RUTHFULLY YOURS

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The moral of Aesop’s fable of the boy who cried wolf is that false cries for help mean real calls for help will be ignored. A climate apocalypse has been forecast for years, sometimes by the well-intentioned but naïve looking to do good, but often by the cynical seeking political or personal advantage.

Two years ago, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, recognizing that global temperatures are indeed rising, compiled a list of dire climate predictions that did not happen. Here is a sample: In 1969, the Nobel winning German scientist, Paul Ehrlich predicted that everybody would “disappear in a cloud of blue steam.” In 1974 Time Magazine warned that “space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast.” The New York Times in 1978 reported that an “international team of specialists” feared the world would experience a never-ending “cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere.” Over the next ten years, Cassandras changed their forecasts from cooling to warming: An Associated Press headline from 1989 read, quoting UN officials: “Rising seas could obliterate nations.” And who could forget Al Gore’s 2006 movie, An Inconvenient Truth, in which he predicted that Artic ice would be gone in seven years. Today, doomsayers blame every forest fire, drought and hurricane on anthropological-caused climate change.

I am not a climate change denier. In fact, I know of no one who is. The term is used by climate disciples to belittle heretics who dare question the dogma that man alone is at fault for a warming planet. They are ruthless in their treatment of those skeptical of their professed causes of a changing climate. In National Geographic’s film Before the Flood, Bjørn Lomborg is listed as one of the ten most prominent “climate deniers.” Mr. Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and, in my opinion, the most reasonable voice on the subject. He begins every interview by repeating that he believes the Earth is warming. His sin is that he uses empirical evidence, logic and common sense to demonstrate that claimed apocalyptic consequences are more hyperbole than factual, which he explains in his 2020 book False Alarm. Fostering panic over climate change gets Progressives elected, sells books and movies and abets corporate welfare for renewable sources of energy. But for the rest of us, it does more harm than good.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/glasgow-festival-globalist-virtue-signaling-bruce-thornton/

The Biden administration is attending the UN’s 26th “Conference of Parties,” the annual summit on what used to be called “Global Warming,” but is now dubbed “Climate Change.” Thirty thousand government officials, including heads of state posing for photo-ops, and government clerks enjoying taxpayer funded junkets, along with noisy activists, NGOs, and “green energy” corporate grifters hunting for more subsidies––all are spewing tons of CO2 into the atmosphere to attend the summit, leaving behind a King Kong-sized carbon footprint.

As with the other COP meetings, however, there will be lots of moral preening, apocalyptic rhetoric, and grand promises, but little of practical utility will be accomplished.

American progressives love such climate pow-wows, which indulge their various ideological shibboleths and demonstrate their superior morality and dedication to “science.” Leftist “Greens,” or “watermelons”––Green on the outside, Red on the inside–– find environmentalism in general a convenient weapon for discrediting free-market capitalism and especially the U.S. for daring to kick a communist superpower into the dustbin of history. Democrats, who like socialists “never let a good crisis go to waste,” find the lurid apocalyptic fantasies of “global warming” a good pretext for redistributing more taxpayer money to political clients. Thus the corporate clean-energy rackets and race-baiters will get money from programs like those in the proposed $550 billion “climate reform” legislation for researching and mitigating the “disparate impact” of climate change on “communities of color.”

And of course, Dems find anthropogenic, catastrophic global warming (ACGW) an opportunity for smearing their political enemies as “deniers,” “kooks,” and disbelievers in science who “cling to guns and religion” and, don’t forget, are “racists” and “xenophobes” to boot. Then there’s the hated Donald Trump, who pulled out of the Paris Accords that grew out of a previous COP agreement. This for the Dems was a heinous act of blasphemy that besmirched Barack Obama’s globalist triumph in signing the agreement, and is yet another sign of their enemies’ stubborn resistance to the global ruling class’s “rules-based international order.”

Speaking of Obama, Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation recalled in an interview that at the 2009 COP Obama “pledged that the world’s wealthiest nations would give $100 billion per year by 2020 to the world’s poorest counties to help them fight climate change.” Groves continued, ‘“Here we are in 2021, [and] there has never been $100 billion put together, much less $100 billion per year,’” adding that there is ‘“not $100 billion in any green climate fund, nor any real prospect of there being $100 billion.’” And even if there were such a fund, what nation would hold dead-beats accountable when they refused to contribute?

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-10-31-cop26-and-the-hubris-of-our-political-overlords

So we look upon our world leaders and laugh at their foolishness and hubris. It’s all we can do.

There is a very reasonable argument to be made that the climate-related Conferences of Parties (COPs) that occur annually under UN auspices are terrible things. They cost (i.e., waste) enormous resources, and they have the potential to do great damage to the world economy and the well-being of the people. Fair enough. But on balance, my view is that it’s a good thing we have them. I can think of no other comparable activities that put on such dramatic and widely-viewed display the immeasurable foolishness and hubris of our political overlords.

By the time you read this, COP26 will likely have opened in Glasgow, Scotland. Thousands will be in attendance. Most every country of the world has sent at least some high-level delegation, and the majority are sending the President or Prime Minister. U.S. President Joe Biden will be there in person, along with PM Boris Johnson of the UK, President Emanuel Macron of France, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, and comparable heads of state from across Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Oceania, and North and South America. U.S. climate envoy John Kerry used his usual portentous tone to set the stage (as quoted by the BBC):

America’s climate envoy John Kerry says the COP26 climate change summit in Glasgow is the “last best hope for the world to get its act together”.

The idea is that hundreds of global leaders, not a one of whom has much if any idea how the world’s energy systems work, will come together to agree and order that those systems must be completely discarded and replaced. Currently, all the world economies run mostly on fossil fuel energy; but these political leaders are oh so much smarter than that, so they will order that use of such energy must be reduced and then ended, and associated carbon emissions will of course decline commensurately. These people equally have no idea how or whether the newly-ordered alternative energy systems might work, or how much the new systems might cost when fully implemented. Those things, you see, are mere engineering details, too insignificant to warrant the attention of great potentates. What they do know is, as the magnificent Barack Obama put it in 2008, “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal. . . .”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-climate-summit-to-nowhere-glasgow-cop26-joe-biden-11635543010?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

World leaders converge on Glasgow for a climate summit this weekend, and don’t laugh. This may be the worst-timed summit in history, but the delegates can still do substantial damage to the global economy, though none of it will matter to the climate.

It’s incongruous bordering on the bizarre to organize a summit like this while Europe is battening down for a winter fuel crisis, President Biden is begging OPEC to produce more oil, China is firing up its coal-fueled power plants amid an electricity shortage, and climate-change plans wilt as soon as they’re exposed to the sunlight of democratic politics.

No matter. This summit is called COP26 because there have already been 25. No less than the United Nations admitted this week that nations have made little progress on their previous climate pledges. But rather than adjust to this political reality, the delegates will make even more unrealistic promises.

The summit’s two main priorities are a pledge to reach “net zero” greenhouse-gas emissions by some future date, perhaps 2050, and to convince developed countries to pay poor countries to sign up for more CO2 reductions. Neither will amount to much.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-10-28-the-climate-is-warming-and-human-activities-are-the-cause-how-exactly-do-we-know-that

“The climate is changing, and we are the cause.” That is a statement that is so often-repeated and affirmed that it goes way beyond mere conventional wisdom. Probably, you encounter some version or another of that statement multiple times per week; maybe dozens of times. Everybody knows that it is true! And to express disagreement with that statement, probably more so than with any other element of current progressive orthodoxy, is a sure way to get yourself labeled a “science denier,” fired from an academic job, or even banished from the internet.

The UN IPCC’s recent Sixth Assessment Report on the climate is chock full of one version after another of the iconic statement, in each instance of course emphasizing that the human-caused climate changes are deleterious and even catastrophic. Examples:

Human influence has likely increased the chance of compound extreme events since the 1950s. This includes increases in the frequency of concurrent heatwaves and droughts on the global scale (high confidence); fire weather in some regions of all inhabited continents (medium confidence); and compound flooding in some locations (medium confidence). (Page A.3.5)

Event attribution studies and physical understanding indicate that human-induced climate change increases heavy precipitation associated with tropical cyclones (high confidence) but data limitations inhibit clear detection of past trends on the global scale. (Page A.3.4, Box TS.10)

Some recent hot extreme events would have been extremely unlikely to occur without human influence on the climate system. (Page A.3.4, Box TX.10)

So, over and over, it’s that we have “high confidence” that human influence is the cause, or that events would have been “extremely unlikely” without human influence. But how, really, do we know that? What is the proof?

This seems to me to be rather an important question. After all, various world leaders are proposing to spend some tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars to undo what are viewed as the most important human influences on the climate (use of fossil fuels). Billions of people are to be kept in, or cast into, energy poverty to appease the climate change gods. Political leaders from every country in the world are about to convene in Scotland to agree to a set of mandates that will transform most everyone’s life. You would think that nobody would even start down this road without definitive proof that we know the cause of the problem and that the proposed solutions are sure to work.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/10/peronist-pontiff-gasbags-with-addled-american/

Flogging a dead horse is nothing unusual. Some people – Australian republicans, campaigners for “balance” on the ABC, British EU “rejoiners” – do it all the time. But two dead horses flogging each other is a rare spectacle. That’s why it will be such a privilege to watch President Biden and Pope Francis in Rome on Friday demonstrating with their unique skills just how this act of deceased equine futility is done: two not very pleasant elderly exemplars of unprincipled ambition reinforcing one another in the illusion that each has something useful to say to the world, something to contribute to the betterment of mankind.

The pair of them will meet in the Vatican to earbash each other on the “climate emergency”. One assumes there will be plenty of black coffee on hand; it wouldn’t do for any of the assembled cardinals and diplomats to yield to the torpor and nod off while these two geriatric bores drone on about the world’s most tedious topic.

Insomniacs on the other hand might find it quite a treat as a senile opportunist and a crafty Peronist schemer try to outdo each other in lecturing us on what we should be going without for the sake of the weather. One hopes that some Vatican functionary is arranging for the wind generated by their combined utterances to be sustainably “harvested”. It could power the floodlighting of St Peter’s.

Biden is on his way, or being steered there, by his keepers, to extrude his verbal contribution to that Olympiad for climate catastrophics, COP26 in Glasgow. Francis had been going too, but changed his mind. Too many other blowhards, he probably decided. As his dictatorial papal style has long demonstrated, he doesn’t like competition. He always has to be the centre of attention.

One might wonder why a Pope is shoving his oar in on secular matters, but perhaps the kingdom not of this world is too small a stage for his talents. Anyway, a quick tête-à-tête in Rome will have to suffice for his agenda with Biden. Can we hazard a guess about what they’ll come up with?

First they’ll diagnose what to do about the climate. This will no doubt be along the lines of less coal for everyone except China, immediate canonisation of St Greta the Ecobrat, wind turbines on all church towers, bath night on Saturdays only – practical steps like that. Next one imagines them turning their attention to solving the COVID crisis. Jail anyone who calls it the China virus might well be Francis’s contribution, since he and President Xi are now all hotsy-totsy together since their agreement to accede to Beijing’s demand and throw China’s loyal Catholics under the bus, or in this case the Tiananmen tank, in return for the Vatican not saying unkind things about Xi’s persecution of the Uighurs. Yes, it’s that kind of one-way deal, a real bargain for the Church.

Biden’s take on COVID will be whatever floats through Dr Fauci’s mind that morning transcribed to the presidential autocue.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/27/that-dirty-green-energy-2/

While governments from Washington westward to California are forcing vaccinations on Americans whether they want the shots or not, don’t forget that policymakers want to do much the same with renewable energy. But renewables aren’t the unalloyed good we’re told they are. They have nasty downsides.

The forms of energy accepted by activists and politicians as “renewable” or “green” are restricted to wind and solar. While both are renewable (and are intermittent and therefore unreliable), neither is truly green. In this editorial, we will focus on solar, just to keep things short.

Solar power depends on photovoltaic panels, which convert sunlight to electricity. Those panels, indispensable to the process, are where solar power’s green reputation breaks down.

To start with, solar panels have a lifespan of roughly 25 to 30 years, so at some point, they become trash. (For the record, powering the world with solar energy would require more than 51 billion panels, which would take up more than 115,000 square miles, a parcel of land larger than Arizona.)

There are nearly 1.5 million panels right now in the lower 48.) What do we do with them?

Solar panels are recyclable – technically. But “the process in which materials are separated can be tedious and requires advanced machinery,” says CED Greentech, which means energy will be burned to extract the components.

Consequently, most dead solar panels, which are in fact considered hazardous waste, end up in landfills. Which isn’t green at all, since the greens despise landfills.