution. There was still enough gasoline to fill up our tanks and the price, adjusted for inflation, seemed to be constant. That didn’t stop the doomsday predictions. You might think that the people making these predictions would be relieved that none of them came true. Some them might even admit that they were wrong and try to find out where they erred. No, the predictions kept on coming. Now it is global warming/climate change that is going to destroy the world. Somehow, doomsday keeps getting put off. It is always ten to twenty years in the future.

This is one of the reasons I am skeptical about just about everything the environmentalists claim. I have a working memory and I remember very well the failed predictions that they have made. Since they have been wrong so many times before, why should I start believing them now? At some point you have to consider that they are either mistaken or lying.

Now, you can argue that the stricter pollution control laws enacted since that first Earth Day have prevented the dystopian future that had been predicted. That is undoubtedly true. Advancing technology has also helped. More efficient machines mean less pollution. The Green Revolution has helped to feed billions who would otherwise have starved. But, that also kind of proves my point, at least about predicting the future. People do not just stand by passively as the world falls apart around them. They take action to fix things. This is why future dystopias are never very accurate glimpses of the future. If the world is indeed warming, then people will take action to ameliorate any ill effects caused by changing climates. There is no reason to worry the future and every reason to be optimistic. And remember, we humans do not have the last word on what is going to happen to this world. That is the prerogative of the One who created it.

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The Rise and Fall of the Akkadian Empire

The first great empire builder known to history was Sargon of Akkad who founded the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia. Dates are always uncertain in ancient times, but the best guess for the reign of Sargon seems to be from 2334 to 2279 BC, though some accounts have his death at 2215. He lived in the Sumerian city of Kish, though he was not a Sumerian but a member of the Semitic people later known as Akkadians. Sargon’s actual name, or title, was Sarru-kinu meaning true or legitimate king in the Semitic language he spoke. This name that he apparently adopted, his birth name is unknown, is a good indication that he was not the legitimate king but a usurper, which is indeed the case. According to legends, Sargon was the cup-bearer to King Ur-Zababa of King, also a Semite. Sargon apparently led a coup against Ur-Zababa, with the support of the goddess Inanna, or Ishtar as she was later known, and deposed and killed him.

Bronze head of a king, most likely Sargon of A...
Bronze head of a king, most likely Sargon of Akkad but possibly Naram-Sin. Unearthed in Nineveh (now in Iraq). In the Iraqi Museum, Baghdad. Height 30.5 cm. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Once secure in power at Kish, Sargon began a series of military campaigns against the other Sumerian city-states, eventually uniting all of Mesopotamia. He led his armies North, East, and West until he had conquered parts of Syria, Iran, and Asia Minor. Not content to rule from Kish, Sargon founded his own city, Akkad or Agade to be the new capital or his new empire. Thus his people came to be known as Akkadians and his empire the Akkadian Empire. The Akkadian Empire lasted a little under two centuries and then fell rather abruptly around 2154. A semi-nomadic and uncivilized people from the Zagros Mountains known as the Gutians invaded and conquered Mesopotamia, ending the Akkadian Empire and disrupting the economy and culture of the region in a century long dark age.

Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/...
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This account of the fall of the Akkadian Empire to barbarian invaders seems straightforward enough, but there must be more to the story. Why were the Gutians able to overcome their more advanced and civilized neighbors so easily? The Sumerians and Akkadians had been able to hold them off before. Why did the Gutians decide to leave their homes in the mountains and move to Mesopotamia instead of simply being content with raiding?
Archaeologists have discovered that the soil deposited in this period was dry and sandy, lacking traces of the activity of earthworms. It seems likely that there was a change in climate in the twenty-second century BC causing the entire region to become more arid. Agriculture failed due to the long lasting drought causing famine. The cities were overpopulated by famine and Mesopotamian civilization broke down under the strain. Meanwhile, the Gutians also suffered from the drought and left their homes to seek food and water in Mesopotamia. This change in climate probably affected much of West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean region. It was during this period that the Old Kingdom in Egypt ended with Egypt falling into chaos.

We like to believe that we human beings are the masters of our destiny both as individuals and as nations. Most historical accounts of the rise and fall of empires attribute the fate of nations largely to human elements, what this or that king or statesman did, or these or those economic and social conditions. They do not like to give credit to nature for its contribution, yet nature in the form of changes of climate and epidemics has surely played a greater role in the course of history than many kings.

About a thousand years after the fall of the Akkadian Empire, around 1200 BC, there was another prolonged period of drought throughout Western Asia and North Africa, causing the collapse of every civilization in the area and vast movements of people. The Hittite Empire in Asia Minor, the Egyptian New Kingdom, the Mycenaean Greeks and others were swept away in the chaos. Assyria and Babylon in Mesopotamia survived but were weakened for more than a century. We perhaps retain dim memories of these dire years in Homer’s poems about the Trojan War and the Biblical accounts from Exodus to Judges.

Plague destroyed Athens’s chance of winning the Peloponnesian War with Sparta. Climate change may have been a leading factor in the decline of the Roman Empire in the West while also explaining the movements of Germans and Huns into Roman territories. Plague and short term climate change, perhaps caused by a volcanic eruption in the tropics during the reign of Justinian made his dream of reconquering the Western Empire impossible. The prosperous period known as the High Middle Ages coincided with the Medieval Warm Period. When the climate cooled and the Black Death appeared, the High Middle Ages ended.

This is part of the reason why I cannot take the warnings and alarmism of the environmentalists too seriously. The Greens seem to believe that nature has been in a state of perfect equilibrium for eons only to be disturbed by the coming of Homo sapiens. Human beings, and only human beings are responsible for any changes in climate or the environment. We are responsible for the degradation of the planet and only we can save the planet. This is all nonsense. The planet Earth has been around long before we appeared on the scene and will be around after we are extinct. The Earth doesn’t need us to save it. The effects of nature on the climate and the environment dwarf anything we could ever dream of doing. It really wouldn’t take much of a change in climate to bring our advanced civilization crashing down just like the Akkadian Empire and we would no more be able to stop it than they were.

That is not to say that we shouldn’t be concerned about the damage we do to our environment. It is never wise to foul one’s own nest, but let’s not deceive ourselves into believing we have more impact than we actually do.

Goggle Gatekeeper

The internet is truly a wonderful invention, for which Al Gore doesn’t get nearly enough credit for creating. Thanks to the internet anyone can research any topic and acquire information in a matter of minutes that would have taken hours or even days before, if at all.  Best of all, one can bypass the traditional gatekeepers of information such as the mainstream media. There is the problem of the quality of the information gathered by search engines such as Google. Since the results are generally ranked by popularity, websites promoting crazy conspiracy theories and medical quackery get the same attention as sober scientific journals. It requires a certain amount of judgement to sift through the results of any web search to get accurate information.

According to some reports, Google is getting ready to do the sifting for us. The researchers at Google are trying to develop a search algorithm that will rank pages according to facts in their database. Webpages will get a truth score based on how closely the claims in that page correspond to the facts in Google’s database. They will then be ranked according to how truthful or accurate they are, at least according to Google.

It should not come as much of a surprise that progressives are gleeful about the possibility of putting a new gatekeeper over the Internet. Reality and truth have a liberal bias, as they say, and fact-checking by the right sort of people can make sure people with ideas contrary to liberal truths are able able to spread their misinformation. I read an article in Salon that is positively ecstatic about putting “anti-science advocates” in their place.

Google could launch an effort to keep trolls and bad information at bay, with a program that would rank websites according to veracity, and sort results according to those rankings. Currently, the search engine ranks pages according to popularity, which means that pages containing unsubstantiated celebrity gossip or conspiracy theories, for example, show up very high.

Google has recently implemented a kind of Knowledge-Based Truth score lite with its medical search results. Now, doctors and real medical experts vet search results about health conditions, meaning anti-vaxx propaganda will not appear in the top results for a “measles” search, for instance.

Even though the former program is just in the research stage, some anti-science advocates are upset about the potential development, likely because their websites will become buried under content that is, well, true.

“I worry about this issue greatly,” said Anthony Watts, founder of climate denying website “Watts Up With That,” in an interview with FoxNews.com. “My site gets a significant portion of its daily traffic from Google… It is a very slippery and dangerous slope because there’s no arguing with a machine.”

One need not have read John Stuart Mill to understand why this is a bad idea, though it might help. You only need to ask a simple question, what if Anthony Watts is right?What if global warming is not a real threat and measures to prevent it will only waste billions of dollars and make a lot of people poorer? Well, we wouldn’t know until too late because Google might place his blog at the bottom of the rankings because they believe him to be wrong. A gatekeeper in charge of sifting good information from bad will not eliminate the problem of bad information on the Internet. It will only ensure that bad information preferred by the gatekeeper will go unchallenged. This idea that the common people cannot decide for themselves what is correct and incorrect has been the pretext for autocrats, despots, and theocrats, throughout history to justify controlling the information possessed by the common people by censorship, propaganda, or other methods. The despots and autocrats have never liked to be shown that they were wrong and their contemporary admirers are no better. If Google ever manages to make this truth ranking system to work, it will inevitably reflect what the designers of the new search algorithm believe to be the truth whether right or wrong. Truths that they do not like, perhaps like global warming is a fraud, will be buried.

Messy as it is, we must have faith that in the free marketplace of ideas the truth will ultimately prevail over falsehood. There is no other way to get at the truth except by allowing all sides to have their say. I predict that if Google adopts this new search method, Google will be a great deal less useful as a search engine and perhaps people will turn elsewhere to find things on the Internet.

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Game Over for the Planet

Here is another message I just received from Moveon.org.

Dear MoveOn member,

In just hours, the Senate will vote on whether to push forward the Keystone XL pipeline—a disastrous and dangerous proposal that would, in the words of leading climate scientists and environmentalists, be “game over for the planet.”1

Either the Senate will send President Obama a Keystone pipeline bill TODAY—and we will need him to promise to veto it; or the Democrats will defeat the measure by one vote, which means that in just seven weeks, a new Republican majority will send him the pipeline—and we’ll need him to veto it in January.

Either way, President Obama is our last line of defense. So we’re joining with allies to mobilize grassroots support demanding that the president commit to vetoing the pipeline bill—today or early next year.

Will you chip in $3 to help stop the Keystone XL pipeline—and to push Democrats and President Obama to be bold in the fights ahead?

Yes, I’ll chip in.

We’ve already begun fighting back. We’re helping organize rallies outside wavering senators’ offices. We’re mobilizing calls to senators. And we’re providing organizers on the ground with access to MoveOn tools and connections to MoveOn members.  

We’re mobilizing because this is a hugely important fight on its own—and it’ll set the stage for the next two years.

When the Republicans take control of the Senate in January, we can expect a rush of right-wing, anti-climate, anti-science bills: a rollback of President Obama’s efforts to regulate carbon, bills to undermine his climate change agreement with China, and bills that give rein to the extractive practices of frackers, Big Coal, and Big Oil.

Following the midterms, some Democrats are feeling nervous—and they are hearing from the usual chorus of consultants and pundits who advise them that the way to win is to be more like Republicans. This is the kind of horrible advice that lost many Democrats their election—yet conservative Democrats continue to listen! And they won’t stop unless they feel sustained, passionate pressure from their grassroots base—the folks who they need to inspire in order to win future elections.

Will you chip in $3 to help us make sure Democrats stop the Keystone XL pipeline, stop listening to big oil and bad consultants, and fight for progressive values?

Yes, I’ll chip in to help stop Keystone XL and fight for progressive values.

This fight isn’t just a preamble to other environmental attacks—it foreshadows the large range of issues that the right-wing Republican leadership intends to tackle. We’ll face similar assaults on health care, women’s rights, equality, decent wages, Social Security, and civil rights.

In fight after fight, Republicans will push forward a radical agenda and then attempt to pick off a few Democrats to give them the supermajority they need, as well as the veneer of “bipartisanship.”

The only way to preserve affordable health care, see humane reforms in our immigration policy, ensure women make their own decisions about their health, and fully invest in Social Security is to make sure Democrats stand strong. And when the Democrats in the Senate falter, it will come to President Obama to be bold in the use of his veto pen.

Following the midterms, many Democrats are nervous. It’s our job to make them realize that the path to a stronger America, and to future electoral victories, isn’t through caving in—it’s through standing up for our shared values.

Whatever happens in the Senate today, we know one thing for sure: We’re going to need to be stubborn, strong, and stiff-spined for the next two years.

Can you chip in $3 to help us defeat the Keystone pipeline—and prepare for the fights ahead?

Yes, I’ll chip in.

Thanks for all you do.

–Anna, Jo, Brian, Corinne, and the rest of the team

Are they serious? According to the geologists, this planet has been in existence for 4.57 billion years. In that time it has survived collision with an object the size of Mars, creating the Moon many other asteroid strikes including the one that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, whatever caused the extinction of ninety-five percent of all life at the end of the Permian Era, ice ages, climate changes, and who knows what else; only to be finally destroyed by a single pipeline.

The trouble I have with the Greens, besides their bullying and obvious lust for power, is that they seem to have some idea that the Earth has existed in a delicate, stable equilibrium from the beginning and that now Man has arrived to upset the balance. I think they get their ideas about nature from Bambi. The truth is that the Earth has changed drastically over the eons, in terms of climate, atmospheric content and even geography. For instance, during the Mesozoic Era (the Age of Dinosaurs), the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may have been as much as five times present levels, even without the nefarious activities of carbon polluters, causing a warmer Earth. Somehow life on the planet survived and even flourished. We have had ice ages over the last several millennia in which the glaciers extended not far north from where I am sitting, but the worst ice age, the glaciers extended almost to the equator. The only thing constant in the history of the Earth is that it is a dynamic, ever changing system. Even if everything the worst alarmists say about climate change were true, it would not mean the end for the planet. We might make ourselves very uncomfortable, perhaps even extinct, but the Earth will survive anything we could possibly do to it.

I should add that Canada is going to develop the tar sands regardless  of what we decide. If we don’t want the Keystone pipeline extended, they can just as easily sell the crude oil to China. I wonder which is a safer method of transporting oil, a pipeline or tankers. I should also add that if there is one thing needed to accomplish the goals Moveon.org says it wants, it would be a robust American economy powered by the recent surge in the energy industry. Rich countries with growing economies can afford to worry about decent wages and equal rights. Poorer countries mired in economic stagnation have to worry about surviving.

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Looking Out the Window

I caught this article in Rolling Stone about the looming threat of climate change and what can be done about it. As you might expect from a magazine that usually covers music, it is short on science and reason and long on alarmism. There are only a few points here and there in the article I want to mention, so I am not going over the whole thing. Feel free to follow the link if you want.

After 25 years of failed climate negotiations, it’s easy to be cynical about the upcoming talks in Paris. But there are at least three factors that make a meaningful agreement next year possible.

The first is that climate change is no longer a hypothetical problem – it’s happening in real time all around us. Droughts, floods, more destructive storms, weird weather of all sorts – just look out your window. In the latest reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s top scientists called the fact that the Earth is warming “unequivocal” and stated that humans are the cause of it. Without dramatic action, the planet could warm up as much as 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 F) by the end of the century, which would be catastrophic. As Kerry said of a report last September, “The response must be all hands on deck. It’s not about one country making a demand of another. It’s the science itself demanding action from all of us.”

If I look out my window, I would see two relatively mild summers in a row with a brutally cold winter between them. Ought I to conclude that the planet is getting cooler? Of course not. Looking out my window tells me nothing about the state of my local climate, much less the climate of the whole world. Looking at the weather for the past year or two also doesn’t tell us very much. In any case, we have not, in fact, been having more floods, droughts, more destructive storms, or weird weather over the whole world for the last decade.

I want you to look at this graph from the Paleomap Project. It shows how the Earth’s temperature has varied over time.

globaltemp

 

The Earth’s average temperature is presently around 17° Celsius or 61° Fahrenheit. Notice that the Earth has warmed, and cooled, quite a bit more than the four degrees that is supposed to be catastrophic. Contrary to what the global warming alarmists seem to believe, the Earth has not existed at a delicate equilibrium temperature for millions of years only to be disrupted by man. The Earth is a dynamic system, which is why it is so difficult to figure out what is actually going on and to what extent human beings are responsible.

The second factor is that until now, the biggest obstacle to an international agreement to reduce carbon pollution has been the United States. But that’s starting to change. Thanks to Obama’s recent crackdown on pollution, as well as the boom in cheap natural gas, which has displaced dirty coal, carbon emissions in the U.S. are on the decline. “What the president has done is very important,” says Robert Stavins, director of the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements. “It allows the U.S. to look at other countries and say, ‘Hey, what are you doing?'”

Well, yes. No previous president has been as willing to disrupt the American economy as much as President Obama has. Don’t look for many other world leaders to be as foolish as he is, however.

The final reason for hope, paradoxically, is China’s relentless demand for energy. China is in the midst of a profound economic and social transformation, trying to reinvent itself from an economy based on selling cheap goods overseas to an economy based on selling quality consumer goods at home, while keeping growth rates high and cutting dependence on fossil fuels. Energy demand is expected to double by 2030, and at that pace, there is not enough oil, coal and gas in the world to keep their economy humming. So China’s ongoing energy security depends on the nation developing alternative energy sources in a big way. “We need more of everything,” says Peggy Liu, a sustainability leader who works across China. “Wind, solar, a modernized grid. We need to leapfrog over the past and into a clean-energy future.”

China’s leaders are also waking up to the fact that recent decades of hypergrowth, most of it fired by coal, have exacted a steep price. Air pollution in China’s big cities is among the worst in the world; one recent report found that poor air quality contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in 2010. As Hank Paulson, former Secretary of the Treasury and longtime China observer, has put it, “What is another point of GDP worth, if dirty air is killing people?” Earlier this year, a riot broke out in Zhongtai, a town in eastern China, when protests against a new waste incinerator turned violent, leaving police vehicles torched and at least 39 people injured; in southern China, protests erupted over the construction of a coal-fired power plant. Similar clashes are increasingly frequent in China as pollution-related illnesses rise.

And it’s not just the air that’s a problem in China. More than 20 percent of the country’s farmland is polluted. Sixty percent of its groundwater supply is unfit for human consumption. Rivers are industrial sewers. Last year, 16,000 swollen and rotting dead pigs were found dumped in the Huangpu River near Shanghai.

The Chinese are not going to stop using coal. They may invest in alternative sources of energy to supplement their fossil fuel but they are not going to let their economic growth slow down just to appease Barack Obama and John Kerry. The Chinese do have an awful lot of work to do towards cleaning up their environment and actual anti-pollution laws that are actually enforced would go a long way towards improving the quality of life in China. China cannot afford to be distracted by global warming alarmism.

The second revelation is that the Paris agreement is likely to be more about money than about carbon. That is not inappropriate: Climate change is, at its base, an environmental-justice issue, in which the rich nations of the world are inflicting damage on the poor ones. One question that has always haunted climate agreements is, how should the victims be compensated? In past U.N. agreements, developed countries have promised aid to poorer nations. But in translating these general commitments into hard numbers, says Elliot Diringer, a climate-policy expert at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, “the cash flows really have never been enough.”

In Paris, they will try again. The delivery vehicle of choice is called the Green Climate Fund, which was one of the few concrete accomplishments to come out of Copenhagen. The idea is simple: Rich countries pay into the fund, the fund’s 24-member board examines proposals from developing countries for clean-energy and climate-adaptation projects, and then it awards funds to those it finds worthy.

The Green Climate Fund was born in the closing days of the Copenhagen negotiations, when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to lure China and other developing nations into a deal by promising that, in exchange for agreeing to a binding cap on carbon pollution as well as outside monitoring and verification of pollution rates, rich nations like the U.S. would pledge a combined $100 billion a year to help poor nations. Many negotiators thought it was a clever (or not so clever) ploy by the U.S. to make China take the fall for the collapse of the Copenhagen deal, since it was clear that China considers emissions data a state secret and would never allow outsiders to pore through the books. But regardless of the intentions, the deal fell apart. The $100 billion promise lingered, however, and was codified in later agreements. (Although $100 billion sounds like a lot, it’s a small part of the $1 trillion a year that will be necessary to transform the energy system.)

Right now, developed nations have a long way to go to live up to Clinton’s promise. The Green Climate Fund has taken four years to get up and running, and still nobody knows if it will primarily make loans or grants. So far, only Germany has come through with a meaningful pledge, offering $1 billion over the next nine years. Stern says the U.S. is putting “a lot of blood, sweat and tears” into getting the fund set up right, and that the $100 billion a year will come from a variety of sources, including private investment. But if the point of the fund is to demonstrate the commitment of rich nations to help the poor, it will need them to make real financial commitments. “Big new public funds are not viable,” says David Victor, a climate-policy expert at the University of California, San Diego. “This could be a train wreck of false expectations.”

Here we get to the real motive behind all this, money. This is not really about climate change or the future of life on Earth. This is about “environmental justice”. Like every other time that the noun justice is modified, environmental justice has little to do which justice and more to do with a left wing agenda, in this case the transfer of money from rich nations to poor nations.

This post is getting to be too long but there is only one more paragraph to highlight.

A few hours later, Kerry and his team jet off to Afghanistan. The world is a big, complicated place, and everyone – even the most committed climate warriors like Kerry – has a lot of other things to think about beyond how much carbon we are dumping into the atmosphere. And that, in a way, is always the problem: There is always something more urgent, more immediately catastrophic to seize the attention of policymakers – and in the coming years, many of the crises that will distract us from dealing with the realities of climate change will largely have been caused by climate change. Through all these short-term emergencies, the Earth will keep warming, the droughts will get worse, food will grow scarce, ice will vanish, the seas will rise, and starting around 2030, climate change will emerge from the background and eventually become the only thing we talk about. It will be the story of the century.

We’ll see what actually happens in 2030. My guess is that we are going to be told that there is some catastrophe looming around the corner and if we don’t take immediate action, the Earth will be uninhabitable by the year 2050. I also predict that the immediate action will consist of more government control over our lives and a willingness to accept a lower standard of living. Their rhetoric hasn’t changed in the last forty years and it won’t change in the next forty years, regardless of actual events.

 

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Manbearpig

I feel privileged today. Al Gore has sent me an e-mail asking me to help him track down and kill manbearpig.

Dear friend —

Folks like you know what I believe: We have no more important priority than confronting and solving the climate crisis.

Luckily, we have a President who has taken up that task with both determination and seriousness of purpose, and it’s amazing what a difference that can make.

In June, President Obama empowered the Environmental Protection Agency to cut carbon pollution, a move which will help reduce dangerous CO2 from power plants by 30 percent in 2030. On top of that, he has established new fuel economy standards that reduce CO2 levels and will save us all money at the pump. With the Recovery Act, he made the single biggest investment in clean energy in the United States, ever. All these steps will have a lasting impact on the planet our children and grandchildren inherit — and they wouldn’t have happened without your support.

If you stand with President Obama, add your name to support Democrats working with him to address climate change.

As Bob Dylan sang, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” We’re seeing real, important progress in the fight against the climate crisis — and it’s coming not a moment too soon.

But you and I both know there are still a lot of deniers out there. The time for leadership in the face of this threat has not passed. If ever there were a moment to send leaders to Washington who make climate legislation their top priority, this is it.

Support Democrats, and tell Congress to address climate change:

http://my.democrats.org/Act-on-Climate

Thanks,

Al Gore

It is really too bad that there are so many deniers out there so refuse to take the former vice-president serial. What does he have to do to convince the deniers? Present actual empirical evidence for what he claims?

If you want to know why I am one of those deniers who cannot take Mr. Gore or the other climate alarmists very serial, it is because they do not act in a particularly honest manner. They do not simply state facts. The try to generate panic by exaggeration and misdirection. They try to bully people who disagree with them and fantasize about blowing such people up.

Carbon dioxide is not, in any way dangerous nor is it pollution. Carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring substance in the Earth’s atmosphere that is absolutely necessary for life on this planet. The Earth’s climate is not at a delicate equilibrium that can easily be disturbed by human activity. The Earth’s climate has changed drastically over the eons and will continue to change long after we are gone.

Another reason I cannot take people like Al Gore very serial is the hypocrisy of their position. Despite what Gore says, cutting “carbon pollution” from power plants and imposing stricter fuel standards will increase the cost of energy in this country. This won’t affect Al Gore. He has no intention of giving up his mansion or jetting around the world to spread the message about manbearpig . It will hurt the rest of us.

Well, since manbearpig has been spotted in southern Indiana, I guess I should get with Mr. Gore and help track it down. Maybe I can get a nobel prize too.

Manbearpig
Manbearpig
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Thankfully Dictatorial

In her article in the National Journal, Lucia Graves is thankful that Barack Obama has taken “dictatorial” action with the new regulations restriction carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, and in so doing has managed to solve the greatest problem in political theory.

In college classes, climate change is taught as a textbook example of where democracy fails. And there are a whole host of reasons to think America will fail on climate change: We’ve waited too long; the consequences aren’t as tangible as in other areas of policy; we’re bad at sacrificing in the short term to achieve in the long term.

President Obama, who on Monday rolled out landmark regulations for coal-fired power plants, has found a way around that age-old political problem posed by climate change and democracies, in part by acting a little bit more like a dictator. This is something he’s been skewered for on the right, with Rush Limbaugh accusing the White House of focusing on global warming just because “it offers the president opportunities to be dictatorial.”

Limbaugh is onto something, but he has it precisely backward: The decision to use executive authority is the means, not the ends. It also makes a lot of sense when it comes to global warming given Congress’s failure to pass the Waxman-Markey energy bill in 2009, and, for decades before that, to pass any sort of comprehensive climate legislation whatsoever.

Considering that a fairly large number of Americans do not place global warming high on the list of problems they want solved, it seems that democracy in America is working just fine, on this issue. Congress has not acted because there has not been much public pressure to act. What Lucia Graves really means, of course, is that democracy has failed on this issue because the public has the wrong opinion on this issue, so the problem cannot be resolved democratically. A little but of dictatorship is in order.

If a little bit of dictatorship is necessary to deal with climate change, why not with other issues? There must be quite a few problems facing this country that are difficult to resolve democratically. Consider the federal deficit. Almost everyone agrees that the federal budget ought to be balanced, yet the government continues to run a deficit every year. Most people want the government to cut spending, except for the government spending they happen to be in favor of. So, spending increases. I wonder if Lucia Graves would approve of a president who decided that since Congress cannot act to balance the budget, he will make out the budget himself without consulting with Congress. For that matter, I wonder if she would approve if President Obama’s successor simply reversed the emissions regulations with a stroke of his pen.

Progressives have been impatient with the whole concept of checks and balances at least since the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, if not before. In this view, checks and balances, rather than being a safeguard against tyranny, just get in the way of the wise and benevolent Tribunes of the People from doing good for everyone. If it so happens that the people don’t really know what is good for them, all the more reason for them to be ruled by those who know better. Unfortunately, people who wield power are seldom wise and benevolent and are usually most interested in what is good for themselves, which is why the framers of the constitution put in so many checks and balances. I wish that the people who write admiringly of President Obama’s “dictatorial” actions would think about what a president they thoroughly disapprove of could do if allowed to act as a dictator. Perhaps they would be less thankful of the example he is setting.

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BFD

Jim Messina is imitating Joe Biden now. As well he might. After all, it is not every day that the President takes steps to destroy the national economy and raises energy prices for everybody.

David —

This is a BFD:

The New York Times is calling President Obama’s plan “the strongest action ever taken by an American president to tackle climate change” — he’s proposing new EPA standards to limit carbon pollution from existing power plants, the single biggest source of the pollution in the United States that causes climate change.

David, it should come as no surprise that polluters and groups that like things the way they are have already started fighting this with everything they’ve got. The best thing we can do is show just how many Americans believe this is the right thing to do.

Add your name right now — stand with President Obama and support aggressive action to fight climate change.

Announcements like this are why we all do this work. It’s proof that grassroots organizing really does pay off. Climate change activists have fought for years for EPA standards on carbon pollution — and this week President Obama is making it a reality.

This fight is about our future, but the effects of climate change are being felt right now — it’s linked to stronger weather, from more frequent and severe droughts to floods, storms, and wildfires.

It’s affecting public health, too. Over the past three decades, the percentage of Americans with asthma has more than doubled, and climate change is putting those Americans at greater risk of landing in the hospital. Over half of all Americans live in an area where air pollution levels are too often unhealthy to breathe.

But while we place limits on dangerous air pollution like mercury, arsenic, and lead, existing power plants have had no national restrictions on the amount of carbon pollution they can emit.

None at all — until now.

The President’s plan promises to cut carbon pollution from power plants for the first time, setting a new standard for action on climate change.

As I write this, powerful interests on the other side are lining up their dirty budgets to try to tear this down. They have plenty of allies in Congress that will try to stop us.

I’m asking everyone who cares about this fight to stand up and say so today — stand with President Obama and new carbon pollution standards:

http://my.barackobama.com/Support-Carbon-Pollution-Standards

Thanks,

Messina

Jim Messina
Chair
Organizing for Action

P.S. — We’ve all been fighting for big action to fight climate change — something that will really make a difference. This is it — add your name today and let’s fight for it.

I have said it before and I guess I will have to say it again and again. Mercury, arsenic and lead are pollutants that are hazardous to human health. Various industrial processes can greatly increase the amounts of these substances in the environment to concentrations far greater than they are normally found in nature.It makes sense to regulate the emissions of substances like mercury, lead or arsenic. Carbon dioxide is a compound that is a naturally occurring component of the Earth’s atmosphere. It is harmless to human health and indeed is necessary for life to exist on this planet. Since virtually every industrial process produces some carbon dioxide as does animal respiration, trying to regulate carbon dioxide emissions is pointless, unless you want to establish some sort of totalitarian control over every part of the economy or you want to reverse the industrial revolution.

Notice just how dishonest Jim Messina is being in this e-mail. He states that half of all Americans live in areas where the air is too unhealthy to breathe, never mind that our air has been getting cleaner, and cites increasing numbers of Americans with asthma. He is conflating actual air pollution with increasing levels of carbon dioxide. As I said, carbon dioxide is harmless, unless you are in an enclosed space without ventilation, or are unfortunate enough to encounter a large cloud of carbon dioxide that has been released by a volcano or stagnant lake. Either he is ignorant or he hopes you aren’t paying attention.

This is certainly a fight about our future. These new restrictions on power plants will almost certainly make many power plants more expensive to operate, if they are not shut down altogether which will translate into higher prices for electricity for all of us, which means higher prices for just about everything, and fewer jobs for everyone to pay the higher prices.

There’s that hope and change we were promised!

 

 

 

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