RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/al-gore-attempts-own-greta-moment-unhinged-davos-rant-equivalent-600000-hiroshima-bombs

Al Gore is testing out his performative Greta mode at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week. The former Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate who as early as the 1990’s was dubbed in the pages of The Washington Post as “very boring” and as having a “naturally stiff, wooden persona” momentarily (and very awkwardly) tried to go climate activist beast mode during a Q&A panel.

His attempt this week to pull off a “Greta moment” and shed his notorious stiffness resulted in an unhinged rant wherein he claimed that carbon emissions and greenhouses gases are trapping “as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the earth.”

That’s right, you heard him correctly… six-hundred-thousand Hiroshima bombs every single day – according to his bizarre rant, which he further said is “boiling the oceans” and creating “rain bombs” and “atmospheric rivers” resulting in millions of “climate refugees”. 

“Climate refugees are expected to reach one billion in this century”… he said, before turning to the “xenophobia” somehow unleashed on the world in the process due to the “Hiroshima bombs”. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/20/insanity-on-display/

John Kerry, former senator, former secretary of state, and now chief climate alarmist for the Biden administration, said in so many words Tuesday during his World Economic Forum rant that it’s too late to save the planet from global warming. Yet he claimed climate programs still need more “money, money, money, money, money, money, money.” The only reason he’s not the worst person in the world is because he has so much competition at Davos.

What Kerry actually said was that he is “not convinced we’re going to get there in time to do what the scientists said, which is avoid the worst consequences of the crisis,” meaning that he doubts that the global temperature will stay under the cap of 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial temperature set by scientists (though it is actually a random figure with no scientific support).

Yet he continues to crusade for a cause that hopes to strip Westerners of both their wealth – yes, according to the United Press International, he said “money” seven times – and freedom to move about.

With absolutely zero self-awareness, the man who flies in private jets, has multiple homes (which most of us would consider mansions) and more cars than most families, and up until a few years ago owned a yacht, preached about “the way we live,” and thundered against “the incredible sort of destructive process of growth the way we interpret it.” He called it “robber-baron growth.”

But his luxurious lifestyle and those of the other wealthy men and women fighting global warming must be OK, because he assured members of his fawning audience that they are all special, “a select group of human beings” who “are able to sit in a room and come together and, uh, actually talk about saving the planet.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/john-stossel/2023/01/18/the-recycling-religion-n1662662

For decades, we’ve been told: recycle!

“If we’re not using recycled paper, we’re cutting down more trees!” says Lynn Hoffman, co-president of Eureka Recycling.

Recycling paper (or cardboard) does save trees. Recycling aluminum does save energy. But that’s about it.

The ugly truth is that many “recyclables” sent to recycling plants are never recycled. The worst is plastic.

Even Greenpeace now says, “Plastic recycling is a dead-end street.”  

Hoffman often trucks it to a landfill.

Years ago, science writer John Tierney wrote a New York Times Magazine story, “Recycling Is Garbage.” It set a Times record for hate mail.

But what he wrote was true.

“It’s even more true today,” says Tierney in my new video. “Recycling is an industry that uses increasingly expensive labor to produce materials that are worth less and less.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/01/climate_change_talking_points.html

For the record, climate change is real — but that’s nothing new.  Just ask a wooly mammoth or a dinosaur.  Atmospheric heat-trapping is also real, or else everything around us would freeze solid every night — just as it does on our airless moon.  And sea level is the best way to tell if the Earth is warming or cooling because it is a truly global indicator, rather than a stew of various local measurements.

It is also important to understand the well known cycles that bring us seasons and weather patterns.  The seasons change from equinox to solstice over and over because the Earth’s rotational axis is tilted relative to its orbital plane.  During winter in the northern hemisphere, the sun appears in the sky farther in the south.  It moves north until it reaches the summer solstice — as the weather warms.  Due to the elliptical nature of our orbit around the sun, the northern summer finds the Earth farther away from its heat source than it is in the winter, which tends to moderate the seasonal temperature change. 

The opposite is true for the southern hemisphere.  Closer to the sun in the summer and farther in the winter would make for more severe weather down there, except for the much greater amount of the southern surface being covered by oceans, which also serve to moderate the weather.

Another axiom of climatology is that the west coasts of the continents have noticeably milder weather than the east coasts.  This is probably due to the rotational direction of the Earth, which is counterclockwise when looking down at the north pole.

Back to sea level and climate change.  Previously at this site, Viv Forbes posted a link to NASA’s website showing a graph of annual sea level measurements going back to 1993.  The overall accumulated increase is 102.5 millimeters.  This site is also sprinkled, nonetheless, with all kinds of dire climate change warnings.  But if you do the math, it comes out to a little under 3.7 millimeters per year.  At this rate, it would take about 82 years for the sea level to be raised by one foot.  Also, the graph forms what is mostly a straight line even if you scroll down to see the same plot going back all the way to 1900.  No “hockey sticks” here…just a steady increase.  This is because we are in an interstitial warm period known as the Holocene — which began about ten to twelve thousand years ago when the last ice age, the Pleistocene, ended.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/is-davos-over/

The social club for the very powerful is still drawing plenty of power brokers, but some big names are staying away.

While there are 52 heads of state of government heading to Davos this year, top-tier leaders are missing. U.S. President Joe Biden and his Chinese and Russian counterparts Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are all giving it a miss.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who promised to Make the Planet Great Again, is also skipping the talkfest, along with new British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and re-elected Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Instead, it’s a European-heavy guest list: German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is the only leader from a G7 country, sharing top billing with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, another German.

Davos always drew more Germans than anyone else. These days it has to settle for….

The U.S. delegation includes cabinet members such as climate envoy John Kerry, who will camp out in Davos for most of the week, but others such as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen are skipping.

John Kerry. That’s like sending an invitation to the family next door and having them send their idiot cousin who doesn’t even live there.

https://jamieglazov.com/2023/01/13/glazov-gang-the-great-reset-and-the-green-fraud/

This new Glazov Gang episode features Marc Morano, the founder of ClimateDepot.com and the author of The Great Reset: Global Elites and the Permanent Lockdown.

Marc discusses The Great Reset and The Green Fraud, exposing The global elites’ pernicious agenda.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=e232eda9a3

Supposedly, we are rapidly on our way toward a zero-carbon, all electric energy future. But has anybody done the arithmetic to see if this adds up?

I’m carving myself out a niche as the guy who does a few simple calculations to check if the grand schemes of our central planners make any sense. So far I’ve taken that approach to the question of energy storage to back up a wind/solar electricity grid, and on that one the schemes of the central planners most definitely do not add up. But the energy storage question, although involving no math beyond basic arithmetic, does have some complexities. How about something somewhat simpler, like: If we convert our entire automobile fleet to all-electric cars, where is the electricity going to come from?

With the big push currently on to get rid of internal combustion vehicles and replace them with electrics, surely someone has done the calculations to be sure that the electricity supply will be ample. Actually, that does not appear to be the case. Once again, the central planners have no idea what they are doing.

A few things in the recent news make this issue highly topical. First, in the days just before Christmas, much of the country experienced a severe cold snap. Severe, that is, but not record-breaking. Almost everywhere that had very cold temperatures during those days had had even colder temperatures in the past, not necessarily every year, but multiple times over the course of decades. Second, several utilities found themselves with insufficient electricity to meet demand, and had to impose rolling blackouts on their customers, even in the face of freezing cold temperatures. Examples of utilities imposing rolling blackouts during the severe cold wave included Duke Energy (covering most of North and South Carolina, and parts of Florida, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky) and TVA (covering all of Tennessee and parts of Alabama, Mississippi and Kentucky). Both of those utilities, and many others, have spent the last decade and more shuttering reliable coal power plants, and building lots of wind turbines and solar panels, along with some (but obviously not enough) natural gas plants, as replacements.

As of today, electric vehicles are a tiny fraction of all vehicles (less than 1% in the U.S., says Reuters as of February 2022), particularly in these Midwestern and Southern states. Yet even with only the tiniest level of electricity demand coming from electric vehicles, already major utilities are short of electricity when a not-out-of-the-ordinary cold snap hits.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-paul-ehrlich-apocalypse-is-back-cbs-60-minutes-human-extinction-11672784525?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

We’ll say this for Paul Ehrlich—at least he’s consistent. In 1968 the Stanford biologist famously declared that “the battle to feed all humanity is over,” at a time when the earth’s population was about 3.5 billion. Today we have a population of eight billion (better fed than ever), yet there was Mr. Ehrlich, on CBS’s “60 Minutes” Sunday night, still predicting that “humanity is very busily sitting on a limb that we’re sawing off.”

The CBS narrator acknowledged that the green revolution in agriculture disproved Mr. Ehrlich’s prediction of mass famine. But the show went on to suggest that Mr. Ehrlich’s repackaged gloom about melting icecaps and the rate of extinction may finally prove him right in saying we are still heading the way of the dinosaurs.

As with Thomas Malthus, the father of doom-and-gloomers, the repeated failures of Mr. Ehrlich’s predictions of catastrophe to materialize never seem to discourage those who believe human beings are breeding and consuming our way to destruction.

The reason these dire prophecies fail is that they ignore the most decisive variable: human ingenuity. In the years since Mr. Ehrlich first forecast apocalypse, human beings have found untold new ways to improve life on earth—e.g., by reclaiming arable land, inventing new medicines, increasing food production, making clean water more available and lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-quiet-refutation-of-net-zero-climate-change-emissions-energy-global-warming-sec-goals-clean-power-11672262963?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

‘Net zero by 2050” is more than a slogan of climate activism. It has become a chief organizational principle for multinational corporations and the BlackRock-led cartel pushing environmental, social and corporate governance investing.

“Net zero” was mentioned in more than 6,000 filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2022 and countless other times by publicly traded corporations and investor groups in statements and on their websites. The SEC says its proposed climate disclosure rule will help investors “evaluate the progress in meeting net-zero commitments and assessing any associated risks.”

“Net zero” and its corollary, the “energy transition,” are talked about so often and so loosely that many take them for granted as worthy goals that could be accomplished with greater buy-in from political and business leaders. But two new reports from the utility industry should put an end to such loose talk.

In September, the Electric Power Research Institute, the research arm of the U.S. electric utility industry, released a report titled “Net-Zero 2050: U.S. Economy-Wide Deep Decarbonization Scenario Analysis.”

The EPRI report concludes that the utility industry can’t attain net zero. “This study shows that clean electricity plus direct electrification and efficiency . . . are not sufficient by themselves to achieve net-zero economy-wide emissions.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/28/new-age-idols-no-not-taylor-swift/

First in a series.

From ancient times, the worship of people or objects other than a Supreme Being was viewed as apostasy, most vividly depicted in the Old Testament by the Golden Calf in Exodus. While idolatry is instigated primarily to control obedient followers, religion has typically had its roots in the notion of deliverance from suffering, salvation, a code of righteous conduct, and a sense of comfort. However, fervent religious belief has also entrenched powerful overlords and been responsible for the persecution and death of millions in the name of holy righteousness. Idolatry and activist religion thus have a great deal in common.

Call it whatever you like, but the United States today is in the grip of several manifestations of a kind of idol worship. This article is the first of a series examining these modern golden calves. We ascribe this disturbing development to educational institutions abandoning a focus on critical thinking and instead nurturing a “clergy” who preach reverence to their conceptual idols. This produces students who lack adequate reasoning skills and instead parrot supposedly enlightened narratives fed to them, much to society’s detriment by crowding out beneficial debate.

The first and most pervasive example of today’s transition from reason to idolatry is the Church of Climate Change. Not only is the U.S. in thrall to this, but most of the West has also genuflected. The cause even has its own Joan of Arc in unhappy, deluded Greta Thunberg. At this point, the theology is centered on the belief that climate change is such an existential near-term threat to humanity that no attempts at mitigation should be off limits, regardless of their futility or collateral damage.